jason parker

Cold War II: The Eisenhower Administration, the Conference, and the Reperiodization

of the Postwar Era* Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021

The wave of that swept through the “” after World War II toppled centuries-old empires and remapped the planet. First in the late 1940s and again around the turn of the next decade, clusters of new nations emerged in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Some had been waging the antico- lonial fight for decades; others drew on a long-churning race consciousness to assert nationhood; still others pointed to archaic imperial economic relation- ships to press their case. All of these nationalist leaders sensed that the long era of formal empire in human history was coming to a close. They invoked the Wilsonian watchword of “self-determination” and did what they could to quicken progress toward that end. Among the most important elements shaping this struggle for Third World was the overarching context in which it unfolded. The East-West superpower clash presented both threats and opportunities to those in the Third World during what nationalists there conceived instead as a crucial moment in “North-South” relations.1 Nor was this conception limited to imperial subjects. The redefinition of racial dynamics within nations intertwined with evolving political dynamics among nations new and old. Nonwhite minorities inside the metropoles fought battles

*Earlier versions of this material were presented at the 2003 University of San Diego conference on “Eisenhower and the Third World” and at the 2003 SHAFR meeting. The author would like to thank his fellow SHAFR panelists, USD organizers Andrew Johns and Kathryn Statler and USD commenter Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, along with Matthew Jones, Robert McMahon, Kenneth Osgood, Jeff Taffet, and the anonymous Diplomatic History review- ers for their insightful suggestions. Special thanks are due as well to the Eisenhower Library Foundation and to West Virginia University for research travel support, and to Abilene archivists Tom Branigar and David Haight. A portion of the text also appears in the Eisenhower conference volume edited by Andrew Johns and Kathryn Statler, and is reproduced here with the gracious permission of Rowman & Littlefield. 1. As Thomas Borstelmann reminds us in ’s Reluctant Uncle: The and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993), for most of the Third World the postwar issue was not the superpower conflict but Western . Matt Connelly also argues for the importance of the “north-south” dimensions of the Cold War, in “TakingOff the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the for Independence,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 ( June 2000): 739–69.

Diplomatic History,Vol.30, No. 5 (November 2006). © 2006 The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX42DQ, UK.

867 868 : diplomatic history Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 1: During the Afro-Asian Peoples Conference, Bandung was crowded from morning till midnight by thousands of Indonesians trying to catch a glimpse of the delegates. (Source: Bettmann/CORBIS.)

for the rights of citizenship, battles that paralleled the concurrent struggles of nonwhite majorities outside the metropoles for the rights of self-rule. The repercussions of these battles did not always alter the strategic calculations of the superpowers, but more than once these struggles overlapped with the bipolar competition that shaped the postwar era. Aside, however, from the clear and anodyne conclusion that both the long wars against colonial rule and on the one hand, and the East-West Cold War competition on the other, exerted a mutual influence on one another unevenly over time, it has been difficult to say much more. The relationship between the two wars varied enormously by time and place. True, in some locations, such as Vietnam and , they merged in violent, tragic, and relatively straightforward fashion, and have received exhaustive scholarly attention. Beyond cases like these, the link is less clear. Many areas only visibly joined the fight when the Cold War was in midlife. Some then found themselves the object of intense superpower competition; others found themselves all but ignored. Almost all saw their individual struggles culminate within a span of two decades during the Cold War. Yet nuanced, compelling explanations of the link between that conflict and the great wave of Third World decolonization—one more sophisticated than mere chronological coincidence—have only just begun to emerge. There thus remains a great challenge facing any effort to write an international history of the Cold War, or indeed of the twentieth century: discerning the precise, subtle, and intricate connections between the Cold War, the global postwar “race revolution,” and the course of Third World decolonization. An emerging critical mass in foreign relations scholarship, as well as sugges- tive findings in new primary-source research, makes this an opportune moment to take up the challenge. The literature on the role of race in U.S. foreign Cold War II : 869 relations, including its role in the diplomacy of decolonization, has grown impressively in breadth and sophistication over the last two decades.2 These studies explore the subject widely, from a variety of angles and a range of times and places. Measuring the shape and extent of race’s role in American diplomacy is the conceptual challenge this literature addresses. Most authors find that that role’s shape was recognizable and its extent considerable. Although there remains important work to be done, this scholarly corpus in toto leaves little doubt that race played an influential role in postwar American foreign affairs. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 Indeed, understood this way, this still-growing body of work offers a new perspective on the Cold War itself, as a protean conflict whose fluctuating “East-West” dynamics slowed, stalled, and then sped the “North-South” decolonization and race revolutions during the Cold War’s first two decades. What we might call capital-R “Race” issues—defined maximally to encompass the end of white supremacy, the end of formal European empire in the “Third World,” and the rise of nonwhite consciousness and nationalism—are, to build on W. E. B. DuBois’s insight, signal themes of the twentieth century.3 The historically constructed nature of such constituent terms as “race” and “empire” need not impeach an effort to integrate these themes into the big picture of the Cold War. The above literature cumulatively traces Race, and allows us to group its key episodes together according to their chronological and thematic coher-

2. Gifted practitioners such as Michael Hunt, Thomas Noer, Paul Gordon Lauren, and more recently Brenda Plummer, Thomas Borstelmann, Penny Von Eschen, Mary Dudziak, and Carol Anderson, among others, have made important contributions to this literature. Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987); Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder, CO, 1988); Thomas Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968 (Columbia, MO, 1988); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York, 2003). See also Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany, NY, 1986); Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy (Boston, 1992); Michael Krenn, Race and U.S. Foreign Policy, 5 vols. (New York, 1998) and Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department (Armonk, NY, 1999); Brenda Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); and James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). 3. I am indebted to Frank Costigliola for the observation that even “defined maximally” in this way, Race is a yet more expansive concept than this formulation permits. Limiting the present analysis to First-Third World relations, for example, omits racialist thinking in First- affairs, as in the 1940s Anglo-American imagery of Stalin as the head of an “Asiatic,” quasi-Yellow Peril. This essay relies on the insights of such scholars as Ivan Hannaford, Kenan Malik, and Nikhil Pal Singh—and on the need for conceptual practicality in advancing its thesis—for its construction of “Race.” See Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, 1996); Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (New York, 1996); and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2004). 870 : diplomatic history ence. Doing so indicates that an international history of a broadly unified Cold War is a problematic undertaking. While we may safely keep the idea of a single, overarching Cold War more or less unified by its core elements—the strategic and ideological U.S.-Soviet clash, the nuclear standoff, and the like—Race obliges a different picture and periodization. Just as changes in the above core elements mark phases such as and détente, changes in Race suggest that, properly understood as international history, the postwar era contained not one but at least two “Cold Wars”: an early one characterized by Race repression, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 which gave way to a second one of Race liberation. A reexamination of the April 1955 Bandung Conference, drawing in part on evidence recently made available, further supports this basic conclusion. Indian Prime Minister and Indonesian President convened twenty-nine nations and colonies at the historic Conference of Afro-Asian Peoples at Bandung, .4 The meeting marked the first time that the decolonizing world had come together to attempt to find a shared voice, one capable of transcending race, region, and the Cold War dichotomy. The Bandung Conference posed a diplomatic challenge to both Cold War camps, but one “particularly discomfiting” to the United States.5 Its timing and its apparent meaning made it a wild card, one the Eisenhower administration was not immediately sure how to play. The conference took place amid a fresh crisis in and an ongoing quandary in Indochina. Moreover, as Thomas Borstel- mann points out, Bandung occurred midway through a “sea-change in American and international race relations” bookended by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Montgomery bus boycott.6 In addition, beyond the obvious

