Lessons from Ike

Lessons on strategy from Eisenhower

2008-09-20T15:58:00.000-07:00

A Strategy for the 21sth Century:

What a New President Can Learn from Ike

William B. Pickett, Professor Emeritus of History, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

September 20, 2008

A presidential election with striking resemblance to the current one took place sixty-six years ago, in 1952. In that election, as in today’s, involvement in an overseas war then in Korea with no apparent path to victory had frustrated the American people and caused the then incumbent, Harry S. Truman’s, popularity to plummet. The candidate more experienced in military and world affairs, like today, was the Republican, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike’s two-term presidency was both successful and institutionalized the Cold-War national security policy that, although with twists and turns, remained in place until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Senator John McCain, a former career military officer, would thus like to portray himself as Ike’s modern counterpart. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, as might be expected, has questioned the importance of experience. Referring to previous presidents who lacked such background but who served with distinction, he has insisted that judgment, not experience is what counts. Unfortunately for both candidates, one must conclude that the amount and nature of Eisenhower’s pre-presidential experience and therefore his preparation for the office were so different from those of today’s candidates that neither candidate is correct. Clearly, Eisenhower’s successful tenure in the Oval Office would counter Obama’s claim about the unimportance of experience; but McCain does not come close to having Eisenhower’s preparation for office. McCain’s background—five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war and 26 in Congress—fails to approximate Ike’s credentials as manager, strategist, and military commander. Nevertheless, important elements of Ike’s approach--its objective to preserve the way of life of his fellow countrymen during a conflict of unknown but possibly very long, duration-- remain relevant today and, were today’s candidates to heed them, might help the nation address the hazards of the 21^st century. They include involving the nation’s best thinkers in the systematic formulation and execution of a strategy that balances ends with means and places threats in order of importance.

A journey back to the early 1950s when Ike took office provides a window on the origins of Ike’s strategic wisdom. Eisenhower’s career as a West Point graduate and career army officer by 1952 included two tours at the War Department in Washington, D.C., where policy intersects with politics at the highest levels. After important training assignments in the continental United States during World War I--including command of the Tank Corps Training Center at Camp Colt near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—his ability moved him onto a fast career track. After the war Colonel George S. Patton, who had commanded new U.S. tank forces in combat, introduced him to Brigadier General Fox Conner, wartime operations officer for American Expeditionary Forces commander General John J. Pershing. Ike served for two years as Conner’s chief of staff in the early 1920s when the general commanded U.S. forces in the Panama Canal Zone. Conner, considered the army’s leading intellectual, became Ike’s mentor, putting him through a personal tutorial in the classics of western literature and military history as they rode horse back on the trails of the Canal Zone. After graduating first in his class at the Command and General Staff College in 1926, Ike worked for General Pershing in Europe as principle researcher and author of the army’s guide to the battlefields of World War I. He also attended the Army War College, and soon thereafter became personal aide, assistant, and amanuensis for the army chief of staff, General Douglas A. MacArthur at the War Department in Washington, D.C.

Ike then accompanied the general to the Philippines, an American protectorate since 1898, as his chief of staff when the latter accepted the position of military adviser to the Philippine president, Manuel Quezon, in 1935. The mission was to prepare the archipelago for independence in 1946.

Not long after Germany in1939 precipitated war in Europe by invading Poland, Eisenhower returned to the United States. Eisenhower became chief of staff of the Third Army at Fort Lewis, Washington, and then one of the key strategists in the largest peacetime army training exercise in American history, the so-called Louisiana maneuvers. The success of his strategy there brought his promotion to brigadier general. Then, in 1941, immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, newly-appointed army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, another former member of General Pershing’s wartime entourage, called Eisenhower again to the War Department and soon made him chief of the Operations Planning Division with orders to draft the strategy by which the United States with its allies would fight, and ultimately, with the aid of the Soviet Union, win, World War II. The immediate goal, Eisenhower wrote, was “to prevent a situation” that will “give the Axis an overwhelming tactical superiority” or in which “their productive potential becomes greater than our own.” “The immediately important tasks, aside from protection of the American continent,” he said, “are the security of England, the retention of Russia in the war as an active ally, and the defense of the Middle East.”[1] Ike soon thereafter received appointment as European theater commander, moving to London to begin making plans with the British for an allied cross-channel invasion in 1943 or 1944. Beginning in 1942, he commanded the amphibious invasions, consecutively, of North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and finally, on June 6, 1944 of Normandy—the largest such invasion ever launched. By the time Germany surrendered at his headquarters in France on May 8, 1945, more soldiers were under his control, some five and a half million, than of any general in the nation’s history. Of those who fought, 587,000 American and 180,000 allied troops had become casualties (including 137,000 American and 60,000 allied dead).[2] During these enormously difficult years in which democratic government had been extinguished or was in jeopardy throughout the world Eisenhower became a practitioner in the military art, learning the crucial importance of planning and of surrounding oneself with the very best thinkers and leaders.

Three months after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the entry into the war of the Soviet Union in August, 1945 brought Japan’s surrender, President Truman appointed Eisenhower, now a five-star general, to replace Marshall as army chief of staff. It then fell upon Ike, as demanded by a war-weary public and their representatives in Congress, to demobilize the majority of American ground forces. Recalling a similar time of unilateral disarmament following the earlier world war and alarmed by the nation’s vulnerability, this time in the new era of intercontinental bombers and nuclear weapons (then 15 to 20 times more powerful than conventional bombs), he ordered studies to determine the extent to which the new weapons could or should replace soldiers in the nation’s peacetime arsenal. He simultaneously advocated Universal Military Training (UMT) modeled on that of Switzerland (or today’s Israel) as an inexpensive and in a democracy, more congenial, basis for peacetime strength, deterrent to aggression, and foundation for diplomacy—a basis that did not rely on large standing armies, aerial bombardment, and devastatingly efficient nuclear weapons.[3] The Congress, despite Ike’s efforts to persuade them, refused.

Eisenhower retired from active military duty in 1948, the year after Truman announced his Cold-War national security policy of containing Soviet expansion and subversion, a policy—the so-called Truman Doctrine--that was the rationale for his request to Congress on March 12, 1947 for aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey, both, like other governments in war-ravaged Western Europe, threatened by Soviet Union. Ike had decided to accept the presidency of Columbia University; but beginning in 1949, after the war scare accompanying the Soviet blockade of access routes to West Berlin, he accepted Truman’s request that he become adviser to the Pentagon, actually de facto first chairman of the newly-established Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Korean War broke out when North Korean columns crossed into South Korea in June, 1950; and President Truman turned again to Eisenhower, this time asking him to accept appointment as the first supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (SACEUR). His mission, to create a unified allied defense force to deter an attack and diplomatic intimidation by the Red Army.[4] It was while carrying out these duties in October, 1951 that Eisenhower, realizing that the likely Republican nominee for the presidency was the isolationist senator, Robert A. Taft of Ohio, quietly informed certain of his supporters that he would enter the presidential race of 1952.

Eisenhower’s journey into electoral politics, it is now clear, actually began in November of 1948, when Truman defeated New York governor, Thomas E. Dewey, the nominee that year of the internationalist, eastern wing of the G.O.P. In the months before the election, as mentioned, the Soviet Union had precipitated a war scare by blocking all three ground transportation routes from West Germany to the allied zones of West Berlin--located deep in East Germany--and clamped one-party, communist control on Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Despite the need for American engagement against Soviet pressure, Republican regulars had announced their desire to curb U.S. commitments in Europe, blamed communist advances on mistakes or misdeeds by Truman and the Democrats, and were promoting the presidential candidacy of Senator Taft. Eisenhower, in response, authorized a group of Republican internationalist activists located mainly in New York and Pennsylvania—individuals who, before supporting Dewey in 1948, had underwritten the candidacy of Wendell Willkie in 1940--to put out national feelers about the possibility of his own candidacy in the event that Dewey was defeated. The feelers brought an enthusiastic response, and when the feared outcome of the election came to pass in November, Ike gave the green light for those individuals, with Dewey’s secret (to avoid being tainted by his defeat) support, to continue activities in his behalf.[5]

