The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  This was 1930s isolationism turned on its head, the far swing of the interventionist pendulum. By no stretch of the imagination could American security be said to be in jeopardy. After 9,000 U.S. Marines had been put ashore under the watchful eye of 70 Sixth Fleet warships and 420 fighter planes, until then the greatest concentration of American armed might ever assembled in peacetime, the President issued a statement explaining that “The mission of these forces is to protect American lives—there are about 2,500 Americans in Lebanon,” but there was not a shred of proof that any Americans (or Lebanese, for that matter) were in danger. Moreover, by raising that issue the President in effect conceded that the Eisenhower Doctrine was irrelevant. Dulles tried to convince the congressional leadership that it was. If the United States did not act on Chamoun’s request, the Secretary of State warned, “our prestige is gone; nobody will take our word again—ever. If we get there first, there might not be Communist intervention.” Fail to act, he said, and the free world would lose not only the Mideast and nearly three-fourths of the free world’s oil reserve with it, but also Africa and non-Communist Asia. This catechism was to be recited by cold-warriors as a justification for the use of force in every international crisis down to and including Vietnam. Eisenhower had resisted it in 1954. This time resistance came from the leaders on the Hill. They made it plain that they wanted no share in the responsibility for the Lebanese move.

  To all intents and purposes, that was the end of the Eisenhower Doctrine. Four months later Chamoun was replaced by a neutralist president and premier, and at their request the marines were withdrawn. The episode had been “a frustrating and unhappy experience for Eisenhower,” Adams concluded. Its implications were graver than they seemed at the time; the President had warned the senators and representatives that he might have to risk war in the Mideast without prior discussion in Congress—“In this case,” he said, “if there has to be a public debate about the course of action, there would be no use in taking it at all”—thereby adding to the sanction of precedent under which presidential power to make war was expanding.

  ***

  Gunboat diplomacy on the other side of the globe was something new for the United States. It suggested an imperial presence, and that is precisely what such Europeans as Reiner Hellman, author of Amerika auf dem Europäischen Markt, and J. J. Servan-Schreiber of Le Défi Américain (The American Challenge) believed they saw rising on the western rim of their horizon. To prewar Europeans the old America had appeared to be a land of affluence and ballyhoo, where everyone looked like Gary Cooper and Ginger Rogers and had children like Mickey Rooney and Ann Rutherford. That U.S.A. had been idealistic and innocent, the wonder and secret envy of the world. Except in time of natural disasters, when Americans were Good Samaritans, they had played virtually no role in world affairs.

  Now they were all over the globe. Missionaries of Point Four, ECA, and technical assistance programs had fanned out across Africa and Asia. Congress had chartered the Development Loan Fund for underdeveloped countries, Fulbright scholarships, and Smith-Mundt exchanges for forty-two countries not covered by the Fulbright program. The number of American tourists abroad was increasing 12 percent annually; there were more than two million U.S. tourists in far lands in the late 1950s, and they were spending more than two billion dollars a year there.

  It was not always spent wisely and gracefully. For every European who said with Churchill, “I love these Americans. They have behaved so generously,” there was one or more who shared the contempt of Jean-Paul Sartre: “Les Américains ne comprendront jamais rien à existentialisme.” Defenders of older cultures on the continent and in Asia felt threatened by the spread of Americanization. They were alarmed by the appeal of America’s teen-age culture, especially its music, for the world’s youth. Jazz could be heard almost everywhere. The young king of Thailand was writing songs for a Broadway musical called Peep Show, and the king of Cambodia taught himself to play a hot saxophone. And then there were the American soft drinks. In Bangkok the prime minister was the Coca-Cola concessionaire and the police chief had the Pepsi-Cola franchise; Adlai Stevenson called their rivalry “the ice cold war.” Coke was ahead there and everywhere else. The sun never set on it. Every day people abroad consumed fifty billion bottles of it, enough Coke to float a light cruiser.

  “What we are faced with,” Servan-Schreiber wrote, “is not classic imperialism driven by a desire for conquest, but an overflow of power due to the difference in ‘pressure’ between America and the rest of the world.” U.S. industry was in the process of investing 57.5 billion dollars in overseas plants, with a gross output of about 100 billion dollars a year. “One by one,” Servan-Schreiber warned, “American firms are setting up headquarters to coordinate their activities throughout Western Europe.”

  As the American giants grew larger and stronger, Europeans, Asians and Africans became more curious about the quality of life in the United States. Not everything they heard was accurate and balanced. Admirers of the Soviet Union and the new China came down hard on racial discrimination, picturing the Montgomery bus boycott and Little Rock as race riots. Most accounts of American society emphasized the high standard of living; it was becoming a source of bitterness. The gap between the American standard and that of the rest of the world, particularly in the emerging countries, was steadily widening. In 1950 Premier Liaquat Ali Khan of Pakistan said on a visit to the United States: “As I let myself ponder over this, I suddenly see the United States of America as an island—a fabulously prosperous island. And all around this island I see the unhealthy sea of misery, poverty, and squalor in which millions of human beings are trying to keep their heads above water. At such moments I fear for this great nation as one fears for a dear friend.”

