The Age of Eisenhower
Page 68
Eisenhower began to assert more personal command over the operation in a meeting with his top national security team on November 29. He expressed his “unhappiness about the general situation” and thought the Castro threat to the Caribbean and Latin America looked like it was “beginning to get out of hand.” He went to the heart of the matter: “Are we being sufficiently imaginative and bold, subject to not letting our hand appear?” He wanted results. “We should be prepared to take more chances and be more aggressive.” According to Bissell, Eisenhower made it clear that “he wanted all done that could be done with all possible urgency, and nothing less.” Coming just three weeks after the bitter election in which Eisenhower had been caricatured as inactive and timid in his handling of Cuba, these words reveal the degree to which he wanted to make a lasting mark in his final few days in office. He had something to prove.14
Eisenhower’s message moved quickly down the chain. On December 8 the 5412 Committee convened a meeting to review the beefed-up operation against Cuba. Around the table that day sat Gen. Edward Lansdale, now seconded to the Defense Department to work on Cuba; Tracy Barnes, one of the key men behind the 1954 Guatemala coup and now Bissell’s deputy at CIA; Jacob Esterline, chief of the special CIA branch WH/4 that was running the Cuba plan; and Marine Col. Jack Hawkins, a World War II and Korean War veteran with extensive guerrilla warfare experience. Over the course of the morning the men laid out the details of the ever-expanding plan. Their plan called for an invasion force, spearheaded by a well-armed brigade of Cuban exiles, trained by the CIA at their Guatemala base camp. The plan initially envisioned “an amphibious force of 600–750 men,” but that number nearly doubled as the date drew near. They would be accompanied by an air bombardment of “extraordinarily heavy firepower. Preliminary strikes would be launched from Nicaragua against military targets. The strikes, plus supply flights, would continue after the landing.” This assault force would seize a landing area, “draw dissident elements to our own force,” and quickly “trigger off a general uprising.”
This scheme looked nothing like the infiltration plan of March 1960, with its small teams of guerrillas and use of anti-Castro radio broadcasts. The CIA now envisioned an amphibious landing of hundreds of armed Cubans, arriving on American-supplied ships and landing craft and supported by significant air power. The Eisenhower administration had not worked out the details yet, but the CIA had its marching orders and was putting into place a much bolder scheme to topple Castro than anything so far considered. The only fly in the ointment was “plausible deniability.” Could the CIA hide its role in such a visible invasion effort? That seemed, frankly, unlikely. As the meeting broke up, General Lansdale laconically observed, “Everyone in Latin America knows about this U.S.-backed force of Cubans.” The one condition that Eisenhower insisted upon—not showing America’s hand—had been casually tossed aside.15
Eisenhower knew the invasion of Cuba would not commence on his watch; the inauguration was only a few weeks off and there was still much planning to be done. But he could take one decision that would bind Kennedy’s hands and make it difficult for him to back away from the plan: he could break off diplomatic relations with Cuba, a move widely understood as a harbinger of armed conflict. He told Livingston Merchant on December 29 that he wanted this done “before January 20,” when he left office. He pointedly said he wanted the State Department “to work quickly.” And it did. On January 3, 1961, following a provocative act by Castro that demanded the United States reduce its embassy staff in Havana, the United States broke off relations with Cuba. This move had the effect of putting Cuba on notice of America’s hostile intent, but it also intensified the pressure on the incoming Kennedy administration. John Kennedy would find it extremely difficult to resist the momentum behind the Cuba operation.16
IV
In his last week in the White House, President Eisenhower had one more formal task to undertake: his last State of the Union address to the Congress. He chose to send it in writing rather than deliver it in person. He knew that his time in the spotlight was over and that on January 30, 1961, President-elect Kennedy would come before the Congress to deliver his own address and lay out his own agenda. Yet in the text he submitted to Congress, and which was duly read by the clerk to a mostly empty House of Representatives on January 12, Eisenhower took a victory lap of sorts. “We have carried America to unprecedented heights,” he wrote. And in retrospect it is hard to disagree.
He took credit for ending the war in Korea, stamping out the fires of war over Suez and Lebanon, halting Chinese threats to Quemoy, and keeping West Berlin free. America had built global alliances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and enhanced the role of the United Nations as the world’s parliament. The national defenses had been built up to a state of high readiness “sufficient to deter and if need be destroy” any enemy. The age of the ballistic missile and the space satellite had dawned. The Polaris missile, housed in submarines that silently knifed through the ocean depths, stood ready to strike anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. A fleet of nuclear-powered warships cruised the oceans, while thousands of jet-propelled bombers and fighters could strike at targets around the world. The Age of Eisenhower had shaped and implemented a warfare state of unprecedented size and lethality.
