American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The oratory continued while the atomic arsenals expanded. At a Geneva summit in the summer of 1955 the Soviets urged that the manufacture and use of atomic weapons be prohibited and that the armed forces of China, Russia, and the United States be limited to a million and a half men each. Eisenhower proposed that each nation give the other a “complete blueprint” of its military establishments and that each permit the other free photographic reconnaissance over its lands. The Russians rejected this “Open Skies” proposal as a bald espionage plot. A year later Adlai Stevenson, once again nominated by the Democrats, suggested suspension of nuclear tests; a year after that, in August 1957, the reelected President asked for a two-year suspension.

  Eisenhower’s initiatives were not working, nor were Moscow’s. Fear continued to dominate diplomacy. And so did politics: Nixon had called Stevenson’s proposal for a halt to nuclear tests “not only naïve but dangerous to our national security.”

  But the President could still display his greatest skill—not going to war. During the early 1950s both the Soviets and the Western powers became increasingly involved in the Middle East, largely because each side feared penetration of the area by the other. In part to neutralize a Soviet arms sale to Egypt, Dulles—at a time when the President was still recovering from a serious heart attack—first offered to help Egypt finance the building of the Aswan Dam, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s top economic priority, and then withdrew the offer. Both steps were taken in light of American strategic needs rather than the Egyptian people’s needs. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel, each for its own reasons, plotted—the term is not too strong—to retake the Suez. The Israelis drove into the Sinai while British and French forces attacked Egypt. A fully recovered and furious Eisenhower threw every ounce of his influence for a solid week into bringing the invasion to a halt. The President not only did not go to war—he stopped a war.

  During this time came another and sterner test of Dulles declamation versus Eisenhower deescalation. Although “liberation of captive peoples” had been quietly dropped as an operational practicality during Eisenhower’s first year in office, Administration propagandists kept alive hopes and expectations at home and abroad. In October 1956, after Poland was swept by rioting, a new leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, warned Moscow defiantly that the Polish people would defend themselves against any effort to push them “off the road of democratization.” Inspired by the Poles, Hungarians took to the streets against their Soviet-dominated government. Massive Soviet intervention followed against Hungarian “freedom fighters” hurling homemade Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks. Eisenhower’s main concern was to give Moscow no reason to think that the United Slates would support the freedom fighters; he feared that Moscow might even start a third world war to maintain its hold on Eastern Europe.

  “Liberation was a sham,” wrote Stephen Ambrose. “Eisenhower had always known it. The Hungarians had yet to learn it.”

  Many on the Republican right shared such bitterness. Not least of these was Joe McCarthy, but in 1956 the Wisconsin senator could no longer threaten the President. The Army hearings had turned into a disaster for McCarthy, who revealed himself to the public as an inquisitorial bully. Near the end, after McCarthy had gratuitously pounced on a young, vulnerable lawyer, Welch said that he had not dreamed the senator could be so reckless and cruel “as to do an injury to that lad.” When McCarthy, glowering and storming, resumed the attack, Welch told him to stop. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” The audience burst into applause. McCarthy was bewildered. Grim, sweating, he kept asking, “What did I do? What did I do?” Six months later the Senate formally “condemned” him for abusive conduct toward his fellow senators. In three years he was dead of alcoholism.

  McCarthy left human wreckage behind him—men humiliated and browbeaten, their reputations tarnished. Among the diminished was Dwight Eisenhower. He had dealt with McCarthy in his own way, by indirection, by persuading others to attack him, by pronouncements that conspicuously failed to mention the senator by name, by blowing off steam to intimates, by various other “hidden hand” manipulations. He had damaged his foe, but he had never struck at his jugular. “Eisenhower’s only significant contribution to McCarthy’s downfall,” according to a sympathetic biographer, “was the purely negative act of denying him access to executive records and personnel. Eisenhower’s cautious, hesitant approach—or nonapproach—to the McCarthy issue did the President’s reputation no good, and much harm.”

  McCarthy also left a legacy of unreasoning fear. Part of that legacy materialized weeks after the Army hearings ended, when Congress passed the Communist Control Act, in effect outlawing the Communist party, which was already moribund. The vote was overwhelming in each house. The author of the bill was Hubert H. Humphrey, Minnesota Democrat.

  It was the communists in Russia, not in America, who posed the true challenge, and the challenge was not purely military. In October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik—“traveling companion”—the world’s first man-made satellite. Sputnik II followed, carrying a dog and instruments. The feat was a “distinct surprise,” Eisenhower admitted. The popular reaction at home astonished him even more. Americans were chagrined, astounded. The Russians were supposed to be far behind on such matters, to be backward in general. Americans indulged in an orgy of self-examination and scapegoating. Seizing on education as the source of the trouble, the authorities instituted crash programs in science and languages.

