***
Long after an event has passed, its place in the scheme of things becomes clear, but at the time it often seems insignificant. Doubtless the driver who told Mrs. Parks to stand merely thought he was dealing with one uppity Nigra; had he known that his own grandchildren would one day study the incident in school, he might have been more circumspect. Presidents are more conscious of history than bus drivers, but they, too, may be blind to the consequences of their decisions. Dwight Eisenhower was above all a man of peace. That and his respect for congressional prerogatives had caused him to stop other members of his administration from making unwise commitments on Indochina. Yet in the same year that Rosa Parks altered destiny, Ike took the country a step down the long road toward madness in Vietnam.
It was not the first such step. Any assessment of the growth in presidential war-making powers should note the precedents set by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 and 1942. Before then, congressional authority in this area was intact. It was shakier afterward; FDR, with his brilliant display of political legerdemain, had used executive agreements to create a situation in which the Axis powers were virtually compelled to attack the United States. Then came Korea. Cabell Phillips, Harry Truman’s biographer, observes that “His decision to intervene in Korea… came close to preempting the right to declare war… all Presidents are now armed with the Truman precedent to strike swiftly on their own, wherever and with whatever force is necessary, when they believe the national interest demands it.”
The last steps in the erosion of congressional authority, and the accompanying executive ascendancy, were to be taken by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon against the backdrop of Southeast Asia, but each link in the chain of precedent deserves notice. The Formosa resolution of 1955 was one of them. It was a special consequence of the cold war, but its implications for the future were broad and grave.
Dean Acheson had wanted to wait “until the dust has settled” in China before formulating a new policy there. By 1955 it was as settled as it would ever be, yet the eastern edge of the picture remained murky. The Communists controlled the mainland and the Nationalists Formosa, but the status of Formosa Strait, which separated them, was unresolved. Here and there the 115-mile-wide sound was sprinkled with tiny, barren islands whose only real significance, in 1955, was as a bone of contention between the Peoples Republic of China, on the one hand, and Chiang and his American allies on the other.
The islands varied in size and proximity to larger land masses. One group of sixty-four islets, the Pescadores, was thirty miles from Formosa and was considered a part of it; the White House let it be known that any attack on the Pescadores would be interpreted as preliminary to an invasion of Formosa and as such would be resisted by the Seventh Fleet. Congressional approval was not needed for a defense of the Pescadores because they had been captured from Japan in World War II; under international law the United States was entitled to protect them. The situation on the far side of the strait was different. The islands there were Quemoy, Matsu, and the Tachen group, each of which was more than a hundred miles from Formosa and within five to ten miles of the mainland. As Adlai Stevenson pointed out, they lay “almost as close to the coast of China as Staten Island does to New York,” had “always belonged to China,” and were properties to which neither the U.S. nor the Nationalists on Formosa had any legal claim. Walter Lippmann underscored the implications of this: “…were we to intervene in the offshore islands, we would be acting on Chinese territory in a Chinese civil war.”
Nothing would have given John Foster Dulles greater satisfaction. He was ready to fight for the offshore islands any time, and he complained to Sherman Adams about the inability of the British and other U.S. allies to understand “the tremendous shock that a retreat from Quemoy and Matsu would be to the free people of East Asia.” That was how Dulles saw the world. He conjured up visions of mass meetings in places like Sumatra and Tibet, with millions of stern peasants gathered under banners reading FREE PEOPLE OF EAST ASIA UNITE and SUPPORT COLLECTIVE SECURITY. The Chinese Communists knew of Dulles’s intractability and liked to twit him. While he was in Manila signing the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization protocols in September 1954 they had bombarded Quemoy, and the following January 18 they occupied the islet of Yikiang in the Tachens. Since Yikiang was so microscopic that it wasn’t even shown on State Department maps, and since the Tachens were two hundred miles north of Formosa, the threat to Chiang’s Nationalists was obscure. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs went into emergency session. A majority was hawkish. Admiral Radford, Admiral Carney, and General Nathan F. Twining felt that it was time to take a stand against the Communists and bring about a showdown once and for all.
General Ridgway was the lone dissenter. He advised the President that “Such an action would be almost impossible to limit. It would bring us into direct conflict with the Red Chinese. It could spread to full and all-out war, employing all the terrible weapons at our command.” Even if China were conquered, Ridgway went on, the situation would still be highly unsatisfactory; the United States would have created “by military means a great vacuum. Then we would have to go in there with hundreds of thousands of men to fill that vacuum—which would bring us face to face with Russia along a seven-thousand-mile frontier.”
With Ridgway the only dove, the Joint Chiefs voted to move against the Reds. Dulles agreed; so did Senator Knowland. But Eisenhower concluded that Ridgway was right. Once again he refused to be drawn into a war on the Asian mainland. The war fever abated. Nevertheless, Dulles did succeed in persuading Ike that face was involved. After the seizure of Yikiang the Peking radio had declared that the thrust showed a “determined will to fight for the liberation of Taiwan.” If under these circumstances America did nothing, Dulles warned, Asians would conclude that the U.S. was a paper tiger. The President agreed to do something. He would ask Congress for a resolution.
