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Authors: Conrad Black

Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (95 page)

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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It is easy to forget, given how successful it ultimately was, how fragile NATO was even five years after its founding. It was convenient for the French to blame their decisive defeat in Vietnam on the U.S., and on August 30, the National Assembly in Paris rejected the European Defense Community. Eisenhower suspected that there were substantial elements of French opinion that would entertain defecting to an alliance with the Soviet Union. But, as always, he was ready with his contingency plan and ordered the immediate convening of a NATO meeting where the United States rammed through the election of Germany to the alliance as a fully sovereign (and effectively forgiven) state. The French, having been soundly trounced by the communist elements of their former Vietnamese colonial subjects, blamed the defeat on the Americans, who had given plenty of advice on how to avoid it and generous tangible support. They kicked the United States mindlessly on the shins by threatening to blackball Germany in NATO (denuding the defense of France itself, if the United States did not salvage their lost colonial escapade in Indochina). France was rewarded by being put over America’s knee and given a further international public thrashing as Germany, the Nazi pariah and rubble heap of just nine years before, was parachuted into NATO and seated higher up the table than France. This was all effected under the observant eyes of the British. If Churchill lamented his loss of what he fancied to be equality of influence with Roosevelt (Chapter 11), he could scarcely fail to notice where the correlation of forces within the Western Alliance stood now. France had learned little of how to manage its relations with the United States since the fiasco of the Citizen Genet and XYZ affairs (Chapter 3), and Napoleon III’s intrusion in Mexico (Chapter 6).
Even at this remove and after the end of the Cold War, it is not clear whether the MacArthur-Nixon-Dulles faction or Eisenhower and Truman were correct about Korea and Vietnam. If the Americans had imported 200,000 Nationalist Chinese into Korea, conventionally bombed Manchuria, and interdicted Chinese reinforcements across the Yalu by air, whether before or shortly after Stalin’s death and with the Kremlin in disarray, Communist China would have been severely chastened in its infancy, and would not have enjoyed the moral victory it claimed in fighting the United States and United Nations to a standstill. It is not clear that peace would have taken appreciably longer or cost significantly more American lives than was actually the case. And, again, the world would have been spared the pestilential nuisance of the belligerently deranged Kim dynasty in Pyongyang.
And if Eisenhower had acted like a real ally at Dien Bien Phu and helped avoid a French debacle, he could presumably have reached an arrangement that Indochina would become the independent democracies of Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam as well as North Vietnam, and that the United States would assist the French in helping the South Vietnamese government resist the communists, as the British were doing in Malaya. SEATO would be set up, the other countries would provide some forces, as most of them eventually did, and France would wholeheartedly support the EDC. Dulles should have shaken hands with Chou En-lai; he was a good deal more civilized than many people Dulles fraternized with, and they should have moved to normalize relations with China as soon as favorable terms were available; nothing was gained by waiting for almost 20 years.
It was a powerful argument for Eisenhower to say that he ended the Korean War and kept the U.S. out of Vietnam. But 10 years later, as an ex-president, he was a Vietnam hawk, urging a strong stand in Vietnam after his successor had allowed Laos to be transformed into a conduit for North Vietnamese infiltration of the South, and after the French had become friendlier with the Asian communists than they were with their ancient American ally. Like most Oriental politics, it is very complicated.
4. THE CIA IN CENTRAL AMERICA
 
As the Geneva Conference droned on, there occurred in Central America another farce of the kind that had been recurring at short intervals for over a century. In Guatemala, the democratically elected reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz was proposing relatively moderate land reform, but accepted support from the local Communist party. Arbenz nationalized some of the acreage of the United Fruit Company (of which Allen Dulles had been a director, and of which even Eisenhower’s secretary, Ann Whitman, was a shareholder, though it is unlikely, despite leftist insinuations, that these facts altered official policy). A CIA operation was cooked up by Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers, and a couple of senior CIA operatives, in which a designated colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas, was suddenly proclaimed by a friendly radio station in Honduras as a challenger for the presidency. A “front” was alleged to exist, headed by Castillo Armas, which in fact consisted of 150 hired hands of the usual ragged CIA insurgent variety. To call them soldiers of fortune would exaggerate both their levels of energy and discipline and the clarity of their motives. The Swedish ship
Alfhem
docked in Guatemala on May 15, 1954, with a cargo of Czech artillery, rifles, and side arms, which Dulles and Eisenhower immediately denounced in the most stentorian terms, with the inevitable bandying about of the Monroe Doctrine. In fact, this equipment wasn’t for the army, which Arbenz realized was being bribed by the Americans and was unreliable; it was for a people’s militia he was setting up.
