I recently read a new book by Slate’s Fred Kaplan (if a webpub can be said to possess a man)—The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War—which is an interesting read, though I wouldn’t call it “definitive”, unless perhaps when Fred says he’s giving us the “secret history” he implies that he’s omitting the “public one”. It’s actually shorter than an earlier book Fred wrote about the nuclear weapons biz, The Wizards of Armageddon, which, I guess (because I haven’t read it), has everything Fred left out of The Bomb.
In The Bomb, Fred tells us of what appears to be the first effective use of nuclear diplomacy/blackmail, by the newly elected President Eisenhower back in 1953, to end the war in Korea:
He [Ike] ended the war, so it seemed, by threatening to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union—which, along with the new Communist government of China, had backed North Korea in its invasion of South Korea. An armistice was signed six months after he took office.
Fred tells us in a footnote that “It remains a dispute how much this threat affected Moscow’s actions’ Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953, three months before an armistice was signed, may also have had an impact. But Eisenhower and many others viewed the threat as decisive.”
With or without the footnote, however, this statement struck me as “odd”. I thought I knew the Eisenhower era pretty well, thanks largely to Stephen Ambrose’s two-volume biography of Ike, which was deeply admiring but not uncritical, and I didn’t remember any “threat” regarding Korea. So I thought I would pursue this by consulting both Ambrose’s second volume and Ike’s own memoir of his first four years as president, Mandate for Change.
Ambrose’s book was available on Kindle so I got that immediately, but Ike’s own book was print only, so I ordered a second-hand copy. What I got was quite a large volume, fitted in a nice slipcase, which you don’t see much anymore, with a clear plastic jacket to further protect the actual book. When I started leafing through the index, I discovered that some of the pages needed to be “cut”. Occasionally, you will come across this problem in a book. Books are printed on large sheets that are then folded when the book is bound.1 Occasionally, the “slicing machine”, however it works, will miss a page. But as I continued working through Ike’s book, I realized that the book hadn’t been “sliced” at all. Six “normal” pages would invariably be followed by two pairs of unsliced pages, something that I’d never seen before in a book printed in the twentieth century.2
The “mystery” deepened when I happened to open the very front of the book and was confronted with this notice:
This edition is limited to one thousand five hundred copies, of which one thousand four hundred thirty-four are signed and numbered. This is copy number 785.
The number “785” was written in graceful script and on the facing page is Eisenhower’s signature. Now, I suspect that one in a hundred presidential signatures are legit, excluding those that are obviously addressograph products, but maybe this one is good. One does wonder why only 1434 were actually signed. Did Ike get tired? Or were only 1434 folks willing to pony up however much this limited edition cost back in 1963? A hundred dollars? A thousand? You kind of think Doubleday would have been able to hustle up 66 more buyers.
Well, anyway, I found the relevant passage in Mandate for Change, on page 181 of my limited edition, to wit:
One possibility [for getting the communists to agree to an armistice] was to let the Communist authorities understand that, in the absence of satisfactory progress, we intended to move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons, and would no longer be responsible for confining hostilities to the Korean peninsula. We would not be limited by any world-wide gentlemen’s agreement. In India and the Formosa Straits area [separating the island of Taiwan and mainland China], and at the truce negotiations in Panmunjom, we dropped the word, discreetly, of our intention. We felt quite sure it would reach Soviet and Chinese Communist ears.
Soon the prospects for armistice negotiations seemed to improve.
Well, saying “we intended to move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons, and would no longer be responsible for confining hostilities to the Korean peninsula” isn’t quite the same as threatening to bomb Moscow, but I guess we can let that slide. Or at least we could, but if we consult Ambrose, we get a much fuzzier picture. Ambrose quotes the language from Mandate for Change that I’ve quoted, while describing a discussion that Eisenhower had with a group that included General Mark Clark, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
In that discussion, Clark asks for permission to bomb Kaesong, a city in North Korea near the border with South Korea where the communists were staging a large build-up. Eisenhower muses that Kaesong would be a good target for the use of an atomic bomb. Bradley says that using atomic weapons would not be advisable, and Dulles says that U.S. allies would be strongly opposed. In the end, Eisenhower refuses to give Clark permission to attack Kaesong at all. In fact, reading Ambrose’s description of Eisenhower’s efforts to obtain an armistice in Kore, he repeatedly gives the strong impression that Eisenhower was determined not to do anything that the communists would find “threatening”. Instead of supplying any detail of the U.S. “discreetly” threatening the communists with the atomic bomb, Ambrose gives us a rather purple passage:
But the greatest pressure, by far, was his own reputation. The Chinese were fully aware that in the war against Germany, Eisenhower had used every weapon at his disposal. They knew that he had atomic weapons available in the Far East, that he would not accept a stalemate, and that he was not demanding their unconditional surrender, but only that they agree to an armistice. The substance behind Eisenhower’s threats was Eisenhower’s reputation, backed by America’s atomic arsenal.