His message of January 24 was unprecedented in American history. Ike was asking Congress for something more and something less than a declaration of war. He wanted it to let him decide when and where America would fight. He said:
The situation has become sufficiently critical to impel me, without awaiting action by the United Nations, to ask the Congress to participate now, by specific resolution, in measures designed to improve the prospects for peace. These measures would contemplate the use of the armed forces of the United States, if necessary, to assure the security of Formosa and the Pescadores.
The President then suggested that whether or not a Chinese attack off the offshore islands invited retaliation depended upon the character of the assault. If they just wanted Quemoy and Matsu he might let them have it. If they had a leap toward Formosa in mind, he might not. He wanted Congress to let him read the Communist mind and take whatever action he thought appropriate.
For a measure which was meant to remove doubts, this one bewildered a lot of people. Liberal Democrats contended that Ike already had authority to take the steps he had in mind. As champions of Roosevelt-Truman foreign policy, they were believers in a strong Presidency. His constitutional power as commander in chief, they insisted, permitted him to deploy American military might any way he wished. Some of the arguments spun that winter make curious reading today. Vietnam was destined to become the graveyard of many U.S. policies, none more so than this one. As in the struggle over the Bricker amendment, conservatives wanted to keep the prerogative of making great decisions abroad on Capitol Hill, while liberals insisted that it belonged in the White House. The absolutist nature of the liberal position was most clearly stated by Richard H. Rovere. On March 19, 1955, he wrote that:
…the President’s power to defend Formosa does not rest on the hastily composed resolution that Congress passed in January. As President of the United States he has the right to take whatever action he deems necessary in any area he judges to be related to the defense of this country, regardless of whether it is related to the defense of Formosa or anything else.
Eisenhower himself
was uncertain over whether he was giving Congress something or taking it away. Before sending the message to the Capitol he made one change. It had read, “The authority I request may be in part already inherent in the authority of the Commander-in-Chief.” He crossed this out and wrote in its place, “Authority for some of the actions which might be required would be inherent in the authority of the Commander-in-Chief.” Congress was no surer of itself than he was. The most common interpretation there was that the administration was looking for a way to get off the hook on the offshore islands.
Hubert Humphrey tried in vain to tack on an amendment which would have restricted the grant of power to Formosa and the Pescadores. Others in Congress were worried that the United States might be trapped into a war over some obscure place that had nothing to do with American security. Senator Ralph E. Flanders went further. “We have had intimations from the highest quarters,” he said, “that it would be militarily advisable to prevent the massing of troops and equipment gathered for the purpose of making an assault on the islands. Put in plain English, this is preventive war. And it is seriously proposed as a possible action pursuant to the purposes of this resolution.”
Opposition receded when Senator George threw his great weight behind the bill, saying, “I hope no Democrat will be heard to say that because the President of the United States came to Congress he is thereby subject to criticism.” The resolution passed the Senate 85 to 3 and the House 410 to 3. Eisenhower signed it on January 29. That happened to be George’s seventy-seventh birthday, and a great fuss was made over the senator when he arrived for the ceremony. Yet in less than a month the Seventh Fleet seemed to show how pointless the whole debate had been by evacuating fourteen thousand Chinese Nationalist troops from the Tachens. So much for the Formosa resolution, Washington said, assuming that it would now become a meaningless scrap of paper. But one man saw it differently. Adlai Stevenson observed that the President had asked for, and had received from Congress, a “blank check.” That is precisely what it was. One day Eisenhower or another occupant of his office could present it for payment without consulting Congress further. The delicate balance of constitutional powers had shifted again; another restraint on the chief executive had been removed.
***
Eisenhower’s greatest foreign policy coup, which came six months later, was a public relations triumph. To achieve it he had to all but run over John Foster Dulles. For ten years the Republican Old Guard had resolutely opposed any meeting with the Soviet leaders. Winston Churchill had been proposing a top-level meeting for some time—he called it a “summit”—but for American conservatives the mere suggestion that an American President might clink cocktail glasses with the Russians was like a Pavlovian bell. It set them to protesting against another Yalta or Potsdam, to them synonyms for sellout. Dulles agreed; as an anti-Communist fundamentalist he recoiled from any bargaining with men as steeped in sin as the Soviets.
He couldn’t come right out and say that, because the President had repeatedly declared that he would meet anyone, anywhere, in the name of peace. Therefore Dulles tried to establish impossible prerequisites for such a meeting. Before it could be seriously considered, he said, Moscow must show by its deeds that the Soviet Union belonged to the comity of nations and would cooperate in settling differences. When pressed for an example of such a deed, he would reply with vague generalities. He gave the impression that he might be impressed by a withdrawal of all Russian troops from eastern Europe, say, or free elections throughout Russia under U.N. supervision. Sometimes he implied that he would expect handsome apologies from them, too, for their transgressions in the past.
To mollify him and the Republican ultras, Eisenhower called in key senators and congressmen and promised them that he would not be party to “another Yalta.” He assured them that no commitments would be made without their approval. Dulles, who was there, said he wouldn’t put it past the Russians to make some grandstand play in the name of world peace. He would be on the lookout for it, he said grimly.