By autumn of 1951, Eisenhower, now located at his headquarters in Paris, had determined that the United States needed a different Cold-War strategy. The Truman Doctrine, as originally formulated, was to contain communist expansion wherever it occurred. But its focus was first on economic means and geographically, on strengthening the countries of Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. This, Ike believed, was considerably better than policies being advocated by Taft and the Republican regulars. At the outbreak of the Korean War, however, Truman, to augment his policy, had adopted National Security Council Memorandum 68 (NSC 68). It projected that the Soviet Union would have sufficient numbers of nuclear weapons to launch an attack on the United States in 1954, which it labeled the “year of maximum danger,” and called for both urgent and massive conventional rearmament against a global communist threat and development of the hydrogen bomb (fifty times more powerful than an atomic bomb). Eisenhower had become alarmed, believing NSC 68 was overblown and too expensive.[6] He believed that it had abandoned the sound thinking on Soviet goals and methods of the official who, beginning in 1946 and later as chairman of the policy planning staff of the State Department, had provided the basis for the Truman Doctrine. That official, the nation’s leading expert on the Soviet Union, was George Frost Kennan. The latter had written that the Cold War was long-term, more political than military, a contest in which the United States should focus first on Western Europe, the home of America’s most important allies and trading partners. By autumn of 1951 Ike, a student of the history that he had lived through, had arrived at three propositions: first, that withdrawing from international politics would repeat one of the mistakes—U.S. withdrawal from world politics--that led to World War I; second, that collective security, including economic and military preparedness, was essential; and third, interestingly but counter intuitively, that Cold-War mobilization, if left unchecked, could itself jeopardize the American way of life, leading possibly to government infringement on individual liberties and what he termed “internal deterioration through the annual expenditure of unconscionable sums on a program of infinite duration.”[7]

The month after his landslide defeat of the Democratic candidate, Stevenson, in early November, 1952, (and just weeks after the United States exploded the world’s first thermonuclear device on an atoll in the Pacific), Eisenhower swung into action. He had promised in his campaign if elected, to “go to Korea,” a statement that had contributed to the magnitude of his victory.[8] Ground offensives by United Nations coalition troops ordered by General Matthew Ridgway and supported by American naval and air power had stabilized the front in the vicinity of the 38^th parallel, the pre-war dividing line of the two Koreas. Eisenhower now traveled to the war-devastated Korean peninsula where he visited the troops and then decided to reject a recommendation by his friend, the new Far East Commander, General Mark Clark (Truman having fired the previous commander, General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination), to authorize another offensive to defeat and occupy North Korea.[9]

Eisenhower then turned to organizational tasks. He set in motion plans to upgrade the National Security Council--then merely an advisory group--to a deliberative, recommending, and monitoring body. Its permanent members were the president (presiding), vice president, secretary of state, secretary of defense, and the director of defense mobilization, with representatives of other departments attending at various times. It now would have its own staff, a special assistant for national security affairs—to administer Council activities but not to advise the president--and an executive staff secretary, who briefed the president every day and handled all national security-classified material going to or coming from the Oval Office. The Council’s two committees: the Policy Planning Board (to prepare papers from materials sent to it from the various departments as guides for deliberation) and the Operations Coordinating Board (to coordinate actions resulting from presidential decisions on national security affairs) would separate policy-formulating from operational duties. This separation, Eisenhower knew, was important to prevent blurring of responsibilities that could result in the advocacy of unwise actions because of bureaucratic interests involved and, during crises, emotional rather than rational decision-making.[10]

In May 1953, a handful of Eisenhower’s close advisors, at his request, met in the sun room (the Solarium) of the White House. He had asked for advice about how best to address the following facts: in Korea, peace talks had started many months earlier but remained deadlocked. In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin had died and it was not clear who his successor would be. At his advisors’ suggestion, Ike decided to seek the best thinking from the departments with day-to-day responsibility for formulating and carrying out policy. He asked twenty-one officials, many of whom he knew personally, to come together in a top secret, month-long strategy-planning workshop. Known by the codename “Solarium,” the activity took place at the National War College from June 10 to July 15, 1953.[11]

The president demanded that the participants consider comprehensively and objectively the most likely threats and the best responses to them. Apportioning participants in equal numbers to each of three study groups, he gave them access to all intelligence information and then asked each group to propose a strategy based on a set of assumptions about Soviet capabilities and intentions different from the others. The first group was to propose continuation, with modifications, of Containment and assume that time was on the side of the West. The Soviet competitive position, they were to assume, would strengthen for awhile but, after ten or fifteen years, would begin to weaken. The second group was to propose that the United States draw lines on the map that, if crossed by the communist adversary, would bring an American military response. They were to assume a cautious but opportunistic Soviet Union subject to miscalculation. The third group was to propose measures short of war—political, economic, diplomatic, and covert—to “eliminate Soviet influence in the free world and weaken communist control in both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself.” This group was to assume a more adventuresome and successful Soviet antagonist. Time was on the side of the Soviets, but the U.S., by taking action, could reverse this advantage. After five weeks of independent deliberation, the groups came together on July 16, to present their findings and answer questions about them at an expanded session of the National Security Council.[12]

Eisenhower listened carefully. When the discussions ended, he stepped to the podium. His thinking reflected his mastery of military history--especially of the ideas of the 19^th century Prussian soldier and military historian, Karl von Clausewitz, who in his most famous quote, described war as “merely a continuation of policy—or of politics—by other means.” As a young officer serving with General Fox Conner in the Panama Canal Zone Eisenhower had read Clausewitz’s volumes, On War, three times and internalized their precepts, including their emphasis on the moral over the physical dimension of war. The objective was all important. It was not to destroy the enemy but rather to cause him to act in a certain way, in accordance with one’s wishes. To accomplish this, one needed appropriate means. Force, while often necessary, was a method that could escalate to an unpredictable intensity of reciprocal destruction. And, paradoxically, these means, if poorly designed or executed, could result in one’s own defeat, either through the exhaustion of one’s army or the loss of the support of one’s populace. Clausewitz had written his book in the early 19^th century, before the advent of the internal combustion engine and mechanized warfare, but his ideas remained relevant. In the nuclear age, inappropriate means could bring the loss of the objective, which had to be one’s own way of life, either through creation of perpetual mobilization at home, which Ike often referred to as a “garrison state”— and a mirror of its totalitarian adversary’s society--or even worse, an unthinkably devastating nuclear strike by a frightened or angry enemy and devastating counter-strike.[13]

Speaking now in mid-July 1953 at a plenary session of the NSC, Eisenhower congratulated the three Solarium groups for their work. He then summarized their conclusions. In the days that followed he asked the NSC staff to draft a strategy that, while including elements from each, would follow the thinking of the first group, a modification of Containment. This should not have been surprising given Eisenhower’s distaste for NSC 68 and that fact that he had brought George Kennan, the group’s leader, back from his recent retirement at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies to temporary government service in the Solarium workshop. Eisenhower’s strategy, unlike that trumpeted at the previous summer’s GOP convention in Denver, which demanded a “rollback” of Soviet power, was called The New Look and became the foundation of United States national security strategy through the end of the Cold War one.

The New Look memorandum, NSC 162, called for and resulted in a combination of activities ranging from multi-lateral and bi-lateral treaties (like NATO, SEATO, CENTO, and the U.S. treaties with Japan and Taiwan) in all parts of the globe where countries were threatened by Soviet or Communist Chinese power; to sound economic policies-- including a balanced federal budget, free trade, and stable growth at home; a reduced but technologically-advanced military with the power to deter or resist by an ability to respond quickly and with massive force to Soviet aggression; a capacity for covert intelligence-gathering and clandestine operations in the Third World; military and diplomatic missions and economic support to such key countries as West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the Middle East; outreach to nations under Soviet domination or subject to subversion by Marxism-Leninism via such programs as Voice of America broadcasts and a variety of citizen exchange programs; and a willingness to correspond and negotiate with the Soviet leaders.

Stateless, suicidal terrorists with weapons of various kinds of destructiveness have replaced Soviet bombers and nuclear-tipped missiles as the main threats to the United States in the first decade of the 21^st century, although the possibility of the latter in the hands of hostile governments has not gone away. If one were to convey to senators Obama and McCain the most important elements of Eisenhower’s experience, the ingredients of his way of thinking in 1952 that were both essential to the success of his strategy and remain relevant for today, one must include his emphasis, above all, on balancing ends—which must be neither territory nor prestige, but rather the nation’s way of life--with appropriate means, including both strengthening and working closely with allies in military, diplomatic, and humanitarian missions. They include his emphasis on adopting and following a well-considered and logical set of priorities. And perhaps most important of all, they included for both their formulation and implementation a team made up of individuals who, like himself, were seasoned professionals who looked to the past, not for ideological or partisan advantage but rather for lessons relevant to the challenges at hand.

--------------

XXX

[1] Mark Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 74.

[2]William B. Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc. 1995), 56.

[3] Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 76; Pickett, “General Andrew Jackson Goodpaster: Managing National Security,” in David L. Anderson ed., The Human Tradition in America since 1945 (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2003), 28.

[4] William B. Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 193.

[5] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 53-54, 76.

[6] The American people, by their reaction to the stalemate in Korea (33,686 Americans would die by the time the armistice was signed in July of 1953), had rejected it as well. http://www.aiipowmia.com/koreacw/kwkia_menu.html; David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 4.

[7] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 162-163.

[8] David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 626.

[9] Ambrose, 30-31; Halberstam, 626.

[10]Ambrose, p. 25; Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 101; The White House, “History of the National Security Council, 1947-1997,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/history.html#eisenhower]

[11] William B. Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan and the Origins of Eisenhower’s New Look: An Oral History of Project Solarium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, 2004), p. 3.

http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~pickett/solarium04.html http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~pickett/dulles88.html http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~pickett/Solarium.pdf

[12] Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan, p. 3.

