Penguin History of the United States of America (115 page)

Even had they been more equal to the challenge of the times, it might have defeated them, at least in international affairs, where the United States confronted difficulties that entailed choices of an unpleasantness and complexity that transcended the vision of both Democrats and Republicans. It had, indeed, nothing to do with partisan distinctions, and much to do with underlying national attitudes. The issues involved were, as it happened, incarnated in the contrast between those devoted partners, President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles.

John Foster Dulles was descended from two Secretaries of State and had lived with the ambition of holding that office himself. He was a man of conspicuous faults and limited virtues. In essence he represented the old American missionary zeal. He spoke of containing communism, of rolling it back, of liberating Eastern Europe. These promises alarmed many observers, who did not see how they could be kept without war; but Dulles and his admirers saw no tension between the great twin goals of peace and liberty, for peace could only come, they held, when all the world was free as Americans understood the word. Peace was therefore to be pursued through the assertion of American power and influence, since only these could resist the communist tide and make the world democratic. Dulles, in short, was all too eager to meddle wherever he saw a chance to do so. He was overconfident that he understood whatever was going on. His style was that of a gloomy Presbyterian elder, a Woodrow Wilson without eloquence; but the substance of his policy was militaristic (he was a great believer in military pacts).

Eisenhower, fortunately for the world, was a man of very different temper. He took care to maintain the defences of the United States, in spite of irrational opposition from Congressional Republicans; apart from that his policy was marked by a profound caution, almost a quietism, which allowed him to act promptly and decisively only when the cause of peace could be furthered in no other way. He hoped that patience and reason would bring about a steady improvement in international relations; until they did he was content to play a waiting game. The skill and success of his policy must not be overstated. He connived at the operations by American intelligence (consolidated since 1947 into the Central Intelligence Agency, headed by John Foster Dulles’s brother Allen) which overthrew the government
of Guatemala so that the operations of the United Fruit Company, an ill-managed American concern, could be safeguarded; he similarly approved the operation which toppled the Iranian nationalist government of Dr Mossadegh and brought back the Shah of Iran from his first exile; in his second term he sent an expeditionary force to restore peace in the Lebanon (a simpler task than it has since become); he made an international issue of the islets of Quemoy and Matsu, off the Chinese mainland, denying control of them to the communists in favour of the Kuomintang. Above all, and most tragically, he did not teach the American people that they could not have both peace and unbridled power. But against that must be set the great facts that he ended the war in Korea and kept the United States out of conflict thereafter, until he left office in 1961; he kept John Foster Dulles under control; he effectively stopped a Franco-British-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956; and he launched the policy of
détente
– that is, of actively seeking understanding and agreement with the Soviet Union, of making that the first of diplomatic objectives. Admittedly, he did not pursue that policy with any great success: a big conference in Paris in 1960 collapsed when Russia successfully shot down an American spy-plane that ought to have been kept on the ground at such a delicate juncture; nevertheless, to him belongs the credit of being the first American President to try to bury the Cold War.

On the domestic front Eisenhower did not do so well. He would not act boldly and openly against Joe McCarthy, explaining privately that ‘I just will not – I
refuse
– to get into the gutter with that guy.’ This left McCarthy free to intensify his persecution of the State Department and to launch a new campaign against the army; luckily for Eisenhower this last enterprise backfired completely, so that in December 1954 the majority of the Senate at last felt brave enough to vote for a motion condemning ‘the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr McCarthy’ for bringing the Senate ‘into dishonour and disrepute’. After that Joe’s unique power as a national bully was at an end. Eisenhower burdened himself with the most pious Secretary of Agriculture in American history, Ezra Taft Benson, member of the Council of Twelve of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism was now utterly respectable), who was also the most unpopular with farmers, for he made a determined effort to reduce the size of federal subsidies to agriculture. In other respects the Eisenhower administration was little more than colourless. Its most important action, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, was undertaken largely at the bidding of a well-organized pressure-group. This Act committed the federal government to spending 833,500,000,000 in fourteen years on building a national network of motor-roads. It was to do more to shape the lives of the American people than any other law passed since 1945. It reinforced the ascendancy of the private car over all other forms of passenger transport; it made continental bus services fully competitive with the already declining railroads; it boosted freight carrying by truck; it gave a great impetus to black emigration from the South, and a huge
boost to the automobile, engineering and building industries, thus helping to stimulate the prosperity of the sixties; by encouraging car-ownership it encouraged car utilization, thus stimulating the spread of the population into vast sprawling suburbs, where only the car could get you to work, to the shops, to schools, entertainments and voting-booths; and this change in turn would soon be reflected in political behaviour. Yet it can hardly be pretended that the administration foresaw or desired these results, any more than it did the widespread corruption and faulty construction that went with the hasty building of the highways.

The Eisenhower years were in general ones of comfortable lethargy. When the Soviet Union put the first satellite into space in 1957 the shock to American vanity was almost unbearable; the cry went up that something was badly wrong with American society, American science, American education; it was to take several years for the speed with which the lapse was made good to wipe out this impression. The rifts in the Republican party were obvious, and if time saw off the dinosaurs (McCarthy died in 1957, Knowland disappeared after losing a gubernatorial election in California) it was not bringing forward many bright new Republican faces. True, Nelson Rockefeller, a grandson of old John D., was elected Governor of New York state in 1958, but by this time the GOP was very weary of always taking its cue from the multi-millionaires of the East, who seemed more and more dangerously liberal. That left only the Vice-President, Richard Nixon, whose one certain talent was for a sort of deodorized McCarthyism. He badly wanted the Presidential nomination, and exploited the Vice-Presidency cunningly, carrying out all the routine party chores which bored the President. Nixon, every party-worker knew, would speak for anyone, anywhere. He called in the debts thus incurred in 1960, when he easily won the nomination. He had the rather reluctant blessing of the President; but if he could turn that into a willingness to campaign on his behalf (Ike never much liked campaigning for himself) he would surely be able to glide into the White House, if not in a landslide, at least without great difficulty. Times were not bad; no grave crises obviously threatened; the Democrats, as usual, were deeply divided.

