Eisenhower Administration Research Articles

Dwight Eisenhower and American foreign policy during the 1960s: an American lion in winter

Chapter 1: Eisenhower Administration Foreign Policy: An Overview Chapter 2: Kennedy and Eisenhower: Uneasy Beginnings Chapter 3: The Crisis Years: 1961-63 Chapter 4: Transition and Reelection: LBJ and Eisenhower 1963-4 Chapter 5: Johnson, Eisenhower, and Vietnam 1965 Chapter 6: Mutual Decline: LBJ & Ike 1966-68 Chapter 7: Conclusion

Die Außenpolitik der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und ihr Bekenntnis zum multilateralen Internationalismus

U.S. foreign policy and its commitment to multilateral internationalism In the present paper I will argue that the Truman and the Eisenhower Administration, in dealing with post-war Germany, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, followed a policy of multilateral internationalism. After having introduced this concept in the first part, the second part will deal with the question whether the reorientation that George W. Bush has brought about in U.S. foreign policy has fundamentally altered its basic focus on multilateral internationalism. Based on an analysis of Barack Obama's foreign policy it will be argued against such an alleged profound change.

The General and the Politician: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and American Politics. By John W. Malsberger. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 265 pp.

The General and the Politician: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and American Politics. By John W. Malsberger. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 265 pp. Most studies of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard have presented a decidedly negative view of their relationship. These works have limited their treatment primarily to Eisenhower's attempt to dump as his running mate in 1952, his suggestion that chart his own course in 1956, and his response to a reporter who asked for one idea that had contributed to his administration: If you give me a week, I might think of one. By focusing on these incidents, and on Nixon's often petty responses to them, historians have been able to conclude that the relationship between these men was strained, if not openly hostile. In his important book, The General and the Politician, John W. Malsberger, professor of history at Muhlenberg College, presents a far more complicated partnership. According to Malsberger, two main factors were responsible for the relationship's complexity. First, the Party was badly divided. Eisenhower's Modern Republican policies were vehemently opposed by conservatives. Nixon, however, had credibility with the Old Guard. This was why he had been chosen as Eisenhower's running mate. Eisenhower's use of as a bridge between the party's wings, however, often put the vice president in difficult situations. Second, the two men had very different values. Eisenhower was motivated by a sense of duty. He pursued the policies he did out of a sincere belief that they were for the good of both his party and the country. Nixon, on the other hand, was motivated almost exclusively by personal ambition. This made it impossible for the men to fully understand one another. Despite these differences, Malsberger argues, men came to learn, sometimes unhappily, that their goals could best be achieved by working together as a team.... Both men understood that their respective goals could be achieved only if the GOP was transformed into a modern, centrist party that had broad appeal (p. xv). This realization led to a partnership that outlasted Eisenhower's presidency. The long-term success of this partnership, he maintains, has been misinterpreted by historians. Malsberger rejects the traditional notion that Eisenhower was a captive hero outmaneuvered by Tricky Dick, but he is unwilling to place himself in the Eisenhower revisionist camp, which, he claims, characterizes Eisenhower as a cunning Machiavellian politician who victimized a loyal obedient Dick Nixon (p. …

Book Review: Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics, by Shawn J. Parry-Giles

Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics. Shawn J. Parry-Giles. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 272 pp. $90 hbk. $27 pbk.Timing is (almost) everything. Coinciding with Monica Lewinsky's article in Vanity Fair and Clinton's memoir Hard Choices, the publication of Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics puts Shawn J. Parry-Giles at the right place at exactly the right time.Parry-Giles, professor of communication at the University of Maryland, combines an understanding of the public's interest in political celebrity with a compelling historical, political, and social sensibility. Clinton in the News follows The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda and the Cold War (1945-1955), a 2001 study of the Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower administrations and the ways they institutionalized propaganda as a presidential tool. Parry-Giles also coauthored Constructing Clinton: Hyperreality and Presidential Image-Making in Postmodern Politics (2002) and The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism (2006), both with Trevor Parry-Giles.Director of the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership, Parry- Giles balances her previous book about Bill Clinton as a postmodern media phenomenon with a provocative exploration of Clinton's rise to prominence. Her study serves as an exploration of the ways media help to construct the public persona of women in politics. Clinton in the News is at once a sprawling study that employs theories of nationalism, feminism, and media practice and a systematic, carefully organized, chronological examination of the definitions of womanhood and the expected behavior of first ladies. Parry-Giles is concerned with social constructions that inhibit a woman's authentic voice and impede other women interested in running for public office. Pulling no punches, Parry-Giles writes,Yet, while Clinton's own defiance was awe inspiring and precedent setting, the magnitude of the disciplining and rhetoric of violence that she faced served as a cultural warning for other women who might dare to enter the political arena and violate the protocols of authentic womanhood. Clinton, privileged by her celebrity, political connections, whiteness, economic status, and heterosexuality, possessed the means by which to challenge the political patriarchy. Even for women of privilege, the didactic gleaned from Clinton's life story functioned as a warning that they too could face similar authenticity scrutiny, public humiliation, and threats of violence should they follow in Clinton's political footsteps.Charges of inauthenticity have pursued Clinton from the moment she stepped into the political spotlight, Parry-Giles argues, and the U.S. media created news frames that defined her, beginning with Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and continuing through her 2008 presidential bid. The introduction, which provides historical context for Clinton's life in the political sphere, is followed by four chapters and a conclusion: Hillary Clinton as Campaign Surrogate: U.S. Presidential Campaigns-1992 and 1996; Hillary Clinton as Legislative Activist and Legal Defendant: Health Care Reform and the Whitewater Investigations-1993-1995; Hillary Clinton as International Emissary and Scorned Wife: Diplomatic Travel and the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal-1995-1999; and Hillary Clinton as Political Candidate: U.S. Senate Campaign-1999-2001. The conclusion focuses on lessons learned, specifically, those learned by the public, the political machines that control elections, the media, and the candidate herself.Parry-Giles studied more than 1,200 television news broadcasts (ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC Nightly and morning news programs). She examined news texts that chronicle key moments in Clinton's political career, focusing specifically on the 1992 presidential campaign, health care, Whitewater, international travel as first lady, the Bill Clinton- Monica Lewinsky affair, her New York campaign for the U. …

Feeling your pain Pain A Political History Keith Wailoo Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 292 pp.

Feeling your pain <b>Pain A Political History</b> <i>Keith Wailoo</i> Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 292 pp.

The Anti-Cuban Embargo Movement in the United States

Ever since the imposition of a partial embargo on Cuba by the Eisenhower administration in 1960, more than one hundred organizations in the United States have been challenging the state on U.S.–Cub...

The ‘Labors of Atlas, Sisyphus, or Hercules’? US Gas-Centrifuge Policy and Diplomacy, 1954–60

This article explores the Eisenhower administration's efforts during 1960 to tackle the apparent nuclear-proliferation risk posed by innovations in gas-centrifuge technology. Washington developed a policy of denial, first tried out in 1954 when Brazil tried to purchase gas centrifuges in West Germany. In 1960, with advances in gas-centrifuge technology raising the possibility of secret uranium-enrichment plants, Atomic Energy Commission and State Department officials agreed that it should be classified secret to limit worldwide access. Yet West Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom were already undertaking gas-centrifuge research and development and German research was unclassified. While secrecy for any West German work on nuclear technology raised difficult political questions, without German co-operation security classification for gas-centrifuge technology in the United States and the other countries could fail. As a holding action to check nuclear proliferation, US diplomats reached agreement with the Germans, Dutch, and British on classification standards. Washington also sought export controls to limit access to the technology. Leaks to the press complicated diplomacy, but the four-power understanding on gas-centrifuge secrecy lasted for years, although A. Q. Khan significantly undermined it when he purloined Dutch centrifuge technology in 1975.

Flirting with Neutrality: The Shah, Khrushchev, and the Failed 1959 Soviet–Iranian Negotiations

Despite the Eisenhower administration's strong support for the Pahlavi monarchy, tensions simmered under the surface of Mohammad Reza Shah's relationship with the United States throughout the 1950s. Following the Qarani coup attempt and the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, the shah sought to diminish the Soviet threat to his regime and reduce his dependence on the United States by exploring Moscow's offer of a non-aggression treaty. Drawing on American, British, and Iranian sources, this article provides the first detailed history of these secret Soviet–Iranian negotiations that ended in disastrous failure for the shah in February 1959.

The Eisenhower Administration and Public Diplomacy in India: An Ambivalent Engagement, 1953–1960

The United States–India relationship was fraught with misapprehension and ideological disagreement during the 1950s. Public diplomacy provides a valuable context for examining these dynamics. This analysis assesses the planning, deployment, and reception of American public diplomacy to India under President Dwight Eisenhower, a period encompassing Washington’s 1954 alliance with Pakistan and economic aid to India in 1957–1958. Public diplomacy reflects the Administration’s difficulty in clarifying its interests in India. The rhetorical and moralising approach of India’s leadership, and their prominence in the global non-aligned movement, contributed greatly to this ambivalence. Public diplomacy planning highlights Washington’s difficulties in confronting India’s identity in world politics; it struggled to craft messages on racial attitudes, consumerism, and Communism, whilst Soviet public diplomacy gave strong competition throughout the period. At the same time, several aspects of American public diplomacy resonated with Indian audiences, indicating that there was the possibility of a closer American relationship with India had Washington taken a different high policy approach to the region.