Castillo Armas’s “front” was claimed by the Honduran radio station the CIA operated to have “invaded” Guatemala, and a completely fanciful account was then disseminated, over the air and in the world generally, to the effect that a war of liberation was raging in Guatemala, and moving ever closer to the capital, Guatemala City. In fact, Castillo Armas moved six miles inside the Guatemalan border and went into permanent bivouac in the jungle, in the Church of the Black Christ. There was no front, no war, and certainly no uprising. Eisenhower himself calculated that the way to frighten Arbenz was air power, and he approved giving two P-51s to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who would then give Castillo Armas the two P-51s he already had. (This was the same Somoza whom Roosevelt had described as “a son of a bitch but our son of a bitch.”) Eisenhower authorized CIA pilots to fly from Managua Airport and do some precise bombing in Guatemala. He had also authorized a blockade of Guatemala and asserted the right of search and seizure on the high seas. This inflamed the ire of the British and the French.
Arbenz requested the United Nations to take up the matter, and the British, scandalized at the threat to seize ships on the oceans, and the French, none too pleased at the failure of the Americans to help them in Indochina, let it be known that they would support Arbenz at the UN, including in the dispatch of observers to Guatemala. These would quickly unearth the proportions of the U.S. presence in these shenanigans, and Eisenhower told his UN ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, to tell the British and the French that the U.S. would veto (for the first time the U.S. would use a UN veto) any such initiatives, and that if the British and French threw in with Arbenz, the United States would reevaluate its views about Egypt, the Suez Canal, and North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco were all in varying stages of revolt against the French). The British and French thought better of it, abstained, and there was no need for a U.S. veto; Arbenz fled at the prospect of Eisenhower turning up the pressure as far as he had to, resigning on June 27, 1954. Churchill and Eden arrived in Washington June 25, and Eisenhower had a blunt talk with them about their meddling in the Americas.
Eisenhower had been decisive in Guatemala, and may have spared the U.S. political inconvenience, but there was the appearance of being too wedded to the United Fruit Company, which had been effectively deploying U.S. forces in Latin America for decades, and was not the hemisphere’s most enlightened employer. The United States might have begun sooner to try to recruit moderate reformers in Latin America, and it is not clear if Arbenz really had any communist sympathies or not, though there is reason to believe that he was a slightly Kerensky-like figure, with an academic interest in Marx. Castillo Armas was assassinated, for unknown reasons, in 1957. Eisenhower was correct to expel the British and French from Latin America (yet again), and it is hard to get too excited about his ejection of a somewhat suspect government, but he was straying a long way from Roosevelt’s public relations success of the Good Neighbor, or even Harry Truman’s much-admired visit to the graves of Mexican soldiers who died in the Mexican War with the U.S. in 1848. If the objective was to keep the communists out of the hemisphere, and not just stop the pretentious blunderings of Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay, America was going to have to do better than this, and Eisenhower did send Nixon to visit South America comprehensively, later in his presidency. As usual, Nixon, who soon emerged as the administration’s star foreign policy thinker (not excluding Dulles or Eisenhower himself), came back with some serious proposals, but there was already a lot of water over the dam by then. (Eisenhower himself eventually toured South America and was very respectfully received, but the whole political nature of the continent had shifted by then.)
5. EISENHOWER’S ASTUTE POLITICAL INSTINCTS
 
A front where Eisenhower was unambiguously successful was in the expunging of the influence of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who had become more and more erratic. Once he attacked Eisenhower, and expanded the “twenty years of treason”
160
he professed to find in Roosevelt and Truman, to include the incumbent, matters proceeded swiftly. McCarthy announced public hearings to investigate charges of subversive infiltration of the U.S. Army. Eisenhower made it clear that no subpoenas from McCarthy to the army would be responded to, and that anyone who responded to any such subpoena could consider doing so in a letter of resignation as a government employee. Eisenhower had had enough and imposed an absolute privilege as commander-in-chief and retired holder of the army’s highest rank and commands, and dismissed the complaints even of his own Republican congressional leaders. Nixon as president of the Senate, and the Democratic Senate leader, Lyndon B. Johnson, organized a censure vote, which passed against McCarthy 67–22 on December 2, 1954, after McCarthy had denounced his opponents as “handmaidens of Communism.”