[13] Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 100-102; http://www.clausewitz.com/CWZHOME/CWZSUMM/CWORKHOL.htm#Politik

Finding a Strategy for the 21st Century: Lessons from Ike

2008-09-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

Finding a Strategy for the 21sth Century: Lessons from Ike

William B. Pickett, Professor Emeritus of History

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

August 31, 2008

The SEALs’ worst day:

On October 22, 2007, SEAL Lieutenant Michael Murphy at a White House Ceremony received the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously. The following is an excerpt from a book by Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor in June 2005 of a four-man mission of navy special forces in Afghanistan to find and capture or kill the leader of a group of terrorists, a mission that was compromised by local villagers and, before it was over, cost the lives of 11 SEALs, including Lt. Murphy, and 8 Army night stalkers. It was the worst single-day loss of American life since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.

“In a sense it was pretty simple. We somehow had to get out into those infamous mountain passes and put a stop to this clandestine infiltration of faceless tribal warriors making their way across the border, doggedly, silently, prepared to fight at the drop of a turban.

We knew their track record, and we knew they could move around the mountains very quickly. They had dominated those slopes, caves, and hideouts for centuries, turning them into impregnable military strongholds against all comers.

And they had already faced the SEALs in open combat up there, because the SEALs had been first in. They would be prepared, we knew that. But like all SEAL operational teams, we believed we were better than everyone else, so the goddamned Taliban had better watch it.”[1]

A Predator strikes in Pakistan:

On the morning of February 1, 2008, national newspapers in the United States ran a story by Robert H. Reid of the Associated Press with the headline: “Al-Qaeda Leader Dies in U.S. Predator Strike.”

“Abu Laith al-Libi, a top al-Qaida commander in Afghanistan blamed for bombing a military base while Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting last year, was killed in Pakistan by an airstrike late Monday or early Tuesday, a U.S. government official said Thursday. The strike was carried out by a Predator unmanned drone, the official said. It was conducted against a facility in north Waziristan, the lawless tribal area bordering Afghanistan. . . . Terrorism experts said al-Libi’s death was a significant setback for al-Qaida because of his extensive ties to the Taliban, but they said the terror network would likely regroup and replace him.”[2]

The art of strategy:

“The art of strategy is to determine the aim, which is or should be political: to derive from that aim a series of military objectives to be achieved: to assess these objectives as to the military requirements they create, and the preconditions which the achievement of each is likely to necessitate: to measure available and potential resources against the requirements they create and to chart from this process a coherent pattern of priorities and a rational course of action.”[3]

Eisenhower’s Campaign Address in San Francisco, October 8, 1952

“The essential need was to remedy what he diagnosed as Truman’s foreign policy pathologies . . . .poor leadership, mismanagement, and the failure to develop a comprehensive, integrated national strategy that encompassed the core and peripheral regions of the globe; established objectives for the long and short term, and set priorities; took into account America’s finite resources and the limits on what it could expect to accomplish; and ‘harness[ed] military plans to a coherent political program.’”[4]

This year’s presidential election resembles in some ways the one that occurred sixty-six years ago. That election, in 1952, was shortly after the outbreak of the Cold War. The Soviet Red Army had occupied the countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet zone of Germany, American soldiers were dying in combat in Korea, and the president, Harry S. Truman, had lost the support of the electorate. The candidate with most experience in military and international affairs was the Republican, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He went on to defeat the Democratic governor of Illinois, Adlai E. Stevenson and a successful two-term presidency, a presidency which set in place the national security strategy that four decades later brought a favorable end to the Cold War.[5] Considering the historical parallels, two questions are worth asking: Is Ike’s precedent a good omen for the more experienced (and Republican) candidate, Senator John McCain, today? And what, if any, elements of Ike’s approach apply in today’s Global War on Terror? The planet is, of course, a much different place. The world’s population has more than doubled; the Soviet Union no longer exists; capitalism has taken root in resurgent Russia and China; the European countries have formed a strong economic union; a global communications revolution is underway; and the main threats to the nation are from fanatical suicide terrorists. While McCain has attempted with some success, to identify his candidacy with that of Ike in 1952, the former naval pilot’s preparation for the presidency--though certainly greater than Senator Barack Obama’s--does not approximate that of the general from Abilene. It is possible to conclude, however, that the new president in 2009, whoever he turns out to be, could benefit from examining Eisenhower’s approach to strategy—his focus on the right objective and priorities, balancing ends with appropriate means, and bringing the best thinking to bear on its formulation.

References to Eisenhower in this year’s election have included a Newsweek article in February about presidents with military experience who performed well in office. It featured Eisenhower, along with George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and George H.W. Bush.[6] More recently, that magazine’s foreign affairs columnist, Fareed Zakaria, wrote that Eisenhower was “perhaps the wisest president during the cold war . . . . His greatest virtues were those of balance, judgment and restraint.”[7] McCain, seeing the possible advantage, has pointed to parallels between today’s political climate and the summer of 1952 when an insurgent moderate wing of the Republican Party out maneuvered the isolationist regulars led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, giving Eisenhower the nomination.[8]

The parallels between today’s election and that of six and a half decades ago are easy to find. Responding quickly to the surprise attack across the 38^th parallel by North Korea in 1950, Truman revised his national security policy, known as Containment. Though global in reach, until the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula it had relied mainly on political and economic aid to the countries of Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. Truman in the summer of 1950, after news of the movement of North Korean armored columns south across the 38^th parallel, asked Congress to authorize the provisions of NSC 68—emergency mobilization and deployment of American conventional and nuclear forces in both Europe and Asia--in effect militarizing and globalizing Containment. Similarly, George W. Bush, in response to attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, discarded his campaign pledge to reduce U.S. military intervention in other countries. He instead asked for and received authority from Congress to bring to justice the 9-11 planners wherever they were, if necessary overthrowing governments and installing new ones in countries that provided safe havens. Like Truman after the successful United Nations counter-offensive at Inchon, Korea in September 1950, Bush’s employment of military force brought initial triumphs, the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 (and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq two years later). Like General MacArthur’s plan, to which Truman acceded, to liberate North Korea, in the months following 9-11 President Bush proposed to spread democracy by force of arms as a matter of both principle and self interest.[9]

Unfortunately, neither Truman’s initial successes nor those of Bush lasted. In late November 1950, the People’s Republic of China, having warned MacArthur against sending troops close to its border, sent 300,000 troops across its ice of the Yalu River into North Korea, surprising U.N. forces and forcing a long and bloody retreat. Truman’s political support at home plummeted. He had to fire MacArthur for insubordination when the general, communicating directly with its leaders, attempted to gain Congressional support for general war in the Far East. Allied forces in Korea, led by, MacArthur’s successor, General Matthew Ridgway, stabilized the battle lines in the approximate location, the 38^th parallel, of the prewar division of the peninsula. As the death toll of American G.I’s continued upward (over 34,000 would die), Truman’s public opinion polls sank to 23 percent. After his defeat in the New Hampshire primary in early 1952, the president decided not to seek re-election.

For George W. Bush, a longer time passed after the initial emergency before his success began to fade. But in the summer of 2003, he realized that toppling the Iraqi government had not brought the hoped for result. U.S. troops were now fighting an insurgency of former Iraqi army officers, militias loyal to rival religious and ethnic groups, and terrorists from other countries. And since two of the stated reasons for invading Iraq—Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda--had not been found, critics at home and abroad began to question the war. Then, as stories of torture and abuse by American troops of prisoners appeared in the news media, they began to condemn it. The combat toll in Iraq by the summer of 2008 reached over four thousand American dead and 29,000 wounded--along with hundreds of thousands of casualties among Iraqis.[10] In Afghanistan, meanwhile, 40,000 American troops, leaders of a NATO contingent, were by that time fighting resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda operating out of sanctuaries in the tribal areas of western Pakistan.

The state of political affairs was no less devastating for Bush and the GOP by early 2008 than it had been for Truman and the Democrats in 1952. As in Korea, a change in American tactics--in this case the so-called “surge” organized by General David Petraeus--greatly reduced the violence and seemed presage a political solution. George W. Bush’s approval ratings nevertheless dropped at one point to 29 percent (and lower in some polls). With the electorate split along partisan lines, the Democrats (rather than the GOP this time) led by their presidential candidate, Obama, called for an early time table for withdrawal from Iraq and a shift of the strategic objective to Afghanistan. The Republicans, led by Senator McCain (Bush being in his second “lame duck” term) supported continued focus on completing the mission in Iraq without a set time for withdrawal.[11] By the late summer of 2008, negotiations with the new Iraqi government seemed to point to a reduced time frame, if not time table, and movement toward a reduction of U.S. troops. By then, however, the partisan battle lines for the presidential race were set.

