EISENHOWER'S NEW-LOOK POLICY, 1953-61 Also by Saki Dockrill

BRITAIN'S POLICY FOR WEST GERMAN REARMAMENT, 1950-1955

FROM PEARL HARBOR TO HIROSHIMA: The Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, 1941-45 (editor) Eisenhower's New-Look National Security Policy, 1953-61

Saki Dockrill Lecturer in War Studies King's College London First published in Great Britain 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-349-39735-8 ISBN 978-0-230-37233-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230372337

First published in the United Stares of America 1996 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Divi sion , 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-15880-4 Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dockrill, Saki. Eisenhower's new-Iook national security policy, 1953-61 / Saki DockriJI. p. crn. Includes bibliographical refcrcnces and index . ISBN 978-0-312-15880-4 I. -Military Policy . 2. United Stares . Dept , of Defense-Apprnpriations and expend itures . 3. United States-Foreign relations-Europe. 4. Europe-Foreign relations-United States. 5. United States-PoJitics and govemment-1953-1961. 6. Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David ), 1890-1969. 7. Deterrence (Strategy) I. TitJe. UA23.D596 1996 355' .03357309045-----{!c20 96-11588 elP e Saki Dockrill 1996 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st ed ition 1996 978-0-333-65655-6

All rightsreserved. No reproduction,copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitred save with written permi ssion or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, ur under the terms of any licence permitring limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tonenharn Court Road , London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal proseennon and civil claims for damages. 10 9 8 7 6 54321 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 To Michael This page intentionally left blank Contents

Acknowledgements x

Preface XII 1 Introduction 1 2 From Truman to Eisenhower 6 1. Defining American national security policy in 1945 8 2. The concept for national security policy 11 3. Eisenhower's assumption of the presidency 15 3 The Road to NSC 162/2 19 1. Eisenhower's initial guidelines 19 2. Attitudes towards the 25 3. Initial debates: objectives and options 29 4. The search for alternatives 33 5. Uneasy agreement on NSC 162/2 35 6. Re-appraisal ofNSC 162/2 42 4 The 'New Look' in Nuclear Deterrence Strategy 48 1. Truman's atomic strategy 48 2. The enunciation of '' 53 3. The nature of a future nuclear war 58 4. Problems of mutual deterrence 62 5. Eisenhower on massive retaliation and the earlier ~~s ~

5 Collective Security in Western Europe 72 1. Dulles's 'LiHle Re-Thinking' in January ]953 73 2. Dulles in Europe, January-February ]953 77 3. The stalemate in NATO's rearmament 79 4. The dilemma of US troop redeployment in Europe 82 5. 'The agonizing re-appraisal' in December 1953 85 6 The Challenge in Asia and Europe 89 l . European allied responses 89 2. Intractable allies 92 3. Faltering American leadership in NATO 95 4. NATO's acceptance ofthe new approach 98 5. The constraints of the 'new look': the Taiwan offshore crisis 102 6. Rising tensions in the Far East September 1954 to May 1955 106

VII viii Contents 7 Aspirations for Atomic Peace 116 I. National security requirements in FY 1956 118 2. Greater commitments to the defence of the free world 123 3. The US sphere of influence 126 4. The bomber gap 129 5. 'In response to a universal urge' 131 6. Anxieties over the 137 7. Eisenhower's 'open skies' proposal 139 8 The Indirect Approach and Liberation 149 I. Covert operations 150 2. Liberation by peaceful means 153 3. A test case: Hungary, 1956 158 4. The re-appraisal of liberation policy 162 9 The Soviet Economic and Technical Challenge 168 I. Mutual security and forcign aid 168 2. Entering the missile age 177 3. The need for balancing defencc requirements 182 4. A dissatisfied Pentagon 185 10 Facing the Nuclear Equation 191 I.A 'sufficient' deterrence 192 2. The concept of 'Iimited war' 195 3. 'Limited war' : Eisenhower and his critics 200 4. Balancing risks 203 11 Realities Behind the New Look: Sputnik and After 210 I. Responses to the Sputnik shock 210 2. 'A maximum deterrent at a bearable cost'? 217 3. The mutual security programme 224 4. Covert operat ions and intelligence 230 12 Eisenhower's Final Struggles: Deterrence, Negotiations and Defence Budgeting 235 I. The case of Lebanon : an abberation of the new look? 236 2. The Taiwan offshore crisis re-visited 240 3. The new in Berlin 246 4. From the talks to the abortive Paris summit 251 5. 'Li mited war' re-visited 256 6. Defence budgets: Eisenhower's final struggle 259 13 Conclusion 267 Contents IX Appendix 1 US Military Personnel Strength, 1945-60 281 Appendix 2 The Personnel in the US Army, 1953-61 282 Appendix 3 US Military Manpower, 1958-60 283 Appendix 4 US Defence Expenditures, 1948-70 284 Appendix 5 US Armed Forces in Europe, 1945-93 285 Notes and References 286 Select Bibliography 371 Index 389 Acknowledgements

