most important periods of recent history - as a wartime commander against the Nazis, as head of the American defense system at the time of the creation of the cold war, and as President of the world's mightiest capitalist and imperialist nation from 1953-60. For this reason it is important to try to work out what his relation to these events was, and what the nature of his policies appears to be.
The gushing obituaries of the bourgeois press and his ertstwhile subordinates and stooges around the role have served only to mystify the significance of Eisenhower's career. It is undoubtedly true that he was personally a benign, charming and diplomatic man, and that he made sincere effort al Russo-US understanding presidency. it is also true that his career as a junior army officer, in the period after the war and as President was marked by an unrelenting defense of US capitalism at home and of the agressive version US abroad. The apparent contradiction these two aspects of life is solved in the columns of the bourgeois press by denying that Eisenhower was responsible for the actions over which he presided he left it all to Dulles, liked to delegate responsibility etc. or else by ignoring the trail of murder and agression he left around the world.
can overcome seeing that it precisely because he was in one way a kindly and inactive leader that he was most suited to head a vicious and agressive imperialist nation:
occasional peace-seeking forays served to dull the alertness of the Soviet bloc, and his Kansas grin served to calm a US population which had been thrown into hysteria by the Korean war. The so-called "confusion' of his foreign policy was no confusion at all - it was a very successful division of labour. He once said of himself: '1 know of absolutely nothing in my entire background and training that in any way whatever qualities me to be President of the US.' But he had qualities which were most useful to his conception of political office efficiency learned through years of staff-work in the army, and a bland confidence in America which served distract attention from repression at home and imperialist plunder abroad.
The great military commander was born into a pacifist sect, the River Brethren, and only left them to become a Presbyterian in 1953. When he was made the Republican candidate in 1952 he declared 'Our government makes no sense, unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith and I don't care what it is' - - a strange statement to come from a man who was about change his religion and had not been a church-goer for forty years. He was for eight years President of the US, but according to the secretary of Dickinson County, Kansas, where Ike was brought up he is not recorded as having ever voted in an election in his life and up to 1952 no-one was quite NuTe if he was a Republican or a Democrat. In his acceptance speech in 1952 he promised to clear up the mess in Washington' and make government as clean as a hound's tooth', yet within weeks his running mate Richard Nixon was shown to have accepted an $18.000 bribe when a senator, and in 1957 his closest adviser Sherman Adams had to be sacked after a long series of scandals.
Eisenhower's junion career is quickly passed over in his obituaries - he seems to have gone straight from Abilene to supreme power, intermediary years being omitted. It significant that although in the 1920s and 1930s the US still had few imperialist possessions, Ike spent periods in two of them, helping to consolidate US power: in the 1920s he was in the Panama Canal Zone, seized by the US in 1903, and he spent the years 1935-40 in the Philippines, which the US had taken from Spain. In 1932 he was involved in the brutal suppression Protests known as the "bonus riots': 15,000 WalE veterans, whose pensions had been cut during the depression, marched on Washington and camped near the Potomac. Like Resurrection City in 1966 they were attacked by government forces and driven out: Eisenhower was at that time deputy to General MacArthur, the man in charge of the whole operation.
During the war Eisenhower reconciled with Berlin, but immediately after he settled down as US Chief of Staff (1945-48) and as Supreme Commander in Europe (1950-52), and had a large hand in building up the military machine.
His Presidency is often regarded uneventful or pacific. It was quite the opposite Eisenhower's attitude to race has been carefully slurred over. The Times wrote that Ike 'had always shown a tenderness for southern feeling WITH MacARTHUR DURING 1932 BONUS RIOTS which seemed to go beyond the need for moderation"; and Time admitted that the record of his Administration on civil rights was, "to say the least, undistinguished". He was, in other words, a racist. He opposed the 1954 Supreme Court decision on desegration and later regretted that he sent troops into Little Rock in 1957. In order to get the nomination from the Republican Party in the first place he accepted the policies of his opponent Senator Taft, and when tour in Wisconsin, MacCarthy's home state, he cut a favourable reference to General Marshall out of his speech because MacCarthy considered Marshall soft on communism. In the State Department Ike appointed the rabid cold-warrior Dulles as Secretary of State but this was not good enough for MacCarthy; so, Ike appointed as the State Department's Personnel and Security Officer one Scott McLeod, a MacCarthy agent who checked ambassadorial and other postings with MacCarthy before they were announced by the President. Precisely because Ike was not of MacCarthy's type he refused to combat him; he let anti-communism run wild while pretending he had nothing to do with it. It was only in late 1954, when MacCarthy.had been destroyed by his rivals, that Mamie crossed Mr. and Mrs. MacCarthy off the White House gues! list. The tranquility of Eisenhower's America was the tranquility of triumphant anti-communism, of racialism and of repression. It was the tranquility of a secure that has now begun to be shaken.