161
McCarthy disintegrated into alcoholism and inconsequentiality, and died, aged 48, on May 2, 1957. It had been a very strange era, an aberration of overreaction and demagogy, which enjoyed the durability it did only because American official policy required that the people be severely frightened by the Red Menace; a certain amount of frothy excess, with the American love of the spectacle and relative procedural flexibility, was almost inevitable.
An aspect of the unsettled climate even of American military opinion was the frequency of requests from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for atomic attacks on China. America and the world were fortunate that in Dwight D. Eisenhower there was a leader who knew exactly how to deal both with trigger-happy generals and admirals, and with bellicose congressional leaders (he said of his Senate majority leader, William Knowland, that he “has no foreign policy except to develop high blood pressure whenever he mentions the words ‘Red China”’).
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Eisenhower patiently repeated to the JCS, headed by Admiral Radford, that an atomic attack on China would swiftly lead to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which would leave the Eurasian land mass from the Elbe to Vladivostok and from the Arctic shores of Siberia to the northern border of Vietnam, except, it could be hoped, Hong Kong, a smoldering ruin of lethal radioactivity, famine, devastation, and scores or even hundreds of millions of corpses, and what did his bemedalled friends (though less bemedalled than he, had he chosen to receive the Joint Chiefs in his full kit) suggest as the civilized world’s next step after that? Answer came there none.
Eisenhower, beneath his deliberately contorted syntax and generally amiable exterior, was a very complicated and sophisticated tactician and strategist. He knew from his dealings with Stalin and Zhukov in 1945 that the Russians would take brinkmanship, the threat of massive retaliation, seriously, and that he could embrace that policy and cut defense spending, run a sensible federal budget, and even cut some taxes. But when the military high command started grabbing for the nuclear toys he slapped them down and told them such a war was out of the question unless the Soviets or the Chinese initiated hostilities against a vital American interest, such as a NATO country or Japan. Thus, his answer to Korea was to threaten nuclear weapons to get the status quo ante that Truman had been unable to close on without believable atomic threats. His answer to Vietnam was not to touch France’s egomaniacal pursuit of a colonial beau geste, not to go in without allies, but to announce that the dominos started at the demarcation line between Communist North Vietnam and a newly independent South Vietnam.
Apart from trying to spare the French the Dien Bien Phu debacle, Eisenhower should have accepted at least discussions with Chou at Geneva, though they would have had to be conducted by a subtler mind than Dulles’s—Nixon, or even some bipartisan combination of MacArthur, Acheson, Bohlen, and Kennan. China might have traded normalization and reasonable assurances such as were made by Nixon 17 years later, over Taiwan, a Korean peace treaty, and the People’s Republic’s assumption of the Chinese seat at the UN, in exchange for a 20-year separation of the two Vietnams. But this is conjecture; Eisenhower tried to reason with the French, got Germany into NATO, and salvaged the possibility of half a loaf in Vietnam. He took a risk in violating the Geneva Accord, by which the U.S. was not bound, and SEATO was not ultimately successful. But by the time Vietnam was unified more than 20 years later, the communists had been massacred in Indonesia and defeated in Malaya; South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore were all tremendous economic success stories; and the United States had constructive relations with the People’s Republic. The resolution of the West German question, though not by Eisenhower’s preferred formula of an integrated European army, was by far the most important strategic outcome of the match, though it had nothing to do with China. As usual, Eisenhower, while seeming cautious and not especially dynamic, had deftly played an indifferent hand; he had taken a swipe at his principal foe, Stalin’s fractious successors, by elevating Germany; had matched wits evenly with the very cunning Chou En-lai; had brushed off the French, who were at this point impossible; and had sent a polite, firm message to the British, while quietly routing the domestic extremists. The Cold War had just begun, but was already very complicated. America had a deceptively subtle leader, and the times demanded no less.
BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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