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Iran's Dr. Mossadegh

Khrushchev and Nixon in Moscow. Click for details

Conflict within the Soviet Bloc

During the Korean War, Stalin ordered intensified industrialization, and thereby created a greater hardship in the Soviet bloc nations. Very little there was being manufactured for consumption and pleasant living. Agriculture in these lands was being collectivized. The middle classes were being stripped of their possessions, and parents were becoming estranged from their children because of indoctrination in the schools.

Communists in the Soviet bloc nations who were seen as insufficiently supportive of Stalinism were accused of being "bourgeois nationalists" and Titoists. Hundreds of thousands who had joined the Communist Party in the idealistic days of resisting fascism were purged. Some were jailed and some were executed, as had been the communist leader Lazlo Rajk in Hungary, accused of conspiring with Yugoslavia's leader, Tito. In 1952 in Czechoslovakia, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, Rudolf Slansky, and others were accused of being Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionists. They stood trial. Slansky made a false confession and he and nine others - seven of whom were Jews like Slansky - were executed. In Poland, the secretary of the Communist Party, Wladislaw Gomulka, and various Communist cabinet ministers were arrested and imprisoned.

In the Soviet Union around this time, the crackdown against bourgeois culture was in full swing - against composers, artists, writers and poets who were accused of being insufficiently proletarian in outlook. Stalin had been annoyed with the admiration of many Soviet Jews for the Zionist movement involved in the creation of Israel in 1948, and "rootless cosmopolitan" was one of the charges thrown at Jews and some others. To be a cosmopolitan was to be an admirer of the capitalist west and therefore anti-socialist. Stalin and those who supported his crackdown feared admiration of the West because of its greater affluence. The Soviet Union was in postwar reconstruction. People were sacrificing again, receiving little economic reward for their labor, the average wage bringing from 20 to 40 percent less purchasing power than it had in 1928 - just before Stalin's industrialization.

Stalin's leading underling in his cultural war had been Andrei Zhdanov. He had died in 1948, but suspicions were about that doctors had caused his death. In January 1953, nine doctors were arrested and charged with having poisoned Zhdanov and with having tried to poison others. The doctors, most of them Jews, were accused of being paid by U.S. and British intelligence and of serving the interests of international Jewry.

Stalin was seventy-three, his health fading, and while fearing doctors, in March 1953, he died. Great crowds of people stood in the cold and wept. Their leader and father figure, who had seen them through decades of trouble, was gone.

A Shaky Succession to Collective Leadership

Succeeding Stalin as premier was Georgi Malenkov, who had been Stalin's aid, a member of the Politburo and deputy premier. No man rules alone, and around Malenkov were the other nine members of the Presidium of the Communist Party, including Lavrenty Beria, who was both a member of the Presidium and head of the intelligence and police agency called the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs). Another Presidium member was Nikita Khrushchev.

Publicly the new leadership displayed loyalty to the great fallen leader, Stalin, but signs of an immediate softening appeared among the leaders. There was talk of production of more consumer goods. Beria described the Doctors' Plot as a hoax, and arrests of were made of scapegoat policemen. Beria advocated reducing the severity of penalties for minor crimes, reforms that would eliminate "inadmissible" police methods, and he spoke of protecting the rights of citizens guaranteed under the Soviet Union's Constitution.

Women married to foreigners would be allowed to leave the Soviet Union to join their husbands. And there was talk of making life easier for people in the satellite nations.

Not all among the new collective leadership in Moscow favored change. Among the conservatives was Vyacheslav Molotov.

Trouble for the new leadership quickly arose. In June, 1953, construction workers in East Berlin rebelled against what had been an increased work load. Their strike spread, an estimated 400,000 workers taking to the streets in the four days that followed the work stoppage. The workers appealed to the East German government. In Moscow, Beria sent Soviet tank units stationed in Germany to confront the strikers. The rebellion was crushed and obedience returned to the work force. Officially, 21 had died. Another account put the dead at 187.

