Eisenhower (46 page)

15

Many Ways to Fight

L
atin America had a special place in the Eisenhower White House. Ike’s brother Milton was an expert on the region, and his trip soon after Ike’s election had greatly gratified American allies in the hemisphere. By 1958, there were hopeful signs in the region: Argentina had at last disposed of Perón and elected a leader, Arturo Frondizi, with whom the administration believed it could cooperate. Similarly, Colombia had cast off Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and elected Alberto Lleras Camargo, whom Nixon regarded as “an enlightened and dedicated statesman.” With so much changing in the region, Eisenhower believed a high-level visit was in order. The midterm elections were approaching, so he tapped Nixon for the duty. Nixon, though he felt he would be better used at home and feared that the two-and-a-half-week excursion would be ponderously boring, nevertheless reluctantly agreed.

Accompanied by his wife, Pat, Nixon left on April 27. At first, the trip was uneventful. The Nixon party stopped in Trinidad to refuel and was greeted warmly in Uruguay. The vice president dropped in unannounced at a university in Montevideo, where he charmed all but his most hardened critics. In Argentina, Nixon conferred with leaders, threw the switch at a new nuclear power plant, and suffered through a gaucho barbecue; he attended Frondizi’s inauguration but got there late—traffic delayed him, and the ceremony started four minutes early. He then visited Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru, where he faced an unruly, rock-throwing crowd at San Marcos University. As Nixon was returning to the hotel, a protester managed to squeeze close to the vice president and spit directly in his face. “I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to tear the face in front of me to pieces,” Nixon wrote later. He maintained his composure, however, and earned Ike’s praise for his “courage, patience and calmness.”

After uneventful stops in Ecuador and Colombia, the entourage arrived in Caracas, Venezuela, where the government assured Nixon it could control trouble despite reports of demonstrations being planned to greet the Americans. From the moment Nixon disembarked the airplane, it was obvious that the government overestimated its abilities. Dick and Pat Nixon stood politely for the playing of the Venezuelan national anthem while, from an observation deck above them, a crowd cursed and spit on them. Pat’s red suit was mottled with chewing tobacco stains. The Nixons, flanked by the Secret Service, pushed through the crowd and into two waiting cars, Dick in the first, Pat in the second. They left the airport and headed for the center of the city. Stores were shuttered and sidewalks empty, but traffic seemed heavy. Then, suddenly, the car pulled to a halt, blocked by a dump truck that created a blockade. A mob descended on Nixon’s car, ripping the flags from the front bumper and hurling rocks. The driver finally pushed through, only to hit a second blockade and then a third.

“Here they come,” a passenger in Nixon’s car said. And with that, a crowd of several hundred descended on the two vehicles. One rock shattered Nixon’s windshield, scattering glass. Demonstrators pummeled both vehicles with metal bars and sticks. Then the crowd around Nixon’s car began to rock it back and forth, attempting to flip it. “For an instant, the realization passed through my mind—we might be killed,” Nixon said. Members of the Secret Service reached for their guns, but just as a riot seemed inevitable, the press truck traveling in front of the Nixon cars plowed through the mob and cleared a path for Nixon’s driver to follow (in all his years of sparring with the press, that may have been the most appreciative Nixon ever was for a group of reporters). Pat and Dick escaped unharmed, though deeply shaken. Nixon’s experience in Caracas was one of the most frightful of his life, and he later dedicated a chapter to it in his memoir,
Six Crises
.

Two days later, the Nixons returned to Washington, where Ike and Mamie greeted them at the airport. Ike brought Nixon’s two daughters, Julie and Tricia, with him to welcome their parents. When the plane landed, he let the girls rush to meet it, rather than standing on protocol. Julie never forgot the courtesy. “He had the biggest smile, the brightest blue eyes,” she recalled of Eisenhower.

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Eisenhower’s attention in early 1958 was again drawn to the Middle East, where Nasser’s personal ambition and quest for leadership over the region prompted him to strike an alliance with Syria. Under it, Egypt and Syria announced their intentions to merge into a new entity, the United Arab Republic. The move did not necessarily threaten American interests. In fact, one consequence was the outlawing of the Communist Party in Syria, and the union was widely popular among ordinary Arabs thrilled by the prospect of a unifying, postcolonial identity. Many Arab leaders, by contrast, viewed Nasser’s designs with unease. Eisenhower monitored the development, sounding out friends in the region and seeking their guidance on a shift that he feared could “carry serious implications” for America’s Arab allies.

