Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The cost of this program, billions of dollars, made it less than welcome to the air force. To combat it, air-force supporters spread rumors that a clique of scientists which they called “ZORC” (Zacharias, Oppenheimer, Rabi, and Charles Lauritsen) were out to destroy SAC by devising, or pretending to devise, a near-perfect air defense for the United States. Thus DEW DAD, according to SAC supporters, would be America’s Maginot Line behind which the country would lie helplessly bankrupt from its cost of $100 billion. The air force, from its control over the Lincoln Laboratory’s budget, was successful in forcing MIT to suppress the DEW DAD report; at least, it was never published. But part of the story, including the horror story about ZORC, was published in the May 1953 issue of Fortune magazine, and some of the rest came out in the hearing on Oppenheimer’s security.

The third significant effort in the scientists’ campaign for American survival in the early 1950’s was known as Project East River. It was also instigated by the air force, early in 1952, and studied the problem of civil defense through a scientific team headed by Lloyd Berkner of Associated Universities. It advocated a fantastically expensive program of air-raid warnings, civilian defense shelters, and radar decentralization, but little was ever done about it. Since such a defensive system would undoubtedly save scores of millions of lives in any all-out nuclear war, and would permit the United States to withstand a Soviet “first strike,” the failure to follow up these recommendations is clearly attributable to the cost, a sum which many felt we could not afford and which the air force was convinced could be far better spent on building up the offensive power of SAC. Some of it did go for this purpose.

The air force, which had 48 wings (of which 18 were in SAC) in June 1950, when the Korean War began, had 95 wings in July 1952, as the presidential campaign began, and had no wings (of which 42 wings were in SAC) at the end of 1953 in the last Truman budget. During these years, covering the last four budgets of the Truman period, expenditures on national security increased from $13 billion in 1949-1950 to over $50 billion in 1952-1953. A fair amount of this increase went for the changes recommended by the scientists, such as the DEW Line, increase in army ground forces from 10 to 20 divisions, and increased air transportation. As a consequence, American power relative to Soviet power reached its highest point in the postwar period about the end of 1953. It then lost ground until its recovery in the missile race of 1958-1963. The lines of the earlier buildup, as recommended by the various scientific defense projects of 1950-1952, were summed up in a general survey for the incoming Eisenhower Administration in NSC 141. This document did not replace, but supplemented, more intensive efforts in air defense, civil defense, and in military assistance in the Near East and Far East.

The Eisenhower Team, 1952-1956

The last two years of the Truman Administration were marked by waves of partisan propaganda which quite concealed the major improvements being made in the American defense posture. The American people were irritated and puzzled by the stalemate in Korea exactly as the Soviets intended them to be. Disruption of the lives of individuals in a war which was not a war, in which nothing seemed to be achieved except unnecessary casualties, and which disrupted the pleasures of the postwar economic boom with military service, shortages, restrictions, and cost-of-living inflation could not help but breed discontent. The Republican-Dixiecrat alliance in the Congress made it impossible to deal with domestic problems in any decisive way or with foreign problems outside the independent authority of the presidential office. And through it all the mobilized wealth of the country, in alliance with most of the press, kept up a constant barrage of “Communists in Washington,” “twenty years of treason,” or “corruption of the Missouri gang” in the Truman Administration, and created a general picture of incompetence and bungling shot through with subversion. In creating this picture the leaders of the Republican Party totally committed themselves to the myths of the neo-isolationists and of the Radical Right.

In June 1951, Senator McCarthy delivered in the Senate a speech of 60,000 words attacking General Marshall as a man “steeped in falsehood,” who has “recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience,” one of the architects of America’s foreign policy made by “men high in this Government [who] are concerting to deliver us to disaster ... a conspiracy of infamy so black that when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. . . .”

When Truman tried to defend his subordinates, an action which Dulles resolutely refused to do when he became Secretary of State in 1953, Senator Taft attacked the President for this combination of human decency with the established legal privileges of the English-speaking world: he was wrong, according to Taft, to “assume the innocence of all the persons mentioned in the State Department. . . . Whether Senator McCarthy has legal evidence, whether he has overstated or understated his case, is of lesser importance. The question is whether the communist influence in the State Department still exists.” Following the tendencies of the day, Taft reversed his previous support of the Korean War, calling it an “unnecessary war,” an “utterly useless war,” a war “begun by President Truman without the slightest authority from Congress or the people.”

A semiofficial version of the Republican position appeared in John Foster Dulles’s article “A Policy of Boldness,” which was published in Life on May 19, 1952. This advocated rejection of “containment” in favor of “liberation,” to be achieved on a smaller budget and with reduction of the armed forces leading to a conclusive victory in the near future. All concessions to reality were rejected out of hand: containment itself was damned as fragmentary reactions to Soviet pressure, as negative, endless, and partial, as “treadmill policies which, at best, might perhaps keep us in the same place until we drop exhausted.” In place of these, Dulles offered liberation and massive retaliation. These two were not expressly linked together since, apparently, the former (applied chiefly to eastern Europe) would be achieved simply by making clear that the United States wanted it. At least, Dulles believed it would come when American policy made “it publicly known that it wants and expects liberation to occur.” The disastrous consequence of this nonsense appeared in 1956 when East Germany and Hungary rose against the Russians and were crushed by Soviet tanks without Dulles raising a hand to help. The threat of instant massive retaliation as the sole weapon by which the United States would get Russia to adopt more acceptable policies was equally unrealistic. No one, not even Dulles, dared to use it in the face of the Soviet Union’s capability for retaliation. Nuclear blackmail is bad, but nuclear blackmail in which the blackmailer has no intention or opportunity to inflict his penalty is pointless and dangerous—unless, perhaps, such threats help to win elections.

It helped win an election for Eisenhower in 1952. The candidate had no particular assets except a bland and amiable disposition combined with his reputation as a victorious general. He also had a weakness, one which is frequently found in his profession, the conviction that anyone who has become a millionaire, even by inheritance, is an authoritative person on almost any subject. With Eisenhower as candidate, combined with Richard Nixon, the ruthless enemy of internal subversion, as a running mate, and using a campaign in which the powers of Madison Avenue publicity mobilized all the forces of American discontent behind the neo-isolationist program, victory in November, 1952, was assured. The coup de gráce was given to the Democratic candidate, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, darling of the academic intellectuals, when Eisenhower adopted Emmet Hughes’s suggestion that he promise, if elected, to go to Korea to make peace.