Experience, as Obama, has frequently pointed out, is no guarantee of presidential success. Indeed, a lack thereof did not diminish the fortunes and standing in history of two of the nation’s most highly-ranked presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Neither was prepared by experience for the emergencies— the Civil War, in the first instance; and The Great Depression and World War II, in the second—from which they emerged as extraordinary leaders.

Still, history contains numerous costly examples of on-the-job learning by presidents. We now know, for example, that Truman’s decision in 1949 to withdraw American occupation troops from South Korea, followed by his secretary of state, Dean Acheson’s, speech excluding that country from the U.S. defense perimeter led North Korean dictator, Kim Il Sung, to believe he could absorb the southern half of the peninsula quickly by force. In 1961, John F. Kennedy’s authorization of an ill-advised, CIA-supported invasion at the Bay of Pigs resulted in a military debacle that paved the way for his failed first summit meeting with Soviet first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, and the subsequent belief by the latter that he could with impunity install nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. Lyndon Baines Johnson, just four years later, accepted advice from his national security assistant, McGeorge Bundy, and his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, to send U.S. ground forces into Vietnam, leading to an ill-fated American take-over of that conflict from a weak South Vietnam ally. Jimmy Carter’s support for the Shah of Iran in 1977 preceded and provided a propaganda target for the fundamentalist Shiite revolution that occurred there two years later, inaugurating what became thirty-one years of hostility toward the United States and its allies.[12] More recently, the 9-11 Report revealed that neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush understood the nature and seriousness of Osama bin Laden’s militant anti-western activities. Bush, influenced by his vice president, Dick Cheney, and secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, went to war in Iraq, it is now clear, without properly appraising the strength of that country’s tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions; the debilitating effects on civil society of Saddam’s decades of cruelty; and, consequently, what it would take for the United States to bring peace and stability, much less democracy, to Iraq.

Senator McCain’s effort to identify himself with the first post-World-War-II GOP president makes sense on other grounds as well. One can see in retrospect, that Eisenhower avoided many mistakes that inevitably beset any president, whether from faulty intelligence, overbearing advisers, lobbying of the armed services, partisan ideologues, or emotional reactions.[13] Ike had learned from both professional training and first-hand experience that both war and international relations were the realm of the unpredictable and therefore that without a well-thought-out and disciplined approach, defeat or at the very least, serious harm was likely. Ike had to face a seemingly unending series of international crises during his two terms. They included revolutionary activity in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran; defeat of French forces by those of the communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, in Vietnam; a military take-over of the Suez Canal from Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel. The People’s Republic of China bombarded with artillery Taiwan’s off-shore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in both 1955 and 1958. A coup that overthrew the government of Iraq in 1958 caused the president of Lebanon to fear that insurgents supported by Egypt, with assistance from the Soviet bloc, were about to overthrow his government and possibly the governments of Jordan, Kuwait, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, as well. Fidel Castro, leading a revolutionary army, took over Cuba and moved that Caribbean island into the Soviet camp in 1959. Meanwhile, Soviet first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, ordered the Red Army in 1956 to invade Hungary; and, beginning in 1958, levied a series of ultimatums demanding that West Berlin to be incorporated into East Germany.[14]

Not everything went well for Ike. The Soviet Union was more intransigent than he expected; the Cold War, he soon realized, would continue well beyond his tenure in office. The launch by the Soviets of Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting satellite, in 1957 brought public alarm and Congressional demands for a crash program to remedy a problem that, it later turned out, did not exist but which led to Democratic charges of a dangerous “missile gap.” An attempt by the Central Intelligence Agency to bring the overthrow of the Indonesian government failed. Ike’s national security strategy resulted in support for anti-democratic (though anti-communist) governments in such places as Iran, Guatemala, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, South Vietnam, the Congo, and the Dominican Republic. On May 1, 1960 the Soviet downing of an American U-2 spy plane over Soviet sovereign territory ended constructive negotiations toward a nuclear test ban treaty. In his farewell address, Eisenhower--who knew from U-2 aerial photography that the United States was ahead in every important measure of national strength, including missiles--warned against an “unwarranted influence, either sought or unsought of the military-industrial complex.” This lobbying nexus was, he said, a threat no less than world communism to “our liberties or democratic processes.”[15]

In retrospect, however, Eisenhower’s successes overshadowed his failures. He achieved an armistice in Korea (his most pressing problem in foreign affairs) in 1953; and by 1955 a NATO defense force with West German participation (completing Eisenhower’s mission in Europe as the first NATO supreme commander) was in place, the latter forming the basis for today’s European Union. He condemned the anti-communist hysteria led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, of Wisconsin, and then, working behind the scenes, helped the Senate arrive at a resolution censoring him. Eisenhower strengthened the nation’s intelligence and military capabilities—although, greatly increasing its reliance on nuclear weapons--and, through a network of multi-lateral and bi-lateral treaties, its position in the world.[16] Except for an amphibious operation and three-month’s military presence stabilizing a situation in Lebanon that appeared to threaten the Middle East, he avoided military interventions.[17] Most notably in hindsight, he turned down a request by the French to rescue their forces surrounded by the Viet Minh forces in North Vietnam in 1954, supporting instead the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization.

The so-called Formosa Straits Resolution which Eisenhower obtained from Congress in 1955 authorized use of any means necessary to protect Taiwan from invasion by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. He ordered both clandestine operations (two of which, in Guatemala and Iran, were successful for a time) and efforts by the United States Information Agency to counter anti-American propaganda.[18] He supported the United Nations’ resolution that rolled back British, French, and Israeli occupation of the Suez canal zone of Egypt in 1956; carried on an extensive correspondence with Khrushchev and met the Soviet first secretary face-to-face in summit meetings in 1955, 1959, and 1960. He reduced defense expenditures (as did the Soviets) and balanced the federal budget in three of his eight years in office. His defense department’s advanced research projects agency established the first national computer communications system (ARPANET), the basis for today’s Internet.[19] His massive Interstate and Defense Highway construction program facilitated commerce, provided for rapid evacuation of cities in case of nuclear attack, and was a mechanism for stabilizing the economy.

Ike’s accomplishments owed much to the fact that he retained the approval of the American people and, of course, helped to bring that support. During his two terms in office, despite three brief recessions, the economy grew by 68 percent with only 1.4 percent inflation. Although the Democrats controlled Congress for six of his eight years in office, only two of his 181vetoes were overridden.[20] Had the constitution allowed, Eisenhower may have been re-elected for a third term. His popularity ratings in held at 59 percent, and his successor, John F. Kennedy, defeated Ike’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, in the election of 1960 by only a narrow margin.[21]

It is important to note, however, that John McCain’s considerable experience by 2008—including twenty-two years in the navy, followed by one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and three in the United States Senate—despite his desire to identify himself with Ike, does not come close to Eisenhower’s preparation for the White House in 1952. A graduate of the United States Naval Academy and the son and grandson of navy admirals, McCain has demonstrated resilience and character. As a fighter bomber pilot he almost died in two training accidents, one of which killed over a hundred of his fellow officers and men in explosions after an electrical short caused a missile to fire into other aircraft on the flight deck of the carrier Forrestal. He carried out twenty-three combat missions over North Vietnam before being shot down by a surface-to-air missile. During five and a half years in prisoner of war camps, his captors brutalized him, testing his patriotism and will to live. Later, after being released in the prisoner exchange following the Paris truce agreement and an extensive period of recuperation, he commanded a fighter squadron. His last assignment before retiring with the rank of captain was as director of the office of naval liaison to the United States Senate.[22]

Ike, for his part, by the time he ran for office, was a West Point graduate, professional soldier, global military strategist, and victorious wartime supreme commander in World War II. As head of the war department’s operations planning division he drafted the strategy in early 1942 by which the United States fought the largest war in history, with some 55 million dead. As supreme commander he was in charge of the allied, combined forces that defeated Germany in the European theater of war.[23] He thus had worked closely with allied heads of state. An international celebrity, factions of both political parties pursued him as their candidate for the presidency in 1948. He could brighten a room (or a crowded parade route) with his large, spontaneous, animated smile. He had studied history and the history of warfare back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Straight-forward and confident in manner, he had internalized the maxim of his mentor, General Fox Conner: “Always take your job seriously, never yourself.”[24] Thoughtful, constantly in motion, he had learned how to elicit the best efforts of staff assistants, subordinate commanders, and troops. Three months after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, Eisenhower, by then a five-star general, became the nation’s highest ranking soldier, replacing his immediate superior, General George C. Marshall, as U.S. army chief of staff.