  U.S. embassies, USIS libraries, and cultural centers around the globe became targets in forty major riots. Spontaneous attacks on the American flag were now a common phenomenon, the reason in most cases being a long-smoldering anti-Americanism among the demonstrators which, for one reason or another, had reached the flash point. There were five such disturbances in Indonesia alone. They were by no means confined to nations whose leaders were critical of the United States. Demonstrations occurred in neutral capitals—Algiers, Cairo, and Khartoum among them—and even in those of U.S. allies, including Rio de Janeiro, Athens, Saigon, Taipeh, and Panama City.

  Americans were puzzled. They had thought of themselves as being generous with foreign aid programs, unaware that, as Leon Keyserling wrote, the actual percentage of America’s Gross National Product that flowed into international economic cooperation and assistance was “so imperceptible that one blushes to mention it.” The American man in the street suspected that the rioters had been misled by agitators. If they understood the benefits of free enterprise, he thought, they would want it, too. In his naiveté he omitted the many other factors that made the U.S. mix so successfully, natural resources and the temperate climate being among them. He thought that if men in other lands only knew how prosperous the U.S. was, they would cheer the Stars and Stripes, not defile it. It never occurred to him that documenting that prosperity would be regarded as intolerable gloating.

  It didn’t occur to his leaders, either. In boning up for visits abroad, Vice President Nixon memorized charts and graphs showing how much better off Americans were than less fortunate people. After one of the visits he described how, in discussions with citizens in host countries, he had awaited an opening and then rammed his points home:

  I cited figures to show that the 44 million families in America own 56 million cars, 50 million television sets, 143 million radio sets, and that 31 million of those families own their own home. Then I made the point that so many people overlook. What these statistics dramatically demonstrate is this: that the United States, the world’s largest capitalist country, has from the standpoint of the distribution of wealth come closest to the ideal of prosperity for all in a classless society.

  By midpoint in the second Eisenhower administ
ration, a considerable number of people overseas had heard this line of reasoning. President Eisenhower had taken to sending Mr. and Mrs. Nixon abroad a lot. In the interests of international good will the Vice President had endured diarrhea in Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia, picketing in Burma, insults in Casablanca, and a sweaty hour trapped in a defective Mexico City elevator.

  These efforts were to be capped, in the spring of 1958, by a strenuous eighteen-day tour of South America with stops in Uruguay, Colombia, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. It was to be a neighborly gesture, and Nixon expected it to be boring. Afterward he wrote: “Of all the trips I made abroad as Vice President the one I least wanted to take was my visit to South America in 1958—not because I thought it would be difficult but because I thought it would be relatively unimportant and uninteresting compared with the assignments I had in Washington at that time.” The CIA had assured him that the trip would be uneventful. To newspapermen who were hesitant about covering it he said that they would probably miss little if they stayed home.

  ***

  There wasn’t much in the beginning. South Americans of the ruling classes, who welcomed the Nixons to Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Asuncion, and La Paz, were accustomed to North American policy makers taking them for granted. Under Assistant Secretary Henry Holland, who kept watch on Latin America for Dulles, the State Department fought all proposals for U.S. loans to countries there on the ground that if liberals came to power they might try to regulate businessmen, thus depressing business morale. The elite in the first countries Nixon visited knew that, appreciated it, and had no intention of rocking the boat.

  Here and there on street corners intense young men held up signs calling the yanqui Vice President “Racist,” “Imperialist,” and “Son of a Dog.” One placard advised him to “Go back to the U.S.A. where you enjoy the lynchings of Negroes and massacres of Indians.” As a forthright politician, he paused wherever possible to explain that he wasn’t a racist, an imperialist, or a son of a dog; that he didn’t enjoy lynchings or massacres and had not, in fact, participated in any of them. But these incidents didn’t amount to much. The number of pickets at his early stops were so few he didn’t notice them. For every hostile placard there were greeters to welcome him with the Latin abrazo, a good-natured bear hug. He heard some students chanting “Fuera Nixon.” His translator told him it meant “Go home, Nixon.” He said smilingly that he didn’t want to go; people were much friendlier here.

  No one later could remember exactly when and where the chants changed to “Muera Nixon”—death to Nixon. He was jeered in Buenos Aires on the fifth day and booed in Asuncion on the sixth, but on the whole the crowds remained cordial. Bolivians showered him with flying confetti; there were no visible signs of danger there. Actually he had been lucky. An attack on him had been narrowly averted in Bolivia by blowing up a railroad track to isolate a mining town where protesters wearing bandoliers of dynamite sticks had assembled. Elsewhere police vigilance had turned away men bent on violence. Such good fortune couldn’t favor the Nixons all the way, and it didn’t. Their first inkling that disaster might lie ahead came in Lima, Peru, on Wednesday, May 7, their eleventh day away from home.