Which, to me, is a polite way of not saying that Eisenhower was fibbing in his memoirs, that in fact, despite Ambrose’s language, there were no “threats,” by Eisenhower or anyone else, to use atomic weapons anywhere, in North Korea, China, or the Soviet Union, and that, to loop back to Fred, who, of course started it all, Eisenhower did not believe that he had forced the communists to bargain via the threat of atomic weapons, but rather he wanted others to believe that he had, that he had succeeded where President Truman had failed, because he was tough and Truman was weak—this despite the fact that Truman was in fact the only man in history to actually employ nuclear weapons.3
The legend that Eisenhower explicitly threatened the communists with the use of nuclear weapons—most likely by hitting targets in China—was first promoted by Secretary Dulles in an interview he gave in 1956 to Life magazine, then one of the most prominent publications in the U.S. in that long-ago print era. Dulles told a reporter from Life that back in 1953 he had told India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, that the U.S. was growing impatient with the armistice talks, and that if China did not become more cooperative, the U.S. would, as Eisenhower said in his memoirs, “to move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons, and would no longer be responsible for confining hostilities to the Korean peninsula”. In the ensuing article, Dulles was quoted as saying that it was a “pretty fair inference” that his message was passed along to the Chinese and that their attitude improved as a result. This was the first public airing of the claim that Eisenhower repeated in his book.
Ambrose, however, throws very cold water on Dulles’ specific claim, quoting Dulles’ summary of his conversation that Dulles supplied to Ike (as he always did when meeting foreign leaders): “Nehru brought up Korean armistice, referring particularly to my statement of preceding day, that if no (repeat no) armistice occurred hostilities might become more intense. He said if this happened it difficult to know what end might be. He urged withdrawal our armistice proposals as inconsistent with the Indian resolutions. He made no (repeat no) alternate proposal. He brought up again my reference to intensified operations, but I made no (repeat no) comment and allowed the topic to drop.” Yet Ambrose still insists that the communists backed down simply because they knew who they were dealing with, an extravagant and unsupported claim.
In fact, the record shows that Eisenhower was happy to accept a “stalemate”. The armistice that emerged infuriated right-wing Republicans, as Ambrose acknowledges. “Members [of the “Old Guard,” as Ambrose calls them] were heard to mutter that if Truman had signed the conditions Eisenhower was willing to accept, they would have moved to impeach him.” On page 190 of his memoirs, Ike quotes a passage from a memorandum he wrote at the time of the signing of the armistice: “There has been so much backing and filling, indecision, doubt and frustration engendered by both [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee and the Communists that I doubt that an armistice even if achieved will have any great meaning.” But, says Ike, “Fortunately, I was wrong.” Rhee wanted the U.S. to unite Korea under his rule and repeatedly sabotaged efforts to reach agreement with the communists. From his perspective, of course, he had every reason to do so. But, at the time, Ike sounded very much like a man who was determined to get himself out of Korea.
Earlier in his book, Ambrose describes an interview Eisenhower had with General MacArthur, who had been commander of U.S. forces in Korea before being relieved of his command by President Truman for, basically, courting an all-out war with Communist China. According to Ambrose, Ike gets an earful of MacArthur’s “no substitute for victory” ranting: “Eisenhower listened patiently. Privately, he was appalled at MacArthur’s willingness—and that of so many others—to advocate the use of atomic weapons by the United States against Asian people only seven years after Hiroshima. To Eisenhower’s way of thinking, that was the sure way to make all Asians into enemies of the United States.” Ambrose bases all this on interviews he had with Eisenhower in the course of writing Ike’s biography, many years after the fact. Ike’s views on the use of atomic weapons seem to have been definitely “flexible”.