There were also anti-government riots in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and a prisoners' strike in Siberia. The Kremlin saw the danger of a weakened Soviet Union against the U.S. trying to "rollback" communism.

Meanwhile, conflict had erupted also among the Party leaders in the Soviet Union. Most of them feared Beria, despite his new liberal demeanor. Beria had the nation's police apparatus behind him, and Khrushchev was convinced that Beria was making a grab for power. Khrushchev won help from the World War II hero, General Zhukov, now Deputy Defense Minister. Beria and six of his associates were arrested on June 28, to the relief of many. Beria was charged with having attempted to seize power and for having raped girls among other things. Khrushchev succeeded in putting the MVD under Party control. Many Communist Party members had been purged in Stalin's time. The Party ruled that its officials could no longer be arrested without permission from a Party committee. And Beria was shot - executed.

Malenkov, meanwhile, favored a new communist leader for Hungary, Imre Nagy (pronounced Imreh Nahj) who had been persecuted under Hungary's Stalinist regime. Nagy took power and put Hungary on a "New Course." This included slowing the pace of industrialization and promising an increased production of consumer goods, allowing people to leave collective farms, easing police pressures and releasing political prisoners.

U.S. Republicans Face the Communist Menace

In the United States, Americans were discovered to have helped pass secrets about the atomic bomb to the Russians - which had advanced the Russian atomic bomb program perhaps two or three years. A Communist, Julius Rosenberg, was involved, but his wife, Ethel, was not. Both were indicted for having conspired to commit espionage in 1944-45. Americans were upset, well dressed demonstrators with bland smiles carried signs such as "Death to Traitors" and "Burn all Reds." The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death in 1951, and both were executed on June 19, 1953.

President Dwight Eisenhower had taken office in January 1953, and in his inaugural address he had spoken of freedom being pitted against slavery and "lightness against dark." In his State of the Union speech he spoke of never acquiescing in "the enslavement of any people." Despite his settling the Korean War in accordance with Truman's strategy, Eisenhower and the Republican Party were determined to be stronger in their fight against communism than had the Democrats. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, rejected the "containment theory" adhered to by the Democrats and spoke of rolling back the iron curtain and liberating Eastern Europe, raising eyebrows in world capitals. The father of the containment theory, George Kennan, rejected Dulles' "roll back" theory, and Dulles told him there would be no place in the State Department for him.

The Eisenhower Administration also lifted the Truman Administrations restrictions on military acts from Taiwan against the Communist mainland. With the U.S. Seventh Fleet protecting Taiwan from the People's Republic of China, the Truman Administration had not wanted any provocations from Chiang's forces. But the Eisenhower administration decided to "unleash" Chiang, Dulles saying that the U.S. restricting Chiang from attacking the Communists was immoral.

And riding hard for the Republicans against the communist evil was Senator Joe McCarthy of Minnesota. McCarthy had exaggerated his war experiences, and he used his senate seat to make himself the loudest of the anti-communists, gaining attention by his calls against treason and for rooting communists out of the government. McCarthy called the Democrats the party of treason. A lot of people were uninterested in the accuracy of his charges and equated his lack of moderation on the treason issue with leadership. But McCarthy annoyed people in his own party - the Republican Party - including the President Eisenhower, who disliked McCarthy's accusation that his old friend and former boss, General George C. Marshall, was a traitor, had made common cause with Stalin and, while working for President Truman, had lost China.

By the fall of 1953, McCarthy was in decline. The Rosenbergs had been executed in June, and the Korean War had ended in July. Passions were subsiding when McCarthy put himself in conflict with the Eisenhower administration and the Pentagon by objecting to the U.S. Army's promotion of one of its officers to major. Televised Army-McCarthy hearings in the Senate took place in the spring of 1954. Approval ratings for McCarthy dropped from 50 percent in January to 36 percent, and disapproval rose from 19 percent to 50 percent. In December 1954, in a special session of the Senate, McCarthy was censured, with half of the Republican senators voting aye.

McCarthy retained about 35 percent favorable ratings throughout the rest of his life, which lasted to May 2 1957. A heavy drinker, he died from acute hepatitis.

Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command

Another intensely anti-communist American was the commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), Airforce General Curtis LeMay. LeMay was more afraid of internal subversion than he was the threat from Moscow. He believed that he and his SAC bombers could readily eliminate any threat from Moscow, and he longed for permission to do so.

LeMay had taken command of SAC in 1948 and had built it into an efficient force. This was before Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), and LeMay's bombers were the primary U.S. capability of striking at the Soviet Union.

LeMay had voted for Eisenhower in 1952 but had become disappointed over the lack of intensity of Eisenhower concern for the communist menace. He was worried about a first strike by the Soviet Union and saw the way to eliminate this threat was for the U.S. to strike first.

LeMay was uninterested in the niceties of international law. In 1954 he sent his bombers on unauthorized flights over the Soviet Union, dodging MIG fighter planes in order to map potential targets. And LeMay would like to have had control over use of the atomic bomb rather than what he called politicians who happened to have been elected president.

Whether to Jaw-Jaw or War-War

Iran was in turmoil. Britain and Iran had been in conflict over sharing wealth from Iranian oil, which led to Britain boycotting Iranian oil. Iran's prime minister, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh was a nationalist hostile toward the British, neutral in the Cold War and tolerant of communists. Iran was broke, and Mossadegh had requested financial assistance from the United States, with little success. The monarchy that the British had returned to Iran had been driven from the country. Mossadegh had allied himself with communists, students and people in the streets. The British Secret Intelligence Service had a plan to overthrow Mossadegh, and they had asked for help from their friends in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Eisenhower administration approved, with Dulles gleeful at the prospect of getting rid of what he called "that madman Mossadegh." In August 1953, the U.S. helped overthrow Mossadegh and return the king to power.

Now Iran's oil facilities would be operated by an international consortium of British, American, French, and Dutch oil companies, with the profits shared between Iran and the consortium. The Russians were disturbed and protested, and soon they would see Iran join one of Dulles' alliances, the Baghdad Pact. [note]

Dulles, meanwhile, was addressing the issue of communist expansion. In January 1954, he alarmed people in the Soviet Union and Western Europe by announcing that the Eisenhower administration was going to rely on a "massive retaliatory power," including its nuclear capability, rather than allow itself to be drawn into limited conflicts similar to the war in Korea. The way to deter aggression, he said, was for "the free community" to be willing to "respond vigorously and at places and with means of its own choosing."

Kennan recognized in Dulles' strategy something of a "first strike" capability. Curtis LeMay and his SAC force were now able to send to the Soviet Union enough bombers and atomic bombs to wipe out all of the Soviet Union's six hundred or so military airfields and most of its command centers, plus urban-military centers, leaving the U.S. free from Soviet retaliation. "Massive retaliation," announced Kennan, was the "principle of first strike."

To add to the alarm, in March, 1954, the U.S. tested its first deliverable hydrogen bomb, on the island of Bikini in the Pacific  - a blast 750 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Soviet Union had already tested a deliverable hydrogen bomb, on August 12, 1953.

A Communist Victory in Vietnam

In Vietnam, the Communists were receiving heavy weaponry from China, which was no longer bogged down in Korea, and the Communists were defeating the French. Eisenhower and Dulles contemplated U.S. intervention. If the Communists won in Vietnam, said Dulles in a speech on March 26,  "the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand" would be threatened. Eisenhower agreed. He believed in the domino theory of falling nations in Southeast Asia.

The defeat of the French at Dienbienphu, in northeastern Vietnam, appeared imminent. Admiral Radford, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, wanted to help the French with a force of planes from the aircraft carriers Essex and Boxer. Army Chief of Staff, Matthew Ridgway, complained to Eisenhower that U.S. bombing would need to be followed by U.S. ground troops - around 500,000 - and that Vietnam  was a mess not worth getting into. Eisenhower listened to Ridgway and also heard a chorus of calls for intervention from Congress, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council.