  The reception at Lima Airport was gracious, but as the motorcade entered the city Nixon observed that there were not many people on the streets and most of those who were there “did not seem to be aware” of who he was. The Peruvian official in his car explained that the motorcade route had not been published, to avoid “incidents.” This, Nixon was to recall, was “somewhat disquieting since I had not anticipated any incidents in friendly Peru.”

  Little is known about the leaders of the mobs which were to confront Nixon there and later in Venezuela. They are shadowy figures, made more so by Nixon’s later insistence that all his troubles could be traced to a centrally controlled Communist conspiracy. Upon his arrival at Lima’s majestic Grand Hotel Bolivar, he wrote afterward, the extent of the plot was revealed to him: “It was apparent that the Communists, after the failure of their efforts to disrupt my tour in Uruguay, Argentina, or Bolivia, had decided to make an all-out effort to embarrass me and the United States at San Marcos University, an institution so well known throughout Latin America that whatever happened there would be front-page news everywhere.” Watching the demonstrators, he thought, “How are they able to stir the people up to this pitch? Then I realized as this was going on that right here was the ruthlessness and the determination, the fanaticism of the enemy that we face. That was what I saw in the faces of the mob. This is really Communism as it is.” Noting the youth of the crowds, he wrote, “My reaction was a feeling of absolute hatred for the tough Communist agitators who were driving children to this irrational state.”

  This is largely conjecture. Undoubtedly there were Communists in the forces which were forming against him in Peru and Venezuela, and clearly people were inflamed by the Tribuna Popular, the Communist weekly, which ran a front-page picture of him retouched so that his teeth looked like fangs and his expression was that of a madman. But to infer from this that all the Latin-American demonstrators protesting his trip were being manipulated and coordinated by agents of the Cominform is, to put it mildly, rich. The CIA was far from omniscient in these years—the agency had been caught napping by the Iraqi coup—but it is hard to believe that it would have missed something that big. A more reasonable interpretation is that poor people, regarding themselves as victims of injustice, saw an opportunity to express their hatred of the wealthy and—understandably—took it. Communists and extremists of other persuasions then added fuel to the flames of anti-American rage that had sprung up on their own.

  ***

  The mobs in Lima were ugly, but there was a respite for the vice-presidential party afterward. Four days in Ecuador and Colombia provided an opportunity to regain the strength needed for the last and most risky stop: Caracas. The situation in Venezuela was volatile, the mood in the streets was ugly, and the ruling junta, which had been in power less than four months, had not taken the vigorous measures needed to suppress the troublemakers. Unwilling to acknowledge its helplessness, the new government responded to periodic inquiries from the American embassy with assurances that it foresaw no serious incidents for the Vice President and that it was prepared to deal with any which might arise.

  Caracas was the one city in which Communist plotting against Nixon was probably a factor. South American Communists are proud of their ability to organize, and the Venezuelan mobs awaiting him had been well prepared. As the vice-presidential aircraft entered its glide pattern over Maiquetía Airport on the morning of Tuesday, May 13, five crowds took up strategic positions. One was at the air terminal. Three others lay in wait for the motorcade on the twelve-mile road between the airfield and the Panteón Plaza in the center of Caracas, where Nixon was scheduled to lay a wreath on the tomb of Simon Bolivar. The last and largest of the crowds, in the plaza itself, was armed with Molotov cocktails. At one place or another, the ringleaders expected Nixon to be torn to pieces and burned. In Venezuela that is regarded as the most degrading death possible. The previous January it had been the fate of policemen defending the outgoing regime, and the fresh memory of that doubtless accounts for the reluctance of surviving police officers to come to Nixon’s aid.

  Official laxity went beyond that, however, and some aspects of it are still puzzling. American correspondents covering the Vice President’s tour landed before he did and found that five hundred anti-Nixon teen-agers had been bused to the airfield and deployed on the terminal’s observation deck. Obviously they were there to make trouble. Already they were shaking fists and shouting insults at the plane overhead. Yet when Secret Service agents asked the Venezuelan security chief to make them move, he refused, saying, “They are harmless. They have a right to demonstrate.” He then ordered the motorcade to form in the street beyond the terminal instead of at the customary place on the field. That meant the Nixons would have to walk another hundred yards, through
demonstrators. His subsequent explanation—that the sleek motorcade limousines would have detracted from the splendor of the honor guard—was preposterous.

  Other suspicious figures that day included the bandleader at the airport, who knew that whenever he struck up the American or Venezuelan national anthem the Vice President would have to stand at attention, and the authorities responsible for safeguarding the motorcade route. These last were the most derelict of all. They told Americans responsible for the Vice President’s safety that all traffic on it had been halted an hour before his arrival. This was untrue; heavy traffic on it continued. In addition, men and material for the three ambushes had been assembled at points where even a casual inspection would have revealed them. Junta complicity in the plot is unthinkable, but hope for a newsworthy episode is not. Latin American editors had noted that the disorders in Lebanon and elsewhere had attracted American attention and aid. If shaking the Vice President up would end U.S. complacency about its southern neighbors, they implied, it would not be wholly deplorable. Nixon later found this explanation for the poor security persuasive. He noted, with commendable restraint, that those responsible cannot have known much about mobs.