A United States of Europe? Amerykańscy ojcowie zjednoczonej Europy u progu zimnej wojny (1945-1957)

It was George Washington who many authors claim first expressed the wish, often reported by Americans, that „one day, on the model of the United States of America a United States of Europe will come into being”. In fact, the idea seems to have been launched by 19th century European federalists, yet it could not materialize until the dawn of the Cold War. Not only did the Truman administration’s reappraisal of US global security interests and its role in the world lead to their support, but to their relentless promotion of Europe’s economic, political and military integration. Out of their mixed idealistic and pragmatic motivation, the Washington establishment argued that, if united along the American model, a federal Europe would overcome its traditional problems (national rivalries and wasting its economic potential) while, on the other hand, it would also reduce US responsibility for the well-being of the Western world. However, as post-war normalization set in, the leaders of Western Europe grew increasingly skeptical of American federalist visions, while Washington responded with ever more resolute threats of withdrawing its forces from Europe. It was not until the ultimate failure of the EDC/EPC project that the Eisenhower administration modified its European policy, coming to terms with the end of federalism and the triumph of functionalism.

"It Would Be a Terrible Thing if We Handed These People over to the Communists": The Eisenhower Administration, Article 14(d), and the Origins of the Refugee Exodus from North Vietnam

"It Would Be a Terrible Thing if We Handed These People over to the Communists": The Eisenhower Administration, Article 14(d), and the Origins of the Refugee Exodus from North Vietnam

The Influence of History on Nuclear Weapons Policy

Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age. By Francis J. Gavin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. 240 pp., $35.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-45101-0). This book studies the history of nuclear weapons, especially the strategies for their employment, and the influence of those strategies on international politics. The history is interesting in its own right and bears directly upon contemporary and future policy, because author Francis J. Gavin is a rare sort of historian. Like his mentor, Marc Trachtenberg, Gavin doesn't shy away from challenging the conventional wisdom based on a careful reading of the relevant documents. And his myth-busting has a clear purpose—to improve policy. “Bad history is almost worse than no history” (p. 2). “We cannot begin to assess the merits of critical policies,” Gavin explains, “ranging from the goal of ‘global zero’ to threatened use of preventive war to reverse proliferation, until we have a much better understanding of the historical forces that brought us where we are today” (p. 11). Thus, his work is of interest not only to academic historians and political scientists, but also to contemporary policymakers and scholars in the wider foreign policy community. In clear, readable prose, Gavin, the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, addresses a series of discrete questions, organized more or less chronologically. He challenges the conventional view that John F. Kennedy's approach to nuclear weapons was dramatically different from Dwight D. Eisenhower's. From there, Gavin moves to the Berlin Crisis, which straddled the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and then to the debate over nuclear nonproliferation in the wake of China's ascension into the nuclear club. Here, Gavin finds important discontinuities between Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's approaches to nonproliferation, particularly toward US allies such as West Germany. The book moves on to the …

The First Alliance for Progress? Reshaping the Eisenhower Administration's Policy toward Latin America

The Eisenhower administration's policy toward Latin America is typically viewed as a failure. The general view is that by ignoring calls for increased economic aid and undermining governments suspected of harboring Communist sympathies, U.S. policymakers allowed relations with Latin American countries to deteriorate so much that Vice President Richard Nixon was almost killed during a goodwill tour. Belated efforts were then made to improve relations, but only the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba and the Kennedy administration's embrace of modernization theory—the argument goes—saw a genuine change in U.S. attitudes. Using a wide variety of sources, including rarely studied personal papers and newly released oral histories, this article demonstrates that even before the Nixon trip a small group of experts on Latin America were determined to adjust attitudes in Washington. Understanding their impact and achievements casts fresh light on the policies of the Eisenhower administration and the nature of hemispheric relations in the subsequent decade.

Cold War Propaganda, US Prestige and the Eisenhower Administration: Implications From a Case Study Approach

Scholarly research in recent years has emphasized the elements of ideology and propaganda in the understanding of the nature and the features of the Cold War. As far as the US was concerned, the importance of cultural diplomacy and propaganda mechanisms grew as the Cold War began to consolidate. The Eisenhower administration elevated government propaganda mechanisms into an indispensable branch of US foreign policy. It is in this context that the present article examines a US government research project on the decline of US “prestige” abroad designed and implemented in 1953. Our aim is to explore the conceptual structure of the research project and its implications based on archival material of the Eisenhower administration. Our assumption is that the development of propaganda techniques was a gradual and evolutionary process associated with the acknowledgement that perceptions of policies may be as important as the policies themselves. Though in an embryonic form, the reports that are examined in the present article try to address complex issues relating to US image in the world and the appeal of Americanism incorporating working assumptions and methodological principles from the rapidly developing at the time social sciences.