It was decided that if the U.S. was to intervene in Vietnam it had to have allies, and Dulles went to Britain, where Winston Churchill - now eighty -  was again prime minister. Churchill's view of the communist menace had changed since his "iron curtain" speech in 1946. He was still anti-communist, but he was hoping that a pursuit of affluence in the Soviet Union would be accompanied by a desire by Soviet leadership to get along with the Western powers. Churchill did not fear that the Russians were out to conquer the world or that the free nations were so weak that they were about to crumble. He saw weakness instead in the Soviet Union's position in Eastern Europe. On January 1, 1953, he had spoken of the Soviet Union having digestive problems regarding its satellites in Eastern Europe, and he had predicted that Eastern Europe would be free of communism in about thirty years or so.

Churchill was opposed to joining Britain to a U.S. intervention in Vietnam. And some in the United States favoring a more aggressive stand against communism dismissed Churchill as having become senile.

Dulles also asked Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines to join a U.S. effort to stop the Communists in Vietnam, but without success. A month later, on May 7, the French at Dienbienphu surrendered to the Viet Minh, with Dulles claiming that the U.S. would have joined the war in Vietnam if it had not been for Britain's opposition.

The Geneva Accords

A Big Power conference was held at Geneva, Switzerland, the conference including representatives from the Soviet Union, China,  France and Vietnam. It was first international summit conference following Stalin's death, and the first conference to include representatives from the People's Republic of China. Dulles arrived, made a fuss over seating arrangements and impressed the Chinese delegate, Zhou Enlai, with his hostility, Dulles refusing to shake Zhou's hand.

It had been only a year since the end of the war in Korea, and China was afraid of another war with the United States. China wanted stability in its part of the world, and the Soviet Union - represented in Geneva by Molotov - also favored peace with Western powers. Both were pushing for what Churchill favored:"peaceful coexistence."

Churchill arrived in Washington, and speaking to leading politicians said that he thought it better to jaw-jaw than to war-war. Then Churchill spoke to more than a thousand reporters, telling them of his opinion that "we ought to have a try for peaceful coexistence - a real good try." [note]

At Geneva, Zhou Enlai proposed elections to defuse tensions still existing in Korea, tensions that he believed could be eliminated with the reunification that Koreans wanted. But nothing could be agreed to that would make Zhou's proposal workable. Attention changed to Indochina. France by now had recognized Vietnam's "complete independence," and Vietnam had agreed to a "free association" within the French Union. France proposed a temporary division of Vietnam at the 17th parallel, leaving France two years with which to pull out of the South. The Soviet Union and China let the Vietnamese know that they could expect no aid from them if they refused to accept the French offer. The Vietnamese agreed to the temporary division at the 17th parallel - a line, it was agreed, that was not be construed as a border. And, it was agreed, elections were to be held in 1956 elections for the purpose of uniting Vietnam's the southern and northern zones. .

Dulles was unhappy and refused to sign the agreement between the French and Vietnamese. The Republican leader in the Senate, William Knowland, was also unhappy, calling the Geneva Accords the "greatest victory the Communists have won in twenty years."  President Eisenhower said he would neither accept responsibility for the agreements at Geneva nor try to overthrow them.

Fear

In the U.S., communism was still thought of as a monolithic movement, making Chinese or American communists agents of Moscow. The Republicans trumped Democrat legislation to outlaw the Communist Party with its own version, leading to the Communist Control Act, signed by Eisenhower in August 1954. This made it a federal crime for a communist to run for public office. And Eisenhower submitted a bill to Congress called the Loss of Citizenship Act, which allowed the government to revoke the citizenship of anyone who had joined the Communist Party. People were free to function politically as anti-communists, but a new line was being drawn on political freedom - as in the Soviet Union, where people could not function politically in favor of free enterprise.