Perhaps most curious of all is that, according statements first made by Eisenhower in 1948, writing in his once-famous World War II memoir Crusade for Peace that he had been very much opposed to the use of the atomic bomb during World War II, describing a conversation with Secretary of War Harold Stimson:
I expressed the hope that we would never have to use such a thing against any enemy because I disliked seeing the United States take the lead in introducing into war something as horrible and destructive as this new weapon was described to be. Moreover, I mistakenly had some faint hope that if we never used the weapon in war other nations might remain ignorant of the fact.... My views were merely personal and immediate reactions; they were not based upon any analysis of the subject.
I have taken this quotation from an article by Barton Bernstein, professor of history at Stanford and a long-time student of the bomb and its use, Ike and Hiroshima: Did He Oppose It?,4 so it’s his ellipsis. Professor Bernstein notes that Eisenhower amplified the story of his opposition to the bomb’s use in Mandate for Change, writing
the Secretary [Stimson], upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at the very moment, seeking to surrender with a minimum of loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions.
Rather remarkably, there are a number of reasons for believing that Eisenhower invented this entire episode, which is the whole point of Bernstein’s article. Stimson kept a famous, detailed diary throughout World War II, and his description of the particular encounter during which Eisenhower supposedly “deeply perturbed” him was simply “a pleasant chat”, hardly consistent with Ike’s recollection. Someone who was “deeply perturbed”, by Eisenhower’s words in 1963, was General Leslie Groves, who partnered with Robert Oppenheimer to create the bomb. It was Groves who sought out the relevant portion of Stimson’s diary and further insisted that Eisenhower was not the man to “deeply perturb” a superior—particularly, one would think, when Ike’s expertise was confined to the European theater. How much would he know about the intent of the Japanese government?
Bernstein notes that Ambrose endorsed Eisenhower’s claim of opposing the use of the bomb in 1945 but argues that Ambrose simply accepted Eisenhower’s word on the matter. According to Bernstein, the historical record shows only one senior military leader—General Marshall—opposing the use of the bomb before its use. Others merely “recalled” their opposition after the fact, as did many others, including Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, co-“father” of the hydrogen bomb5 and passionate anti-communist (and anti-any agreement with the communists) throughout the Cold War.
Back in 2014, Bernstein wrote an article for the Mercury News, “American conservatives are the forgotten critics of the atomic bombing of Japan,”, noting that in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and continuing at least until the late 1960s, it was not unusual for conservatives to have denounced the use of the atomic bombs against Japan as immoral and inhuman. The point, of course, though Bernstein doesn’t make it specifically, is to blacken the reputations of both FDR and Truman, who were loathed by all true conservatives.6
Bernstein doesn’t mention Ike’s two-part whopper in this article, perhaps under the assumption that Ike wasn’t a “true” conservatives—and by “Old Guard” standards he certainly wasn’t—but one purpose—in my opinion, at least—for the publication of Crusade In Europe (aside from the quite reasonable desire to make money),7 was to position Eisenhower for a run for the presidency. Immediately after the German surrender in World War II Eisenhower called his generals together to commemorate their great victory. Afterwards, General Patton told his staff “Ike’s running for president.”
There was a time when Truman thought that Eisenhower should be the Democratic nominee in 1948 rather than himself (fearing that he would lose to General MacArthur), but one can suspect (or at least I can) that Eisenhower preferred to keep his own counsel. Immediately after the war Eisenhower naturally continued to hold very high commands in the army—military governor of the American occupation zone in Germany and Army Chief of Staff—and always offered almost definitive denials when asked about a possible political future. He was certainly “lucky” in that New York Governor Thomas Dewey did not defeat Truman in 1948, as almost everyone expected him to, but Eisenhower knew how to be patient, famously serving twelve long years as a major in the peacetime army following World War I and was approaching the age of fifty as a virtual nobody when Hitler’s invasion of Poland suddenly gave him his big chance.
