Eisenhower (29 page)

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.

The United States had no right to police Guatemalan trade, but Eisenhower was playing for psychological advantage. And the stakes were high. The CIA station chief warned that the introduction of Soviet weapons might upend the balance of power in Latin America. “Should this ammo ship arrive and its cargo be dispatched nothing short of direct military intervention will succeed,” he wrote. “I want you to know above is written not in panic but with cool, deadly determination that freedom shall not perish in this country.”

Meanwhile, the clandestine radio broadcasts and the government’s fruitless attempts to shut them down were squeezing Arbenz as intended. Arbenz begged Eisenhower for a meeting; Eisenhower did not respond. On June 8, Arbenz suspended constitutional freedoms, and two days later he rounded up suspected subversives, some of whom were tortured, continuing his descent into the repressive regime the United States imagined him to lead. On June 18, the invasion began.

“Even before H-hour,” the CIA history records, “the invasion degenerated from an ambitious plan to tragicomedy.” Castillo Armas’s army consisted of three hundred to five hundred rebels, well armed by the United States but no match for the Guatemalan regular army, which was Latin America’s largest fighting force. The army was still loyal to Arbenz, though nervous about his purchase of Eastern bloc weapons. The U.S. plan was for Castillo Armas to avoid direct conflict and instead to engage small firefights en route to the capital, destabilizing Arbenz without attempting to defeat his army. The military operation was supplemented by radio broadcasts trumpeting the success of the campaign and exaggerating the size and effectiveness of Castillo Armas’s forces. Although the psychological aspects of the plan worked brilliantly, Castillo Armas was a singularly ineffective commander. By June 20, his band of followers had penetrated only a few miles into Guatemala. That day, 122 rebels met up with 30 Guatemalan soldiers and, despite orders to avoid conflict with the army, engaged in a long battle. The result: all but 30 of the rebels were killed or captured. Another fight the following day saw the rebels defeated at Puerto Barrios.

Desperate, Castillo Armas begged for American air support, but Eisenhower hesitated. Authorizing such a strike would risk exposing the U.S. role and antagonize other Latin American nations. But withholding planes might doom the coup to failure. On the afternoon of June 22, Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, and Assistant Secretary of State Henry F. Holland met with Eisenhower at the White House. Holland opposed supplying Castillo Armas with aircraft, while the Dulles brothers, or at least Allen Dulles, favored it. What, Eisenhower asked, were the chances of the rebels succeeding without the air support? Allen Dulles replied: “About zero.”

“Suppose we supply the aircraft. What would be the chances then?” Eisenhower asked.

“About 20 percent,” Dulles answered. That was good enough for Ike. He authorized two fighters to be sent into the battle.

Later, Eisenhower told Dulles he was impressed by the director’s realism and said he might have rejected the request if Dulles had rated its chances of success at 90 percent.

Two planes were hardly enough to tip the military balance, but they contributed mightily to the psychological campaign against Arbenz. His army, though not challenged by a serious fighting force, was increasingly alarmed that the United States stood behind the rebels. The Guatemalan military could only wonder what might happen if the U.S. Army was committed to the fight. The day after Eisenhower authorized the two planes to the region, one of Arbenz’s allies found officers “cowering in their barracks, terrified and unwilling to fight.” Arbenz’s support was fading. The American pilots were given free rein to hurl explosives out the windows, so they began a rudimentary bombing campaign in Guatemala City (one improvised bomb hit a British freighter in the harbor; the United States later paid $1 million to settle that embarrassing mishap). The ensuing mayhem reinforced the public sense that Arbenz was unable to defend the nation. The CIA radio station, meanwhile, broadcast that Castillo Armas’s forces were converging on the capital, another falsehood but one easily believed in a city where bombs were exploding.

With his army frightened, his allies restless, and his public convinced that his leadership had failed, Arbenz gave up. At 8:00 p.m. on June 27, he announced his resignation, eventually leaving the country for Mexico. “Our first victory has been won,” the CIA wired from Guatemala. Dulles disingenuously told congressional leaders the next day that it was a great triumph for American diplomacy. (It was anything but. Diplomacy had failed; victory had been achieved through subversion.) A series of juntas briefly held power after Arbenz’s abdication, but Castillo Armas eventually received the position he coveted: command of his country. Briefed on the events of that month, Eisenhower listened in amazement as the CIA’s representative Rip Robertson described a scrubbed version of what had actually taken place. How many men, Ike asked, had Castillo Armas lost?