Liberal-leftist intellectuals were also a concern to impassioned Americans. Eisenhower's Postmaster General, Arthur Sumerfield, a former Chevrolet dealer with an eighth-grade education, boasted that the Eisenhower administration was getting rid of the "egg heads." Eisenhower was also concerned about America's foremost nuclear scientist, Robert Oppenheimer. Not wanting to take chances, he wanted a wall between Oppenheimer and anything secret or top secret. Oppenheimer had been proper in his handling of secrets, but he was removed from the government's atomic energy and defense programs.

In Eisenhower's State of the Union speech in 1954, he boasted of having dismissed twenty-two hundred "security risks" from government employment. The actual number was fewer than one hundred:homosexuals, alcoholics, people who did not pay their bills and some who were considered mentally disturbed.

John Foster Dulles, meanwhile, was pushing ahead with his strategies. He managed to put together an alliance of sorts among nations involved in Southeast Asia: the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, New Zealand, Australia and Britain. It was called the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and was signed in Manila on September 8. Members were to consult with one another and to unite against an aggressor if they could unanimously agree on who that aggressor was.

Pessimism, meanwhile, abounded regarding resistance to the spread of communism. Eisenhower's ambassador to Italy, Clare Booth Luce - wife of the conservative founder of Time, Life and Fortune magazines - wrote that the U.S. was probably going to lose the war against communism. Western Europe, she complained, was becoming neutralist, Italy was on the verge of surrendering to communism, and by 1959, she predicted, half of the nations in NATO would be under Soviet control.

The Spirit of Geneva - 1955

Nikita Khrushchev was the most intellectually aggressive member of the new collective leadership in the Soviet Union, and the Presidium was coming under his influence. He wanted to lift some of the burden from people under Soviet control, and he wanted to ease Cold War tensions. But he did not trust the West. Ringing in his ears was Stalin's remark that after he died the capitalists would wring the necks of his successors like chickens.

In early 1955, tensions arose over small islands next to the China's mainland that were occupied by Chiang's forces - the islands of Quemoy and Ma-tsu. Dulles talked about "tactical" atomic bombs. There was talk of bombing China's cities. The majority leader in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, denounced the talk among Republicans of war.  Public opinion in the U.S. was disturbed and unenthusiastic about a war against China. The Australians and Canadians were upset with Dulles, and the Eisenhower administration let the crisis disappear.

On May 5, 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) joined NATO, and in response, on May 14,  the Soviet Union signed agreements with its satellite regimes, creating what was called the Warsaw Pact.  According to the agreement, each member nation would be defended against "imperialist" interference or military intervention.

In May, Britain and France proposed a conference with Soviet leaders, to ease tensions, while the Soviet Union was trying to negotiate a withdrawal of the World War II allies from their occupation of Austria. The suspicions of Dulles were overcome, and the four powers - the U.S., U.S.S.R., Britain and France - signed an agreement that reestablished Austria's independence, with the proviso that Austria would remain "forever neutral" in foreign affairs. The Kremlin pulled its troops out of Austria, and, of the three countries divided at the end of World War II, Austria became the first to achieve reunification.

Eisenhower was impressed by the Soviet Union's behavior regarding Austria, and he argued in favor of accepting a British and French proposal for a summit meeting at Geneva. He was concerned about the arms race and was hopeful that a summit meeting would help create an atmosphere of trust between the Soviet Union and his administration. Dulles argued against it, and so too did some Republican Party hardliners who were reminded of the Yalta summit meeting.

The summit meeting opened on July 18. Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and Britain's new prime minister, Anthony Eden, discussed disarmament and European security. Eisenhower announced his "Open Skies" proposal. The British and French were enthusiastic, and the Soviet delegates were dumb struck. Bulganin, when asked, said the proposal would require study. Khrushchev did not want to wait for any study. He  believed that "Open Skies" would help LeMay improve his target data. Also he did not want to expose a  bluff: the United States had an overwhelming superiority in ability to deliver nuclear weapons. Khrushchev said that Eisenhower's proposal, "Open Skies'" amounted to spying.

Dulles left the Geneva summit impressed by the Soviet leaders desire for good relations with everyone - what was called the spirit of Geneva. Khrushchev left Geneva, still concerned about Soviet competition with the West and what he called their tricks. 

