A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (133 page)

In 1953, therefore, Eisenhower had a remarkable opportunity. As the first GOP president since Hoover, he was in a position to limit or end some of the New Deal policies, especially with the House and Senate under Republican control for a brief time. Nevertheless, Ike recognized that part of his appeal rested on his bipartisan image. He had not run as anti-Roosevelt, and was indeed far too progressive for some in the Republican Party, including “Mr. Republican,” Senator Taft of Ohio. Many voters thought Taft and other conservatives overemphasized anticommunism to the exclusion of other issues (although Taft is perhaps best known for his sponsorship of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1946, prohibiting closed-shop, union-only, workplaces). Taft’s insurgency failed, and the senator died in 1953, removing the most significant Republican opposing voice to Ike’s policies, although remaining GOP insurgents forced the president to moderate the rate of growth of New Deal programs. Where Ike did reverse New Deal policies was in his cabinet selections, who were mostly businessmen. Among the group was the devout Mormon, Ezra Taft Benson, who cut back federal ownership of hydroelectric power businesses and limited regulation of offshore oil leases. But Eisenhower did not hesitate to spend: the National Highway Act of 1956 used federal money to link the nation’s cities, thus lowering (private) transportation costs. Blasted as “corporate socialism” for Detroit, the act reflected Ike’s World War II experience, which impressed on him the need for a highway system for defense.

His domestic strategy, called dynamic conservatism, was a policy that shed the criticism that conservatives were only against something and offered nothing positive. The minimum wage rose to a dollar an hour under Eisenhower and federal aid to education increased through the National Defense Education Act. Social Security benefits likewise rose, and Ike created a new superagency—the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—to continue to administer the New Deal welfare-state programs. Eisenhower did not end the New Deal, but he slowed its growth.

The Atomic Genie

Both Truman and Eisenhower maintained a consistency in dealing with atomic energy and atomic weapons. Realizing that atomic power provided not only new terrors, but also new sources of relatively clean energy for civilian use, Congress authorized the Atomic Energy Commission under civilian control to examine peaceful uses of nuclear power. Bernard Baruch, head of the War Industries Board in World War I, became the American delegate to the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. To control the spread of nuclear weapons—which could easily grow out of the unchecked expansion of peaceful nuclear power—the UN proposed an international agency to supervise all atomic development. Baruch even submitted a plan to have the United States hand over atomic secrets to the UN, on the condition that the United States, the USSR, and other nations likely to develop nuclear power would agree to allow international inspections at atomic installations. The United States, under those conditions, would agree to destroy its nuclear stockpile. The Soviets had already secretly started construction of their own atomic bombs, and they had no intention of allowing free access by international inspectors to anything.

H-bomb testing produced fallout of a different sort when a national meeting of church leaders, scientists, authors, and other notables in June 1957 led to the formation of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). Emphasizing the “human community,” SANE placed ads in major papers protesting the H-bomb tests, but soon its agenda included international control over all U.S. weapons.

By 1948, even before the USSR had detonated its own atomic bomb, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Truman’s security advisers understood that temporarily the only way to protect Europe from further Soviet expansion was the threat, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, of the use of nuclear weapons by the United States in the event of aggression against any of the NATO allies. In a document called NSC-30, “the first formal expression of American atomic policy,” the United States deliberately left its options open regarding the use of nuclear weapons.
⁵³
After NSC-30, which effectively established the principle of linkage, America’s enemies knew that the atomic weapons in the arsenals of democracy would not just sit by while Europe or Asia was being overrun.

At about the same time, an independent group of civilians established the Research and Development Corporation (RAND) as a think tank to study problems associated with nuclear warfare. RAND employees John D. Williams, mathematician John von Neumann, and others concluded that nuclear war was not “unthinkable”; quite the contrary, to prevent it, someone
should
think about it. RAND developed studies that crystallized the armed forces’ concepts of how to use, and how to prevent the use of, nuclear weapons, essentially forming the theoretical basis for mutual assured destruction, or MAD.
⁵⁴

Eisenhower, along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, further delineated America’s strategy in 1954 by making it clear the United States would, if necessary, use nuclear weapons even on nonnuclear countries that threatened American national interests. To the Soviets—who by then had their own nuclear arsenal—this sent a clear message that the United States would not be bullied. Wishing to keep the nuclear genie in his bottle, however, Eisenhower introduced a flexible response that allowed for a wide range of military options when confronted with local or regional threats.
⁵⁵
In short, Ike kept America’s enemies guessing and off balance, never sure if aggression might invoke a nuclear response. This tended to keep rogue nations cautious and, for the most part, peaceful.

Secretly, Eisenhower prepared the nation to win a nuclear war far more than historians have previously thought, going so far as to disperse nuclear weapons to the soil of allies such as Canada, then later to Greenland, Iceland, Greece, Italy, and Japan, beginning in the 1950s.
⁵⁶
America kept ahead of the Soviets and far ahead of the Chinese, as seen in the 1958 confrontation with China over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Formosa Straits. The Nationalist government claimed these islands, as did the communist mainland, which made plans to invade them. Quiet diplomacy provided an agreement, but looming over the discussions was the fact that the United States had an “ace in the hole,” as historian Timothy Botti called the nuclear weapons. Time and again, this nuclear backstop enabled the United States to pursue its national interests in ways that few large states in previous eras ever could have imagined. In short, the implicit threat of its large nuclear arsenal permitted the United States to engage in less than total war and to pursue localized, or limited, wars on several occasions.

Eisenhower also sought to develop a broader nuclear policy that would make use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes. In December 1953, Ike delivered his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations in New York City in hopes of breaking the deadlock over establishing international supervision of fissionable materials, and of approving an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 that provided for research in nuclear energy in civilian areas under the direction of the National Security Council.
⁵⁷
Thus, the federal government assumed authority for the safety and regulation of all civilian nuclear plants in the nation. This expanded federal power on the one hand, but it opened up an untapped resource to be used with confidence on the other.