Once he declared himself a Republican and won both the nomination and the presidency, Eisenhower found it convenient to blame a number of his embarrassments on his predecessors, both in Mandate for Change and via Ambrose’s authorized biography. Eisenhower was supreme commander of the Allied invasion of North Africa. The first engagement between U.S. and German troops, the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, was a humiliating defeat for American troops. Why did that happen? Ambrose, relying on his interviews with Ike, “explains” why:
He [Eisenhower] had watched MacArthur beg FDR for more defense spending in the thirties; he had seen the results of FDR’s refusal to do so on the battlefield of Kasserine; he would never allow his country to be caught unprepared again.
Uh, really? The Battle of the Kasserine Pass happened in 1943. And since Eisenhower was, you know, supreme commander, shouldn’t he at least share some of the blame? An unknown scribe at Wikipedia, generally sympathetic to Ike, describes the embarrassing battle as follows: “Eisenhower created some confusion in the ranks by some interference with the execution of battle plans by his subordinates. He also was initially indecisive in his removal of Lloyd Fredendall, commanding U.S. II Corps.” Eisenhower had never held a combat command before; Fredendall was widely regarded as an incompetent showoff and a coward; American troops, untested in battle, were up against Rommel’s experienced Afrika Corps; the Germans had defeated British troops in every single engagement from the start of the war until November 1942 in the second battle of El Alamein.8 It’s a pretty good bet that U.S. military spending in the mid thirties had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in the Kasserine Pass.
According to Bernstein’s “Ike and Hiroshima” article, Ambrose himself sometimes “exposed” Ike’s hypocrisy rather than conveying it.
In Ike’s own case, Ambrose has shrewdly shown, the general sometimes tailored important remembrances of the past to suit his needs. Well after the Truman Doctrine [dating from March 1947 and often given as the start of the Cold War], for example, Ike periodically cited his 1945 efforts to warn Roosevelt about the Soviets; but actually in 1945, General Eisenhower was not giving such counsel and was quite optimistic, even past Potsdam [the last “Big Three” conferences, held after death of FDR and the successful testing of the atomic bomb], about maintaining good relations with the Soviet Union.
I can’t quote Ambrose himself on this because I have his book on Kindle, which lacks the pagination needed to identify the citations given by Bernstein, though I have found one of my own. On page 77 of Mandate for Change, Ike claims that he was upset at Potsdam when “the request—completely unnecessary, many of my associates and I thought—was again made that the U.S.S.R. enter the war against Japan.” In fact, as Eisenhower well knew, there was no way to stop the Soviets from coming in. After all, Czarist Russia had been forced to cede the southern half of Sakhalin, a large island just north of Japan, to the Japanese as a result of the Russo-Japanese War, and Stalin surely wanted it back. In addition, many historians argue that the Soviet entry helped push the Japanese over the line to immediate surrender, so that if Eisenhower did feel that Soviet entry was “completely unnecessary”—and it is very likely that he did not—he was wrong.
But perhaps Ike’s least attractive whopper of all—the worst I’ve unearthed, anyway—came in a letter he wrote to his son John, serving in Korea, “justifying” his decision to let the execution of Ethel Rosenberg go forward, which he reprinted in Mandate for Change:
I must say that it goes against the grain to avoid interfering in a case where a woman is to receive capital punishment. Over against this, however, must be placed one or two facts that have great significance. The first of these is that in this instance it is the woman who is the strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one. She has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy ring. The second is that if there would be any commuting of the woman’s sentence without the man’s then from here on the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women.
Here Eisenhower unconsciously buys into the myth that, since communists are all “twisted” in the first place, it is “natural” for the women to be strong and ruthless and for the men to be “weak”—even though, of course, the Soviet leadership was entirely male. In fact, as Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton amply demonstrated in their excellent book, The Rosenberg File, the FBI had almost no evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, and simply charged her as leverage against Julius. Both, of course, refused to confess, and then Judge Kauffman, acting on his own initiative and deliberately pre-empting any sentence recommendation from the Justice Department, sentenced both to death. If Eisenhower actually examined the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg, and acted honestly on it, he certainly would have reduced her sentence, though surely leaving it at life imprisonment, to avoid having to acknowledge that the sentences imposed on both Rosenbergs were in fact unduly harsh.9
Dwight David Eisenhower, a man of great accomplishments and deep humanity, most of the time. But those who played poker with him were well advised to always cut the cards.10
Afterwords
When President Trump was threatening North Korea with fire and fury back in 2017, William Hitchcock, professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s, as well as a number of other books on the early Cold War era, wrote an article in the Washington Post debunking Dulles’ claim that his nuclear threat, delivered through Indian Prime Minister Nehru had backed the communists down, arguing that we know from secret Soviet records released after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. that the nervous collective leadership that took over temporary control of the Soviet state following Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953 were ready to end the Korean War. China’s Mao Zedong and Korea’s Kim Il Sung felt the same way, Hitchcock says. Furthermore, he also contends, the significant concessions made by the Chinese occurred in early April 1953, before Dulles’ supposedly pregnant meeting with Nehru.