  American scientists were already racing to loft their own Sputnik. After vast publicity a Vanguard rocket lifted off before television cameras. It rose for two seconds, attained an altitude of four feet, caught fire, crumpled down, and blew up. The world jeered. It was a hard time for Eisenhower. A committee headed by H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., had just given him a secret and frightening report that American military defenses were inadequate against the Russians, that Moscow had a huge nuclear arsenal, that its intercontinental ballistic missile would soon be operational, that the Soviet GNP was growing faster than the American, and more. The Gaither committee of experts was so frightened that three members urged an immediate preventive war. For the first time in its history, Eisenhower told Dulles, the United States was “scared.”

  Still, the President would not overreact. He knew—though he could not say so without compromising the source of his information—that the United States had great strategic superiority. But for how long? The Soviet challenge stirred him to one last effort, in the closing years of his Administration, toward détente with Moscow. And he now found himself dealing with a man in the Kremlin with whom it seemed possible to try such a venture. This was Nikita Khrushchev, who had emerged as the Soviet leader during the post-Stalin years.

  Western leaders found Khrushchev almost a welcome relief from the grim gray men who had succeeded Stalin—and a striking contrast to the silent, implacable, paranoid Stalin. Short, broad, bald, no matter how well dressed he looked to Americans like an unmade bed. His earthiness, suspiciousness, rough speech revealed the “worker and peasant” origins of which he was proud; his shrewdness in Kremlin infighting, sense of timing, grasp of when to speak out with biting candor and when to be silent and patient reflected his long immersion in party affairs and foreign policy. At a showdown Plenum of the Central Committee, Khrushchev and his cohorts chastised Foreign Minister Molotov to his face for Stalinist, even “imperialist,” interference in Tito’s Yugoslavia, patronizing and arrogant intrusion into Polish affairs, blundering in approaches to Mao Tse-tung. There had probably never been another communist gathering, according to David Dallin, “at which so much unvarnished truth was spoken about Soviet behavior abroad.” But the outcome had been carefully prepared: a solid vote against Molotov, followed by his “admission” of errors and his inevitable downfall.

  Six months later, in February 1956, Khrushchev astounded the Twentieth Party Congress with a blistering attack on Stalini
sm—on its old assumptions that capitalist wars and violent revolutions were inevitable, that “peaceful coexistence” among nations with differing social systems was impossible. Amid perhaps uneasy cheers from the delegates, he castigated Stalin for his personality cult and dictatorial ways, for underestimating the American resolve to defend Korea, for his “lack of faith in the Chinese comrades,” for his “shameful role” in Yugoslavia, and—jumping back more than fifteen years—for relying on his pact with Hitler and not preparing for the Nazi attack. While Khrushchev and his allies made clear that the United Slates was still the great adversary, the speech signaled major departures in Soviet policy: a shift from bipolar confrontation to more conventional rules of multilateral diplomacy and pluralistic accommodation; an acceptance of existing territorial arrangements in Europe; political rapprochement toward uncommitted neutrals and toward nationalist, even bourgeois, regimes; widening of the “socialist camp” to embrace independent communist states like China. And it was now clear that Khrushchev was cock of the walk.

  Accepting an invitation from Eisenhower, the Soviet dictator in September 1959 treated the United States with a visit. Khrushchev made the most of his twelve days, visiting the Eisenhowers in Washington and Camp David, appearing at the United Nations, seeing the sights in Hollywood and the Iowa heartland and industrial plants, all the while wisecracking, praising, arguing, criticizing, and complaining. His loudest complaint was that he and his party had not been allowed to visit Disneyland.

  “Why not?” the dictator had asked as he reported to a Hollywood luncheon. “Is it by any chance because you now have rocket-launching pads there?” It was for his own safety, he had been told. “What is it? Has cholera or plague broken out there that I might catch?” His audience guffawed. “Or has Disneyland been seized by bandits who might destroy me?”

  Khrushchev’s visit survived such contretemps, however, and culminated in what came to be known as the “Spirit of Camp David.” Though Khrushchev disappointed the President by appearing not at all impressed by the abundant American homes, highways, and cars that the President had arranged for him to see by helicopter—too crowded, expensive, and wasteful, the dictator said—he pleased his host by appearing more conciliatory about Berlin and agreeing tentatively to a summit meeting in Paris in August i960.

  A summit in Paris in the last year of his administration—the President now looked forward to this as the culmination of his efforts for peace. Could he will the means to this great end? As a man of peace he devoutly wished for détente with the Russians; as an old soldier he had to know what the Russians were up to, both as a military precaution and also as a means of keeping hard-liners and Pentagon spendthrifts at bay by assuring them that the Russians were not ready to go to war.

  A remarkable new intelligence machine was serving this purpose—the U-2, capable of flying so high above the Soviet Union as to escape missile fire, but low enough to photograph military installations and preparations. It was this plane that assured Eisenhower of the Soviets’ relative strategic weakness. Faced both by eager CIA demands for frequent flights and by warnings as to the potential Soviet reaction, the President monitored and limited the U-2 missions over Soviet territory. As the summit conference neared he cut the flights more sharply to avoid provoking Moscow. Finally he allowed one last foray by May 1. For fourteen days Russia was covered by clouds. On May 1 the weather cleared, and Francis Gary Powers took off from his U-2 base in Turkey for Bodö, Norway.