Abroad, Ike's presidency was marked throughout the world by violence and intervention. He 'solved' the Korean crisis by threatening to drop an atom bomb on the Chinese. He withdrew Truman's 1950 order to the US 7th Fleet to stop any Kuomintang attempt to invade the mainland, and he actively prompted aids and attacks on the Chines mainland. He stepped up US aid to the French imperialist in Indo-China and when they were forced to negotiate he took over their role. It is often claimed that Eisenhower restrained Nixon and Admiral Radford, who wanted to invade Vietnam; but he was not against the idea - he merely wanted to get Congress behind him: and when it refused, in April 1954, he was not prepared go alone. He deliberately sabotaged the 1954 Geneva agreements: "The United States has not itself been a party to, or bound by, the decisions taken by the [Geneva] Conference. The Agreement contains features which we do not like' (July 21, 1954).
Eisenhower played a key role in three of the | wanted to pre-empt the Russian capture ofG for Change). As it was, the US sponsored Ngo Dinh Diem, forcibly deported more than half a million Catholics and French sympathisers from the north of Vietnam, and began the policy of repression that led to the rise of the South Vietnamese liberation movement.
In Laos the US armed the corrupt civilian leader Katay in the middle 1950s, and when he failed and the left won the 1958 elections, they staged another coup under their new royal stooge, Phoumi Nousavan. They are still there.
In Cambodia they backed the anti-Sihanouk Free Khmer movement; in Indonesia they dropped arms to the right-wing 1958 generals rebellion in the Celebes islands; in Thailand they backed the Sarit regime and threw in money to build bases; in Burma they armed the remnants of Chiang's army the northern jungles and used them to smuggle and fly arms to the Tibetan rising of 1959. The whole area was ablaze with imperialist arms, whether shipped in by the CIA or openly distributed by the Dulles-Eisenhower pact, SEATO, created after the Geneva Conference.
In the Middle East Eisenhower was not less active. In 1953 the CIA otherthrew the regime of Mosadeq a nationalist leader who had nationalised the oil companies; As Andrew Tully (CIA - - The Inside Story) remarks: "It is senseless, as some observers have written to say that the Iranians overthrew Mosadeq all by themselves. It was an American operation from beginning to end. The US refused to support the 1956 Suez invasion but only in order to move in themselves under the Eisenhower Doctrine, according to which the US would provide economic aid and troops to friendly governments who needed them. *A greater responsibility now devolves upon us, Eisenhower remarked, and indeed it did. A year later, he had alerted the British and their agent Husein to the existence of a left-wing plot in the Jordanian army, and he had sent troops into the Lebanon to bolster the reactionary Chamoun regime, which had protected Lebanese capital from Ene guests of Arab nationalism. Tully tells us: *Somebody forgot to check with Chamoun. He knew nothing of the President's action until he heard of it on the radio. Fortunately he welcomed the troops 1958 did not pass, however, without a final fling in Pakistan, where the ill-fated Ayub Khan was launched into military dictatorship with US backing in October.
In Ăfrica things were quieter. In June 1960 the US openly set out to topple the progressive Lumumba regime, and under the guise of the UN forces effectively wiped out Lumumba's power and installed their own puppets. In Latir America Eisenhower had a field day. In 1954 the liberal regime of Arbenz in Guatemala had English-language service:
AIM AT THE DEMON OF PLAGUE! FIRE!