Among those troubled by Nasser’s efforts was Lebanon’s earnest but skittish president, Camille Chamoun, whose appreciation for the Western powers helped fortify his rule but also made him suspect in the eyes of Nasser and other Arab nationalists. Chamoun’s own authority was weak, as he ruled over a fractious nation, divided between its Maronite Christian community and its growing Islamic population. If Nasser was intent on expanding his base, Chamoun understood that it could come at the expense of his own.

Through late 1957, Eisenhower suspected Nasser of fomenting trouble in Lebanon. He worried that the Soviets would seek a foothold in the region and that Nasser would unify Arabs against the West and threaten its oil. On a more personal level, Eisenhower liked Chamoun and had appreciated the president’s kind words after Ike’s heart attack in 1955. Eisenhower even asked his doctor to give Chamoun a checkup in 1957 after Chamoun too was diagnosed with heart trouble.

With his country in a state of agitation, Chamoun in early 1958 debated whether to seek another term as president. To do so would have required an amendment to the Lebanese constitution, and the mere prospect of Chamoun maneuvering to retain power enraged his critics. Still, Chamoun held on, motivated in part by concern that leaving office without a natural successor would exacerbate his country’s divisions and expose it to Nasser’s designs. By June, Ike had grown deeply concerned. “Chamoun is most friendly but indecisive,” he confided to Paul Hoffman. “There are, of course, wheels within wheels, conflicting reports, cross currents of personal ambition and religious prejudice, and, above all, a great internal campaign of subversion and deceit, possibly communistic in origin. Unless the United Nations can be effective in the matter, it would appear that almost any course that the United States could pursue would impose a very heavy cost upon us. The two alternatives could become intervention and non-intervention.”

Those were the options that remained just weeks later, when, to the surprise of the American government, the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown and its king murdered. Suddenly the entire Middle East was inflamed. The challenge, Ike wrote, “changed from quieting a troubled situation to facing up to a crisis of formidable proportions.” Chamoun could not bring stability to his own nation; Iraq had failed to protect its king. The Shah of Iran, there by Ike’s hand, worried about spreading instability. Saudi Arabia’s monarch feared it as well. Amid such manifest weakness, Eisenhower had to admit grudgingly: “No matter what you think of Nasser, at least he’s a leader.” Chamoun pleaded for American troops to maintain the order that he found impossible to impose himself, and on July 14, Ike approved a decision he would make only once during the entirety of his presidency: he ordered American troops to invade a foreign land.

The invasion of Lebanon was carried out under the principles of the Eisenhower Doctrine and in keeping with Ike’s views of war: it should be conducted with overwhelming force, with an articulated mission, and with a path for victory. He recognized that no one could foresee the complexities of combat, but Eisenhower would not authorize conflict without a detailed plan and the personnel to carry it out.

Dispatching American soldiers to occupy a Middle Eastern nation was, as Eisenhower had known for months, sure to embitter Arab nationalists. Just two years earlier, the United States had impressed Arabs by breaking with Britain and France during the 1956 invasion of Egypt; now America risked being cast as a colonial aggressor, rather than as a protector of nationalist aspiration. There were, however, as Eisenhower would aptly note, profound differences between the Suez crisis and the Lebanese invasion. Lebanon’s rightful leader invited in U.S. forces; Egypt’s president angrily denounced the force used against his nation. Access to oil, as always, hovered in the analysis of the Middle Eastern crisis, but what specifically motivated the U.S. president were American obligations under the Eisenhower Doctrine and the recognition that Communist subversion rarely came in the form of direct combat. “Today aggression is more subtle and more difficult to detect and combat,” he wrote in his diary. “Its forms include propaganda barrages, bribery, corruption, subversion, and export into the affected countries of arms, munitions, supplies and, sometimes, so-called ‘volunteer’ combatants. This type of aggression is carried on under the name of ‘civil war,’ a term that connotes domestic difficulty not directly affected by outside influences.”

At 3:00 p.m. on July 15, seventeen hundred Marines splashed ashore just south of Beirut, threading their way between swimmers playing in the surf. The U.S. ambassador met up with the troops on the road from the airport and escorted them the rest of the way into the capital.

