Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (91 page)

The reality was quite different. ‘Complex and devious’, was the summing-up of his Vice-President, Richard Nixon (no mean judge of such things); ‘he always applied two, three or four lines of reasoning to a single problem and he usually preferred the indirect approach’.
¹⁰⁹
In the late 1970s, the opening up of the secret files kept by his personal secretary, Ann Whitman, phone logs, diaries and other personal documents, revealed that Eisenhower worked very much harder than anyone, including close colleagues, supposed. A
typical day started at 7.30, by which time he had read the
New York Times, Herald Tribune
and
Christian Science Monitor
, and finished close to midnight (he often worked afterwards). Many of his appointments (especially those dealing with party or defence and foreign policy) were deliberately left out of lists given to the press by Haggerty. Long and vital meetings with the State and Defence secretaries, the head of the
CIA
and other figures, took place unrecorded and in secret, before the formal sessions of the National Security Council. The running of defence and foreign policy, far from being bureaucratic and inflexible, as his critics supposed, in fact took place in accordance with highly efficient staff principles, contrasting strongly with the romantic anarchy of the Kennedy regime which followed. Eisenhower himself was in charge throughout.
¹¹⁰

Eisenhower practised pseudo-delegation. All thought Sherman Adams, his chief of staff, took the domestic decisions. To some extent Adams shared this illusion. He said that Eisenhower was the last major world figure who actively disliked and avoided using the phone.
¹¹¹
In fact the logs show he made multitudes of calls about which Adams knew nothing. Far from delegating foreign policy to John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, Eisenhower took advice from a number of sources of which Dulles knew nothing, and kept him on a secret, tight rein: Dulles reported back daily by phone, even when abroad. Eisenhower read a huge volume of official documents and maintained a copious correspondence with high-level friends at home and abroad in the diplomatic, business and military communities. He used Dulles as a servant; and Dulles complained that though he often worked late into the night with the President at the White House he had ‘never been asked to a family dinner’.
¹¹²
The notion that Dulles and Adams were prima donnas was deliberately promoted by Eisenhower, since they could be blamed when mistakes were made, thus protecting the presidency – a technique often used in the past by crowned autocrats, such as Elizabeth I. But conversely, Eisenhower sometimes exploited his reputation for political naïvety to take the blame for mistakes made by subordinates, as, for instance, when Dulles made a series of blunders in the appointment of Winthrop Aldrich to the London embassy in 1953.
¹¹³
Kennan grasped half the truth when he wrote that on foreign affairs Eisenhower was ‘a man of keen political intelligence and penetration…. When he spoke of such matters seriously and in a protected official circle, insights of a high order flashed out time after time through the curious military gobbledygook in which he was accustomed to expressing and concealing his thoughts.’
¹¹⁴
In fact Eisenhower used gobbledygook, especially at press conferences, to avoid giving answers which plain English could not conceal; he often
pretended ignorance for the same reason. Indeed he was Machiavellian enough to pretend to misunderstand his own translator when dealing with difficult foreigners.
¹¹⁵
Transcripts of his secret conferences show the power and lucidity of his thoughts. His editing of drafts by speechwriters and of speeches by Dulles betray the command of English he could exercise when he chose. Churchill was one of the few men who appreciated him at his correct worth. It could be said that they were the two greatest statesmen of the mid-century.

Eisenhower concealed his gifts and activities because he thought it essential that the autocratic leadership, which he recognized both America and the world needed, should be exercised by stealth. He had three quite clear principles. The first was to avoid war. Of course if Soviet Russia was bent on destroying the West, resistance must be made, and America must be strong enough to make it. But the occasions of unnecessary war (as he judged Korea) must be avoided by clarity, firmness, caution and wisdom. In this limited aim he was successful.
¹¹⁶
He ended the Korean conflict. He avoided war with China. He stamped out the Suez war in 1956, and skilfully averted another Middle-Eastern war in 1958. Of Vietnam he said: ‘I cannot conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved now in an all-out war in any of those regions.’ Again: ‘There is going to be no involvement… unless it is as a result of the constitutional process that is placed upon Congress to declare it.’
¹¹⁷
Congressional authorization; Allied support – those were the two conditions he laid down for American military involvement anywhere, and they were reflected in the Middle Eastern and South-East Asian systems of alliance he added to Nato.

Eisenhower’s second and related principle was the necessity for constitutional control over military endeavour. He used the
CIA
a great deal and was the only American president to control it effectively. He skilfully presided over the
CIA
operations in Iran and Guatemala without any damage to his reputation.
¹¹⁸
The 1958
CIA
coup
in Indonesia failed because for once the work was delegated to Dulles. It is hard to believe Eisenhower would have allowed the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation to proceed in the form it took. He had in 1954 created a civilian Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, under a wily old diplomat, David Bruce, and this was one of a number of means he employed to keep the military establishment under his authority.
¹¹⁹
He disliked generals in politics. The 1952 Chicago Republican convention, which selected him to run for the presidency, was so thick with generals, supporters of Senator Taft and MacArthur, that Eisenhower kept his chief aide, Colonel Bob Schultz, and his doctor, General Howard Snyder, out of town.
¹²⁰
Eisenhower was always aware of his need to steer a difficult path between
isolationism and over-activism in world affairs. He used Dulles to satisfy the activists of the Senate. For Dulles, who was Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s nephew and had been at Versailles, the Senate’s rejection of the 1919 Treaty was the never-to-be-forgotten lesson. He was always, wrote Kennan, ‘intensely aware of the dependence of a Secretary of State on senatorial support for the success of his policies’.
¹²¹
Under the guidance of Eisenhower, who carefully vetted his statements in advance, Dulles used what sometimes appeared to be inflated language (’rollback’, ‘go to the brink’, ‘agonizing reappraisal’) to marry legislative support to military and political realism. Only the two men knew which of America’s overseas commitments were real or rhetorical.