Revolts in Poland and Hungary

By  February, 1956, Khrushchev had become First Secretary of the Communist Party, and that month, at the party's 20th All Union Congress, Khrushchev gave his famous six-hour "secret speech" denouncing the  "crimes of the Stalin era." Journalists and foreign party members, including Italy's Togliati, were not allowed to attend. But, of course, the contents of the speech became widely known, and in the satellite countries it  aroused a sense of justification for reforms.

In June, 1956, a revolt against Soviet influence erupted in Poland, and it was defeated by the Polish army. But the Poles gained some concessions from Moscow. Wladyslaw Gomulka, who had been accused of Titoism in the late forties, was released from prison, became the head of Poland's Communist Party and won the backing of Poland's workers against the Russians. And Poland won control over its own economy while remaining loyal to the Warsaw Pact and friendly toward the Soviet Union.

Communists in Hungary also sought changes, as did university students, who were expressing solidarity with the Poles. Here resentment remained over the looting and raping by Russian troops in 1945, and resentment over the punishment of people who did not deny that such things happened. In 1955, Khrushchev had replaced the more liberal communist, Imre Nagy, with the hardliner, Rakosi, believing that Rakosi might better be able to hold Hungary together under communist leadership. Now, in 1956, in response to troubles in Poland, demonstrators in Hungary's capital, Budapest, filled the streets. A party hardliner made a truculent speech over the radio which set off an explosion of protest. Armed workers and others overwhelmed the secret police and the hardline government. The hardline government called in the Russian troops, the Russians came, the Russian delegation angry, believing that hardliners had acted stupidly and removed them from power. Russian tanks merely sat about, their crews smiling and talking with the Hungarians in the streets. And after four days the Russians left, with Nagy back in power and the Hungarians delirious with joy.

Immediately after the Russian left, Nagy moved to make Hungary a genuine democracy. He abolished the one-party system and announced the coming of elections. He had gone too far for the Russians, who feared losing Hungary. On October 31, Russian troops turned around and headed back to  Budapest. Nagy complained that a new entry by Soviet troops violated the Warsaw Pact Treaty, and he announced that unless the troops withdrew he would withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Treaty. On November 2, Hungary's Cardinal Mindzenty appealed to the West for support. When the Russian tanks burst into Hungary for the second time, fighting erupted between the tanks and those called freedom fighters. The Russians won. The Russians put in power a new regime headed by Janos Kadar, who had been between the hardliners and Nagy. Nagy was taken to the Soviet Union and imprisoned. He was charged with treason, and in 1958 he was executed.

Confronting Nuclear Terror

The Hungarian uprising was crushed while Israeli, French and British troops were moving against Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt - four months after Nasser had announced that he was nationalizing the Suez Canal. The invasion provided some distraction for the Russian assault on Hungary. Eisenhower disliked Nasser but was opposed to the military invasion of Egypt, fearing that it would create an outrage among anti-colonialists and maybe stir up a guerrilla war, and he felt betrayed by the British and French. The Soviet Premier, Bulganin, proposed a joint Soviet-U.S. military action to end the hostilities in the Middle East - rejected, of course, by Eisenhower. But with Eisenhower against the attack on Egypt and the UN moving against their action, on November 26 the British, French and Israelis halted their advance - less than 48 hours after it had begun.

On January 5, 1957, Eisenhower asked Congress for what was to become known as the Eisenhower Doctrine - a program to guard against communist aggression in the Middle East. And in his State of the Union message on January 10, Eisenhower spoke of his commitment to the defense of the entire free world.

These were times of unrest in the South of the United States. Through 1956 there had been the bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama, and in 1957 a battle over school integration was in the making. Eisenhower declared at a news conference on July 17 that he could not imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce him to send federal troops. He tried to remain aloof from what he regarded as a state problem, but in September he reluctantly federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 men of the 101 Airborne Division to Little Rock to "prevent anarchy," angering those who believed that states had a right to act or not to act as they saw fit.

