by Jim Newton
Those were trying and often exhausting months. Eisenhower tried to relax with his golf clubs and family. One rainy day he moped around the White House, then brightened when it cleared just in time for him to take his grandchildren on a trip down the Potomac.
Ike’s grandchildren were a source of joy and comfort. Failing to reach John and his wife, Barbara, one day to wish them a happy anniversary—they celebrated their seventh anniversary in June—Eisenhower instead dropped them a note of congratulations. “I couldn’t possibly be prouder of you both,” he wrote, “unless possibly if I had another grandchild!” He would get his wish: Ike’s three grandchildren—David, Barbara Anne, and Susan—would be joined by a fourth, Mary Jean, in 1955. He took delight in the young ones, at ease with them in a way that had sometimes been difficult for him when John was growing up. As Eisenhower came upon David and Anne one day in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom, he overheard a snippet of their conversation. “This,” David lectured his younger sister, “is President Lincoln’s bed.”
“That can’t be,” Anne replied. “That man isn’t President. Ike is President!”
Eisenhower cheerfully relayed that exchange to Edgar, with the comment that “by the time they are eight, they will probably be candidates for their Ph.D.’s.”
But family could also provide tragedy, none more shocking or heartbreaking than the news that Milton’s beloved wife, Helen, was diagnosed with cancer in early 1954. She initially responded to treatment but then suddenly died at home of a blood clot on June 10. She was forty-nine years old. Milton and their son, Milton Jr., were by her side. A shocked Ike and Mamie canceled their plans for the coming week—Eisenhower had been scheduled to address a gathering of governors—to rush to Milton’s home in University Park, where he served as the president of Pennsylvania State University. For months thereafter, Ike treated his little brother with delicacy, calling on him for advice and service but taking care not to overburden him.
Dwight Eisenhower was a profoundly conservative man, dedicated to the conviction that government served society best by safeguarding the individualism of the governed and allowing maximum liberty within those limits. His “middle way,” as he shaped and explained that idea, explicitly rejected the notion that government should control the lives of citizens or eliminate all fear or want. But he also stood firmly apart from those who would, as a matter of principle, reject the useful services of a government that could advance the economy or protect its people. As he wrote to a much more conservative friend in 1954:
When I refer to the Middle Way, I merely mean the middle way as it represents a practical working basis between extremists, both of whose doctrines I flatly reject. It seems to me that no great intelligence is required in order to discern the practical necessity of establishing some kind of security for individuals in a specialized and highly industrialized age. At one time such security was provided by the existence of free land and a great mass of untouched and valuable natural resources throughout our country. These are no longer to be had for the asking; we have had the experience of millions of people—devoted, fine Americans, who have walked the streets unable to find work or any kind of sustenance for themselves and their families.
On the other hand, for us to push further and further into the socialistic experiment is to deny the validity of all those convictions we have held as the cumulative power of free citizens, exercising their own initiative, inventiveness and desires to provide a better living for themselves and their children.
That quest for balance, a defining feature of Eisenhower’s life and presidency, found expression in the summer of 1954 with the completion of a long-sought deal to open the middle of the United States to oceangoing goods through the construction of a system of locks linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. The opportunity for that project, known as the St. Lawrence Seaway, had long fascinated engineers, but it was mired in complexity and cost, not to mention considerable opposition from rail companies that worried it would break their lock on trade through the region.
In this case, Eisenhower saw a constructive opportunity for government action. He urged Congress to create a public corporation that would issue bonds to build the seaway and then recoup the money through tolls from the ships that used it. Using the same logic that would later prevail in his support for a national highway system, he argued that the economic benefits were vast and that no blind fidelity to limited government should deter thoughtful progress. Congress passed the St. Lawrence Seaway Act, and construction began in the fall of 1954. When it opened, Eisenhower, joined by Canada’s prime minister and Queen Elizabeth, proclaimed it “a magnificent symbol … of the achievements possible to democratic nations peacefully working together for the common good.” It was also, he hardly needed to note, a triumph of the middle way—of government making possible private sector investment in order to advance a public good.