Sputnik: Cold War in Space

To America’s shock, in August 1957 the cold war took a new turn or, more appropriately, an upward arc when the USSR announced it had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a rocket fired upward out of the earth’s atmosphere on an arc that would descend on a target and release warheads. Although the public did not immediately appreciate the import of these tests, in October the Soviet Union claimed the lead in the space race by launching
Sputnik I
into orbit, using a launcher similar to that on their ICBMs. To the man on the street,
Sputnik
represented little more than a Soviet scientific feat, but added to the ICBM test,
Sputnik
’s successful orbit suggested that now the USSR had the capability of raining atomic bombs on American soil safely from within bases inside Russia.

Realistically, the Soviets had merely skipped a step in the development of nuclear weapons, temporarily forgoing construction of a long-range bomber fleet. Eisenhower personally seemed unconcerned. Not so the general public. Popular media publications such as
Life
magazine headlined its post-
Sputnik
issue with
the case for being panicky
. The public did not know that General Curtis LeMay, of the Strategic Air Command, in an internal study reviewing the results of a simulated missile attack on American bomber bases, had concluded that the Soviet Union could have wiped out sixty of the major U.S. bases with a coordinated attack.
Sputnik
persuaded the United States to keep a force of long-range reconnaissance aircraft—the U-2 spy planes—in the skies over the USSR at all times to detect enemy preparations for an attack. Eisenhower also offered intermediate-range ballistic missiles to NATO allies, such as Britain, Turkey, and Italy.

Nevertheless, the public demanded a response to the threat of ICBMs. This came in a crash program aimed in two directions. First, money poured into education, particularly into universities and colleges for engineering, science, and math programs. Through the National Defense Education Act (1958), Congress “authorized grants for training in mathematics, science, and modern languages.”
⁵⁸
That might have kept the money in the labs where Congress intended it, but by also funding student loans and fellowships, the federal government flooded the humanities and other university departments with cash, providing the financial base for the student rebellions that would dominate the late 1960s.

Second, the United States moved with urgency to develop its own solid-and liquid-fueled rockets, resulting in some early spectacular crashes as American technology exploded on launching pads or flew apart in flight. Defense spending surged, and Congress turned the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics (NACA, created in 1915 by President Woodrow Wilson) into a larger, more powerful agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In May 1961, Commander Alan B. Shepard Jr. became the first American into space; then, in February 1962, Colonel John Glenn was launched into orbit aboard a Mercury rocket. In both cases the Soviets beat the United States to the punch, placing their own “astronauts”—a new term coined to describe space travelers, although the Russian “cosmonauts” preceded American astronauts—into space, then into orbit. To the public, these activities merely confirmed that the communists continued to lead in the space race. The images of exploding American rockets remained fresh, and even with Glenn’s flight, American scientists feared the worst while they hoped (and planned) for the best. Military planners even had a plan (Operation Dirty Trick) that would blame Cuban communists if the Mercury flight failed.
⁵⁹
Soviet victories in space contributed to the cloud of anxiety that hung over what otherwise was a decade of prosperity and growth.

Happy Days:
Myth or Reality?

A popular television sitcom called
Happy Days
appeared from 1974 to 1984 and depicted life in 1950s America as lighthearted and easy, with intact families, supportive communities, and teenagers who, although prone to an occasional prank or misstep, nevertheless behaved like upstanding citizens. Even the antihero, the Fonz (Vincent Fonzarelli, played by Henry Winkler), who sported a motorcycle jacket and a tough-guy mystique, possessed a heart of gold and displayed loyalty, courage, and wisdom. Of course, in the cynical 1970s, critics salivated at the opportunity to lampoon
Happy Days.
They pointed out that the show did not deal at any length with racial prejudice (it did not, although Asian actor Pat Morita was the original owner of the diner) or family problems such as alcoholism and divorce (again, guilty as charged). But the very fact that so many critics, especially of the Left, responded so vehemently to
Happy Days
suggests that the show touched a raw nerve. Despite genuine social problems and hidden pathologies, despite racial discrimination and so-called traditional roles for women, and despite the threat of atomic warfare, for the vast majority of Americans, the 1950s
were
happy days.

One view of the 1950s, focused on those who had entered adulthood in the decade or slightly before, comes from generational pundits William Strauss and Neil Howe. They label the group born from 1901 to 1924 the GI generation. By 1946, GIs would have reached twenty-two at the youngest and forty-five at the oldest, putting them at the prime earning years of their lives. That coincided with the postwar economic boom that fitted together a generation viewed as “fearless but not reckless,” replete with heroes and full of problem solvers.
⁶⁰
As the inscription on the Iwo Jima shrine (itself a testament to their courage) puts it, “Uncommon valor was a common virtue.”

Adults of the 1950s included many of America’s greatest achievers, including Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, Lee Iacocca, Lyndon Johnson, George Bush, Bob Hope, John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Ann Landers, Billy Graham, Sidney Poitier, Walter Cronkite, Jimmy Stewart, Charles Lindbergh, and Joe DiMaggio. They produced such cultural monuments as Herman Wouk’s
The Caine Mutiny
, Leonard Bernstein’s
West Side Story
, Jackie Gleason’s
The Honeymooners
, and Walt Disney’s
Lady and the Tramp
and
Bambi
. They initiated a spiritual revival that spread the Gospel of Christianity more broadly through Billy Graham and the ministry of Oral Roberts. Epitomizing the spirit of the decade, the best-known comic strip character, Superman, fought for “truth, justice, and the American way.”