I ~ould like to express my thanks to Richard H. Immerman for his incisive and detailed comments on my original outline of this project and to David Rosenberg for kindly sending me a copy of a dec1assified memorandum by the , which I have cited in chapter 3 of this volume. I am also grateful to for discussing the Eisenhower administration and the New Look with me while he was a visiting profes• sor at the Queen's College, Oxford, in June 1993. On that occasion, he explained to me in more detail what he meant by the 'asymmetrical response' enshrined in the New Look. The generous support of the John M. Olin Fellow Foundation and of the Department of History at Yale University, where I was a fellow during the 1988-89 academic year, made it possible for me to undertake archival research on the Eisenhower administration in the United States. My research for this book has been facilitated by the American national secur• ity documents and the papers of the Eisenhower administration which are on microfiche at the LiddelI Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College, London. The War Studies Department at King's College has also provided me with research funds which enabled me to inspect various archives in Washington, DC, in 1992. My special thanks go to Lawrence Freedman, the head of the War Studies Department, for his warm encour• agement and invaluable support throughout. The research for this book was helped by a number of archivists and librarians at various institutions. I wish to acknowledge my thanks to: the archivists at the National Archives, Washington, DC; the Manuscript Division, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, ; the United States Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania; the Operational Archives Branches of the Naval Historical Centre, the Department of the Navy, Washington, DC; the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, Washington, DC. They were all efficient and courteous, which made my task much more pleasant. I am especially grateful to James Leyerzaph, archivist, and to Kathleen A. Struss, audiovisual archivist, at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas and to Patricia Methven, archivist at the LiddelI Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College, London, for their invaluable assistancc.

x Acknowledgements xi I would also like to thank the Trustees of the LiddelI Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College, London for their permission to examine and reproduce extracts from the papers of Sir Basil LiddelI Hart. The Trustee ofAdmiral Burke's oral histories, Mr William P. Daisley, has kindly allowed me to quote from the Admiral Arleigh Burke's oral histor• ies. Copyright material from the Public Record Office, Kew, appears by permission of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. My special thanks also go to Paul Kennedy for allowing me to re-produce part of the table contained in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which appears in appendix 4. Abridged portions of chapters 5 and 6 appeared in Diplomacy and Statecrajt in March 1994. The full citation of this article is given in the bibliography. I wish to thank Tim Farmiloe, Director, and Annabelle Buckley, Commissioning Editor, at MacmiIIan for their valuable help in preparing the manuscript for publication. I am also indebted to Keith Povey, Editorial Services Consultant, for his editorial work on the text. The publi• cation is made possible by a grant from the Committee administering the late Miss Isobel Thornley's Bequest to the University of London. My thanks also go to Geoffrey Warner, who patiently listened to my ideas about Eisenhower's policy and who read some of the draft chapters. He also lent me a number of books and published French and American docu• ments from his own collection. While I was racing against time in my final effort to complete this book, Andrew Stewart, a former undergraduate student of the Department of War Studies, King's, gave me valuable assistance in compiling my bibliography and in photocopying material for the book. I have also benefited from the support and encouragement given by my friends and colleagues. My warm thanks go to Günter Bischof, Beatrice Heuser, Gunthur Mai, Ann Lane, Sabine Lee, Effie Pedaliu, Brian Holden Reid, Gustav Schmidt, Thomas Schwartz, and John Young. Finally, I owe a great debt to all my family, who have cheerfully under• taken more household chores to enable me to complete my work. I would like to express my special thanks to Michael for proof-reading the manu• script, and for his support and love over the last five years. This book is dedicated to hirn.