Eisenhower had said nothing when Dulles spoke scornfully of dramatic peace proposals. Inwardly, however, he must have been troubled. He himself had that very thing in mind. Nothing definite had been decided, but the draft of a fresh approach to disarmament lay on his desk. In March the President had appointed Nelson Rockefeller chairman of a panel of experts in arms control and psychological warfare. He had given Rockefeller office space at the Marine Corps base at Quantico and asked him to come up with new recommendations which might be produced at a summit meeting. Dulles heard about the task force, but he didn’t know its mission. All the same, he was suspicious. To Sherman Adams he said of Rockefeller, “He seems to be building up a big staff. He’s got them down at Quantico, and nobody knows what they’re doing.”
They were studying European opinion surveys. People in the NATO nations, they learned, were weary of the alliance, unenthusiastic about the American bases on the continent, and in favor of banning nuclear weapons. That was disturbing. Lacking Russia’s huge standing army, America needed the bombs and the bases as a deterrent. Some way must be found to keep them and still convince Europeans that the U.S. was seeking peace. The Quantico group’s answer was a proposal for aerial inspection—in a felicitous phrase, “Open Skies.” The idea was not new. Aerial inspection had been suggested as early as 1946 in a Bernard Baruch plan for the international control of atomic energy, and later it had appeared in the report of a U.N. disarmament commission and an Acheson plan for “international disclosure and verification” of all armed forces and weapons. Until now, though, it had been overlooked. Eisenhower thought it both appealing and practical. He hadn’t made up his mind over whether to present it at the summit, but on the way to the Columbine, his plane, he stuffed it in his briefcase.
The Columbine’s destination was Geneva. There he unpacked in the fifteen-room Château Creux de Genthod, which the wife of a Swiss perfume tycoon had placed at his disposal. Meantime Plane No. 001 of the Ilyushin fleet landed and discharged down its ramp Stalin’s two successors, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, the first looking like a labor union boss and the second bearing an uncanny resemblance to Colonel Sanders, the fried chicken magnate of the early 1970s. Later that afternoon, Anthony Eden and French Premier Edgar Faure arrived to complete the roster of participants in the Big Four talks, or, in the neat Swiss phrase, the Conférence à Quatre. Already the Spirit of Geneva, the newsmen’s name for it, was casting a magic spell, attracting crowds of tourists and some celebrities. Pastor Martin Niemöller was there to hold a press conference, and an American clergyman, Billy Graham, was presiding over a revival in the Parc des Eaux-Vives.
In the Palais des Nations Dulles looked disconsolate. Ike, by contrast, was in fine form. At first he tried to match Dulles’s stony expression, agreeing with the secretary that it would be unwise to raise false hopes that might be quickly dashed if the meetings were unfruitful. But Eisenhower was too genial, too optimistic, too bursting with good spirits to stay gloomy. He allowed himself to tell the press that “a new dawn may be coming,” and in chairing the opening session on Monday, July 18, he spent the first quarter-hour greeting Marshal Zhukov.
The Russians, for their part, seemed more relaxed than at any time since the war. Khrushchev assured his listeners that “neither side wants war,” and back home Pravda and Izvestia were telling the Russian people the same thing—a major shift in the party line, which until now had held that the rest of the world was implacably against them. Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Zhukov rode around Geneva in open cars and took long walks without bodyguards, something of an embarrassment to the Americans, because Eisenhower’s every move was screened by Secret Service details and monitored by men in helicopters overhead.
Nevertheless, it was Ike who dominated the Conferénce à Quatre. His smile, his candor, and his obvious concern for all mankind captivated the Europeans. Le Monde of Paris, usually anti-American, observed that “Eisenhower, whose personality has long been misunderstood,
has emerged as the type of leader humanity needs today.” Addressing himself to the Soviets, he said earnestly: “The American people want to be friends with the Soviet people. There are no natural differences between our peoples or our nations. There are no territorial or commercial rivalries. Historically, our two countries have always been at peace.” He then proposed freer communications between East and West, disarmament, and a united, democratic Germany.
Despite their better manners, the Russians were still Russians when the chips were down. They had a few favorable words to say about peaceful coexistence, but in exchange for it they wanted nothing less than the dissolution of NATO. They dusted off and presented a plan which all those present had heard before: America, Russia, and China would each limit itself to 1,500,000 soldiers; Britain and France would have 650,000 each; and all nuclear weapons would be banned. When they laid that on the table the talks bogged down. After a two-hour huddle of the Americans in the château, Stassen went off to draw up a general disarmament proposal while the President himself drafted an Open Skies presentation. He continued to be undecided about submitting it; he wanted to hear what Bulganin had to say in the morning. Bulganin said nothing new. Not much was expected from Ike, either; this was the fourth day of the conference, and the others assumed that he had already spoken his mind. His first words were familiar: the United States was “prepared to enter into a sound and reliable agreement making possible the reduction of armaments.” Then he paused, squared his shoulders against the high windows looking out over Lake Geneva, took off his glasses, and laid them down. He said:
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 112