With McCarthy vanquished and the seaway approved by Congress, Eisenhower looked forward to a summer rest, only to have it delayed in July when the Chinese shot down British and American planes performing rescue missions in the South China Sea. Peace, it seemed, was always tested.
At last he escaped to Denver, where his staff worried about him. “Eisenhower had spells of depression that summer, and the reason was not easy to pin down,” Sherman Adams wrote. He and Ike’s secretary, Ann Whitman, feared that it was the result of too many problems that defied easy solution—long, deep questions that had perplexed and angered him all year. The stresses of the presidency were hard to bear and impossible for aides to ease.
9
Revolutions
Deterrence was one prong of New Look, but Eisenhower and Dulles promised to do more than merely contain Communism; that was the essence of Truman’s foreign policy, which they rejected as too timid and defensive. Ike wanted to challenge Communism, to roll it back where he could and liberate its captive populations. Full-scale confrontation was out of the question—the expense far too great, the threat to humanity too horrifying—but so was passivity. The ease with which Mossadegh was bumped from office in Iran whetted Eisenhower’s appetite for covert action, and Project Solarium had specifically identified subversion as a useful tactical device. The CIA hardly needed encouragement when, in the early weeks of 1954, it became increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of the Guatemalan government and its president, the former Army captain Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Indeed, Project Solarium’s Task Force C had been shockingly unambiguous in its proposal for how to deal with this turn of events in the Western Hemisphere. Under recommendations for Latin America, the report suggested: “Coup d’etat in Guatemala.”
For Truman, Guatemala had been a source of anxiety and ambivalence. Under the histrionic rule of Jorge Ubico—who fancied himself Latin America’s Napoleon and liked to pose in the image of his idol—Guatemalans enjoyed no right of dissent, and the nation’s large Mayan population was relegated to impotent poverty. But Ubico opened the country to foreign investment, and American firms, most notably the United Fruit Company, established large and prosperous operations. Still, suppression has its limits, and university unrest in 1944 spread to the middle classes. Together, students, teachers, and the Guatemalan bourgeoisie overthrew Ubico. Arbenz was among the military officers who deposed Ubico’s junta; the officers then ceded power back to civilian authorities, and Juan José Arévalo was elected president in December 1944. Arévalo, a university professor educated in Argentina, launched the nation on an ambitious program of social and economic reform that placed him at odds with the interests of American corporations. In 1947, the Guatemalan National Assembly, with the encouragement of Arévalo, approved new labor rules permitting unionization of large industries, including United Fruit. The company appealed to the U.S. government for help and received it. “If the Guatemalans want to handle a Guatemalan company roughly that is none of our business,” an American official explained, “but if they handle an American company roughly it is our business.”
American support for United Fruit placed the U.S. government, first under Truman and then under Eisenhower, in lockstep with the repressive forces in the region. That connection was reinforced by John Foster Dulles, whose law firm represented United Fruit, and by other American representatives of the company, including the famous fixer Tommy Corcoran and General Robert Cutler, an old friend of Ike’s who headed the president’s NSC Planning Board. Even Ann Whitman’s husband served as a public relations executive at United Fruit.
The objections of the American firms in Guatemala crested after Arévalo’s historic transfer of power in 1951—he was the first civilian president of Guatemala to yield office voluntarily. Arbenz’s chief opponent in that campaign was Francisco Arana, a fellow military officer who had joined him in the 1944 coup but had since tacked to the right and was supported by Guatemala’s upper class. Arbenz was the strong favorite to win, but Arana tried to force an early election; his campaign ended in a shoot-out on a bridge outside of Guatemala City. Blame for Arana’s murder was never fixed, but the shadow of culpability would hover over Arbenz and taint the CIA’s later appraisal of his administration.
