The Eisenhower Era

Chapter 37part-3

Eisenhower Republicanism at Home• Eisenhower came into the White House

pledging a policy of “dynamic conservatism,” - that he would be liberal with people, but conservative with their money.

• Ike decreased government spending by decreasing military spending, tried to transfer control of offshore oil fields to the states, and triedto curb the TVA by setting up a private company to take its place. His secretary of health, education, and

welfare condemned free distribution of the Salk anti-polio vaccine as being socialist.

Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson tackled agriculture issues, but despite the government’s purchase of surplus grain which it stored in giant silos costing Americans $2 million a day, farmers didn’t see prosperity.

Operation Wetback Thousands of illegal Mexicanimmigrants were forcibly repatriated to Mexico in thefederal government’s 1954 roundup operation, which

was promoted in part by the Mexican government.The man in this photograph is being pulled across the

border by a Mexican official, while an American spectatortries to pull him back into the United States.

• Eisenhower also cracked down on illegal Mexican immigration (a direct reversal from the bracero program) by rounding up 1 million Mexicans and returning them to their native country in 1954.

With Indians, Ikeproposed ending the lenientFDR-style treatment towardIndians and reverting to aDawes Severalty Act-stylepolicy toward NativeAmericans. However, due toprotest and resistance, thiswas disbanded.

• Actually, Eisenhower only balanced the budget three times in his eight years of office, and in 1959, he incurred the biggest peacetime deficit in U.S. history up to that point.

Critics said that he was economically timid, blaming the president for the sharp economic downturn of 1957-58.

• Still, Eisenhower did keep many of the New Deal programs, since some, like Social Security and unemployment insurance, had already become nationally accepted and depended upon by the American people.

• In some respects, Ike even did the New Deal programs one better, such as his backing of the Interstate Highway Act, which built 42,000 miles of interstate freeways – a far larger and more expensive project than anything in FDR’s New Deal.

• Also, the AF of L merged with the CIO to end 20 years of bitter division in labor unions. The AFL-CIO is the most powerful union in America today.

A New Look in Foreign Policy• Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated that the policy of containment

was not enough and that the U.S. needed to push back communism and liberate the peoples under it. This became known as “rollback.”

•Eisenhower’s "new look" policy was called massive retaliation - the greater reliance on air power and the deterrent power of nuclear weapons than on the army and navy.

•The U.S. created the Strategic Air Command (SAC). This was an airfleet of superbombers equipped with city-flattening nuclear bombs. These fearsome weapons would inflict "Massive Retaliation" on the enemy, and were also a “great bang for the buck.”

• At the same time, Eisenhower sought a thaw in the Cold War through negotiations with the new Soviet leaders, who came to power after dictator Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953.

• At first, the Soviets were surprisingly cooperative, and the new premier, Nikita Khrushchev publicly denounced Stalin’s brutality.

• In the end, the touted “new look” proved illusory.

• Khrushchev rudely rejected Ike’s call in 1955 for an “open skies” mutual inspection program over both the Soviet Union and the United States.

• In 1956, Hungarians rose up against their Soviet masters and felt badly betrayed when the United States turned a deaf ear to their desperate appeals for aid. Their resistance was crushed.

• The brutally crushed Hungarian uprising revealed the sobering truth that America’s mighty nuclear sledgehammer was too heavy a weapon to wield in such a relatively minor crisis.

• The rigid futility of the “massive retaliation” doctrine was thus starkly exposed. To his dismay, Eisenhower also discovered that the aerial and atomic hardware necessary for “massive retaliation” was staggeringly expensive.

The Vietnam Nightmare

• In Vietnam, revolutionary Ho Chi Minh had tried to encourage Woodrow Wilson as far back as 1920 to help the Vietnamese against the French. Ho did gain some support from Wilson, but as Ho became increasingly communist, the U.S. began to oppose him.

• In March 1954, when the French became trapped at

Dienbienphu by Vietnamese rebels, Eisenhower’s aides wanted to bomb the Viet Minh guerilla forces, but Ike held back, fearing plunging the U.S. into another Asian war so soon after Korea. After the Vietnamese won at Dienbienphu, Vietnam was split at the 17th parallel, supposedly temporarily.

• Ho Chi Minh was supposed to allow free elections, but soon, Vietnam became clearly split between a communist north and a pro-Western south.

• Dienbienphu marked the start of American interest in Vietnam.

• Secretary Dulles created the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) to emulate NATO, but this provided little help.

Cold War Crisis in Europe & the Middle East• In 1955, the USSR formed their own “gang”, the Warsaw Pact to counteract NATO, but

the Cold War did seem to be thawing a bit, as Eisenhower pressed for reduction of arms.

• However, in 1956, when the Hungarian revolutionaries were brutally crushed, talks went out the window.