London SAKI DocKRILL Preface

Historians of American diplomacy of the 1950s would agree that the task is achallenging one. The quantity of archival documents is voluminous and is becoming larger with the opening of the archives in other western countries and in the former Soviet Union. Given also the increasing number of publications on this period, the sheer quantity of research is almost overwhelming. My initial interest in the Eisenhower administration began when I was working on my previous book Britain 's Policy for West German Rearmament 1950-1955. This book dealt chiefly with British and American strategy and diplomacy for the cold war in Europe. I was then struck by the fact that the Eisenhower administration was rather more restrained in encouraging European unity than its Democrat predecessor had been. This was despite the fact that the United States became a fully• f1edged world leader after 1953, a fact of life accepted almost unani• mously, but with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by the other NATO powers. This was the riddle which prompted me to write this book. There is an extensive iiterature on the Eisenhower presidency and, to a lesser extent, on Eisenhower's New Look national security policy. This is hardly the piace to list the historiography of the Eisenhower administra• tion. However, revisionist historians (to mention a few - Stephen Ambrose, Robert Burk, Robert Divine, John Lewis Gaddis, Fred Greenstein, Robert Griffith, Richard Immerman, Chester Pach, Herbert Parmet and Elmo Richardson) have considerably improved the image of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the point where he has emerged as a resource• ful, astute and determined American president.' As many revisionists have argued, Eisenhower exercised a much greater influence on policy making than the early historians of this subject were prepared to accept. Similarly, greater attention has been paid to the other American decision makers of the period and especially to . Richard Immerman, John Lewis Gaddis, Robert Pruessen, and Frederick W. Marks III have thrown new light on Dulles, who is now seen as a much more subtle, cautious and flexible diplomat than the rigid and simplistic 'cold warrior' portrayed by the earlier historians of this period.? Previous works on the 'New Look' include an article by Glenn H. Snyder in Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (1962) and also by Samuel Huntington, in The Common Defense (1963). Although these studies are now rather out of date, they still contain useful information