Khrushchev also had domestic problems. The revolts in Poland and Hungary had strengthened his conservative critics, people who believed that his anti-Stalin speech was conducive to creating anarchy and support for the capitalist West. Presidium members including Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich tried to abolish the office of Party First Secretariat, held by Khrushchev. In the political struggle that followed, Khrushchev won. Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich were voted out of the Presidium, and the Minister of Defense, Zhukov, a Khrushchev supporter, was voted in. Molotov was sent to Mongolia as ambassador. Malenkov was sent to Kazakhstan as director of a hydro-electric plant. And Kaganovich was made director of a cement works.

In October, Khrushchev received a boost from the successful launching of the Soviet Union's first satellite - sputnik - six times heavier than the satellite the U.S. had been planning. A second satellite was launched on November 2. Many in Washington, other than Eisenhower, were alarmed. Dulles hinted publicly that he would seek to equip overseas bases with intermediate-range missiles capable of delivering atomic bombs. Prime Minister Lester Pearson of Canada spoke in favor of another summit meeting, The World Council of Churches spoke in favor of  "massive reconciliation" rather than "massive retaliation." Eisenhower believed that another summit might help prevent a nuclear war.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed a cultural agreement. The Soviet Union's journal, USSR, would now appear on magazine racks in the United States - without doing much apparent damage to U.S. citizens, and more Western works were available to Soviet Citizens - not long after the novel Doctor Zhivago had been banned and its author, Boris Pasternak, prevented from going to Sweden to accept his nobel prize.

Lebanon

Nasser was working toward unity for the Islamic peoples of North Africa and the Middle East and was supporting the revolt by Algerians against French rule. In Iraq, a coup in July, led by pro-Nasser army officers, left Iraqi royalty dead and brought an end to a pro-Western regime there. Iraq had been a member of the Baghdad Pact, detested by Nasser, who considered it imperialistic. The Eisenhower administration considered intervention, but with the royal family dead and no one in Iraq to collaborate with, no grounds for intervention could be found.

Iraq pulled out of the Baghdad Pact, and ended its treaty with Jordan, where trouble was also brewing. The CIA warned the British, who had an interest there, and the British sent a paratrooper brigade to protect Jordan's King Hussein.

Syria had joined with Egypt in what was called the United Arab Republic, and when Nasser visited Syria, hundreds of thousands of  Lebanese journeyed there to see him. Nasser was a hero to Lebanon's Muslims, and Lebanon was in a civil war. Lebanon was divided between Muslims and Christians, and the president, Camille Chamoun, was a Christian who was holding on to power as a result of a rigged election. The U.S. Information Agency library was burned and an oil pipeline was cut, and Chamoun appealed to the United States for help.

The Pentagon urged the sending of a UN force rather than a U.S. force, but this was overruled by Dulles, who believed that Moscow was fomenting the trouble in Lebanon. The Eisenhower administration sent its Sixth Fleet to Lebanon. On July 15, Marines were landed, and Lebanon's airport was secured. No ground fighting involving Americans broke out. A couple of Marines made a wrong turn and drove into Muslim territory. They were disarmed and asked why they were in Lebanon, and the Marines said they did not know. The Marines were given a lecture on imperialism and then allowed to return from whence they had come.

On July 31, Lebanon's parliament elected General Faud Shehab as president to succeed Chamoun, and Shehab selected a Muslim, Rashid Karami, as his prime minister. Karami's cabinet had an equal number of Christians and Muslims. Karami pursued rebuilding and pacification, and, in October, U.S. forces withdrew.

Quemoy and Ma-tsu Two

Two months after the evacuation of Lebanon, the U.S. military sent ships back to the Taiwan Strait.  Since the first crisis involving Quemoy and Ma-tsu, Chiang Kai-shek had occupied those islands in force. From Quemoy he had been shelling the mainland and sending teams against the communists. Using old American destroyers and patrol boats he was cruising China's territorial waters, disrupting trade and doing battle with China's inferior boats.