4. Nehru and Sukarno, along with fellow members of the “Colombo Powers”—that is, the former colonies of Burma, Ceylon, , Indonesia, and , which had won independence—organized the meeting for a combination of ideological and parochial reasons. See George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference (Ithaca, NY, 1956), 2–3. Other contemporary works of note on Bandung include , The Color Curtain (New York, 1956; reprint ed., Oxford, 1995); Carlos Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill, NC, 1956); and G. H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London, 1966). 5. Cary Fraser, “An American Dilemma: Race and in the American Response to the Bandung Conference, 1955,” in Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom, 115. Aside from Fraser’s insightful study and one other excellent article-length exception—Matthew Jones, “A ‘Segre- gated’ Asia? Race, the Bandung Conference, and Pan-Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954–1955,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 5 (November 2005): 841–68—investigation of the Eisenhower administration’s diplomacy regarding Bandung has been somewhat scarce, and has tended to treat the conference in passing as a minor event best folded into larger narratives of foreign affairs. The present essay covers some of the same ground as Fraser and Jones, though it differs in what it argues were Bandung’s ultimate fruits in Eisenhower-era U.S. diplomacy. In addition to H. W. Brands and to Borstelmann, other scholars who focus on U.S. diplomacy and race relations have incorporated Bandung into their analyses. See Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 167–73; Plummer, Rising Wind, 247–56; and Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 209. Nicholas Tarling has used British sources to examine the place of the conference in London’s foreign policy in “ ‘Ah-Ah’: Britain and the Bandung Conference of 1955,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 23, no. 1 (March 1992): 74–112. 6. Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 93. Cold War II : 871 challenge Bandung posed to U.S.-Third World relations, the conference com- plicated U.S. relations with both its Communist rivals and with its closest allies in imperial Europe. For an administration that placed a premium on confronting , using allies and proxies where possible abroad, and waging psychological Cold War, Bandung might have appeared, to amend Brenda Plummer’s phrase, as either a threat or a positive challenge.7 The conference’s announcement of an embryonic Third World neutralist bloc presented a potential paradigm shift in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 international affairs; the attendance of China heralded a possible opening for Communist expansion. Either constituted a threatening scenario. Moreover, the latter prospect also bore the yet more ominous possibility that China would use its position as both a Communist and nonwhite nation to challenge Nehru’s neutralism and lay claim to leadership of both of those blocs. Even if ultimately unsuccessful, such a bid might bolster China’s standing as a power broker in the fragile Asian peace. At the same time, the administration’s apparently diffident treatment of the conference might seem a missed opportunity to campaign for Third World friendship and gently begin the inevitable break with a European colonialism whose time had come and gone. In addition, Bandung must be understood within the broader structure of Eisenhower’s diplomacy—especially its internal contradictions, and its handling of the mid-1950s “sea-change” in international racial and colonial affairs. Newly available evidence allows us to reconstruct in detail the administra- tion’s response to the conference as a high-profile symbol of the changing dynamics of Race, and affiliated issues such as neutralism, in Cold War affairs. This evidence reveals an administration that paid sustained and evolving atten- tion to Bandung and its implications both before and after the conclave. This essay argues that the conference posed a minor threat to the administration’s foreign-policy goals, which Washington took seriously and successfully averted. After it was over, Bandung helped to spark a shift in the Eisenhower team’s diplomatic thinking—but a shift still incomplete when it was finally overtaken by events. Eisenhower’s team chose to play it safe with respect to Bandung, and smiled at their success. Afterward, though, officials recognized that the confer- ence stood at the confluence of three streams—neutralism, nationalism, and racially tinged anticolonialism—rushing ever faster and wider across the postwar landscape. These officials set out to rethink the meaning of this confluence for American diplomacy. Their effort fit nicely into the fuller patterns of the admin- istration’s foreign relations, and when framed by recent historiography on Race in the postwar world, reflects the profoundly changing nature of the Cold War in the mid-1950s—reflects, that is, what could be called the start of Cold War II. Almost immediately after receiving a December 29, 1954 communiqué announcing the Afro-Asian conference, the Eisenhower administration began to

7. Plummer, Rising Wind, 252. 872 : diplomatic history brainstorm a reaction. The announcement came in the context of the seemingly endless crisis in the region, as from north to south along the East Asian coast, fighting waxed and waned. The United States had previously responded with the creation of SEATO in September 1954. The Bandung proposal, to its authors at least, was a response to the response. This was not its only raison d’être; each of the authors had his own vision for the conference as well. Nehru sought to rally a nascent neutralist bloc, one which could promote his principles of pancheela— and one which could serve the more practical purpose of countering the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 Pakistani-American alliance that threatened not only those principles but regional peace and Indian security as well.8 As Robert McMahon notes, with that May 1954 alliance “the United States had brought the Cold War to south Asia.”9 For Nehru, Bandung could potentially send it back out. Sukarno, for his part, agreed. His hosting of the conference signaled his desire to at least share the leadership of the neutralist movement.10 It would also offer him the chance to gather Third World support for his effort to evict the “holdout” Dutch regime in West Irian. But beyond the limited national-strategic objectives of this stripe, the nature of the collective Bandung agenda—which included anticolonialism, disarmament, and development, among other transnational priorities—made clear its overarching purpose as an ideological and realpolitik answer to the recent regional turmoil. Within two days of the joint communiqué announcing the conference, which according to Cary Fraser “posed a serious dilemma for the United States,” Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson advised Secretary of State of “this Afro-Asian business.”11 Robertson urged that the secretary “should be giving thought to it. It is a vehicle of Communist propaganda.” Nor was this the only potential problem. The specialist pointed out the contrast between the forthcoming U.S.-sponsored “Bangkok Conference with mostly whites and a few Asian people, and their [Bandung] conference would be prac- tically all colored.”12 The prospective Bandung Conference would not be, as seen from Washington, totally without its positive qualities. It might, for example, turn out to be superficially “feel-good” and then forgotten, a salve to Third World pride but strategically meaningless. There was also the possibility

8. The “five principles” of pancheela (alternately panchsheel or panchshila), agreed upon by Nehru and China’s and meant to serve as a model for intra-Asian relations, are summed up by Jones as follows: “Respect for territorial integrity; nonaggression; noninterfer- ence in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit in relations; and .” Jones, “A ‘Segregated’ Asia?,” 851. 9. Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York, 1994), 190. 10. Robert McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II (New York, 1999), 84. 11. Fraser, “An American Dilemma,” 118. 12. Memorandum of Telephone Call, Dulles and Robertson, 31 December 1954, Tele- phone Calls Series, John Foster Dulles Papers 1951–1959 (hereafter JFDP), Box 3,f:“Tel. Conversations—General November 1–December 31, 1954,” Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter DDEL). Cold War II : 873 that China would fail to bridge the Communist and nonwhite blocs, and would instead find itself weakened by being torn between them. But most of the conference’s potentialities were more ominous than auspicious. As Dulles put it in a circular to selected chiefs of mission, “Department seriously concerned eventual implications and most interested to avoid damaging effects this conference [sic].”13 Indeed, the specialist’s allusions to communism and race helpfully underline the immediate context of the congress. In addition to the continuing repercus- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 sions of the SEATO and Pakistani-American alliance noted above, the ongoing low-level war between Chinese Communists and Nationalists was worsening, as the two sides drew swords over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. The chance of renewed crisis in a Far East so recently the site of stalemate in Korea added weight to China’s role. The French defeat at Dienbienphu eight months earlier, and the ensuing settlement at Geneva, added to the sense of a region hanging in the balance. Bandung might tip that balance against American interests, espe- cially if China should attend. Finally, the reference to the racial makeup of the Bangkok and Bandung conferences suggests an evolving awareness of the link between America’s racial practices and its foreign affairs after the Brown decision of the previous May.14 It bears noting that this awareness was at this point quite vague; it tended, in the minds of American policymakers, to be overshadowed by what were seen as higher-stakes and less philosophical strategic issues. Brown, Bandung, and other markers of the global race revolution had not yet coalesced into a Cold War watershed. Still, the process of that coalescing within the Washington worldview is instructive. That worldview encompassed what Matthew Jones identifies as “recurring images and fears of potential racial conflict” vis-à-vis the U.S. position in Asia.15 The coalescence of the watershed began, regarding Bandung, with Robertson’s surface observation. It would lead within eighteen months to much deeper conclusions. For the moment, Dulles took his subordinate’s advice, as shown in his report to the National Security Council (NSC) on January 5, 1955. If the still- prospective meeting took place, Dulles opined, it “raised interesting problems [and] would involve important decisions for the United States.” Ignoring for the moment the military and nuclear implications of the proposed event—all of which were much on the minds of its organizers—Dulles presented the Afro- Asian meeting in public relations terms. He was more sanguine than his aide about its propaganda impact: “The voice of the free world”—channeled through pro-Western Asian countries in attendance—“should be able to blanket the