The nation’s gross national product had passed the half-trillion mark, and the average American family enjoyed an income 15 percent higher than it did in 1952. Wages of factory workers had risen 20 percent over the life of the administration, while inflation averaged only 1.8 percent for the decade of the 1950s. The strikes that so crippled the nation in the Truman years had been reduced by half. Unemployment insurance and social security had been expanded, and builders had erected more than a million new houses a year for the previous eight years—a record—and the government offered more home mortgages than ever. New highways were spooling out across the land. And yet the government had passed tax cuts and kept careful control of the federal budget. The Union itself grew too, as Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th states.
Democrats dismissed Ike’s speech as “far-fetched” and “an extravagant misstatement of the actual conditions” the country faced. Congress was, after all, hostile territory, dominated by Democrats in both chambers. And when Kennedy came before these members just 18 days later, he heaped abuse on the outgoing administration for its failures to meet “the grave perils” abroad and the economic problems at home. Kennedy declared the very existence of the Union was in jeopardy, and Americans would “have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure.” To invoke Abraham Lincoln and the crisis of the Civil War might have been a trifle high-handed in the bountiful year 1961, but it was Kennedy’s first State of the Union address, and he enjoyed rhetorical flourishes. In any case, the huge surplus of Democrats in the House that day gave Kennedy a thunderous ovation and interrupted his speech 37 times.17
The real reason Eisenhower did not read his message to Congress is that he was working on a personal statement of farewell to the American public, which he planned to give in a televised address on January 17. It was not a spur-of-the-moment idea. Eisenhower had been thinking about it since the middle of 1959, when he told speechwriter Malcolm Moos, who had joined the staff in mid-1958 to replace Arthur Larson, that he wanted to give a farewell address recalling the envoi delivered by his role model, George Washington. He wanted to avoid any partisan statement, and initially he had in mind that he would “emphasize a few homely truths” about governing in a democracy, as he put it in a letter to his brother Milton.18
Eisenhower’s staff pored over Washington’s 1796 send-off and circulated it around the White House. They noted especially its tone of warning against partisanship and sectionalism that might “disturb our Union,” followed by an admonition to avoid the European tendency to erect “those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty.” Obviously Ike, who had so recently adumbrated to Congres
s the immense growth of America’s national defense under his peacetime government, could hardly now call for its undoing. But he could put the nation on guard about its significance.
In the fall of 1960, Moos and his assistant Capt. Ralph E. Williams sketched out some ideas about the place of militarism in American life. The United States for the first time in its history, they noted, possessed a “permanent war-based industry” and a “war-based industrial complex” that inevitably shaped governmental decisions. “This creates a danger,” Williams wrote, “that what the Communists have always said about us may become true. We must be very careful to insure that the merchants of death do not come to dictate national policy.” Over the course of the late fall, Eisenhower worked with his staff to hone the speech, the core of which had become a warning not about the military-industrial complex itself but about limiting its power over democratic government.19
At 8:30 p.m. on January 17 Eisenhower spoke to the nation from the Oval Office, seated at his desk, reading from notes and wearing his glasses, which tended to make his eyes look rather tortoise-like. He wore, as always, a three-piece suit. He looked old, and he was. But his voice was the same clear mid-American baritone, and he delivered a stern warning to the 70 million Americans who tuned in. “America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world,” he began. But a “hostile ideology” of “infinite duration” had compelled the United States to build “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” This new development would have “grave implications” for the country’s democracy. Thinking perhaps of the recent calls from Democrats for still more defense spending, more missiles, more aircraft and combat forces, and thinking too of the inexperience in managing such forces of the president-elect, Eisenhower warned, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
It was in a way a paradoxical send-off. Eisenhower had worked so hard to build this massive warfare state, even as he worried about its cost. He never hesitated to use the military power of the United States, whether covertly, in various coups and subterfuges, or overtly, as when he rattled nuclear missiles at communist China. Yet now, after eight years of frenetic expansion of America’s arsenal, Eisenhower sounded the alarm. Why now? Undoubtedly he had in mind the youth and inexperience of his successor. For Eisenhower there was only one way to meet the challenge of the military-industrial complex: strong and prudent leadership: “It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system.” Eisenhower had shown he could provide that leadership; it would be Kennedy’s task to follow in the general’s footsteps.