  He never made it. The President was informed next day that the plane was missing and must be down inside Russia. Since the craft was equipped for self-destruct of both plane and pilot, Powers was surely dead. Eisenhower did nothing, on the assumption that Moscow would do nothing, at least publicly, in order not to jeopardize the summit. Eisenhower approved a statement that a weather plane had been lost. Next day the Kremlin published a photograph of a wrecked plane, calling it the spy plane—but it was not a U-2. Why? Khrushchev was luring the White House into a trap. The longer Eisenhower stuck to his story about a “weather plane,” the more discredited he would be when the truth came out.

  Then Khrushchev sprang his trap. He had “parts of the plane” and also “the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking.” Hardly able to believe the news, the President now faced a terrible dilemma. He could admit that the Administration had lied but argue that Soviet secrecy had made overflights necessary. This might wreck the summit. Or he could say that the fliked howght had been unauthorized. But as an old army man he could not confess that his outfit was out of his control; as President he could not legitimize charges that he had lost command of his Administration. Soon the Administration was caught in such a tangle of falsehoods, with the Kremlin joyfully exploiting every misstatement, as to leave Washington embarrassed, angry, and fearful of the implications for the summit.

  “This was a sad and perplexed capital tonight,” James Reston reported in The New York Times, “caught in a swirl of charges of clumsy administration, bad judgment and bad faith.” The President was so upset that he talked briefly of resigning. He could hardly doubt the price to be paid: Khrushchev would not sit down at the summit with a President whose spy had invaded the Russian homeland—and on May Day, the worldwide communist holiday.

  In retrospect, the incident was a microcosm of the ills—the fears, suspicions, misperceptions, and miscalculations—that had afflicted Soviet-American relationships for years. Just as the Kremlin had underestimated Washington’s reaction to the invasion of South Korea, so Moscow underrated American fears of Soviet aggression—fears that in turn led to provocative spying. And typically men in the Kremlin viewed the whole affair not as a series of blunders but as a plot by the Pentagon or the CIA—perhaps by the President himself—to produce an incident that would abort the summit. The Americans repeated all their old errors: putting undue faith in intelligence technology, keeping “secret” the U-2 flights long after Moscow and other capitals—indeed, all but the American people—knew of them; allowing intelligence agencies too much influence over policy; evoking the worst of Soviet fears about intrusion onto their turf. Eisenhower and Khrushchev each underestimated the vulnerability of the other to hard-liners; hence each brought out the worst in the other.

  It was one of the saddest moments in postwar history, for each of the leaders, in his better half, genuinely wished for détente. Eisenhower came off the worse. He went on to Paris, but the “summit was over before it started, all the hopes for détente and disarmament gone with it,” in Ambrose’s bleak words. He had only a few months left to see his Vice President, Nixon, defeated, a brash young Democrat elected, and no further progress toward détente. At least he could advise the nation. In his Farewell Address he pointed to the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” and warned Americans that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The price of such acquisition could be the loss of freedom.

  His great solace was that he had “kept the peace.” People, he said later, asked how it had happened. “By God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that!” But he told a friend not long before his death in March 1969 that he had longed to bring world peace but “I was able only to contribute to a stalemate.” Could anyone else have done better? Ike had the wry satisfaction of living through two Democratic presidencies for which the U-2 affair was a dress rehearsal—a minor flap compared to the real crises and stalemates of Cuba and Vietnam.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Imperium of Freedom

  TOWARD THE END of the 1950s the Soviet Union had about 3.6 million persons under arms, the United States about 2.5 million. Each nation maintained stupendous nuclear arsenals capable of devastating the other. With its more than 500 long-range B-52S, almost 1,800 medium-range bombers, twenty-three aircraft carriers, and three Polaris submarines, the United States was far ahead in the capability for continental attack or massive retaliation, while Soviet t
roops, tanks, land-based aircraft, and medium-range ballistic missiles confronted the European allies. British and other friendly forces bolstered the power of the West. Amid a remarkable variety of nuclear weapons—from recoilless riflelike Davy Crocketts for close-up infantry support to eight-inch howitzers to ballistic missiles— the Strategic Air Command wielded the most usable military might, for its “bombers could burst through the pervious screen that protected our opponent.”

  The nation’s relative economic power was even more marked than its military. National economic productivity had grown strongly during the 1950s, as had the gross national product. Americans produced almost half the world’s generation of electricity and large shares of its steel, copper, and coal. The nation’s exports and imports dwarfed those of all other countries. In 1955 a congressional report had shown the United States leading the Soviet Union in virtually every dimension of economic power. “For the United States,” economic historian David F. Noble summed it up, “the postwar decades were an expansive time, fertile ground for technological achievement and enchantment.” Assured by their leaders—in this era before Sputnik—of their unrivaled military, economic, and industrial might, “infused with the pride, confidence, and triumphant optimism of victory, relatively unscarred by the actual horrors of war, and with the ruins of failed empires at their feet, Americans embarked upon their own ambiguous fling at empire.”