13. Dulles to Certain Diplomatic and Consular Offices, 31 December 1954, Foreign Rela- tions of the United States (hereafter FRUS), pt. 1, 12: 1084–85. 14. This awareness had begun before the Eisenhower administration, although events now gave it a critical mass it had previously lacked. See Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 90–114,on the Truman administration’s amicus curiae support of cases leading up to the Brown decision. 15. Jones, “A ‘Segregated’ Asia?,” 843. 874 : diplomatic history voice of Communism at the Afro-Asian meeting.”16 This “p.r.” focus did not equate to blindness about the larger strategic picture, either on Dulles’s or the president’s part. Both saw in Bandung a potentially decisive moment in the aforementioned ongoing regional crisis, a moment whose importance out- weighed most if not all of the basically symbolic issues the conference might raise.17 At any rate, in terms covering both strategy and public relations, Dulles concluded elliptically that “there were still many unresolved problems” that the meeting would pose to the United States, as so much about the conference’s Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 agenda and attendees was still unknown.18 To address these problems, the next week the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), apparently on Dulles’s initiative, formed a working group on the Afro-Asian conference.19 The group’s charge was the “development of courses of action to promote U.S. objectives” regarding the Bangkok and Bandung meetings. The group’s terms of reference directed attention to three points, beginning with the need to harmonize policy regarding the two meetings. Second, the group was to prepare materials for Bandung relating to “Soviet- Chinese aggression and ...soastoplace Communist Bloc coun- tries...psychologically on the defensive.”20 Third, the group was to create channels through allies to the conference. Finally, time was short; the group’s report was due by the February 9 meeting of the OCB. Further compressing the time frame was the fact that few invitees to Bandung, as far as Washington could ascertain, had shown much interest in attending.21 As an early progress report put it, “A canvass of [invited] governments by U.S. Embassies reveals a general lack of enthusiasm for the conference.”22 With the guest list thus unknown, shaping a coherent U.S. policy for Bandung was akin to shooting at a blurry target on short notice. The group gleaned some leads from the purposes of the meeting as laid out in the 29 December communiqué: the conference did not seek to create a

16. Notes of Discussion, 5 January 1955, NSC Series, Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers as President 1952–1961 (Whitman File), Box 6,f:“230th Meeting of NSC, January 5, 1955,” DDEL. 17. See, for example, Memorandum of Conversation, 9 April 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957 21: 82; and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change: 1953–56 (Garden City, NY, 1963), 480, 482. 18. Notes of Discussion, 5 January 1955. 19. The State Department chaired the group, which included a half-dozen agencies includ- ing Defense, the CIA, and the USIA. 20. Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 11 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, White House Office-NSC Staff Papers, 1948–1961 (WHO-NSC), Box 85,f:“OCB092.3 [Interna- tional Affairs—Conferences & Boards] (9) January 1954–April 1955,” DDEL. For an excellent analysis of the centrality of psychological warfare to the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy, see Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS, 2006). 21. Report “Attachment A,” “Reactions to the Afro-Asian Conference,” OCB Staff, 10 January 1955, attached to Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 11 January 1955. 22. Report, untitled, OCB, 12 January 1955, Executive Secretary’s Subject File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 58, f: “Indonesia (6),” DDEL. Cold War II : 875 regional bloc; dialogue would be nonbinding; and economic issues, Third World self-determination, and the nuclear were paramount.23 From this, the OCB concluded that “most states [would] use the Conference to further their private aims or for prestige purposes...[Pakistan, for example], is enthu- siastic about using the Conference to embarrass Nehru.” “wishes to use the Conference to end its isolation from the mainstream of Asian politics.” Meanwhile the “[should] be encouraged to attend to provide a means of keeping the U.S. closely informed...andtoprovide a friendly non- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 neutralist spokesman.”24 In late January, the Office of Intelligence Research (OIR) reported that there was perhaps more to the original Bandung communiqué than previously believed. Despite Nehru’s allusion to the meeting during an October 1954 trip to Beijing, “no [Chinese] mention was made of possible Chinese Communist participation.” Now, however, the OIR concluded that following the , China had decided to “pursue world recognition more actively...and consider seriously opportunities outside Asia to play upon colonial problems.”25 Bandung would offer an excellent chance to do so. The OIR predicted that China would attend, and would “miss no opportunities to turn conference emotions against the US and to present subtly its own case as leader and liberator of colonial peoples.”26 The OCB deduced that the prospect of Chinese participation altered the equation. For one thing, an active role by Beijing turned the “anticolonialism” theme to Communist advantage. As one official put it in a report entitled Exposing the Nature of the Afro-Asian Conference, “The Afro-Asian Confer- ence, with Chinese Communist participation will [thus] present the grimly amusing spectacle of world communism holding itself up as the protagonist of local nationalist movements and anti-colonialism.”27 Moreover, American options for “turning [this plan] against them” were limited. Because the United States would not be present, Washington could only approach Bandung on a “moral and psychological level [from which to] expose the Soviet colonial- imperial pattern which uses China as its agent in Asia.” The OCB passed its findings to the United States Information Agency (USIA) so that appropriate material could be produced in an effort to “discredit the Conference and create an atmosphere that it is a Communist propaganda maneuver.”

23. Report “Attachment B,” OCB Staff, no date given, attached to Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 11 January 1955. 24. Report “Attachment A,” “Reactions,” 10 January 1955. 25. Appendix to Intelligence Report 6797, Office of Intelligence Research (OIR), 20 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85,f:“OCB092.3 (9),” DDEL. 26. Intelligence Report 6797, OIR, 20 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO- NSC, Box 85,f:“OCB092.3 (9),” DDEL. 27. Memorandum, “Exposing the Nature of the Afro-Asian Conference,” McNair to OCB, 21 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85,f:“OCB092.3 (9),” DDEL. 876 : diplomatic history

As of the end of January, though, this psychological war-gaming awaited two things. One, an ongoing policy review at the State Department left the U.S. stance on the conference in limbo, and prevented a decision on how to “use . . . available materials on Soviet colonialism in connection with [Bandung].”28 Two, although Chinese participation had fixed Bandung on Washington’s radar, the outlines of the conference agenda and possible American responses remained blurry. OCB official Kenneth Landon reported on February 7 that things were coming into focus. A list of possible Bandung agenda items, for Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 example, gleaned from consular reports worldwide, included colonialism, nuclear matters, economic development, color discrimination, and Zhou Enlai’s “five principles.”29 These suggested that the agenda would be deliberately “non- controversial...so that it can be made to appear...that when Afro-Asian nations meet together without the ‘war-mongering’ Western democracies that peace prevails and aggression ends.”30 The OCB sketched several American options in reply. The means for execut- ing them were few; Landon pointed out that the United States “will have to work through its friends, or [through] propaganda [or] public statement.” One of these was a high-level goodwill statement and hope for political and economic progress for the attendees. Another was “saturation” anti-Communist USIA programs in “affected countries.” Finally, advance talks with friendly attendees could turn them into American proxies: “[Consultation would] enable them...to unmask the real purposes of the Communists at the conference and...disturb [its] pseudo, peaceful, and unanimous atmosphere. In the inevi- table discussions on colonialism they should be prepared to raise questions regarding the new colonialism of communism.”31 This strategy governed U.S. moves regarding Bandung through February and March to the eve of the conference. At its Bangkok meeting, the SEATO Council sent salutations to Bandung, and demonstrated the “transmitting” role of the friendly Asian governments. The statement asked Pakistan, , and the Philippines to convey “cordial greetings to the other 17 free countries” at Bandung, as well as a shared dedication to peace, equal rights, and self- determination.32 This reference to free countries, conveyed through SEATO, sought subtly to reinforce the point about “Communist colonialism.” Channel- ing that point through SEATO gave at least an outside chance at pulling off a