Waging Financial War

ABSTRACT: Has the emergence of global financial markets brought with it global financial warfare? This article discusses the canon of financial warfare and how one might wage it across both the strategic and tactical realms. ********** Imagine warfare waged in financial cyberspace: electronic, remote, fought in hypervelocity with millions of engagements per second, and with nations forced to construct redundant systems, sacrificing billions in economic efficiency for survival capacity. Financial warfare strikes can blockade vital industries; delink countries from the global marketplace; bankrupt sovereign economies in the space of a few days, and cause mass exoduses, starvation, riots, and regime change. Financial warfare can support US policy objectives by attacking regime elites, collapsing trade, draining foreign currency reserves, decreasing economic production, spiking inflation, driving unemployment, increasing social and labor unrest and accelerating population migration. Financial warfare can assist the warfighter by halting an enemy's capability to produce and distribute war materials, fund training, operations, or proxies. Financial warfare can amplify and accelerate the damage inflicted by economic warfare. Financial warfare spoofing operations can assist intelligence collection by isolating and mapping crisis response patterns of individual adversaries, organizations, nations, and regime elites. The aim of financial warfare is, quite literally, to disarm opponents by reducing their ability to finance production or distribution, complete transactions, or manage the consequences of a transaction failure. If precisely employed, financial warfare can reduce a targeted society's will and cohesion by forcing upon it, in stark terms, the daily necessity to choose between guns or butter. This dilemma highlights and magnifies the real, immediate, and personal consequences of resource allocation. Deployed within an indigenous society's political framework, financial warfare can deepen the divide between rival constituencies, reducing societal cohesion and inciting civil unrest. Financial warfare is not a new concept. While many individual policy actions had financial aspects, perhaps the first pure financial warfare campaign in United States history occurred in the Eisenhower administration. It was prompted by the Soviet invasion and suppression of the Hungary Revolution on 4 November 1956 and sparked by the seizure of the Suez canal by NATO allies, Britain and France, in Operation Musketeer on 5 November. (1) President Dwight Eisenhower determined he could not effectively oppose Soviet military intervention in Hungary, while allowing European military intervention in Egypt. (2) Diplomacy had not convinced the British or the French to withdraw. (3) The United States was hesitant to intervene with military force against NATO allies. As an alternative, Eisenhower employed financial warfare. With just three offensive strikes, the United States achieved its immediate policy aims of forcing Britain and then France to withdraw from the Suez Canal. The three financial warfare strikes were: (1) blocking the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from providing Britain with $561 million in standby credit; (2) blocking the US Export-Import Bank from extending $600 million in credit to Britain; and (3) threatening to dump America's holdings of pound-sterling bonds unless Great Britain withdrew from the Suez. (4) The credit blockade froze Britain's ability to borrow and forced it back onto its negative cash flow, effectively bankrupting it. The pound-sterling threat significantly raised the perceived risk of dealing in British currency. That threat, if executed, would have directly affected British ability to trade internationally. By 1956, Britain was grossly overleveraged and dependent on further international borrowing to maintain its standard of living. The United States owned $3. …

Securing justice? The Australian campaign to save the Rosenbergs

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs”, recalled Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. Others recalled this event differently: as legal murder and a flagrant miscarriage of justice. The electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in June 1953, on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage, was unprecedented in the history of the United States and aroused international outrage. Although there are scattered studies of the worldwide protest movement, none has examined the Australian dimension. This paper, therefore, fills a historiographical gap by exploring the genesis, development, and activities of the Australian campaign to pressure the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to grant clemency to the Rosenbergs. That campaign faced several obstacles: one was the liaison and intelligence sharing between the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and US Consular and Embassy officials in Sydney and Canberra and another was the infiltration of its leadership by an important ASIO operative. Drawing on the extensive papers of the New York-based Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, the article will illuminate the close transnational connection between the Australian and American campaigns and challenge the customary characterisation of the Rosenberg clemency committees as “fronts” for the Communist Party or products of Moscow's machinations.