Ike retired from active military duty in 1948 to accept the presidency of Columbia University. With the outbreak of Cold War and, in 1948, a war scare with the Soviet Union, he accepted President Truman’s request that he advise the Pentagon regarding organization of the armed forces. Beginning in 1949 he served as de facto first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The following summer, with the outbreak of war in Korea, Truman called Eisenhower back to active duty, this time as first supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (SACEUR). His mission was to protect a disunited and vulnerable Western Europe from Soviet military/political intimidation by establishing a European defense force with an American nuclear deterrent.[25]

While Eisenhower had been ambitious for advancement during his long military career, there is little evidence the presidency was something he coveted. Indeed, he had disdained electoral politics as self-seeking, parochial in nature, and hazardous to the interests of the army. Before 1948 he had never voted. By the late 1940s, tired from the strains of war and peacetime command, his place in history established, he looked forward to a retirement of reflection, writing, sharing his memories, supporting worthy causes and enjoying his grandchildren. Still, he knew that it was the civilian politician in a democracy who made and carried out policy and had begun to worry that American political leaders failed to grasp the international threat. National power, Eisenhower told his friends and supporters, “is the mathematical product of spiritual, economic, and military strength. ‘If any one of these falls to zero, then the product of the equation—the influence of the nation in the international field—likewise falls to zero.’”[26] He and General Marshall, during World War II, both had internalized General Fox Conner’s aphorism about wars by democracies. “Fight only if you have to, but never alone, and never for long.” In the nuclear age, this entailed creating coalitions to deter war altogether.[27] By 1951 Eisenhower had come to believe, first, that the American way of life (tied closely to that of its European allies) was in peril and, second, that since he was in the best position to do so, he had a duty to save it--if necessary even, by running for the presidency. Accordingly, in October 1951, under pressure from his closest supporters and influenced by his belief that avoiding another global conflagration depended upon his doing so, Eisenhower assured close supporters he would enter the presidential race.[28]

“Plans are nothing,” Eisenhower often said, “but planning is everything. The secret of a sound, satisfactory decision made on an emergency basis, has always been that the responsible official has been ‘living with the problem’ before it becomes acute.’”[29] “The basic principles of strategy,” he also said, “are so simple that a child may understand them. But to determine their proper application to a given situation requires the hardest kind of work from the finest available staff officers.”[30] For many years after he left the presidency, because national security classification made the documents inaccessible, few people had a well-informed knowledge of the origins of Eisenhower’s Cold-War strategy. With the declassification of those documents in the 1980s, researchers began to fill this gap. In the early summer of 1953, they discovered, Eisenhower organized a five-week-long strategy-planning workshop code named “Solarium.” Held at the National War College, the workshop resulted in a national security policy known as “The New Look,” which revised and replaced Harry S. Truman’s policy of expressed in NSC 68. What came as a surprise to historians was the discovery that George F. Kennan, the State Department’s leading expert on the Soviet Union during the administrations of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and the intellectual source of the latter’s Containment policy, was a key participant in the deliberations. [31] Despite the fact that the GOP campaign platform of 1952 had criticized Truman’s foreign policy as timid and passive--calling for liberating Eastern Europe, not just containing communism—Eisenhower, once in office, had reached out to Kennan, who by then had embarked on a life of research and writing at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, for this one important assignment.[32]

As laid out in NSC 162, the New Look asserted that the United States, instead of using military power to overthrow communist governments, must protect and strengthen allies and assist countries on the communist periphery. The goal was not overthrow but rather to “create a ‘climate of victory’ that would bolster the morale of the free world while forcing the Soviet bloc on the defensive.”[33] It called for “strong, independent, and self-sufficient groupings of nations friendly to the United States centering on Western Europe (with Germany a focal point) and the Far East (especially Japan), and a position of strength in the Middle East.” At home, it sought economic growth, adequate intelligence, appropriate armaments, and “a U.S. capability for a strong retaliatory offensive [referring to the Strategic Air Command], a base for mobilization and continental defense.” It called for covert operations in response to threats and “action other than military to reduce indigenous communist power in the nations of the free world.” Meanwhile, the United States, when possible, would engage in negotiations with adversaries, seeking ways to reduce the threat and accompanying military spending.[34]

With the passage of over sixty years, the New Look seems less relevant today. The Global War on Terror exists in a world in which the population has increased from 2.57 to 6.6 billion. Among the largest increases (and countries where the largest cohorts are under twenty-five years of age) are in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Central Asia—including Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, and Pakistan--where tribal customs and fundamentalist religions abhor modern culture. [35] Unlike 1952, the U.S. is no longer the world’s manufacturing and banking colossus. Instead, it depends upon foreign sources for both petroleum and consumer goods, with a large imbalance of payments, federal budget deficit, and a $9.5-trillion-dollar national debt funded increasingly by the no-longer-hostile People’s Republic of China (the PRC).[36] The immediate threats, again unlike 1952, are covert and “low tech.” McCain or Obama, for their part, must prepare, not for the nightmare of a surprise ground assault on Western Europe or an aerial one on the United States, but rather for suicide attacks by fanatic groups, often educated young men (and now often, women) without other meaning in their lives who are living outside the control of any government, their deadly missions assisted or made possible by laptop computers or cell phones with access to the World Wide Web.[37]

Still, important parallels remain and the possibility of useful lessons. Eisenhower, after taking office, shifted strategy from American global military expansion to American participation in several coalitions of nations responding in a variety of ways to crises around the globe. Today, as in 1952, the United States faces hostile forces--both covert and ideological—with ends-justifies-the-means philosophies (most often distortions of Islam) that, as did Marxism-Leninism, appeal to those downtrodden by poverty, disorder, or authoritarian governments. [38] In 2009, as in the earlier period, American strategy requires a combination of measures, none of which it can carry out by itself with any hope of success, and an ability to anticipate and adapt to threats. The United States remains the world’s largest economy, twice the size of the next largest, the PRC. To address the nation’s largest long-range problem--dependence it and its allies on oil from autocratic, unstable, or hostile countries--a new president might propose a twenty-first-century equivalent of Ike’s Interstate Highway Program, a public initiative and example to the world, to create domestic sources of clean, renewable energy. The United States continues to have, as before--with its intercontinental air and missile force, deep sea carrier task groups, and base agreements with more than thirty countries—the world’s dominant military capability. (The covert, dispersed, and technological nature of today’s threat, however, requires that--in addition to infantry, tank drivers, deep-water sailors, bomber pilots, and missile officers—the United States, working in cooperation with its friends abroad, must mobilize specialists in global positioning systems and unmanned aerial vehicles [UAV’s], experts who can track payments and monitor the movement of weapons material across international borders, and computer and software engineers [geeks and nerds] able to fend off “denial-of-service” viruses and/or spam messages.) And, finally, just as before, the United States and its allies must be prepared to deter and use diplomacy to reduce the threat of nuclear-armed missiles in the possession of hostile governments. A rogue North Korea possesses nuclear weapons, as does a politically-unstable Pakistan. And, of course, a hostile Iran, rebuffing international entreaties, seems intent on obtaining them, as well.[39]

In the twenty-first century, American and its allied troops--like the Cold-War Special Forces, but more than ever before--need the contradictory qualities of soldier/peacekeepers who are also trained linguists able to deliver medical care and clean water to indigenous villagers and, at the same time, help them to defend themselves from death squads. The United States needs to continue work with others to provide assistance (and sometimes refuge) for people caught in civil wars, natural disasters, or political tyranny. It needs to help governments of Third-World countries create systems of secular education to enable young men and women earn a living through useful work. As did Eisenhower in responding to the Soviet and communist Chinese propaganda, the new president will need to refine, augment, and expand the Voice-of-America and Radio-Free-Europe/ Radio-Liberty broadcasts and encourage private programs such as student exchange agreements and the People-to-People citizens’ exchange.[40] And, of course, in 2009, just as it attempted to win the hearts and minds of people attracted by Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War, American strategy must support and encourage communities on the World Wide Web that reinforce moderate, mainstream Islam.[41]

But perhaps most importantly, the president who takes office in January 2009 needs to heed three basic elements of Ike’s approach to strategy. The first was his understanding that the means of waging a war must be appropriate to its ends.[42] For American society, the strategic objective remains that of preserving the American way of life—political, economic, intellectual, and religious rights and freedom via the rule of law; the upholding of “individual enterprise and initiative . . . the social bonds of family, school, church, and neighborhood.”[43] Eisenhower moved against both the partisan Red baiting of Senator Joe McCarthy and the resulting excessive spending for national defense. Under Ike’s leadership, the United States, although modernizing and increasing the readiness and explosive power of its military, sought to avoid situations in which combat, with its tendency to escalate, might be necessary.[44] Similarly, in the Global War on Terror, the United States must continue to both deter missile attacks and intervene as necessary to provide stability in situations vital to the long-term national interest, continuing, as before, to avoid actions that could result in use of unrestricted or excessive force.