28. OCB 337 Minutes, OCB, 31 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85,f:“OCB092.3 (9),” DDEL. 29. Interestingly, the document refers to the “five” as belonging to Zhou Enlai but for reasons unexplained does not note their other identity, and their true origin, as Nehru’s pancheela. 30. Memorandum, Landon to OCB, 7 February 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO- NSC, Box 85,f:“OCB092.3 (10),” DDEL. 31. Ibid. The proxies would “expose the difference between [Zhou’s] words of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and the deeds of aggression” and comment on nuclear arms tests and on Formosa. 32. Telegram, Dulles to Eisenhower, 26 February 1955, Dulles-Herter Series, Whitman File, Box 4, f: “Dulles February 1955 (1),” DDEL. Cold War II : 877 very hard sell. As even Dulles would later note, for Nehru and many if not most in the Third World, Soviet “colonialism” lacked the racial dimension necessary to qualify for the c-word.33 The message also had the additional virtue, in U.S. eyes, of not committing Washington to economic aid to the countries concerned. This was an important hedge. Anything more substantial regarding American aid could have unpleasant ramifications for the United States. It might be construed as unsubtle bribery; it might hurt feelings, both among any slighted Bandung conferees and elsewhere in the Third World, notably Latin Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 America. Moreover, it was not at all clear that Congress would ultimately approve whatever foreign aid promises the administration might make. Finally, such rhetoric “on the cheap” underlined the basic message that the United States, uninvited, would accept that status, and remain uninvolved. The effort to project the image of a helpful, hands-off, supportive-yet- resolute United States nonetheless ran some risks. Among them was the possi- bility that despite the conference’s purposely nonpolemical agenda, Nehru or Zhou might have other plans. Either was capable of generating turbulence at the meeting. Another risk was the timing. As Bandung drew nearer, the adminis- tration pondered whether 1955 was a window of opportunity or an omen of failure regarding U.S. relations with “neutralist” countries. UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge wrote a skeptical Senator William Knowland that currents were running in American favor: “In the last two years the Soviet propaganda output has declined both in quantity and effectiveness...[and this] has regis- tered even among the so-called Cold War neutrals.”34 The president was unconvinced. His NSC on April 7 discussed the growth of nationalism and neutralism, and what this meant for the United States in the Cold War: The President referred to the widespread growth of nationalism which had become obvious in the world since the end of the war. He said that it was very alarming...howtheCommunists had managed to identify themselves and their purposes with this emergent nationalism. The US, on other hand, had failed to utilize this new spirit of nationalism in its own interest....The Communists seemed to be more successful in this area than we did.35 The discussion soon turned to the Bandung Conference. CIA Director Allen Dulles stated that “a very odd assortment” of twenty-nine nations would attend, whose “nearest common denominator...wasarecent experience of Western imperialism.” While “it was very obvious that the Conference would present

33. Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 170–71. 34. Letter, Lodge to Knowland, 15 March 1955, Administration Series, Whitman File, Box 24, f: “Lodge, Henry Cabot 1955 (4),” DDEL. 35. Minutes of Discussion, NSC, 7 April 1955, NSC Series, Whitman File, Box 6,f:“244th Meeting of the NSC, April 7, 1955,” DDEL. 878 : diplomatic history many opportunities for exploitation in Communist propaganda...theoutlook for the West was perhaps not as pessimistic as it might seem” due to the presence of pro-Western Asian countries. Preparations by OCB “to counteract hostility to the U.S.,” and the possibility of a battle between Nehru and Zhou, also tempered the risk. Whether Lodge was correct that the Communists had blown their chance, or Eisenhower that the United States had missed its own, the administration had come to a decision. Where nationalism, neutralism, and communism met at Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 Bandung, the United States would “stress an offensive rather than defensive approach.”36 This would entail “taking steps...notonly to prevent the Com- munists from exploiting the Conference to [our] detriment, but also to turn the Conference to the positive benefit of the free world.”37 An OCB “gameplan” of March 28 prescribed these steps. The plan started with the work of the OIR and the working group in assessing “Communist intentions, and [giving] suggestions for countering [them].”38 These were distributed to U.S. officials abroad, with instructions to consult with invitee governments and friendly attendees. Regard- ing the latter, “efforts will be made to exploit [the Bangkok message]” through the Thai, Pakistani, and Philippine delegations. Other U.S. posts—notably in Japan and —were working along similar lines. At home, members of the American press were briefed, which “appear[s] to have been instrumental in setting the public tone.” Plans for USIA coverage abroad had also been put in place. Finally, the March 28 document notes that the British embassy in Wash- ington shared a copy of its instructions to UK diplomats regarding Bandung, and U.S. missions were authorized to discuss the conference with them. Within the administration, a number of key issues remained unaddressed. Would these “offensive rather than defensive” backroom maneuvers be too subtle to succeed? Or would the use of Asian proxies be seen as American manipulation—and thus not subtle enough? Perhaps most important, what if any public position should Washington take to complement its indirect efforts? Given the “discreet” offensive strategy, any high-level engagement would require great care. Nelson Rockefeller, the administration figure most con- nected to foreign aid, colonial, and Third World issues, had proposed in March that Eisenhower give a speech on these issues “before Bandung.” John Foster Dulles differed. The timing of such a speech, he argued, was too tricky. If given too close to the conference, it would be perceived as an American attempt to interfere. In addition, the American position on these issues had still not taken firm shape, certainly not firm enough to write “a major Presidential speech [on]

36. Extract, OCB 337 Minutes, 1 April 1955; Attached to Memorandum, Staats to Villard, 28 March 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85,f:“OCB092.3 (10),” DDEL. 37. Memorandum, Staats to Villard, 28 March 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO- NSC, Box 85,f:“OCB092.3 (10),” DDEL. 38. Ibid. Cold War II : 879 subjects which are highly controversial...delicate to deal with...[and] which are not yet fully resolved at the highest levels.”39 As a compromise, it was decided that the administration’s weekly press conference would state the American position: praise for the “constructive progress...being made toward the elimination of colonialism.” This was to accompany Washington’s central theme in its approach to Bandung: “The only powers today that are seeking to extend a dominating control over other peoples in the time-worn pattern of colonialism are the Communist powers.”40 If the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 methods were subtle, the message was not: Western colonialism was dying a natural death, while “eastern” colonialism was spreading. Even this caused Dulles some discomfort. Mere days before Bandung, he continued to wonder about the wisdom of a high-level pronouncement. Any such that touched on the subject of economic aid to Asia, for example, “will have people think we are going to have a massive and they will get their hopes too high,” and would play badly in non-Asian countries which would feel slighted. More- over, Dulles thought that Rockefeller’s recommendations regarding colonialism were fairly empty, and blind to the racial subtext: “[Dulles] said colonialism to the Asians means rule of whites over blacks.”41 Once again, the inklings surfaced about Race issues as factors that needed to be dealt with along with regional strategy, inklings that were suggestive but not decisive. Soon, however, this inevitable racial dimension of the Bandung Con- ference agenda presented a notable complication to the Eisenhower adminis- tration’s efforts at image management. African-American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell made this complication manifest. As early as January, Powell had called on Washington to send a diverse, multiracial “all-America” team to represent the United States at the meeting.42 He offered to attend, pointing out that his “presence there as an American Negro will do much to counteract any propaganda...concerning the United States and its minority problem.”43 The Eisenhower administration feared that a hip-shooter like Powell might derail the subtle campaign it had planned. The congressman’s unsolicited advice before the conference was one thing; his unscripted role while there quite another, scarier one. Powell ultimately traveled to Bandung, sponsored by Ebony and Jet magazines, in a kind of freelance diplomacy. To the administration’s relief his presence did its plans no harm, and in the end arguably did them some good.44

39. Memorandum, Dulles to Adams, 31 March 1955, White House Memoranda Series, JFDP, Box 3, f: “White House Correspondence—General 1955 (4),” DDEL. 40. Memorandum, Rockefeller to Adams, 6 April 1955,OF116-FF, White House Central File (WHCF), Box 592,f:“116-FF Asia-Africa Conference (Bandung Conference),” DDEL. 41. Memorandum of Telephone Call, Dulles and Hagerty, 11 April 1955, Telephone Calls General Series, JFDP, Box 10, f: “Tel. Calls—General March 7–August 29, 1955 (3),” DDEL. 42. Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York, 1991), 238–39. 43. Telegram, Powell to Eisenhower, 6 April 1955. 44. For a trenchant account of Powell’s Bandung trip, see Fraser, “Dilemma,” 133–37. 880 : diplomatic history Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 2: In a shot that captures the strategy of cooperation between Washington’s Asian allies and the American media, General Carlos Romulo (left), the Philippines delegate to the conference, is shown conferring with journalist Norman Cousins during a session. (Source: Bettmann/CORBIS.)