• The U.S. did change some of its immigration laws to let 30,000 Hungarians into America as immigrants to escape Soviet rule.

In 1953, in order to protect oil supplies in the Middle East, the CIA engineered a coup in Iran that installed the youthful Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, as ruler of the nation, protecting the oil for the time being, but earning the wrath of Arabs that would be repaid in the 70s and has never really waned…...

• The Suez crisis was far messier: President Gamal Abdel Nasser, of Egypt, needed money to build a dam in the upper Nile and flirted openly with the Soviet side as well as the U.S. and Britain.

• Upon seeing this blatant communist association, Secretary of State Dulles dramatically withdrew his offer of financial aid, thus prompting Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal.

Suez Canal Crisis

• Late in October 1956, Britain, France, and Israel suddenly attacked Egypt to regain control of the Suez Canal, thinking that the U.S. would supply them with the oil needed to carry out the operation, as had been the case in WWII, but an angry Eisenhower refused, and the attackers were forced to withdraw.

• The Suez crisis marked the last time the U.S. could brandish its “oil weapon” to make foreign policy demands.

• The poor Middle Eastern nations increasingly resolved to reap for themselves the enormous oil wealth that Western companies had been pumping out of their deserts for the last 30 years.

In 1960, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela joined to form the cartel Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

• In the aftermath of this crisis, the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine was announced, which empowered the president to extend economic and military aid to nations of the Middle East that wanted help to resist communist aggression.

Round Two for “Ike”• In 1956, Eisenhower again ran against

Stevenson and won easily by a landslide.

• The GOP called itself the “party of peace” and the Democrats attacked Ike’s health, claiming he was unfit to be re-elected since he had just suffered a heart attack in 1955 and a major abdominal operation in ’56. – However, the Democrats did win the

House and Senate.

• After Secretary of State Dulles died of cancer in 1959 and presidential assistant Sherman Adams was forced to leave under a cloud of scandal due to bribery charges, Eisenhower, without his two most trusted and most helpful aides, was forced to govern more and golf less.

• A drastic labor-reform bill in 1959 grew from recurrent strikes in critical industries.

• Teamster chief “Dave” Beck was sent to prison for embezzlement, and his controversial successor, James R. Hoffa’s appointment got the Teamsters expelled out of the recently united AFL-CIO due to his criminally suspect union tactics. – Hoffa was later jailed for jury tampering and

then disappeared before going to prison, allegedly murdered by some gangsters that he had crossed.

• The 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act was designed to bring labor leaders to book for financial shenanigans and prevent bullying tactics. – Anti-laborites forced into the bill bans

against “secondary boycotts” and certain types of picketing.

• A “space-race” began in 1957. – On October 4, 1957, the

Russians launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, into space, and a month later, they sent Sputnik II into orbit as well, thus totally demoralizing Americans as this seemed to prove communist superiority in the sciences.

– Plus, now the possibility existed that the Soviets could fire missiles at the U.S. from space.

– Critics charged that Truman had not spent enough money on missile programs while America had used its science for other, more frivolous things, such as television.

– Still, only four months after Sputnik I, the U.S. sent its own satellite (weighing only 2.5 lbs) into space. Still, this apparent lack of U.S. technology sent concerns over U.S. education, since American children seemed to be learning less advanced information than Soviet kids.

– In response to Sputnik I, the 1958 National Defense and Education Act (NDEA) was passed, granting the federal government the power to spend millions of dollars to improve American science and language education.

The Continuing Cold War

• Humanity-minded scientists called for an end to atmospheric nuclear testing, lest future generations be deformed and mutated from radiation poisoning.

• Beginning October 1958, Washington did halt “dirty” testing, as did the U.S.S.R., but attempts to regularize such suspensions were unsuccessful.

• Then, in 1959, Khrushchev was invited by Ike to America for talks, and when he arrived in New York, he immediately (and quite surprisingly) spoke of disarmament, though he gave no means yet of how to do it.

• Later, at Camp David (the presidential retreat), talks did show upward signs, as the Soviet premier said that his previously stated ultimatum for the Allied evacuation of Berlin would be extended indefinitely.

What’s So Funny? 1960 Premier Khrushchev gloatsover Ike’s spying discomfiture.

• THEN, at the Paris summit conference in 1960, shortly after such promising progress at Camp David the year before, an enraged Khrushchev stormed out of the meeting after it was revealed that the Soviets had shot down a United States U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory.

• After initial denial of any knowledge of such a spy plane, Eisenhower was embarrassingly forced to take personal responsibility when the Russians revealed the wreckage AND the pilot!

• Sadly, Cold War tensions immediately tightened again over the U-2 incident.

U-2 Spy Plane