‘A Puppet, Even Though He Probably Doesn't Know So’: Racial Identity and the Eisenhower Administration's Encounter with Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Arab Nationalist Movement

This article demonstrates that US beliefs concerning racial identity guided the Eisenhower administration's encounter with Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Arab nationalism during the 1950s. It establishes that US texts propagated certain racial-identity assumptions about Arab peoples. The most important of these included the assertions that Arab peoples were irrational and easily manipulated or deceived. Policy-makers utilised these beliefs to explain and contextualise Arab actions, especially those of Egypt and its Arab nationalist government. Officials within the Eisenhower administration believed that Arab irrationality prompted Egyptian leaders to adopt a neutralist position in the cold war. The assumption that Arabs were susceptible to deception and manipulation convinced policy-makers that this position was unacceptable. The Soviets would ultimately, they believed, prey upon Arab manipulability and subjugate Egypt, the Arab nationalist movement, and the entire Middle East. These concerns made the Eisenhower administration's decision to contain Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the Arab nationalist movement seem logical and necessary.

Networking necessities in the world of big science

Networking necessities in the world of big science

Laos. The universe unraveling: American foreign policy in Cold War Laos. By Seth Jacobs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012 and Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. Pp. 328. Index.

The universe unraveling: American foreign policy in Cold War Laos By SETH JACOBS Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012 and Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. Pp. 328. Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000465 Professor Seth Jacobs writes readably, sometimes even racily, as we already know from his two books on Ngo Dinh Diem, America's Miracle Man (Duke University Press, 2004) and Cold War Mandarin (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). There is no fashionable jargon nor burdensome 'theory'. But he puts forward arguments that are well worth the consideration of historians and indeed of others. His new book, covering American policy towards Laos between the Geneva conferences of 1954 and 1961-2, has two thrusts, which might be roughly categorised as 'cultural' and 'political'. The first is concerned with the American 'construction' of Laos and the Lao. Here Jacobs is at his most entertaining. He writes well of 'Dr Tom' and 'Mister Pop', and of the image of the laid-back Lao who were unwilling to fight, retarded children who were not prepared to help themselves or be helped, lethargic and party-loving. Jacobs also offers some telling images of the Americans, most memorably of the pompous ambassador J. Graham Parsons, and, more broadly, of the obsession with the Cold War and the way it provided a lens through which to view the Lao and the international situation in general. Neutralism was as unacceptable to the Americans as the failure to take sides was incomprehensible to Mao. The two images combined in a disastrously simplistic policy towards Laos. That is Jacobs' second focus. He gives some account of the policies of the Eisenhower Administration and of the changes that Kennedy made. It would be hard to obtain as clear a narrative from his book as that provided on a grander scale by Arthur Dommen, for example. Jacobs' prime intention is rather to argue that the 'cultural' attitudes he describes inflected the political approaches adopted even at the highest levels, not merely those of Americans who read their newspapers or listened on the radio to Dr Tom and Mr Pop. He is, he tells us, interpreting US policy towards Laos 'as a product of cultural prejudices rather than logistical considerations or other ostensibly more salient imperatives' (p. 7). Even those sympathetic to the Lao, like young Joel Halpern, were unable to shed a patronising attitude. Kennedy's decision for neutralisation, Jacobs suggests, was primarily based on his conviction that the Lao were 'incorrigible pacifists' (p. 250). Certainly American leaders were quite unwilling to appreciate the most sophisticated Lao they met, Prince Souvanna Phouma, or to make a realistic assessment of his policies. He was a neutralist: he had to be distrusted. Neutrality was the only option for Laos if it was to be kept intact, independent and at peace. But the message, as Jacobs puts it, 'never got through' (p. 18). Indeed Parsons, later assistant secretary of state, worked against Souvanna, who bitterly complained that the former was 'the most reprehensible and nefarious of men, ... the ignominious architect of [the] disastrous American policy toward Laos' (quoted, p. 102). But the Kennedy Administration was unwilling to accept Souvanna as prime minister, and most unwilling to drop the man the CIA had supported, Phoumi Nosavan. Indeed, after neutralisation the United States--while complaining of the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese--retained its connection with Phoumi, not to mention Vang Pao and the Hmong whom the United States had organised and armed under Eisenhower and to an even greater extent under his successor. …

Gazing Toward Ghana: African American Agency in the Eisenhower Administration’s Relations with Africa

African Americans viewed Ghana as a symbol of black success, capability, and modernity during the 1950s and pressured the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to attribute more importance to the decolonizing nation and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Black American leaders thus played a role in shifting American policy in Africa toward a more ‘middle ground' approach balancing European and African desires and also helped cause Vice President Richard Nixon's 1957 trip to Ghana and Nkrumah's 1958 visit to the United States. Such actions reveal domestic influence on international relations, black American agency and a positive outcome of racially based worldviews during the Cold War.