At any rate, as the Powell drama was unfolding on the eve of the conference, it did not influence Washington’s chosen public relations course. Eisenhower both approved Dulles’s approach and soothed his concerns, instructing his secretary of state to address the Bandung Conference informally during an April 17 press conference, in profoundly banal language. The statement lauded Bandung as a venue for the affirmation of peaceful rather than military solutions to Asian crises, naming the ongoing Chinese offshore islands controversy as one such. This, in turn, would advance the cause of “social and economic advance- ment...responsible self-government, and durable national independence” beyond Asia alone.45 The Bandung Conference opened April 18 and proceeded, on the whole, collegially; its course has been sketched elsewhere.46 For its participants, the event carried a historic importance of almost immeasurable dimensions; as the Philippines’ chief delegate—and the United States’ chief onsite ally—General Carlos Romulo put it, “Bandung was...ahistorical pageant, symbolizing the coming of age of Asia and Africa.”47 The novelist Richard Wright, who attended,

45. Quotes from Eisenhower-Dulles meeting, in Press Release, Dulles (via Hagerty), 17 April 1955, Dulles-Herter Series, Whitman File, Box 5, f: “J.F. Dulles April 1955 (1),” DDEL. 46. See footnote 4 above. 47. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, 35. Cold War II : 881 averred that “this [meeting was] something new, something beyond Left and Right. Looked at in terms of history, these nations represented races and religions, vague but potent forces.”48 However, Bandung’s influence on the Eisenhower administration’s diplomatic thinking has been largely overlooked. Bandung pro- duced few of the anti-Western broadsides that had so concerned U.S. officials. The prospective “neutralist” bloc championed by Nehru got little traction, the Communist delegates were fairly restrained, and Zhou Enlai struck a subdued tone. Finally, the friendly Asian countries followed the script. The final confer- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 ence communiqué included resolutions that barely qualified, in Western eyes, as nuisances. The administration’s immediate post-Bandung analysis focused on these developments. With the proviso that much would depend on how the confer- ence’s issues were subsequently pursued, the OIR offered some preliminary conclusions. First, the conference showed “that there is an Asian-African consensus...strong enough to discourage Communists, neutralists, or anti- Communists from splitting it.” Yet “no single regional leader emerged,” not- withstanding either Nehru’s or Zhou’s best efforts. The meeting constituted a psychological milestone as well. The prospect of Afro-Asian partnership, either ad hoc or formal, the assertive unity of the pro-Western Asian countries, and the end of “a lingering sense of inferiority” might combine to create a stronger and friendlier region, even one “more ready to cooperate with the West.”49 Dulles, extending this analysis in a report to the cabinet on April 29, declared that the conference was on balance a gift to Washington. With a few small changes, he said, its final communiqué “was a document which we ourselves could subscribe to [and he] listed about eight points of [it] which were consistent with our own foreign policy.” Better still, this went beyond the public American stance; the secretary said that “even [the Bandung document’s] references to colonialism were in accord with what we feel in our hearts (though we are unable to say them publicly).”50 Dulles stated that Bandung was a win in other respects as well: “The Conference was a very severe reverse for Mr. Nehru...Zhou [by contrast] achieved a certain personal success”—but did so only by striking a conciliatory, not confrontational, pose. The administration had feared that Zhou would present the United States as aggressor and China as liberator in East Asia, “and thus gain a green light to...start violence in the Formosa area. Just the opposite occurred.” This laid the groundwork for a cease-fire in the ongoing offshore islands crisis, and even positioned the United States favorably in related negotiations. Finally, Dulles reported that as per the U.S. plan, “the

48. Wright, The Color Curtain, 13. 49. Report, OIR no. 6903, “Results of the Bandung Conference: A Preliminary Analysis,” 27 April 1955, attached to Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 12 May 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 86,f:“OCB092.3 [file #2](2) April–November 1955,” DDEL. 50. Minutes, Cabinet Meeting, 29 April 1955, Cabinet Series, Whitman File, Box 5,f: “Cabinet Meeting of April 29, 1955,” DDEL. 882 : diplomatic history Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021

Figure 3: Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai shakes hands with Pakistan Prime Minister Mohammed Ali at the end of the Bandung Conference. (Source: Bettmann/CORBIS.) friendly Asian countries put on an amazing performance at Bandung with a teamwork and coordination of strategy which was highly satisfying.”51 This early assessment framed deeper reflection in the following weeks. A May 2 analysis agreed that the “most gratifying aspect...wasthevigorous and effective” free world position articulated by friendly attendees. Moreover, all attendees shared in “a marked enhancement...of their own self-esteem as Asians and Africans [but which was not] unfriendly to the western and white nations.” Best of all, thanks to the pro-Western Asian participants, any reference to colonialism condemned not only its Western version but “the more recent evil of Communist colonialism” as well.52 A May 11 CIA memo further enu- merates “Post-Bandung Thoughts.” Like Dulles, the CIA found that the “Western friends” had done “a most admirable job” and were proud of it; indeed, “they were inclined to take credit for the fact that the conference was not a propaganda triumph for Chou En-lai” nor, as feared, for Nehru. U.S. actions should now take advantage of the “psychological climate [the pro-West powers] created at Bandung,” to avoid any “apparent intransigence on our part,” and “to find a formula for restoring Nehru’s pride.”53 The U.S. embassy in , the

51. Ibid. Observers outside the government, such as Dulles’s friend Freddie Mayer, per- ceived the same: “I believe we should seriously consider capitalizing on, to our future as well as our present advantage, the surprising independence, wisdom, and courage of many of the Bandung conferees.” Mayer to Dulles, 23 April 1955, folder “Re: Bandung Afro-Asian Con- ference 1955,” Box 89, John Foster Dulles Papers, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton, New Jersey. 52. Report, CA-7532, “Preliminary Evaluation of Results of Asian-African Conference,” 2 May 1955, attached to Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 12 May 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 86,f:“OCB092.3 [file #2](2),” DDEL. 53. Memorandum, “Post-Bandung Thoughts,” Bissell (CIA) to OCB, 11 May 1955, Plan- ning Coordination Group Series (PCG), WHO-NSC, Box 2, f: “Bandung (4),” DDEL. It bears mention that not all evaluations were so sanguine; Lebanese Ambassador to the United States Charles Malik thought that Zhou Enlai and to a lesser extent Nehru were the real “winners” at Cold War II : 883 closest American eyes to the action, seconded this evaluation of Bandung as a Western win and explored its larger ramifications.54 In key respects, Bandung seemed to vindicate the Eisenhower team’s basic approach to the Third World: a focus on covert and/or psychological opera- tions, hints at economic aid, the use of pro-American proxies, and where pos- sible a light touch.55 Bandung repaid this approach in spades. Those aspects of the conference that the administration sought to orchestrate went as planned; and even those parts over which Washington had no control, such as Zhou’s Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 conduct, redounded to American advantage as well. However, there is another aspect of Bandung that is of equally interesting, and arguably greater, impor- tance. After the conference, some American officials began to reflect on its deeper lessons. As a result, Bandung initiated an ultimately incomplete shift in the administration’s long-term diplomatic thinking. The first evidence of this shift took the form of renewed interest in neutral- ism. Although not a new concern, by the mid-1950s U.S. observers noted that neutralism was evolving. After Bandung, the Planning Coordination Group (PCG) began a study of the issue in Europe and Asia, and of possible U.S. responses.56 Bandung seemed to show that these were not all unpleasant. Neu- tralism might be a Western liability, but one perhaps less grave than once feared. As “the ultimate psychological warrior of the Eisenhower team,” C. D. Jackson, put it, “No question—neutralism is a Soviet trump card but I doubt that it is the Ace of Spades.”57 While Jackson, as a media man, could always be counted on for a colorful assessment, his relationship with Eisenhower suggests that the presi- dent put great stock in his analysis. Walter Hixson notes that, in the words of one administration official, Eisenhower had “enormous confidence in C. D. Jackson in the field of opinion-molding and propaganda and international

