Did Eisenhower Push Castro into the Arms of the Soviets?

Abstract

ONCE BLITHELY DISMISSED AS AN ILL-INFORMED, inarticulate, and under-involved president, Dwight D. Eisenhower has come to be regarded with a great deal of admiration, particularly by historians whose ideological proclivities are considerably to Eisenhower's left. He governed in a time of prosperity; he ended one war and entered no other; he resisted pressures to increase dramatically the size of the defense budget and resurrected the summit as an instrument of diplomacy with the Soviet Union. Upon leaving office, he issued an historic warning about the perils of the military-industrial complex. Considering what followed the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam it is no wonder that Eisenhower's reputation has undergone a sea change. In re-evaluating the Eisenhower years, historians have more and more come to believe that Eisenhower was prudent, strong and well-versed in international affairs.1 In response to this revisionism, however, there has arisen a growing literature highly critical of the Eisenhower administration's relations with the Third World (McMahon, 1986). Driven by an obsessive fear of communism, it is said, Eisenhower positioned the United States against the tides of history, against movements for reform and social justice, creating enemies out of potential friends. He tied the US to unpopular and unrepresentative governments which were inherently unstable, and which would inevitably be supplanted by regimes that would, precisely because of this history, take sides against the United States. As Robert McMahon put it: The Eisenhower administration grievously misunderstood and underestimated the most significant historical develop-