“Only one,” Robertson lied. The CIA’s own files had identified twenty-seven dead at Puerto Barrios and sixteen at Gualán, not to mention the scores who were killed in Arbenz’s final crackdown. The coup hatched in delusions of Soviet adventurism rather than nationalist aspirations ended with an intelligence community so emboldened by its covert capacities that it was willing to lie to the president of the United States. The CIA could truthfully boast of only two facts: it had overthrown an enemy and had done so within its budget. The entire coup cost precisely $3 million.

There was one other notable aftermath in Guatemala. Just as the overthrow of Mossadegh had left a deep mark on one of those who witnessed it, the cleric then known as Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, so, too, did the coup against Arbenz burrow itself into the consciousness of one of its observers, a young Argentine named Ernesto Guevara. He yearned for a political affiliation worthy of his intellect and passion; he found it in the Arbenz reforms. “Guatemala right now is the most interesting country in America and must be defended with all possible means,” he wrote as the U.S. campaign gathered momentum. When the fall came, Guevara blamed Arbenz. To Guevara, the agents of Guatemala’s downfall were a weak government, a reactionary press, a complicit Catholic Church, and a failure to “arm the people” to resist the invasion. Of Eisenhower, he wrote to his father: “Politically, things aren’t going so well because at any moment a coup is suspected under the patronage of your friend Ike.” Those notions, impressed upon the twenty-six-year-old Guevara, would return to haunt the United States when he resurfaced as Che.

Subduing McCarthy and overthrowing Arbenz represented Cold War victories of different types. But the period’s most significant such triumph was only indirectly Eisenhower’s work. At 12:52 p.m., May 17, 1954, Earl Warren, Ike’s first appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, startled lawyers and reporters by turning to the case they had been waiting for. “I have for announcement,” he said, “the judgment and opinion of the Court in Number 1:
Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka.
”

This was the long-awaited, much-postponed work of the Court in the most difficult area before it. It had flummoxed the Vinson Court and preoccupied Warren since his arrival the previous fall. Those early months had been difficult for Warren. He had to leave his wife, Nina, behind in California to finish up their business there. The Warrens had six children—five together and one by Nina’s previous marriage—and had spent a dozen years in the California governor’s mansion. Eisenhower’s appointment had sent Warren to Washington, and it fell to Nina to organize the move east. Warren himself was accustomed to presiding over a large staff and now had just two secretaries and his clerks. He was lonely and out of sorts.

But he also was busy. From the start, Warren charmed his brethren. Harold Burton buried any regret over being passed over and commended Eisenhower for the selection, remarking that Warren “will meet the opportunity admirably,” praise that Ike gracefully acknowledged the next day. At the Court, Warren asked Hugo Black, the senior associate justice, for advice on what to read that would help him with crafting opinions. Black suggested Aristotle’s
Rhetoric
, and Warren quickly picked up a copy. “The new Chief Justice is a very attractive, fine man,” Black wrote to his sons approvingly. For the first few weeks, Warren asked Black to chair the Court’s weekly conferences, but by the end of the year he felt comfortable doing so himself.

On December 12, 1953, Warren presided over his first conference on the subject of school segregation. Warren was chief justice, so, by tradition, he spoke first. As the other justices well knew, the matter had divided the Court in Vinson’s final term, with at least three—and perhaps five—members of the Court prepared to uphold school segregation. Vinson, along with Justices Stanley Reed and Tom Clark, had clearly signaled his willingness to tolerate “separate but equal” schools for black children. Justices Jackson and Frankfurter flinched at such a prospect, but they, too, had reservations about the Court striking down segregation after specifically upholding the principle through decades of precedent. In his conference notes, Justice Douglas recorded Jackson and Frankfurter as likely to uphold those precedents, dating to the infamous
Plessy v. Ferguson
, which legitimized the practice of “separate but equal,” in effect American apartheid. Though Douglas’s observations must be regarded skeptically, no doubt colored by his deep dislike for Frankfurter and Jackson, there was at least the possibility that the Vinson Court could have, had Vinson lived, voted to uphold the constitutionality of Jim Crow.