and after Bandung, although he was unable to persuade Dulles or other American analysts of this. Memorandum of Conversation, 5 May 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957 21: 96. 54. Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 12 May 1955. One of these ramifications was a lesson in what might be called Orientalist psychoanalysis. The conference swelled Asian self-esteem, and, as a result, “Asia’s attitude in the future may stem somewhat less from a defensive mechanism originating in an inferiority complex and its attitude may be somewhat less anti- western and less emotional.” The second was that “the free world scored a considerable substantive success, both positively and negatively.” That is, the insertion of pro-Western points, such as the equation of Soviet communism with “new colonialism,” and the dilution of Communist ones, were both Western victories. Third, both Zhou’s “tremendous triumph” and the “personal failure of Nehru” were real; for the latter, “[he] in the near future cannot again speak with the same weight he claimed in the past.” Finally, put simply, the administration’s plan had worked: “The careful planning and effective briefing of our friends by the Department and Embassies, and ...theskillful maneuvers of the pro-Western delegations.” 55. See Andrew L. Johns and Kathryn Statler, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the of the Cold War, 1953–1961 (New York, 2006). 56. Memorandum, Rockefeller to Barbour, 26 May 1955, PCG, WHO-NSC, Box 2,f: “Bandung (4),” DDEL. 57. Letter, Jackson to Luce, 13 May 1955, C. D. Jackson Papers, Box 71,f:“LuceH/C, 1955 (5),” DDEL. The “ultimate” quote is from Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propa- ganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York, 1997), 22. 884 : diplomatic history actions and reactions.”58 As a student of international opinion dynamics and as an architect of the American campaign of psychological Cold Warfare, Jackson sensed the converging currents of neutralism and nationalism in the Third World. He, and the PCG personnel conducting the study of neutralism world- wide, embodied the first phase of the administration’s rethinking of the post- Bandung global landscape. The PCG study characterized neutralism as more problem than opportunity, a “sizable” problem that “is likely to become more serious with the passage of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 time.”59 The study’s findings regarding Asia and Africa bore the stamp of the administration’s Bandung experience. Afro-Asian neutralism, in this view, com- bined power politics and collective psychology. The former reflected a rational position for weaker nations whose interests could be best advanced by diplo- matic negotiation, avoidance of armed crisis, and a balance of superpowers rather than dominance by either one. The latter—the psychological aspect of Afro-Asian neutralism—had different implications: “Asian and African nations . . . feel that they are still...exploitable and that, despite their formal indepen- dence, they are not yet masters of their own destinies.” In addition, “color consciousness” strongly influenced Third World neutralism; “this sensitivity about race is one of the chief obstacles to sympathy with the West.” Indeed, “neutralism is widely justified on the ground that the racial intolerance of the Western powers is just as bad as anything [done] by the Communist bloc.” All told, because these “questions of nationalism and anticolonialism are closely related to [Afro-Asian] neutralism,” that neutralism was a rather more intricate challenge in the Third World than in Europe.60 The report recommended that U.S. policy on neutralism be drafted on a country-by-country basis, with a basic Bandung template of patience, working behind the scenes, and “doing no harm.”61 Yet this was not the end of the conference’s repercussions on American thinking. These first appeared imme- diately after the meeting but peaked a half-year later. Cumulatively, these “lessons of Bandung” reoriented the administration’s analysis—if not, ulti- mately, its actions—on American relations with the Third World and its European rulers. The big “lessons” were twofold. First, the global equation was changing; and second, the evolving climate offered the United States an opportunity. The changes were not due to Bandung alone; the Indochina settlement at Geneva, among other factors, also contributed to them. In Jackson’s words, “Thanks to Bandung and a few acts [by] major allies, it is now possible to talk [about] certain

58. Abbott Washburn, Oral History Interview, DDEL, cited in Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 22. 59. Report, Murphy to Rockefeller, 19 August 1955, PCG, WHO-NSC, Box 2,f: “Bandung (1),” DDEL. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. Cold War II : 885 delicate subjects, such as colonialism.”62 According to one official speaking in retrospect, “Eisenhower’s feeling was that the era of colonialism had passed and the best thing the Western powers could do would be to get out of there.”63 The president had occasionally—and delicately—urged the Europeans on this point even before taking office. In the months around Bandung, he continued these efforts with somewhat greater vigor, attempting unsuccessfully “to convince that colonialism was ended.”64 Bandung did not, of course, produce a conclusive epiphany of American Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 clarity and resolution. But it did prompt officials to rethink the situation. As Jackson wrote that autumn, “The U.S. has definitely not sorted out its own thinking, torn between a) our instinctive anticolonial feelings and b) playing ball with our colonial allies....Thecombination has made our policy contradictory, confusing, and at times almost irresponsible.”65 The context raised the stakes of this incoherence; for example, Jackson went on, at the United Nations “the ghost of colonialism hovers over the chamber at all times, and is in complete control of the thought processes of the Asians, Mideasterners, Africans, and Latin Americans—and with reverse English, of the Europeans.” If Jackson was correct, the best U.S. policy would be to be vocally against colonialism, and simultaneously for orderly decolonization. Nor was he alone in his assessment; as Powell told Dulles and Eisenhower at the end of 1955, “Colonialism and racialism must be eradicated as quickly as possible in our foreign policy....The timetable for freedom was no longer within our control—Bandung had stepped it up, and we [had] to move fast.”66 Powell, of course, had insufficient standing in Ike’s White House to dictate foreign policy. But it could not have escaped Dulles’s and Eisenhower’s notice that Powell had received a standing ovation on Capitol Hill upon his return from Bandung—or, more important, that Powell’s take meshed with their own in-house analyses.67 Indeed, Dulles, among others, was himself increasingly leaning in the same direction. At Geneva in late 1955, Dulles and British Foreign Minister Harold Macmillan discussed the idea of a “Bandung Confer- ence in reverse.”68 The meeting, to be organized by the colonial powers and the United States, would promote orderly, pro-Western decolonization, and would thereby “catch the imagination of the world and take the initiative away from the

62. Letter, Jackson to Rockefeller, 26 April 1955, CDJP, Box 91, f: “N. Rockefeller,” DDEL. 63. Oral History, Andrew Goodpaster, OH-477, 35, Oral History Collection, DDEL. 64. Memorandum of Conversation, Eisenhower and Malcolm Muir, 25 May 1955, Diary Series, Whitman File, Box 5, f: “Whitman Diary May 1955 (2),” DDEL. 65. Letter, Jackson to Jessup, 5 October 1955, folder “Jessup, J.,” Box 63, CDJP, DDEL. 66. Letter, Powell to Eisenhower, 8 December 1955, Subject Series, WHCF (Confidential File), Box 70, f: “Department of State November–December 1955,” DDEL. 67. On Powell’s reception upon returning to Congress, see Singh, Black Is a Country, 178. 68. Brands recounts the short career of this idea, but a brief recap suggests its larger meaning. H. W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960 (New York, 1989), 117–18. 886 : diplomatic history