Eisenhower’s chief fear, in the tense atmosphere engendered by the Cold War, was that the government would fall into the grip of a combination of bellicose senators, over-eager brass-hats and greedy arms-suppliers—what he termed the ‘military-industrial complex’. For his third principle, reflected in his diaries and other personal documents, was that the security of freedom throughout the world rested ultimately in the health of the American economy. Given time, the strength of that economy could duplicate itself in West Europe and Japan. But the US economy could itself be destroyed by intemperate spending. He said of the brass-hats: ‘They don’t know much about fighting inflation. This country could choke itself to death piling up military expenditures just as surely as it can defeat itself by not spending enough for protection.’ Or again: ‘There is no defence for any country that busts its own economy.’
¹²²
But Eisenhower was equally fearful of reckless spending in the domestic field. He was not opposed to Keynesian measures to fight incipient recession. In 1958, to overcome such a dip, he ran up a $9.4 billion deficit, the largest ever acquired by a US government in peacetime.
¹²³
But that was an emergency. What Eisenhower strove mightily to avoid was a huge, permanent increase in federal commitments. He put holding down inflation before social security because he thought it was ultimately the only reliable form of social security. He loathed the idea of America becoming a welfare state. He was in fact deeply conservative. He admitted in 1956: ‘Taft was really more liberal than me in domestic matters.’
¹²⁴
His real nightmare was a combination of excessive defence spending combined with a runaway welfare machine – a destructive conjunction that became reality in the late 1960s. While he was in charge, federal spending as a percentage of
GNP
, and with it inflation, was held to a manageable figure, despite all the pressures. It was a notable achievement and explains why the Eisenhower decade was the most prosperous of modern times. And that prosperity was radiating through an ever-increasing portion of the world.

The world was more secure too. In 1950–2, the risk of a major war was very considerable. By the end of the decade, a sort of stability had been reached, lines drawn, rules worked out, alliances and commitments settled across the globe. The ‘containment’ policy-had been applied. Militant Leninism, which had expanded rapidly in the 1940s in both Europe and Asia, found its impetuous march slowed to a crawl or even halted entirely. But no sooner was the system of containment complete than it ceased to be the whole answer. For the collapse of the old liberal empires of Europe brought into existence a new category of states which raised fresh and intractable dangers.

FOURTEEN
The Bandung Generation

The same historical process which created the superpowers placed traditional powers in a dilemma. What was their role? The defeated nations, France, Germany and Japan, were driven by necessity to a fundamental reappraisal. But Britain had not been defeated. She had stood alone and emerged victorious. Could she not carry on as before? Churchill had fought desperately for British interests. He rejected utterly Roosevelt’s notion of America and Russia as the two ‘idealist’ powers and Britain as the greedy old imperialist. He knew of the bottomless cynicism reflected in Ambassador Maisky’s remark that he always added up Allied and Nazi losses in the same column.
¹
He pointed out to the British Ambassador in Moscow that Russia had ‘never been actuated by anything but cold-blooded self-interest and total disdain for our lives and fortunes’.
²
He was sombrely aware that Russia was anxious to tear the British Empire to pieces and feast on its members, and that America too, aided by the Dominions and especially Australia and New Zealand, favoured ‘decolonization’. H.V.Evatt, Australia’s cantankerous Foreign Minister, got such notions written into the
UN
charter.
³
Churchill snarled at Yalta: ‘While there is life in my body no transfer of British sovereignty will be permitted.’
⁴

Six months later Churchill had been thrown out by the electorate. His Labour successors planned to disarm, decolonize, make friends with Russia and build a welfare state. In practice they found themselves at the mercy of events. In August 1945 Lord Keynes presented them with a paper showing the country was bankrupt. Without American help, ‘the economic basis for the hopes of the country is non-existent’.
⁴
Ernest Bevin, the trades union leader turned Foreign Secretary, began with the slogan ‘Left can talk to Left’ and hoped to share atomic secrets with Russia. But he was soon telling his colleague Hugh Dalton: ‘Molotov was just like a Communist in a local Labour Party. If you treat him badly, he makes the
most of the grievances, and if you treat him well he only puts his price up and abuses you the next day.’
⁶
Gradually Bevin came to embody Britain’s determination to organize collective security. He told Molotov in 1949, ‘Do you want to get Austria behind your Iron Curtain? You can’t do that. Do you want Turkey and the Straits? You can’t have them. Do you want Korea? You can’t have that. You are putting your neck out and one day you will have it chopped off.’
⁷

Bevin’s foreign policy meant Britain had to stay in the strategic arms race. Exactly a year after Keynes delivered his bankruptcy report, the Chief of Air Staff indented with the government for nuclear bombs. Specifications for the first British atom bomber were laid down 1 January 1947.
⁸
Britain’s leading nuclear scientist, P.S.M.Blackett, opposed a British bomb, but then he thought that Britain could and should adopt a posture of neutrality vis-à-vis America and Soviet Russia.
⁹
The chief scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard, was also against an independent nuclear force: ‘We are
not
a great power and never will be again. We are a great nation but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to behave like a great nation.’
¹⁰
But Tizard was staggered by the Soviet success in exploding an A-bomb as early as August 1949: he attributed it to theft of the material. At all events the decision to make the bomb was taken in January 1947, at the height of the desperate fuel crisis and just before Britain handed over the burden of Greece and Turkey to Truman. Only Attlee, Bevin and four other ministers were present.
¹¹
The expenditure was ‘lost’ in the estimates and concealed from parliament. When Churchill returned to office in 1951 he was astounded to find that £100 million had been thus secretly laid out and the project well advanced.
¹²