They were not, however, downhearted. The election of 1956 had been a nightmare; Adlai Stevenson had again won the nomination, but had campaigned far less effectively than in 1952, and been beaten even more thoroughly. However, his party had increased its majority in Congress; and in 1958, at the worst point of the Eisenhower recession, had increased it again, enormously. Eisenhower the Invincible was constitutionally barred from running again. Nixon was widely distrusted and disliked (the favourite Democratic joke of the period was a picture of the Vice-President looking shifty, with the slogan underneath, ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’). The economy had still not wholly recovered. Eisenhower’s modest and cautious style of leadership had appeared to many as merely timid and incompetent, and the collapse of his peace-seeking ventures at the Paris
conference had confirmed the impression. Finally, the Democrats had plenty of energetic and talented candidates.

Of the field, two men looked to the past: Adlai Stevenson, half-reluctant, half-anxious for a third nomination; and Senator Symington, Harry Truman’s candidate, who had been one of Truman’s Cabinet officers and came from Missouri. These two never looked very likely to get the prize. Three candidates saw themselves as men of the future: Hubert Humphrey, Senator from Minnesota, one of the most energetic and politically creative spirits in Congress; Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, Senate Majority Leader, who had given Congress the firm leadership that Eisenhower had refused to supply; and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, junior Senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy won the day. He was young, as politicians go; very handsome, very charming, very able, very rich. He was also a consummate politician. While he demolished Humphrey in the primaries, he quietly rounded up enough support among the old pros of the Democratic party (men like the mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, and John Bailey, the boss of Connecticut) to be sure of defeating the rest, and particularly Johnson, at the convention. Everything went according to plan, and soon nothing was left but the battle with Richard Nixon. It proved a hard tussle; but Nixon’s charmlessness, his implausibility as the heir of the smiling, reassuring, authoritative Eisenhower, and half a dozen blunders, of which the worst was to engage in a television debate with Kennedy, which simply gave the rival candidate a chance to get better known, eventually handed the Presidency to Kennedy, who ran a brilliant campaign. He was elected by an almost invisible majority (118,574), but elected he was, and a country which had basked quite happily in the sunny inaction of the Eisenhower era began to feel eager to see what the energetic leadership promised by the new man would amount to. There was a lot needing attention: the ever-deepening rift between the United States and the communist regime which had recently come to power in Cuba; the latest Berlin crisis (the Russians in August 1961 built a wall across the city to stop the flow of refugees from East to West); threatening campaigns by communist guerrillas in Laos and Vietnam; at home, a backlog of long-overdue reforms and, above all, an explosive racial situation. At least one old problem had been solved: though Kennedy had certainly lost votes in some important states because he was a Catholic, he had won them elsewhere for the same reason, and proved in the end that it was no longer necessary to be a Protestant to be President of the United States. So a bad tradition came to an end, and Kennedy stepped forward to take the oath of office. Then he delivered a short inaugural speech. It was an essay in the higher eloquence, well enough for such an occasion though perhaps rather fustian when read in cold blood; its note was stirring, but possibly disconcerting:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure
the survival and success of liberty. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of human rights to which this Nation has always been committed…

Could he mean it? It sounded like a call to a new world war. Well, time would show. Meanwhile it was a moment for joy: joy in the glitter of the new administration, in the high spirits of the President, the beauty of his wife, the obvious intelligence, energy and devotion of his ministers; in the strength and splendour of America at her height, queen and dynamo of the nations. Eisenhower went quietly back to his farm at Gettysburg. Nobody foresaw that his bumbling, peaceful reign would ever be looked back on fondly.

There comes a time when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired – tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. We have no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.

Martin Luther King, 5 December 1955

The bland smile of American democracy displayed a rotten tooth, or rather two rotten teeth: the plight of the South and that of the African-Americans. They were and always had been intimately related, never more so than at the beginning of the twentieth century, when 85 per cent of 8,800,000 African-Americans lived in the South, a region where the per capita income was little more than half the national average (if one omitted the trans-Mississippi South from the calculation, it was
less
than half the national average). Before the First World War the final touches were put to the Jim Crow edifice, and in spite of all the brave aspirations to a ‘New South’ the region stood supreme in disease, poverty, ignorance, sloth, hunger and cruelty: in 1900 there were 115 lynchings (nine of whites, 106 of blacks) in a year when the total number of homicides was 230. Not all the lynchings occurred in the South, but most of them did. Southern politics appeared to be immune to the successive challenges of Populism and Progressivism: however vivacious the reformers, in the end the old order of corruption, demagogy and reaction, cemented by hatred of the blacks, persisted, it seemed, unchanged. The South still seemed caught in the trauma of Appo-mattox: the old Jeffersonian themes of agrarianism and states’ rights were mumbled (or, when necessary, shouted in defiance of the Yankee intruder) like prayers to a rosary, and with ‘the war’ formed the staple of most
respectable public discourse. It was a world, it appeared, condemned by itself and fate to permanent exclusion from the American mainstream. The teeth, one might pardonably have assumed, were beyond the skills of the dentist: were past repair and (thanks to Abraham Lincoln) impossible to extract.