As he closed the speech, he made a characteristic gesture. Just as he had begun his inaugural address in 1953 with a prayer, so he ended his last presidential message by beseeching Providence for peace, freedom, charity, and well-being and a wish that “all peoples will come together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.” Taking off his glasses, looking into the camera, he said he now looked forward to becoming a private citizen, and bade his audience good night.20
V
John F. Kennedy took the oath of office on January 20, 1961, as the 35th president. The youngest man elected president, he took over the reins of government from the oldest man to serve as chief executive up to that time. Kennedy understood the importance of this generational divide, and his remarks on that cold January morning stressed a new beginning and a New Frontier, a break with the ways of the past. “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century,” he said, consigning Eisenhower (born in 1890) to the dustbin of history. After Kennedy’s swearing-in, Ike and Mamie attended a farewell lunch with former cabinet officials, then quietly slipped out of Washington by car, driving through the snow-blanketed Maryland countryside to Gettysburg, and home at last.21
Yet the Age of Eisenhower did not come to an abrupt and decisive end in January 1961; it endured. Presidential transitions feature more continuity than rupture, and that was certainly true of the Eisenhower-Kennedy handoff. Consider the men Kennedy drew into his administration. The new president reached out to Douglas Dillon, a wealthy establishment Republican who had been Ike’s ambassador to France and undersecretary of state, to run the Treasury. Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, was also a Republican, and like Eisenhower’s first Pentagon chief, he was a businessman; Charles Wilson had run General Motors, and McNamara had been president of Ford. As his national security adviser Eisenhower had appointed Robert Cutler, a Harvard-educated Bostonian with a career in banking and the military. JFK’s national security adviser was McGeorge Bundy, also a resident of Boston, who attended Yale before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard, where he became dean of the college. Bundy, a Republican before 1960, counted Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and George Kennan among his friends. Like Ike, Kennedy kept his brother close at hand, though JFK gave Robert, whom he appointed attorney general, far more power than Milton ever enjoyed. Perhaps the most striking illustration of continuity came with the decision to leave both Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover in place running the CIA and the FBI, respectively. Kennedy’s team might have been younger and smarter than Eisenhower’s cabinet, but these men were cut from the same cloth.
Even Kennedy’s famous inaugural address bore a striking resemblance in substance, though not in style, to the rhetoric of Eisenhower. Kennedy insisted, as Ike had before him, that what distinguished the free world from the communist bloc was a belief that the “rights of man” derived from God and not from the state. Kennedy, like Ike, pledged to “bear any burden” to defend liberty around the world. Kennedy said that nations newly emerging from colonial rule would have a friend in Washington and that America would champion the United Nations as the place to settle international disputes. These too had been Eisenhower’s hopes. And when Kennedy pointed woefully to the looming threat of the nuclear arms race, he echoed Eisenhower’s 1953 “Chance for Peace” address. In fact the central theme of Kennedy’s unforgettable speech—America’s unbending and tireless commitment to human freedom around the world—had been hammered out, shaped, and polished in the Age of Eisenhower.
Continuities abounded. On the burning issue of civil rights, on which Kennedy had campaigned so boldly, progress crept forward at about the same rate as it had under Eisenhower. Knowing that Congress would not pass meaningful civil rights legislation, Kennedy took some executive actions to combat discrimination in federal hiring, building on the measures of his predecessor. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy encountered furious southern intransigence to desegregation, and like Eisenhower, he used federal troops to assert his authority. At the University of Mississippi rioters and school officials blocked the enrollment of James Meredith, an African American student, in September 1962; Kennedy responded much as Ike had in Little Rock. In June 1963 Kennedy intervened to compel the University of Alabama to enroll black students, despite the defiance of the segregationist governor George Wallace. Only then, two and a half years into his administration, did President Kennedy break with Eisenhower’s approach. On June 11, 1963, he spoke to the nation, and for the first time framed the civil rights struggle as a moral issue, not just a legal matter. Announcing new legislation to address the enduring problem of segregation in the United States, Kennedy finally departed from the cautious incrementalism of the Eisenhower years.
In his management of the cold war, however, Kennedy picked up right where Eisenhower left off. As biographer Robert Dallek noted, “no foreign policy issue commanded as much attention during the first two months of his presidency” as did Laos, the seemingly insignificant nation in Indochina. The Soviets appeared to be backing a communist seizure of po
wer there, in a move that would jeopardize America’s ally, South Vietnam. Kennedy reluctantly prepared to airlift U.S. troops. “The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence,” he said in a late March 1961 news conference, sounding much like his predecessor.22
But it was in Cuba where Kennedy most tragically ensnared himself in the threads of continuity. In his January 19 meeting with the outgoing president, Kennedy heard Eisenhower state unequivocally, “In the long run the United States cannot allow the Castro Government to continue to exist in Cuba.” Ike told him the plan to overthrow Castro should be “continued and accelerated.” On January 25 President Kennedy met with his military advisers, and Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged him not to delay. “Time is working against us,” warned the general, because Castro was rapidly strengthening his defenses in preparation for an invasion. And on January 28, just a week after taking office, Kennedy received his first full briefing on the Cuba plan. Although the military cautioned that the landing forces were not sufficiently large to defeat Castro’s militia, CIA director Dulles spoke optimistically, claiming that the invasion force was adequate to bring down the regime. Kennedy showed no inclination to shelve the plan. In fact he ordered that the planning go forward and that the military do a careful evaluation of the CIA’s proposal. This review was duly undertaken, and at the start of February the military chiefs signed off on it. Bundy told Kennedy that Defense and the CIA were “quite enthusiastic” about the invasion.23