I like Ike and you should too.
This sentiment struck me after reading an April 30 article in the Washington Post. Walter Pincus reported on newly declassified information that shows President Eisenhower ruled out a proposal by senior Air Force officers to drop nuclear bombs against targets in Communist China in 1958.
The proposal to nuke China was made at a Cabinet meeting in the summer of 1958 as the threat of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan was developing. Air Force Gen. Nathan F. Twining, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained “that at the outset American planes would drop 10-to-15 kiloton bombs on selected fields in the vicinity of Amoy,” a coastal city on the Taiwan Strait now called Xiamen, according to the documents.
But Eisenhower, nearing the end of his two-term presidency, “simply did not accept the contention that nuclear weapons were as conventional as high explosives.”
Whew! As a child of the 1950s and early 1960s – the “hide under our desk” generation – I read this account of Ike’s wisdom, coolness, and calm judgment with a mixture of awe and amazement. The classic Stanley Kubrick 1964 film, “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” suddenly didn’t seem so far-fetched.
We should be grateful for Eisenhower’s resolve not to commit what would have been a disastrous act of war that not only would have killed untold numbers of innocent Chinese, but surely could have forced a nuclear response on the American mainland from the Soviets. In other words, Ike averted starting World War III.
By mid-1958, Pincus wrote, the Air Force had deployed five Strategic Air Command B-47 bombers that “went on alert to conduct nuclear raids against the [mainland] China airfield,” according to the declassified documents. At that time, the Air Force commanders assumed “presidential approval [that] any communist assault upon the offshore islands would trigger immediate nuclear retaliation.”
Instead, Eisenhower forced Air Force leaders “to think more seriously about conventional warfare instead of relying on nuclear arms,” Pincus writes. Eventually, the U.S. managed to provide naval escorts to resupply the besieged Taiwanese, as well as dispatch an Air Force strike force – but one that wasn’t trigger happy to drop The Bomb. By early October, 1958, the Chinese government – after shelling the islands from the mainland – backed down and announced a cease fire.
Like the Cuban Missile Crisis four years later – and for which Ike’s successor, John F. Kennedy, received well-deserved plaudits – this previously secret crisis deserves its own place in the pantheon of presidential greatness.
Eisenhower’s leadership mettle was forged in the crucible of World War II as he endured his share of doubts and doubters over the Allies’ conduct of the war in North Africa. For a recent account of Ike’s steep learning curve as the American military commander, read Rick Atkinson’s “An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943.”
Atkinson’s book is filled with fresh insights about the leaders on both sides of the battle line, including this note from Eisenhower to his son at West Point: “I have observed very frequently that it is not the man who is so brilliant [who] delivers in time of stress and strain, but rather the man who can keep on going indefinitely, doing a good straightforward job.”
A full half century after Ike averted disaster, as America spins its wheels in a presidential race that seems to rely more on “gotcha moments” on YouTube than reasoned discourse, let’s hope for all our sakes that whoever wins the 2008 election has the mixture of humility and wisdom of Dwight David Eisenhower – a Kansan who simply tried to “keep on going indefinitely, doing a good straightforward job.”
To read Eisenhower’s final speech as president, in which he warns of the dangers of a growing “military industrial complex,” go to Yale.edu.