The second element was his understanding of the need for priorities. Eisenhower had to worry first about attacks from the Soviet Union. The Korean armistice (although without a treaty ending the war) in July 1953 allowed for large reduction of U.S. forces with a continuing military presence to provide stability in a region that included the U.S. allies--South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan--in close proximity to the hostile North Korea, People’s Republic of China, and Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Eisenhower worried about Marxist terrorists and guerrillas attempting to gain control of Third World countries such as Guatemala, Indo-China, and Indonesia. Suicide squads rather than missile attacks will be the new president’s first concern in 2009. His strategy, accordingly, will have to include intelligence gathering and, in addition to patient diplomacy, a capacity for quick direct action. Such a strategy also will require, through military assistance and gradual withdrawal of American troops, creation of a secure, self-sufficient, and peaceful Iraq that can protect itself from depredations by both extremist groups and hostile neighbors. At the same time, the new president, working with NATO allies and Pakistan, will need to build a stable and independent government in Afghanistan, one that will undertake the measures of economic development and security necessary for elimination of terrorist training camps. He also will need to employ multi-lateral diplomatic initiatives to reduce threats from North Korea, Iran, and, perhaps, since its invasion of neighboring Georgia, a newly-assertive Russian Federation.

The third and final element the new president should consider is Eisenhower’s method of formulating strategy. The newly inaugurated commander-in-chief, whether McCain or Obama, in the first months after taking office or earlier, might gather a group of the nation’s most knowledgeable, imaginative, non-partisan, and experienced national security professionals—today’s counterparts of George F. Kennan and the Solarium participants— to a national security study and planning workshop to devise the twenty-first-century equivalent of Eisenhower’s approach to the Cold War.

[End]

[1] Marcus Luttrell with Patrick Robinson, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10 (New York: Back Bay Books,), 73. http://www.navy.mil/moh/mpmurphy/soa.html

[2]Robert H. Reid, “Al Qaida Leader Dies,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, 2-1-08, 3A.

[3] David Fraser, Alanbrooke (London, 1982) in Gordon A. Craig, “The Political Leader as Strategist,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 481.

[4] Robert R. Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 79.

[5] Bowie and Immerman, 3.

[6] David von Drehle, “Does Experience Matter in a President?” Time, March 10, 2008: 26-30; Evan Thomas, “What These Eyes Have Seen,” Newsweek, Feb. 11, 2008: 30-31.

[7] Fareed Zakaria, “We Need a Wartime President,” Newsweek, July 14, 2008: 50.

[8] Ryan Lizza, “On the Bus: Can John McCain Reinvent Republicanism,” New Yorker, February 25, 2008: 35.

[9] http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html; David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 331-332.

[10]This included both insurgents and innocent civilians. Estimates of the war’s financial burden by 2008 had reached over a trillion dollars and slow political and economic progress tied down over 140,000 American troops. http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0310/p16s01-wmgn.html

[11] “A Special Report on America and the World,” The Economist, March 29, 2008, 5-6. http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm

[12] John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War, revised and expanded edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 356-357.

[13] Michiko Kakutani, “Who’s Your Daddy,” NYT, 2-1-08, B33—her review of Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (New York: Random House, 2008); excerpts from the book appear in Newsweek, January 28, 2008, 30-34.

[14] Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 115-134.

[15] Paul Dixon, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Berkeley Books, 2001), 108-133; William B. Pickett, “Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair,” in J. Garry Clifford and Theodore A. Wilson, eds., Presidents, Diplomats, and Other Mortals: Essays Honoring Robert H. Ferrell (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 137-153; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 612-613; Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 171; Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 164-165.

[16] It had 18,638 nuclear weapons by 1961, along with 1,300 intercontinental bombers and 3,000 missiles capable of delivering them to the Soviet Union or other parts of the world. Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Touchstone), 562, 570.

[17] Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President, 469-473.

[18] For perceptive appraisals of Eisenhower’s national security affairs, see Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 100, 161-162; Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003), 304-305, 343.

[19] Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), 36, 42.

[20] William Bragg Ewald, Jr., Eisenhower the President: Crucial Days, 1951-1960 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1981), 293-294.

[21] Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower, 121-138, 170.

[22] Robert Timberg, John McCain: An American Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 1999): 130.

[23] Mark Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Penguin Books): 74.

[24]Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease with Ike (New York: Avon Books, 1967): 184.

[25] William B. Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 193.

[26] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 185, xvi.

[27] Perry, 400.

[28] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 128-129.

[29] Fred I. Greenstein and Richard H. Immerman, “Effective National Security Advising: Recovering the Eisenhower Legacy,” Political Science Quarterly 115 (November 3, 2000): 342.

[30] Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1948), 36.

[31] William B. Pickett, “The Eisenhower Solarium Notes,” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Newsletter 16, no. 2 (June 1985) .

[32]In summer of 1985, a package of registered mail arrived at my door from the Eisenhower Library. It contained several hundred photocopied pages newly declassified from Top Secret which I had requested via the Freedom of Information Act two years earlier while doing research on a biography of Eisenhower. The package contained notes of Eisenhower’s Solarium strategy workshop held in May and June, 1953. As I read the notes--which I soon summarized in an article published in The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations--I discovered to my amazement that none other than George F. Kennan, now retired from public service, had been a key participant, the leader of the group whose recommendations became the core of Eisenhower’s revision of Truman’s strategy. In 1988 and again in 2004, two scholarly conferences in which I participated at Princeton University discussed the Solarium workshop, its results, and Kennan’s participation. The first of these, the John Foster Dulles Centennial Conference, included a session featuring three officials--Kennan, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, and Robert R. Bowie--who had either participated in the Solarium workshop and/or in implementing the strategy that resulted from it. The published oral history transcript of that session, which I edited as a monograph, was available to the attendees at the second conference, the Kennan Centennial in 2004.

William B. Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan and the Origins of Eisenhower’s New Look: An Oral History of Project Solarium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, 2004), p. 3; http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~pickett/Solarium.pdf; http://www.rose-Hulman.edu/~pickett/solarium04.html; William B. Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1995), 92.

[33] Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984), 2:440-41; Pickett, George F. Kennan, 3-4.

[34] Pickett, George F. Kennan, 5.

[35]http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm

[36] http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

[37] The 9-11 Commission Report. Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), 170-171, 374-375;

[38] James Jay Carafano and Paul Rosenzweig, Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War on Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Books, 2005).

[39] Brian Grow, Keith Epstein, and Chi-Chu schang, “The New Espionage Threat,” BusinessWeek, April 21, 2008: 033-041.

[40] http://www.peopletopeople.com/peopletopeople/aboutus.aspx.

[41]Sageman, 41-42.

[42]William B. Pickett, “Eisenhower as Student of Clausewitz,” Military Review, Vol. LXV (July 1985); William B. Pickett, “Eisenhower, Clausewitz, and American Power,” The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Newsletter, Vol. 23, December 1991.

[43] Martin J. Medhurst, Dwight D. Eisenhower: Strategic Communicator (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 12; Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run, 37.

[44] Craig, 159-162.

Link to an excellent Eisenhower bibliography

2008-07-31T07:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/leaders/eisenhower.htm

Links to national security policy sites

2008-07-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

National Security Policy:

http://www.fareedzakaria.com/

http://www.shafr.org/

http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=Robert+D+Kaplan

http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=Rory+Stewart

http://www.rorystewartbooks.com/

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145874

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1823753,00.html

http://www.carnegieendowment.org/about/staff/index.cfm?fa=expert_view&expert_id=16

http://www.cfr.org/bios/5641/max_boot.html

http://www.princeton.edu/~fig/

http://astro.temple.edu/~rimmerma/

http://www.fpri.org/about/people/zubok.html

http://www.richardrhodes.com/

http://press.umsystem.edu/spring2007/clifford.wilson.htm

http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1216649421/ref=sr_pg_1?ie=UTF8&rs=1000&rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Cp%5F27%3ARobert%20H.%20Ferrell&page=1

http://www.theatlantic.com/

http://www.economist.com/

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=220

Bibliography of Recent Publications on Eisenhower and National Security Affairs

2008-06-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

By William B. Pickett

Summer 2008:

Bowie, Robert R. and Richard H. Immerman. Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped and Enduring Cold War Strategy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Craig, Campbell. Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Jones, Bryan Madison. Abolishing the Taboo: Eisenhower and the Permissible Use of Nuclear Weapons for National Security. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of History. Kansas State University: Manhattan, Kansas, 2008.

http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/2097/773/1/BrianJones2008.pdf

Korda, Michael. Ike: An American Hero. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.

Perry, Mark. Partners in Command: George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace. New York: Penguin Books, 2007.

Pickett, William B., Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.

Pickett, William B., “New Look or Containment? George f. Kennan and the Making of Republican National Security Strategy,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. LXVI, Number 2, Winter 2005: 303-312. [To read, see document below.]

Pickett, William B., ed. George F. Kennan and the Origins of Eisenhower’s New Look: An Oral History of Project Solarium. Princeton University: Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Number 1, 2004. [To read, click on url in June 18 post below.]

Pickett, William B., “Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair: A Forty-Six-Year Retrospective,” in J. Garry Clifford and Theodore A. Wilson, eds. Presidents, Diplomats, and Other Mortals. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2007: 135-153.

