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

Although not himself a neo-isolationist or a reactionary, Eisenhower had few deep personal convictions, and was eager to be President. When his advisers told him that he must collaborate with the Radical Right, he went all the way, even to the extent of condoning Senator McCarthy’s attack on General Marshall. This occurred when Eisenhower, under McCarthy’s pressure, removed from a Wisconsin speech a favorable reference to Marshall.

Once elected, the new President reintroduced the Republican conception of the Presidency which had been used in 1921-1933. This conception saw the President as a kind of titular chairman of the board who neither acted himself directly nor intervened indirectly in the actions of his delegated assistants. Fully aware of his own limitations of both knowledge and energy, Eisenhower allotted the functions of government to his Cabinet members (“eight millionaires and a plumber,” according to one writer) and expected to be consulted himself only in unsettled disputes or major policy changes.

Over-all government operations were divided into two parts, with John Foster Dulles, as secretary of state, in charge of foreign affairs, and ex-Governor Sherman Adams of New Hampshire (in place of Taft, who died in 1953) as assistant President in charge of domestic matters. Apart from these, the real tone of the Administration was provided by three businessmen: George Humphrey, a Taft Republican and president of the great holding company of M. A. Hanna and Company, was secretary of the treasury and the most influential member of the Cabinet; Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, was secretary of defense; and Joseph M. Dodge, a Detroit banker with extensive government experience, was director of the budget, the only man in the government who could, with impunity, do or undo Acts of Congress. The chief aim of the Administration, and almost the sole aim of these three, was to reduce government spending, and subsequently business taxes, by the greatest amount that would not jeopardize reelection in 1956. Dulles and Adams had to work within the financial framework thus provided.

Within this framework foreign policy was boxed, even more narrowly, between the realities of the country’s world position and the constant hounding of the neo-isolationist groups in Congress who had been roused to a pitch of unholy expectation by the encouragement they had received from Eisenhower and Nixon during the electoral campaign of 1952. In that campaign they had discovered that Eisenhower could be pushed. They now concluded that their pushing from without, combined with the pulling of Dulles and Nixon from within, could overthrow the foreign-policy lines established by the Truman Administration in the preceding six years and create a new policy more in accord with their mistaken ideas of the nature of the world. Opposed to this change were the old defenders of the Atlantic System, the remnants of former Wall Street influence, the Ivy League colleges, the foundations, the newspaper spokesmen of this point of view ( The New York Times and Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, and Washington Post) led by Walter Lippmann, and the unrepentant scientists and “eggheads” straggling behind Adlai Stevenson.

Eisenhower as President can be summed up in one word: amiability. He not only liked people; he was also eager to be liked, and was, indeed, likable. If he gave the impression that he had no firmly held convictions, that was because of two other qualities: he was relaxed, fully willing to live and let live, in an easygoing tolerance of anything which did not disturb his own peace of mind. He was quick-tempered but not a fighter. He had convictions, none of them very firm, but he was not prepared to sacrifice his own rest and relaxation for them, except for brief occasions. His span of attention was neither long nor intense. As a consequence, he was a wonderful companion, but not a leader.

In all this, the President was the antithesis of his secretary of state. John Foster Dulles was a tireless and energetic fighter, full of convictions, most of which he saw in black-and-white terms. He rarely rested and had little time for any relaxation because the world was full of evil forces with which he must wage constant battle. Tolerance and the right to be neutral were to him largely words which had little real meaning in his tightly wound neurological system. To Dulles it was a real effort not to equate opposition with evil. As he hurried throughout the world, traveling 226,645 miles in his first three years in office, in pursuit of Communism, he was like John Wesley, two centuries earlier, racing through England in pursuit of sin, both men fully convinced that they were doing the work of God. Eisenhower, who saw the world as a place almost without evil, once told an adviser, “You and I can argue issues all day and it won’t affect our friendship, but the minute I question your motives you will never forgive me.” This lesson would have been lost on the secretary of state, for Dulles, almost alone in a world full of sin, was always seeking the reason behind the event, the motive behind the action, and was obligated by his own alignment with righteousness to denounce the reason and the motive when he had discovered them.

It must be evident from this that Eisenhower and Dulles, in spite of their close cooperation and almost unruffled personal relations, were very dissimilar, both in personality and in outlook. Dulles was considerably to the right of Eisenhower, and the Republican congressional party was far to the right of Dulles. As a result, the two were under constant pressure from the party’s isolationist leaders in Congress and from the party’s big financial supporters to go further toward neo-isolationism and the Right than either Dules or Eisenhower considered safe. To avoid this, the Administration had to do two basically contradictory things: to make verbal concessions to the Right and to find its congressional legislative support among the Democrats. In 1953 alone, according to the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, the “Democrats saved the President … fifty-eight times” by their votes in Congress.

Some examples of this skirmishing, in what was locally known as the “Battle of the Potomac,” form a necessary background to the development of international affairs in Eisenhower’s eight years.

The Republican platform of July 1952 had promised to “repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements.” In his first speech as secretary, Dulles spoke of the liberation of satellite peoples, and told them, “You can count upon us.” The Republicans in Congress from then on kept demanding support of these two promises, beginning with a resolution to repudiate Yalta and Potsdam. The Administration naturally had to oppose this congressional desire to take campaign talk seriously, since any repudiation of past agreements could be done by Russia more easily than by us and could jeopardize most of our advanced positions in Europe, beginning with Berlin and Vienna. Eventually the resolution was dropped.

A somewhat similar struggle arose over the Bricker and the substitute Dirksen Amendments to the Constitution. These would have forbidden the Federal government to make any foreign treaties which could not be carried out by powers granted to the Federal government elsewhere in the Constitution. This would have greatly hampered the State Department in making agreements, such as those with Canada to protect migrating game birds, since power to do so was not granted elsewhere in the Constitution. The Amendment was finally defeated by the Administration after a bitter struggle with Republicans in the Congress, and only by the support of Democrats.

The Administration condoned or suffered through all kinds of Right-wing attacks, many of them supported by members of the Cabinet. Some government employees were harassed for years, even suspended without pay for months or years, before final clearance of unfounded charges. Wolf Ladejinsky, the country’s greatest authority on East Asian agriculture and a known anti-Communist writer, had been responsible for much of MacArthur’s success in occupied Japan as the author of a land-reform program which increased agricultural production and largely eliminated agrarian discontent, so that Communism in Japan, quite opposite to China, ceased to be a rural phenomenon and was, indeed, largely restricted to student groups in cities. Cleared by the State Department to return to Japan, he was suddenly declared a security risk and suspended by Secretary of Agriculture Benson.