In the ensuing weeks, the Soviets played up the crisis, decrying the imperialist images of American forces in the region but confining their objections to rhetoric. American troops, meanwhile, gingerly held positions in and around Beirut, building up to a force of more than fourteen thousand soldiers. Operation Blue Bat, as it was called, had the desired effect. Elections at the end of July produced a winner in General Fuad Chehab, a Christian moderate acceptable to both sides. Chehab’s victory settled Lebanon, and he amused Ike when he wrote to express his misgivings about giving up the Army for politics. “His statement,” Eisenhower wryly observed, “struck a responsive chord.” Chamoun stepped down that fall, and by the end of October, American forces had withdrawn from the country. Over the course of that brief occupation, only one American was killed in battle, shot by a sniper (three more died in a bus accident). The American occupying forces did not kill a single civilian. Nasser, meanwhile, was left to contemplate the fortitude of Soviet power, which, when challenged, retreated into talk.

In Lebanon, Eisenhower responded to a deteriorating situation in a country within easy reach of U.S. force, far from the heart of Communist power, and of clear strategic consequence. In that same year, however, a far more complicated struggle resumed in a familiar location. Once again, the venue was the bothersome pair of scruffy rocks within sight of the Chinese mainland: Quemoy and Matsu.

China’s advance on those same islands in 1954 and 1955 had produced the defense pact between the United States and Taiwan pledging America to defend Taiwan and its “related positions and territories” without specifically committing the United States to war over Quemoy and Matsu. “I won’t be pressed or pinned down,” Dulles said at the time, “on whether an attack on Matsu and Quemoy would be an attack on Formosa.” That studied approach—strategic clarity layered over tactical ambiguity—persuaded China to halt its aggression, but Mao went away mad and now girded for another attempt to wrench the islands from the grasp of Chiang Kai-shek, or at least to provoke an American response that would work to Mao’s advantage.

Chiang warned in July and August that a buildup was under way. Chinese leaders delivered bellicose statements, and two Nationalist planes were shot down in July while on routine patrol. As the hostilities mounted, Khrushchev paid a surprise visit to Beijing, alarming Chiang as well as CIA observers. Inside China, government-sponsored demonstrations featured angry crowds protesting Taiwan’s presence on the islands, and the Chinese government moved war planes to fields within striking distance of Taiwan. The threat to the islands escalated, and Eisenhower once more had to decide whether the United States was prepared to go to war over two useless island redoubts, and if so, would it wage nuclear war?

In one scenario, Eisenhower was prepared to go all the way. If China invaded the offshore islands and then turned to Taiwan itself, America’s obligations under its mutual-defense treaty would leave it no choice. “If the Chinese communists attack Taiwan,” Ike said, “we have got to do what is necessary.” That, he added, “would be all-out war.” The Joint Chiefs, meanwhile, were preparing to wage nuclear war at a lesser threshold. If the Chinese Communists succeeded in blockading the offshore islands, the chiefs believed that alone would warrant nuclear strikes against six to eight airbases in mainland China. Gerard Smith, an assistant secretary of state, was aghast to learn of the Joint Chiefs’ willingness to launch a nuclear war over such insignificant islands—indeed, merely over the blockade of those islands, not even their invasion—especially in light of Eisenhower’s long insistence that no nuclear conflict could remain local once it had commenced. Smith pleaded with Dulles to urge Eisenhower to explore a military alternative that would not catapult the United States into a general war with China or its closest ally, the Soviet Union.

Finally, on August 23, after weeks of escalating tension, the Chinese bombardment began. The first fusillades brought in the steel and explosive hail of as many as thirty-five thousand rounds (that was the Nationalist estimate; American sources put the number closer to twenty thousand rounds). More than five hundred Taiwanese soldiers were killed or wounded. After the first day, the shelling tapered off but still continued. Chiang Kai-shek pleaded with Eisenhower for help. Not only was artillery blanketing the island, Chiang wrote, but enemy torpedo boats had sunk or damaged two Taiwanese vessels, and Chinese planes had strafed ground positions. Three generals were dead. In his message, Chiang, who referred to the president as “Your Excellency,” asked Ike to declare emphatically that the United States would repel any attack on the islands with military force and urged Eisenhower to grant Taiwanese field commanders the latitude to respond to bombardment or invasion as they saw fit (the terms of the mutual-defense treaty prevented Taiwan from attacking mainland China without U.S. approval). Eisenhower was nonplussed, and Dulles, though bafflingly out of the office on vacation as the crisis unfolded, contacted Herter, the acting secretary of state, and reinforced his skepticism about giving Chiang a free hand to respond to the aggression.