xii Preface xiii about, and analyses of, Eisenhower's national security policy. Douglas Kinnard's President Eisenhower and Strategy Management (1977), based on archives and on Congressional records, still remains the only detailed account of the New Look, covering the entire period of the Eisenhower presidency. However, this volume is mainly concerned with Eisenhower's and defence budgets, and with Congressional reactions and pays less attention to other important components of the New Look • diplomacy, foreign aid and mutual security, psychological warfare, covert operations and collective security. Russell Weigley has written a balanced chapter on the New Look in his book The American Way 0/ War (1973). Other excellent studies of this subject are by Samuel F. Wells Ir, "The Origins ofMassive Retaliation' in Political Seien ce Quarterly (\ 981), by David Alan Rosenberg, 'The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy' in The National Security - fts Theory and Practice 1945-1960 (\ 986), and by Mare Trachtenberg's articles 'A "Wasting Asset": American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949-1954' and 'Nuclearization of NATO and US-West European Relations', in his book entitled History and Strategy (1991). They are all illuminating in their accounts of the strategic, technical, and diplomatic aspects of nuclear weapons, but they do not pretend to be comprehensive studies of the New Look doctrine. H.W. Brands Ir has focused on the internal debates in the administration on Eisenhower's national security policy in his article 'The Age of Vulnerability: Eisenhower and the National Insecurity State', The American Historical Review (1989). Brands is rather more critical about Eisenhower's national security policy than the other revisionist writers, while Dulles emerges as a rather opportunist figure, whose attitudes towards nuclear weapons kept changing. Equally detailed - a persuasive and comprehensive treatment of Eisenhower's New Look - is Martin Beglinger's Containment im Wandel (1988); however, the volume deals only with the period of transition from Truman to Eisenhower (1952 to 1954). One of the more sophisticated analyses of the New Look is con• tained in two chapters by lohn Lewis Gaddis in his book Strategies 0/ Containment: A Critical Appraisal 0/Postwar American National Security Policy (1982). Gaddis convincingly explains how and why Eisenhower and Dulles adopted the New Look, after abandoning Truman's NSC 68 concepts about national security.:' Eisenhower's New Look overlapped, to a considerable extent, with America's diplomacy and, to a lesser extent, with America's domestic policy. Almost every work on the Eisenhower administration refers to the New Look and it is impossible to mention here all the works which have, xiv Preface to varying degrees, influenced my thinking on this subject; however, I have tried to incorporate these studies into this volume wherever possible. My intention is to build on these revisionist themes and to expand, if possible, the understanding of the New Look by consulting declassified documents and private papers in the United States and in Britain, and official published docurnents, biographies, memoirs, and secondary sources in Britain. Although the New Look has been described loosely in many books and articles as the New Look policy, the New Look strategy, the New Look concept or simply the New Look, I have occasionally used the term the New Look doctrine, because the book attempts to deal with the New Look on a number of levels - as strategy, as policy, and as diplo• macy, all of which are part of a 'doctrine'. My main concern was to examine the origins of the New Look in terms of the motives of the policy makers and their perception of the external threat and of the nation's security goals. Secondly, I sought to discover how and why the 'massive retaliation strategy' came into being and what was the aim of this strategy in the context of the New Look doctrine. What sort of problems - real or imag• ined - did the administration encounter in formulating its nuclear deterrent strategy? In pursuing this strategy, what goals did the president have in mind and how different were these goals from those of other policy makers in the administration? Third, in the minds of Eisenhower and Dulles, collaboration by America's European allies and NATO with the US was of considerable importance to the success of the New Look. I have tried to investigate the implementation of the New Look into NATO in some detail. Fourth, I wanted to examine how the New Look, while not tailored to deal with specific crises, was applied to the various confrontations which took place in Taiwan, Indochina, Hungary, Lebanon, and Berlin during this period. Of course, each crisis is a book in itself and I have not dealt with them in detail, but have examined thern only in the context of the New Look. Fifth, the process of negotiations with the Soviet Union was also an important component of the New Look, since such negotiations might reduce cold war press ures and lead to arms control agreements between the two super powers. I have examined the fleeting opportunities which arose for East-West detente at the Geneva summit and later at the Camp David talks. Sixth, while nuclear weapons, defence budgets and negotiations with the Russians were all crucial to the New Look doctrine, Eisenhower and Dulles were equally concerned with the less 'dramatic' and less 'public' aspects of the New Look - covert operations, intelligence, and foreign aid Preface xv and mutual security programmes. Stephen Ambrose, Richard Immerman, lohn Prados, Burton Kaufman, and W.W. Rostow have written definitive accounts about each of these subjects and I have not attempted to deal with the minutiae or technicalities of these activities. My main task was to examine how these operations were linked to the success of the New Look and how important they were in the promotion of the New Look. While the concept of 'liberation' in the precise sense was not included in the New Look, the doctrine was inspired by the determination of both Eisenhower and Dulles to capitalise on the weaknesses of the Communist bloc and if possible to encroach upon the Soviet sphere of influence. I was concerned to find out what the Eisenhower administration actually did in the case of Hungary in 1956 and what were the limiting factors in Eisenhower's policy of 'Iiberation'. FinaIly, while Dulles had a significant influence on the formulation of many of the concepts enshrined in the New Look, with Gruenther, Radford, and Twining enthusiastic supporters of its military and strategie components, Eisenhower was at the centre of the origins and operations of the New Look and my main interest in writing this book has been to examine and to try to understand the motives behind his various state• ments and policies on the cold war, his negotiations with the Russians, and his ideas about the role of nuclear weapons, foreign aid and national security. Given his preference for 'hidden hand' methods of presidential control and given the occasional and often deliberate ambiguity in his use of language, it has been achallenging, but rewarding, task to try to follow his thought processes. Overall, this book is chiefly about American perceptions of the New Look doctrine and about their efforts to implement it at various levels. The book also examines how the Eisenhower administration and the Pentagon were divided over the New Look doctrine and why, towards the end of his second term, the majority of Eisenhower's subordinates became eventu• ally disenchanted with the New Look. Given the limitations in space and time, I have concentrated on the more crucial aspects of the New Look rather than tried to provide a detailed account of the New Look at every level of its operation. There are probably a considerable number of documents, conference and seminar papers, PhD dissertations, books and articles which I should have read before writing up this book. However, the completion of this book does not mean that my interest in Eisenhower has now ended. I hope that my book will enable me to increase my contacts with historians working on the same period, thereby deepening my understanding of the subject. Like Eisenhower's New Look, this book does not pretend to be XVI Preface 'perfect' and is not meant to be a thorough analysis of the subject drawing from every possible declassified document. There is certainly room for further research. Despite the almost overwhelming number of publications on the Eisenhower presidency, and despite the fact that his popularity has been growing in the United States, both president Eisenhower and his policies remain controversial - if my experienees with the students I teach at the University of London on this subject are anything to go by. The views expressed by students from Britain, Afriea, Asia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East have sometimes surprised me. Students coming from Asian and Middle eastern countries tend to view the United States in the 1950s as a ruthless imperialist power, intending to deploy nuclear weapons in order to dominate the world, while European and British students tend to argue that the Eisenhower administration, despite its 'aggressive' massive retaliation strategy, was isolationist, selfish, and incapable of exercising strong world leadership. My hope is that this book will make a modest contribution towards cor• reeting some of these extreme assessments of the Eisenhower administra• tion. To a certain extent I have used various narrative accounts and quoted from statements by Eisenhower and his decision makers so that students can obtain a more aceurate insight into Ameriean thinking on national security and foreign policy during the 1950s. The United States has been the key player in international relations during my generation. I believe that that eountry deserves much more historieal attention from the wider international community than it has hitherto received.

London SAKI DOCKRILL