Soviet Communists.”69 Dulles and Macmillan agreed to explore this possibility. Dulles lobbied within the administration, winning the enthusiasm of the president himself.70 As 1956 dawned, an “Anglo-American Bandung” was one medium through which the United States would put itself “on the right side of the anticolonial issue worldwide.”71 However, taking such a side would unavoid- ably complicate relations with European allies. All parties perceived this; British officials such as Anthony Eden, for example, saw the implications of the “reverse” proposal. Dean Rusk at the Rockefeller Foundation, as per Dulles’s Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 request, organized a study group that by April 1956 “was approaching a crys- tallization of ideas.”72 But its British counterpart could not say the same. Rusk noted that there was little evidence of British progress, and soon afterward the initiative was dropped. London’s foot-dragging was, in a narrow sense, well-founded: it was a defense of British prerogative in response to the post-Bandung shifts in Ameri- can thinking. A January 1956 Policy Planning Staff (PPS) think piece put it in terms of a new American dilemma: “It is universally admitted that the colonial eraisdead...yetinthecurrent phase of the Cold War we [are] saddled, in the minds of millions, with the onus of colonialism.”73 The United States must recognize that liberation could allow Communist forces to create geopolitical vacuums, but must also show itself sympathetic to the anticolonial movement. The British, of course, had no access to PPS documents, but hardly needed it to detect the evolving U.S. stance. The Anglo-American “Declaration of Wash- ington” of February 1956, which outlined it and obliged London to pay it at least lip service, was one hint. Another came in April, when in a speech the president stated that “Bandung...bears witness to Emerson’s vision” of shots heard round the world.74 Three months later such shots could be heard in

69. Memorandum of Conversation, Dulles and Macmillan, 16 November 1955;and Memorandum of Conversation, Dulles and Lange, 27 October 1955, Subject Series, JFDP, Box 7, f: “Policy of Independence for Colonial Peoples,” DDEL. 70. Memorandum, Dulles to Hoover, 23 November 1955, White House Memoranda Series, Box 3, f: “White House Correspondence—General 1955 (1)”; and Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, Dulles and Rusk, 21 November 1955, Telephone Calls Series, JFDP, Box 4, f: “Tel. Conversations—General September 1–December 30, 1955 (3),” DDEL. 71. Others included revision of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC) and renewed consideration of Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood. Memorandum, Hanes to McCardle, 6 December 1955, Special Assistants Chronological Series, JFDP, Box 9,f: “Macomber-Hanes Chron. December 1955 (3),” DDEL. The quote specifically refers to the AACC revision. 72. Memorandum of Conversation, Dulles and Rusk, 6 April 1956, Subject Series, JFDP, Box 7, f: “Policy of Independence for Colonial Peoples,” DDEL. 73. Report, “U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem of Social-Political Change,” Policy Planning Staff (PPS), 28 January 1956, Record Group (RG) 59 Lot Files—PPS 1956, Box 106, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland (USNA). 74. Speech, Eisenhower to Editors Society, Washington, DC, 21 April 1956,RG59 Lot Files—PPS 1956, Box 106, NA. Cold War II : 887

London as well, fired not only from Bandung but from Washington.75 It bears noting that the Emerson reference was a reply in kind—though perhaps an accidental one—to some of the conference rhetoric itself. The opening cer- emony of the conference had been timed to fall as close as possible to the 180th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord. At that ceremony, Sukarno read an excerpt from Longfellow’s “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” and explicitly named the American Revolution as an inspiration to all peoples seeking to throw off the yoke of foreign domination.76 Such gestures, in both Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 directions, could not overcome the suspicions of realpolitik—but they surely helped Bandung to reverberate in Washington, and thus to stir the deeper shift in American thinking that the conference produced. However, for a solid year and more after Bandung, that American shift was found far more in word and thought than deed. Some officials urged more. Lodge, for example, wrote the president in June of the urgent need for a “New Anti-Colonial Statement By You,” including a timetable for self-government in Western-administered areas, to be “followed up by a US sponsored resolution in the next General Assembly, which should appeal not only to the Latin Ameri- cans but to all the Bandung nations which voted against ‘colonialism in all its forms.’”77 This would allow Washington to capitalize on cresting anticolonial- ism, within geopolitical limits. As Jackson put it in July, “I think the US believes...that there is a world anticolonial trend, so strong and so vital that colonialism as we have known it is through.”78 As Jackson wrote, discerning the implications of this trend for U.S. allies in Europe and the Third World was still an abstract exercise. But not by much; mere weeks later, events would render them concrete, when on July 29 Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. That crisis has been well covered elsewhere.79 Its relevance here lies in the way that its disposition had been foretold in the lessons the administration chose to learn after Bandung the year before. To learn, that is, but not fully to apply—until Nasser forced the issue at Suez. The need to alter

75. The British embassy in Washington reported that the changes in American thinking were a mixed bag. Some voices, including influential commentators such as Marguerite Higgins, were now blasting colonialism more stridently: “[Although] the State Department [also] has its share of historic American anticolonial feeling but it has been our impression that there is an increasing understanding ...ofthetrueposition of [the European] colonies. Independence before a colony is ready for it is recognized as a danger.” British Embassy- Washington to Foreign Office (FO), March 1956,FO371/120328, United Kingdom National Archives (UKNA), Kew, England. 76. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, 16. 77. Memorandum, Lodge to Eisenhower, 26 June 1956, General Correspondence and Memoranda Series, JFDP, Box 2, f: “Strictly Confidential—L (2),” DDEL. 78. Letter, Jackson to Heilperin, 18 July 1956, CDJP, Box 69,f:“Log1956 (3),” DDEL. 79. Notable recent works include Fawaz Gerges, The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955–1967 (Boulder, CO, 1994); Ray Takeyh, The Origins of the : The U.S., Britain, and Nasser’s , 1953–57 (New York, 2000); Cole Kingseed, Eisenhower and the of 1956 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1995); and William R. Louis and Roger Owen, eds., Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences (New York, 1989). 888 : diplomatic history

American policy in response, in both tactics and strategy and toward both old allies and new nation neutrals, was signaled by the conference but only enacted in the crisis.

The Bandung Conference represented the crossroads of several key Cold War trends: the old specter of communism and the newer one of neutralism; the vectors of anticolonialism and Third World nationalism; and a stirring con- sciousness of changes in inter- and intranational race relations. As such it offers Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 an opportunity to probe the Eisenhower administration’s handling of these challenges at a crucial stage. Concerning the conference itself, that handling was at least a partial success, and arguably much more. The administration took the conference seriously from early on, enumerated its goals for it, and sketched a strategy for achieving them. That strategy moved in step with the administra- tion’s preferred diplomatic dance, using some of its main moves: working from behind the scenes via proxies, emphasizing psychological maneuver, and orches- trating low-cost, light-touch operations to advance U.S. interests, in this case apparently successfully so. In another sense, of course, Bandung was a missed opportunity. After the conference, when Eisenhower, Dulles, Lodge, and Rockefeller realized to what extent it had changed the global landscape, their efforts to react accordingly ran aground on British intransigence, American inertia, and fear of communism spreading in an unstable Third World. Bandung helped to prompt the American conclusion that European colonialism was becoming more a Western liability than an asset. But the abstract conclusion did not produce concrete action. Thus the missed chance: the Eisenhower administration deduced that Bandung opened the way for an ultimately necessary break with European colonialism, but did not follow this logic to its fullest extent—and did not, in the end, act until the proverbial “moment of truth” at Suez. Indeed, the full dimensions of that moment might have taken a much differ- ent shape, had the administration acted vigorously on the insights that Bandung stirred before it. Eisenhower, for example, although he had somewhat better luck with Macmillan, never was able to persuade Churchill of the need to seize the initiative in matters of decolonization. Dulles’s “reverse” conference never occurred. Even after Suez, Congress remained skeptical of the utility of engag- ing the Third World, declining, for example, to approve Eisenhower’s foreign aid initiatives at the funding level and duration the president sought.80 Perhaps most tellingly, the administration’s “default” setting in decolonization crises from Vietnam to the Congo remained support of the metropoles in the name of

80. Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), 137–38, cited in Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation-Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 27. Cold War II : 889 stability, and skepticism of Third World nationalism in the name of anticom- munism. While from one angle this may merely have reflected Washington’s inclination to place what it saw as the safer bet, from another it suggests that in doing so the administration did less with the lessons of Bandung than it might have. The import of Bandung, however, goes beyond the retrospective diplomatic and tactical score card of the Eisenhower administration. The broader implica- tion of the episode connects it to the events of the next two years. As Borstel- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 mann suggests, the conference was part of a sea-change in international and race relations in 1954–1955. Extending the time line a bit further to include Suez in October 1956, Ghanaian independence in March 1957, and the Little Rock crisis in September 1957 only confirms the concept. This cluster of events, which many contemporary Western observers saw as being distantly related at best, looks in hindsight rather different. Takentogether, these events sufficiently altered the dynamics of racial, national, and global relations to mark off distinc- tive phases of the postwar era. As analyzed in the flourishing literature on Race and foreign affairs, they offer an opportunity to begin rethinking the periodiza- tion of the Cold War. Although much work remains to be done before any such synthesis can take comprehensive shape, a basic framework can be discerned: an early phase of racial, colonial, and ideological repression, followed by a phase of widespread though incomplete liberation. Studies of Race in the first decade of the Cold War are close to unanimous in their conclusions regarding the effect of the latter on the former. The end of the postwar flux brought a hardening of the ideo- logical struggle between West and East. By 1950, the apparent failure of had raised the stakes of every crisis, whether at home or abroad— whether launched by a North Korean Communist or a Wisconsin senator—and thus reduced the room to maneuver for those who had sought to turn the fleeting postwar moment into concrete societal progress. This included Race actors such as African-American and Third World activ- ists, who sought to harness forces unleashed by the war to achieve greater freedom. In the United States, African Americans won concessions from the Truman administration in their ongoing battle for civil rights. Abroad, a handful of colonial areas on the Asian periphery won independence in a “first wave” of decolonization. The moment of possibility, however, soon ended. After 1947, the Cold War began to circumscribe the political space activists had used to press for nonwhite freedom. The ensuing ideologically rigid decade saw a Western crackdown on leftism that crushed progressive-internationalist projects, including both white and nonwhite variants. Penny Von Eschen offers one of the better-known analyses in this vein, arguing that repression in the early Cold War destroyed two decades of black and pan-African progressive alliances. The NAACP’s decision, for example, to break its ties with “radical” organizations like the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs indicated the Cold War’s coercion away from a 890 : diplomatic history transnational left-black agenda. The harassment of figures such as Paul Robeson further confirmed the pattern. Other works, such as Carol Anderson’s excellent study, indicate the limitations of this argument, and suggest instead essentially that the Left left the African-American center, rather than vice versa. As far as the proposed reperiodization is concerned, though, both authors would agree on the basically repressive nature of the early Cold War regarding Race, while differing in their interpretations of that repression. This provides a serviceable sketch: the quick, high stakes of the late 1940s forced an ideological entrench- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 ment, the impact of which went far beyond the two competing poles to block most of the immediate avenues for reform of the racial-imperial regime. After early postwar progress, a pattern of repression obtained on grounds that given the global conflict, it was simply too risky at that moment to undertake any further, and potentially destabilizing, change. The moment, however, soon ended. Beginning in the mid-1950s, events such as Bandung began to transform the relationship between Race and the Cold War. The “Suez--Little Rock” time line noted above inaugurated what might be called the liberation phase of the Cold War, during which the dynamics of the superpower conflict served to advance rather than hinder progress on Race issues. The end of the early repression phase of the Cold War was neither comprehensive nor inevitable. As regimes from Nicaragua to Hungary would demonstrate, repression per se was alive and well. However, the Race-foreign affairs scholarship suggests that in much of the Third World, liberation replaced repression because the ideological freeze of the latter thawed between a pair of burning contradictions. One, civil rights agitation in the United States began to quicken, undermining the image of the “land of the free”—and convincing U.S. officials that this was a serious Cold War concern. Two, even “progressive” colonial administration, understood as a gradual devolution of European authority, became increasingly untenable as the Third World asserted the right of self-rule sooner rather than later. Baldly regressive colonial administra- tion in, for example, Algeria, only amplified calls for the end of metropolitan rule. By the late 1950s, both superpowers understood this development as virtually inevitable if not necessarily universally desirable. For Washington, Moscow, and the Third World alike, the crumbling of imperial rule represented a strategic opportunity. Both superpowers sought the loyalties of emerging peoples. The “Race-tinting” of U.S. and international affairs in the mid-1950s thus offered opportunities to savvy nationalists, who learned to use the changing dynamic of the Cold War to advance their interests instead of being oppressed by it. The superpowers, for various reasons, assented in most though not all such cases. This led, among other results, to the crowning achievement of the liberation phase: the wave of decolonization that swept through Africa around 1960. This is not to say that Washington was happy to see the Race boat rocked. At home and abroad, from Kinshasa to Greensboro to Sharpeville, Race risings threat- ened stability and were anathema to U.S. policy. Yet coexisting with this aversion Cold War II : 891 was resignation—a deeper sense that the era of racial-colonial liberation could be managed but not prevented. This is not to suggest an epiphanic conversion; the Eisenhower administra- tion’s subsequent conduct in the Third World, and its assessment of Communist specters everywhere abroad, show otherwise. It does, however, suggest the growing belief—among superpower officials, nonwhite activists, and Third World nationalists alike—that liberation was imminent despite the Cold War standoff. This conclusion, in turn, helped to make that liberation a self-fulfilling Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021 reality. The officials acceded to the changing dynamic; the activists and nation- alists acted on it. More research is required to trace how each group came to its conclusion, but little imagination is required to delineate the period beginning in the mid-1950s as one of Cold War liberation. The decolonization of sub- Saharan Africa, the legal triumph of the civil rights movement, the superpowers’ resignation to the establishment of a Third World neutralist bloc—these, together, represent a softening of previously hardened positions, as well as unmistakable Race progress. Neither of the two phases proposed above, of course, is free of contradictory counterexamples. Surely an African-American soldier who served both in Nor- mandy and in Korea had reason to feel “freer” in the latter case, despite the climate of repression; surely a black South African in 1960 had reason to doubt that an era of liberation was afoot. Likewise, the hybrid concept of capital-R Race poses definitional problems, relying as it does on thorny root terms like “race,” “decolonization,” and “Third World.” Nor will a scheme limited to only the two Cold War phases proposed here be likely to suffice; at least one other phase, one that can make sense of the postdecolonization and post-civil rights years, will have to be added to fill out the picture. However, these flaws can be lived with for the moment. They are important, but can be set aside for now as “exceptions to the rules” of the proposed phases of the Cold War. These phases, built on the implications of the Bandung episode and on the critical mass of recent Race-foreign relations literature, permit us to transcend the confines of that conflict—and to write the Cold War era, as the above scholarship has begun to do, as a truly international history. This is perhaps not a presently urgent matter, but it is an ultimately unavoid- able one. Consider the challenge this way: will the next generation’s Strategies of Containment—a widely assigned, universally referenced landmark published, say, in 2015—incorporate the implications of Bandung and other Race episodes, and the insights of the race-and-diplomacy literature? If so, how and which ones? If not, why not? It may be replied that Strategies and that literature are apples and oranges, and so the specific question is moot. But the general one is not. As our grasp of DuBois’s insight evolves, as the Cold War recedes, and as the dilemmas of globalization persist, it will become increasingly important to delineate the relation between Race and the Cold War, even if doing so prompts us to redraw the conventional picture of the latter. At the time of Bandung, the Eisenhower administration showed a willingness to do no less, and recognized at least the 892 : diplomatic history vague outlines of a watershed in the understanding and waging of the Cold War. The president himself, after all, compared Bandung to the shot heard round the world. The events of the next two years after it—and the hindsight of the next fifty—suggest that he was right, and that perhaps our own conceptualization of the Cold War ought also to change accordingly. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/30/5/867/353959 by guest on 30 September 2021