Arbenz’s early moves as president troubled American officials and United Fruit. On June 17, 1952, just six months after taking office, Arbenz signed Decree 900, a land reform act that appropriated uncultivated land from large landowners and distributed it in eight- to thirty-three-acre plots to farmers who could pay back the government over time. Landowners whose property was taken were to be compensated for their loss based on the property’s assessed value for tax purposes. Although all large landholdings were affected by Decree 900, United Fruit’s properties were especially burdened by it since the company was Guatemala’s largest landowner. Moreover, it had systematically avoided paying its share of Guatemalan taxes in part by securing absurdly low valuations for its land, which stung now that compensation was to be based on those same fraudulently low estimates. Over the next several months, the government moved to acquire large portions of United Fruit’s property and proposed to pay the company $1,185,000; the company, with the support of the Truman administration, countered with a bill for $15,854,849.
As tension mounted, American officials increasingly came to see the Arbenz reform efforts as the work of a reckless administration, infected by Communists. With reference to Eisenhower, two things must be noted: First, his administration did not set out to put the might of the U.S. military behind United Fruit; rather, the challenge to United Fruit seemed, to Eisenhower as it did to Truman, to be part of a larger rejection of American influence in Guatemala. Second, Eisenhower was not wrong to spy Communist influence in Guatemala, but he misapprehended both its extent and its relationship to Moscow.
The National Intelligence Estimates for 1952 and 1953 highlighted the presence of Guatemalan Communists. In 1953, with Eisenhower freshly in the White House, the estimate reflected a gathering pessimism: “As long as President Arbenz remains in power the Arbenz-Communist alliance will probably continue to dominate Guatemalan politics.” Arbenz did count among his supporters some Guatemalan Communists, especially in the nation’s labor movement, which strongly backed the Arévalo and Arbenz reforms to strengthen labor’s position in Guatemalan society (prior to Arévalo, it was a capital offense in Guatemala to join a union). Nevertheless, Guatemalan Communists never held high-ranking positions in the government, nor did they capture more than a handful of seats in the National Assembly. American intelligence officers searched enthusiastically for evidence of contact between Guatemalan Communists and Moscow—examining travel records and investigating allegations of a courier network—but never produced any evidence of such connections. Nor was Guatemalan Communism a dominant force in that country’s politics. When Bill Allen, a friend of Eisenhower’s, visited the country in 1954, he cabled back that there were indeed Communists in the country but, he noted, “not as many as [in] San Francisco.”
From Washington, however, the possibility of Communism in Guatemala seemed real. Eisenhower would not have it. The U.S. analysis was in many respects flawed—Arbenz’s reform plan more closely resembled the New Deal than Stalinist collectivization—but Communists operated in secret, so estimates of their strength were invariably regarded as conservative. There was, in fact, an international Communist movement directed by Moscow, and though Soviet leaders in practice were far more conservative in their foreign policy than Washington believed, their occasional aggressiveness made it easy to overestimate the danger they posed. As a result, the overarching threat of international Communism repeatedly caused American officials, including Eisenhower, to overlook or underestimate nationalist or regional impulses.
Those intelligence and analytical failings would become clearer over time, but in 1954 they were overwhelmed by the urgency for action, supported by Ike himself. In March, the Organization of American States met in Caracas, and the United States, led by John Foster Dulles, demanded an uncompromising resolution pledging member states to “take the necessary measures to protect” against Communist incursions into the Americas, language clearly intended to put Guatemala on the defensive. Even Ike conceded that the “draft resolution was harsh,” adding, “It was meant to be.” Arbenz stood his ground, accusing United Fruit of fomenting the false allegation regarding Communist subversion and pointing out that forces allied with the company had complained of Guatemalan Communism even before the party existed. “How could they invent an umbrella before it rained?” he asked plaintively. Still, after an acrimonious debate, the member states voted 17–1 to approve the resolution, with Guatemala voting no and Mexico and Argentina abstaining.