Pickett, William B., “Dwight D. Eisenhower: His Legacy in World Affairs,” in Virgil Dean, ed., John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2006: 278-305.

Pickett, William B. “General Andrew Jackson Goodpaster: Managing National Security,” in David L. Anderson, ed. The Human Tradition in America since 1945. Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2003.

Pickett, William B. Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson Inc., 1995.

Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Anchor Books, 2008.

2008-06-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

The following address by Willliam B. Pickett at the Kennan Centennial Conference at Princeton University on February 20, 2004 was published in the Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. LXVI, Number 2, Winter 2005: 303-312.

--------------

Remarks by William B. Pickett for the Kennan Centennial, Princeton University, Feb. 20, 2004:

“New Look or Containment: George F. Kennan and The Making of Republican National Security Strategy”

On October 28, 1992, just a few days before the presidential election in which Bill Clinton defeated George Herbert Walker Bush, the New York Times published an op-ed piece by George F. Kennan. He was responding to a Bush campaign claim that the Republicans had won the Cold War. He said, “The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish.” [1]

Kennan said the Republican policy of relying on military force was, if anything, counterproductive. “The more the American political leadership was seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military, rather than political, resolution of Soviet-American tensions,” he said, “the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies within the regime.”[2] The United States, he implied, had unnecessarily prolonged the cold war.

In retrospect, it is possible to understand Kennan’s obvious frustration. As the nation’s foremost expert on Soviet Russia in the 1940s and 50s and the individual who, more than any other, had provided the intellectual underpinnings of America’s strategy known as the Truman Doctrine, he was aware of key groups on both sides of the iron curtain who, either from fear or vested interest in cold war, had been unwilling to seek a less costly and dangerous route. This Republican claim of cold-war victory was apparently just too much.

Kennan, we now know, had earned the right to be aggravated. Just four years earlier, at a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson School, the Dulles Centennial Conference of 1988, he had commented publicly for the first time on newly-released documents at the Eisenhower Library revealing that he personally had a role in shaping national security policy, not just of the administration of Harry S. Truman but also--although briefly and to a modest extent--that of his successor, the Republican, Dwight David Eisenhower.[3] His discomfiture in 1992 was, in part, from the fact that American national security affairs had drifted from the course he had envisioned in 1946. In his famous “long telegram” from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to top foreign policy and defense officials in Washington he characterized the Soviet Union as intransigent and militant, and in 1947 he advised Truman—in his “Mr. X” article in Foreign Affairs—about the need not to conquer or prevent but rather to contain Soviet expansion. But it is now clear that while American national security policy, as Kennan saw, strayed and at times took side trips, it did not lose focus on the real nature of the threat and thus on the appropriate response to it, which he believed, as long as the West remained unified and strong, was long-term, economic, and political. And it was this kind of containment as implemented first by Truman and then by Eisenhower that—as shown by Robert R. Bowie and Richard Immerman in their excellent book on Eisenhower’s cold-war strategy--provided “the indispensable external context” for the “Soviet collapse and the peaceful resolution of the cold war.”[4]

My contact with Kennan began in required readings for my graduate courses in Russian and American diplomatic history at Indiana University in the mid-1960s. For the former, I read his The Decision to Intervene, about President Woodrow Wilson’s dispatch of American troops to Siberia and Northern Russia in 1918 following the Bolshevik revolution, troops whose activities had the effect, if not purpose, of aiding the opponents of Lenin’s new Bolshevik government.[5] For the latter course, I read his classic, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, which spoke of a United States that was isolationist in the 1920s and 30s. In Kennan, the historian, I found a scholar-diplomat par excellence, an individual for whom history was a repository of lessons for the conduct of public affairs. One lesson was the extreme cost—World War II and some 55 million dead--of American refusal to participate in global political and diplomatic affairs. During the 1930s fascist imperialism had gone unchallenged. The Munich conference of 1938 in which the democracies bowed to Hitler’s military pressure on Czechoslovakia became, for Kennan and his generation, a symbol of infamy.

Containment, the policy Kennan, as a State Department official and head of the Department’s policy planning staff, helped to fashion in 1946 and 1947, would, he believed, be the best response to a new, postwar totalitarian threat-- this time from the Kremlin. It would bring not isolationism but engagement in world affairs—economically, politically, diplomatically, and if necessary though less likely, militarily.[6]

Kennan’s analysis was a sophisticated one, requiring mastery of history’s lessons and a willingness by the nation’s leaders to move in a purposeful and consistent fashion. By the spring of 1950, however, Kennan was no longer on the policy planning staff of the State Department, and he detected problems with American policy planning. As the Truman administration had responded to crises, its national security policy increasingly reflected a fear of Soviet military power. Czechoslovakia fell to the communists and the Soviet Union blockaded land routes to Berlin in the first half of 1948. In 1949, the Soviets built and tested an atomic bomb and the Chinese communists took over the Chinese mainland. Then, in early 1950, Truman’s new adviser (and Kennan’s successor as head of the State Department policy planning staff), Paul Nitze, wrote in National Security Council Memorandum 68 that the Soviets, “Envision complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the non-Soviet world.”[7] It recommended a stockpile of atomic bombs and a program to build a bomb one hundred times more powerful, the hydrogen bomb. It also recommended a crash program of rebuilding American conventional forces with the purpose of seeking some kind of resolution—perhaps rolling back Soviet power in Eastern Europe--before 1954, which it considered “the year of maximum danger.” By that year, NSC 68’s author estimated the Soviet Union would have sufficient nuclear weapons to counter the American nuclear arsenal.[8]

Kennan saw the need for some military build-up but was critical of the concept of “a year of maximum danger.” “I had a very strong feeling,” he later recalled, “that the Russians were not going to attack us but that, on the other hand, the strength of their armed forces, the disparity between theirs and ours, was a reality and would not go away.” “Our plans” he said, “ought to be laid, in a military sense, in such a way as to endure for many, many years into the future.”[9] In this, he saw eye to eye with other Soviet experts, especially Charles E. Bohlen, who also spoke out. The disagreement between advocates of rollback (NSC 68) and advocates of containment, and Truman’s apparent agreement with the former (although unwilling in the spring of 1950 to seek Congressional approval for appropriations to implement NSC 68) revealed an uncertainty in Truman’s cold-war strategy that caused one potential Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to believe the nation needed a firmer hand at the tiller.[10] In the summer of 1950, however, with the North Korean communist invasion of South Korea, Truman asked Congress for the appropriation and it passed. The cold war had become both militarized and global.

Kennan served a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to Moscow, from May to October, 1952, and with the advent of the Eisenhower administration the following spring, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, on March 14, 1953, fired him from government service.[11] Kennan retreated to the hallowed halls and grounds of Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Kennan’s final, but until the mid-1980s, little known opportunity for personal influence on American foreign policy came later, in the summer of 1953. President Eisenhower had admired Kennan’s thinking. In 1948, when Eisenhower was president of Columbia University, he had asked Kennan, unsuccessfully it turned out, to serve on a committee sponsored by the Council of Foreign Relations to study the effects of the European Recovery Program.[12] Eisenhower, as chairman of the committee, had agreed with Kennan’s view, embodied that year in NSC memorandum 20/4, that American nuclear monopoly and economic power and the Soviets’ own domestic weakness would prevent the Soviet Union from launching an attack even after they obtained the foreseen numbers of nuclear weapons.[13] Military pressure, Kennan felt—because of the Soviet regime’s priority of survival in power and abhorrence of war--would bring neither a weakening nor a softening of its position. The Soviet leaders, he believed, would not launch an unprovoked attack, but they would use fear of a militant United States at home to justify their existence and continued totalitarian rule. “What was needed,” he believed, “was a reasonable and sensible compromise” between the political and military approaches.[14] This view Eisenhower found compatible with his own determination--something that would increase during his two terms in the Oval Office--to avoid if at all possible the coercive use of American military force. It was thus not surprising that in the late spring of 1953, Eisenhower asked Kennan to be chairman of one of three ad hoc task forces in a top-secret, three-week-long policy planning exercise code-named project Solarium. Its purpose was to examine thoroughly the nation’s security policy in the light of the Korean war, the creation of a NATO defense force, and—the previous March—the death of the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin. It also provided a way for Eisenhower to take control of national security policy. When the exercise was finished, Eisenhower ordered that the recommendations from Kennan’s task force be combined with those from the others (and from the NSC planning board) in yet another memorandum, NSC 162/2.[15] This new policy, often referred to as “The New Look,” superceded NSC 68. It discarded the latter’s concept of a year of maximum danger. The Soviet Union, it said, posed an on-going, long-term threat. Abandoning any possibility of rolling back Soviet power by military force, it embraced nuclear deterrence and patient but persistent political and economic containment.