Angry waves toss and foam in the Strait of Taiwan, Across them a hurricane of awesome fury screams, The heavens answer and the earth reels, Mountains and seas shout amid stabs of lightning. (Music)
Eisenhower go home! Fire! (Roar of cannon)
US aggressors, get out of Taiwan! Fire! (Roar of cannon) Get out of South Korea! Fire! (Roar of cannon) Get out of Japan! Fire! (Roar of cannon)
Get out of the Philippines! Fire! (Roar of cannon) Get out of South Vietnam! Fire! (Roar of cannon) Get out of the West Pacific! Fire! (Roar of cannon)
Down with US imperialism! Fire! (Roar of cannon) Fire! (Roar of cannon) Fire! (Roar of cannon)
Blast away at the demon plague! At the savage marauder!
In June 1950 the US occupied Taiwan by force of arms; In June 1960 the US tentacles still grip our island. Oh Taiwan, glistening pearl of the motherland, today mired in slime and smeared with blood!
Oh gem of the motherland, engulfed in a sea of flames, victim of calamity after calamity!
Brothers of Taiwan, igniting leaping flames of hatred! As of old stand Taiwan's volcanoes. Today they rumble. Injustices have their author, debts their maker, debts of blood only blood can pay.
Brothers and sisters of Taiwan!
At your side are 600 million countrymen and the mighty sinews of our armed forces!
Listen! (Roar of cannon) Thousands upon thousands of cannon speak, shaking the earth, (Roar of voices) Thunderous roars issue from millions of throats, Striking fear into the demon of plague, causing the war criminals to quake and shudder! (Continuing roar of voices)
Our land is not to be violated!
Angry waves toss and foam in the straits of Taiwan, Across them a hurricane of awesome fury screams, For our brothers and sisters in Taiwan, fire! (Roar of cannon) For martyred blood in Tokyo streets, fire! (Roar of cannon) For blazing hearths in Seoul and Pusan, fire! (Roar of cannon) Guatemalans under the command of Castil Armas backed by the United States; Arma himself was assassinated in 1957 but Guatemal is still in imperialist hands. In November 196( armed risings in Nicaragua and Guatemala wer both crushed with US military support.
Eisenhower did not act immediately agains the Cuban Revolution. He may well have bee restrained by his desire to achieve a detent with the Soviet Union in 1959; but he soor learnt his mistake and in March 1960 ordere the CIA to train Cuban exiles in preparation fo the Cuban counter-revolution. In the fina months of his Presidency he cut Cuba's suga quote and began the systematic attempt t strangle the revolutionary republic.
Eisenhower, backed by Dulles and the CIA hawks, was as the Chinese used to call him th world unrelenting counter-revolutionary intervention. In hi attempts to get an agreement with the Sovie Union, an agreement he saw essentially in term of containing communism and then disarming he never for a moment envisaged relinquishin the US role in Asia, Africa and Latin America His 1959-60 peace offensive ending abortive summit conference of May 1960 wa sabotaged by his own regime; the military sen the U-2 over the Soviet Union. It is probably for this reason that he came out in farewe speech with a stirring denunciation of th "military-industrial complex' which he said wa threatening Americar democracy. *Th potential for the disastrous rise of misplace power exists and will persist, he warned. Bu although dimly aware of the contradiction between his own naive and ignorant vision o world politics and the realities of power ir capitalist America, he never saw his way to any solution.
Personally his policies, such as they were •came to nothing, but this very failure of hi initiatives and the apparent contradictior between his amiable smile and the domesti repression and international counter-revolutior of his Presidency were the result of his relation to US capitalism in the 1950s. He was choser precisely because he fitted capitalism's needs and whatever attempts he made personally t influence events were sabotaged in one way o another. Simultaneously storybook Americar and imperialist chieftan he represented th contradictions of American life in their acutes form, the contradictions between certair dynamism and naivety on the one hand and murder and exploitation on the other which he incarnated and resoived, as they are alway resolved, by counter-revolution at home an abroad.
Fred Halliday On the occasion of Basenhowers sit to Vaiwan nine ears ago, broadcast the following Heroic guns speak and thunder, heroic fighters roar their battle cry: We shall liberate Taiwan, pearl of our motherland! Fire! (Roar of cannon) Let them understand, the Chinese people are not lightly to be provoked
pro-Moscow NAP had not participated and had The government made full use of the absence of demonstrations The Black Dwarf April 18 1969 1959 1960 1961 Page 1962 1963 1967 1968 -Tariq Ali Reports by the workers further
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Hic romark on whu they would not Sisters of Taiwan, gazing on the motherland through a veil of tears!