Eisenhower had already moved beyond resolutions. As early as August 1953, the CIA categorized Guatemala as its “number one priority,” and Eisenhower authorized the agency to move against Arbenz. With some reluctance, the United States settled on Carlos Castillo Armas for its leader. A diminutive, mustachioed army officer with a small force of loyalists and an ill-defined political philosophy that barely extended beyond reversing the “Sovietization” of his country, Castillo Armas enjoyed the backing of neighboring Central American dictators. With American help, he assembled a small force of rebels just outside Guatemala’s borders. There he waited as CIA operatives inside Guatemala worked to soften up the public and rattle Arbenz. Eisenhower imposed an arms embargo, covertly shipping weapons to the rebels while overtly cutting them off from the government. In the spring, a clandestine radio station began taunting the government. The Guatemalan leaders were so weak, the announcers claimed, that they could not even find and shut down one local radio station (it was, in fact, based in Miami). Forces loyal to Castillo Armas used U.S.-supplied airplanes to drop leaflets on the capital, and Arbenz responded by curtailing free speech and protest, “making Guatemala into the type of repressive regime the United States liked to portray it as,” according to the CIA’s classified history of the operation.
On September 11, the CIA completed its budget for overthrowing the Guatemalan government. A timely sprinkling of cash had helped in Iran, and agents now proceeded to draw on that experience. The money covered “subversion,” payments to a cadre of five hundred men, and weapons—the total came to $2.735 million. Allen Dulles approved $3 million three months later.
Through those weeks, there was significant criticism of Eisenhower’s policy, but not of the type that one might expect. Rather than reacting to Arbenz’s appeals for international assistance, American opinion leaders were angered by what they perceived as Ike’s inaction. A Communist threat had been detected in the hemisphere, and it appeared to many in Congress and the press that Eisenhower was tolerating it. NBC News aired a documentary that spring called Red Rule in Guatemala, Walter Winchell reported that Guatemalan spies had infiltrated neighboring countries, and newspaper editorials castigated Eisenhower for sitting idly by while Latin America succumbed to Communist influence. As was so often the case, Eisenhower’s style of leadership cloaked fervid maneuvering behind what seemed to be inaction. Critics
yearned for brash statements and confrontations—in scenarios as diverse as the McCarthy hearings and the threat to Dien Bien Phu. Receiving none, they assumed Ike was disinterested when, in fact, he was actively but covertly pursuing his objectives.
Certainly, no one in the Arbenz government believed that Ike was dragging his feet. To the contrary, Arbenz felt cornered. He then made a fatal mistake: he sent a trusted emissary behind the Iron Curtain to arrange an arms purchase. CIA agents learned of the deal and tracked a Swedish vessel as it traveled from Poland to Guatemala with two hundred tons of small arms stashed in its hold. It arrived on May 17. The U.S. ambassador to Guatemala stood on a dock in Puerto Barrios and waited for the cargo to be unloaded. The news of Communist weapons being unloaded on Guatemalan docks ignited the American press and Congress.
“Communist Arms Unloaded in Guatemala by Vessel from Polish Port, U.S. Learns,” read the headline in the New York Times, directly abutting an article announcing that Eisenhower had invoked executive privilege in the McCarthy hearings. “This is a development of gravity,” the State Department announced. The Times agreed: “The Guatemalan regime has been frequently accused of being influenced by Communists.” American anxiety over Guatemala now liberated the Eisenhower administration to move more forcefully on the one hand while subjecting it to heightened scrutiny on the other. At his press conference two days later, Eisenhower responded with a carefully drafted statement; he could not deny the right of the Guatemalan government to secure weapons, especially given that he was well aware the United States was itself supplying rebels. “It is disturbing,” he said of the situation, adding that it reinforced the American insistence on language at a recent conference deploring the presence of Communism in the Americas. To legislative leaders, he went further and announced on May 21 that the United States would stop and search suspicious vessels bound for Guatemala.