By the end of Eisenhower’s term in office in 1961, despite Kennan’s view of a less threatening Soviet Union, American national security preparations were in high gear. Eisenhower’s efforts to maintain deterrence combined with a series of foreign policy crises--beginning with the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1955 and including the Soviet launching of sputnik, the first space satellite, in 1957 and Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum in 1958--to cause many Americans to fear that the United States had allowed the Soviets to get ahead, first in bombers and then in missiles. The danger, they and presidential advisers said, was from surprise attack--a nuclear Pearl Harbor. While Eisenhower, perhaps better than anyone else, understood the danger, his aerial intelligence-gathering operations had caused him to suspect that the United States, not the Soviet Union, was ahead. He also knew that beyond a certain point, when considering nuclear weapons, relative advantage was meaningless. He nevertheless, to appease his critics, increased defense spending and accelerated testing of nuclear weapons.[20] And the American people and their Congressional representatives--influenced by apparent Soviet missile developments and by the claims during Eisenhower’s lame-duck second term of the candidates for president, such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, that the United States had fallen tragically behind in the arms race--came increasingly to feel that security depended upon possession of more and better weapons.[17] By this time what political scientist, Derek Leebaert, has called a “spending constituency for national security and everything that might accompany it,” had become the dominant Washington lobby. Eisenhower, in early drafts of his farewell address, called it “a military-industrial-congressional complex” and a “scientific-technological elite.”[18] By the end of his presidency, the U.S. had produced a ring of American military and air bases around Soviet territory, sent American reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory, and built thousands of nuclear weapons on a variety of launch vehicles. As early as 1959 the United States had 2000 strategic bombers, 14 aircraft carriers, 114 Polaris missiles on 9 submarines, and 200 intercontinental ballistic missiles.[16]

In retrospect, Kennan’s work, while accomplishing less than he had hoped, did, nudge American policy in a favorable direction—away from both NSC 68 and the 1952 Republican national convention’s militant advocacy of an American effort to roll back communism and “liberate” the countries of Eastern Europe. The Solarium report, as had the earlier containment policy, recommended that the United States, with allies, develop areas of economic and political strength and stability as a basis for negotiations that, with a steady weakening of the Soviet system caused by spontaneous internal difficulties, would bring a peaceful resolution of conflicts.[19] NSC 162’s guidelines expressed Eisenhower’s belief in American possession of a deterrent military force, both conventional and nuclear, combined with a resolve to use neither to roll back Soviet power, and his efforts to negotiate--beginning with a test ban treaty--an end to the nuclear arms race.

It was at the Dulles Centennial Conference in 1988 that I, by then a professor, had the opportunity both to meet Kennan and hear him speak at a session devoted to the newly-released Solarium documents. He recalled the Solarium exercise with satisfaction but also with misgivings. The Eisenhower administration, Kennan said, generally accepted his own task force’s proposals for the financing of national defense, the size of the military, and relations with the allies; but, he said, the political parts “were not taken seriously.” The State Department, for example, refused to accept the recommendation that the United States should offer to withdraw from West Germany in exchange for Soviet withdrawal from East Germany. This, he felt, at the least would have put the onus on them, if they refused, for the failure of German reunification.[21] This recommendation, it is clear in retrospect, ran against Eisenhower’s need, given Soviet intransigence and the Korean war, for a separate West Germany as the keystone of a new NATO defense force, one of Eisenhower’s primary considerations upon entering the presidency.[22] Despite such misgivings Kennan believed that what the new president set out to accomplish was sound. Indeed, he recalled that Eisenhower, in his summary at a full meeting of the NSC on July 16, 1953 of the various Solarium task force recommendations, demonstrated his intellectual ascendancy over everyone in the room, including himself.[23]

Kennan believed that despite periodic crises and hysterias containment remained American policy after 1953. A review of the events generally confirms this observation.[24] Despite crises in Hungary and Suez in 1956; in the Formosa Straits in 1955 and 1958; and Berlin in 1958, 1959, and 1961; and after the downing of an American spy plane over Soviet territory in 1960, Eisenhower avoided armed conflict. The two sides signed an armistice in Korea in 1953 and then met in Geneva in 1955, at Camp David in 1959, and in Paris in 1960. Deviations from Eisenhower’s efforts to avoid use of coercive force occurred with the landing of U.S. troops in Lebanon during unrest in 1958, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the United States’ intervention in Vietnam in 1965, and the enormous Carter-Reagan arms build-up in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1989. But, as the Solarium report had predicted, the Soviet Union remained in control of its satellites until 1989--using Warsaw Pact troops to rein in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The People’s Republic of China remained firmly in place, but its relations with the Soviet Union had fallen apart by 1960. Alliances in the Western Europe, the Middle East, and Far East, along with negotiated treaties for a limited nuclear test ban, strategic arms control and détente during the Nixon years, and, finally, arms reductions, allowed—although for a much longer period than Kennan had hoped--for changes within the Soviet system to play out. Technological, economic, social, and cultural change combined with the forces of nationalism, to favor individual freedoms and national autonomy if not independence.[25]

These forces began working against the Soviet Union in the 1950s, because it was then, in the words of historian John Lewis Gaddis, that internal “reforms intended to restore competitiveness shattered authority, both internally and within the international communist movement.”[26] They became unstoppable and, as it turned out, irreversible in the 1980s, after the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost allowed new kinds of freedom.[27] The gulfs between the ruling party and the Soviet people, and between the center and the Soviet periphery began to widen.[28] The intermediate nuclear forces treaty negotiated by the Republican president, Ronald Reagan, and Gorbachev in 1987 was the first to eliminate an entire class of nuclear missiles. The Soviet leader then, having withdrawn Soviet troops from Afghanistan, announced a unilateral withdrawal of 500,000 Red Army troops from Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet empire began.[29]

Clearly, Kennan in 1992 had been correct to deny that the Republican Party--and the United States for that matter—deserved sole credit for the end of the Soviet system. And history has shown that he was correct in his assertions of 1947 and 1953 that just as diplomacy without strength is fruitless, strength without diplomatic restraint is counterproductive.

*********

[1] George F. Kennan. At a Century’s Ending: Reflections 1982-1995 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), 185.

[2] Ibid.; See also George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950-1963, Vol. II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 138-144.

[3] William B. Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan and the Origins of Eisenhower’s New Look: An Oral History of Project Solarium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, 2004), passim.

[4] Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 256.

[5] George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene: Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Vol. II (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958), passim.

[6] George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), passim; Robert H.Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 248-249.

[7] William B. Pickett, Eisenhower Decides to Run: Presidential Politics and Cold War Strategy (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 65.

[8] For a recent recounting and analysis of the implications of these decisions see Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 317-322.

[9] Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan, 28.

[10] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 65-66.

[11] Kennan, Memoirs, 119, 160-167, 180-181.

[12] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 19, 29, 31, 60, 65-66, 187.

[13] Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 60-61.

[14] Kennan, Memoirs, 141.

[15] Bowie and Immerman, 154-155.

[16]Ibid, 135; According to the Natural Resources Defense Council’s estimate, the United States by 1960 had 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads, 15,000 tactical nuclear warheads for a total of 22,000 nuclear warheads. http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/fig9.gif

[17] Derek Leebaert, The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002), 250-251.

[18] Leebaert, 249; for an account of the U.S. nuclear build-up that by the 1968 had reached over 32,000 nuclear weapons see Stansfield Turner, Caging the Genies: A Workable Solution for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1999).

[19] Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 69.

[20] William B. Pickett, Dwight David Eisenhower and American Power (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1995), 116.

[21] Pickett, ed. George F. Kennan, 19.

[22] Bowie, telephone conversation with the author 2-18-04; Pickett, Eisenhower Decides, 214.

[23] Bowie, telephone conversation.

[24] “What he [Eisenhower] said on that occasion [Eisenhower’s summary of the Solarium reports on July 16, 1953] gave me the impression that in general he was prepared to accept the thesis we [task force A] had put forward, that our approach to the problem of the Soviet Union, as it had been followed in the immediately preceding years, was basically sound.” Pickett, ed., George F. Kennan, 20-21.

[25] Kennan. At a Century’s Ending, 185.

[26] John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 191.

[27] Kort, 249-256.

[28] David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Vintage, 1994), 162-179.

[29] Michael Kort, The Soviet Colossus: History and Aftermath (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 356-380.

Monograph on how Eisenhower formulated national security

2008-06-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~pickett/Solarium.pdf

This is a link to a monograph published by the Princeton University Institute for International and Regional Studies on how Eisenhower after taking office went about formulating and establishing his national security policy. It discusses the historical context and its relationship to the policy of his predecessor, Harry S. Truman.

Dwight D. Eisenhower and the issue of presidential experience

2008-06-13T10:23:00.000-07:00

Having spent a good portion of my professional life learning and writing about the life and career of Dwight David Eisenhower, it has often occurred to me that, as the individual who established the precedents for many of the national security policies that exist today, it might be useful for the public and today's policy makers to know more about who he was, what he accomplished, and why. The blog, it seems to me, could provide a forum for such discussions and commentary.

I will be anxious to see what unfolds in the days and weeks ahead.

WBP