In 1989, before the full collapse of the Soviet Union, Roger Dingman, then associate professor of History at the University of Southern California, published an article, Atomic Diplomacy During the Cold War, in an MIT Press publication, International Security. The release of many previously secret U.S. documents allowed Dignman to trace in detail discussions of possible use of the atomic bomb by both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations during the Korean War. As Dingnam points out, the possible use of atomic weapons had been the topic of public discussion by both administrations, unavoidably. It worked in Japan. Why not Korea?
Like Professor Hitchcock 30 years later, Dingman disputes Dulles’ 1956 claim, arguing in detail from transcripts of National Security Council discussions and Dulles’ actual conversations with Nehru that the U.S. was not threatening the use of atomic weapons, either explicitly or implicitly, though “allowing” that if the armistice talks failed, the war might be expanded. Dingman quotes Dulles directly as saying that if the talks failed the U.S. “would probably make an expanded rather than a lesser military exertion [which] … might well extend the area of conflict,” but added that “only crazy people” would think that the U.S. desired to do so.
1. In the nineteenth century, and earlier, books were often described by size as determined by the number of times the sheets were folded. Atlases and other large books were “folios” (folded once). “Quartos” were smaller, followed by “octavos” and finally “duodecimos”. “Duodecimo” used to be learned slang for “tiny”—a porpoise was a “duodecimo whale”, according to Melville. I don’t know why the terms dropped out of use.
2. When I was young, in the fifties, books printed in the late nineteenth century were not uncommon, but they all had sliced pages, as far as I can remember, although, possibly, someone had done this already. I have a few books from around the 1850s that were entirely unsliced—suggesting, of course, that no one had ever read them.
3. As president, Truman once said that use of the bomb in Korea was “under consideration”, terrifying the British, even though he hadn’t meant to imply, as he did imply, that its use was likely, which in fact it was not. Under both Truman and Eisenhower, its use was frequently suggested and then rejected. The fantasy that use of atomic weapons can end a limited war, rather than starting an unlimited one, remains a fantasy.
4. Available online, but you have to pay, a lot, for it, if you don’t belong to an institution.
5. As I understand it, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who worked with Teller on the original Manhattan Project, came up with the idea of using the energy of an atomic bomb to provide the compression and heat necessary to initiate the fusion process, but Teller figured out the precise way to use that energy. Teller was much more comfortable being identified as the “Father of the H-Bomb” than was Ulam and was happy to employ his notoriety and presumed expertise to discourage any agreement with the Soviet Union. He was an enthusiastic advocate of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” project, repeatedly coming with fabulous new “weapons” more quickly than honest scientists could shoot them down. Thirty-five years after Reagan first proposed “Star Wars” (how time flies), the “smart rocks” and “brilliant pebbles” of Teller’s fecund imagination still remain “imaginary”.
6. According to Ambrose, when Eisenhower retired from the army after World War II he had $8,000 in savings, which he used to buy a new Chrysler for his wife Mamie.
7. It was only after the influx of “neo-conservatives” into the conservative movement, almost all of them Democrats and many of them Jews who deeply admired Truman for his early recognition and support for Israel, that the right-wing hatred for FDR and Truman began to relax.
8. Winston Churchill: "Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat."
9. I’ve written about both Radosh and the Rosenbergs here.
10. Eisenhower’s wife Mamie refused to be his bridge partner because he would yell at her if she made a wrong bid. I imagine he wouldn’t yell at a bridge partner who wasn’t his wife.