Mao was impressed by the Soviet Union's missile and H-bomb capability and thought that weapon superiority was an opportunity to get rid of capitalist imperialism. Khrushchev was appalled by the idea, but for the sake of solidarity he offered Soviet backing for any attempt to capture Taiwan. Three weeks after Khrushchev departed from China, Mao began bombarding Quemoy, firing 50,000 shells against the island in one day, initiating another Quemoy crisis. Dulles and the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged Eisenhower to consider using nuclear weapons to prevent an invasion of Quemoy and Ma-tsu. Eisenhower refused. He was not interested in the use of tactical nuclear weapons as he had been early in his presidency, but he went on television and announced that there was not going to be any appeasement and that he believed there was not going to be any war. A U.S. delegation met with a Chinese delegation in Warsaw, Poland, and the crisis ended.

Plans for Better Relations and another Summit

The Vice President of the United States, Richard Nixon, was the most active Vice President in recent times, and with his extensive travels on behalf of the United States government and his pragmatic turn of mind, his approach to the Soviet Union and communism was close to Eisenhower's. In 1959, Nixon visited the Soviet Union and found his host, Khrushchev, friendly but filled with bluster. Khrushchev had little understanding of U.S. politics and began discussions with Nixon by denouncing a resolution by the U.S. Senate that had established "Captive Nations Week." Khrushchev called the resolution an insult and a serious "provocation."  Nixon remained calm while defending the Eisenhower Administration positions, and he was persistent in expressing support for democracy and the rights of people to express themselves freely.

In touring Moscow on the weekend, Khrushchev and Nixon, with an army of aids and reporters, came upon some Russians relaxing, sunbathing and swimming, and for Nixon's benefit Khrushchev joyfully asked them if they felt they were slaves or captive people. The people happily answered no, and Nixon laughed.

The issue arose of  the American proposal for inspecting missile sites for the sake of disarmament, and Khrushchev said that this might be done after the United States "liquidated its overseas bases." Nixon said that the money that each of their nations were spending on missiles was unfortunate, and Khrushchev agreed. Nixon said the United States and the Soviet Union would be better off if they stopped talking about a balance of power and emphasized instead that "both are powerful and want a future of peace rather than war."

Later in their discussions, Nixon answered Khrushchev's accusations of U.S. aggression by bringing up Khrushchev's statement in Poland that the Soviet Union would support revolution everywhere in the world. Khrushchev complained that the U.S. did not understand Marxists, that Marxists did not believe in terror. Revolution, he said, had to come from the masses.

The discussion turned to Germany. Khrushchev accused the West of trying to "engulf East Germany and make all of Germany an ally of the West." Khrushchev expressed the Soviet Union's displeasure with what he called the "occupation regime" in West Berlin (in the middle of East Germany). The Berlin Wall had not yet been built, and Khrushchev was aware of the mischief that U.S. agents were creating in East Germany, including offering Germans with skills money to defect.  Khrushchev wanted a secure border between East and West Germany. He said that the Soviet Union was open to proposals, including the withdrawal of Allied forces from Berlin and Soviet forces from East Germany and Poland.

Khrushchev was invited to tour the United States, and eventually he accepted. Anti-communists welcomed him to the U.S. with demonstrations and called him the "Butcher of Budapest." Eisenhower met with Khrushchev at his summer retreat at Camp David, and there the two leaders laid plans for attending a summit meeting in Paris.

Then on May 2, 1960, the Soviet Union shot down a U2 spy flight from Turkey, and the United States was caught lying. Eisenhower took responsibility for the flights, and on May 14, as scheduled, he journeyed to Paris for the summit meeting. Khrushchev had to maintain appearances among his fellow Russians regarding Russian security. He could not appear friendly with Eisenhower given Eisenhower's admission that he had approved the U2 flights. He canceled Eisenhower's planned trip to the Soviet Union and canceled his plan to attend the Paris summit. The thaw in the Cold War appeared to have been canceled.

Monolithic Communism Splits

In 1959 Khrushchev had abrogated the Soviet Union's 1957 aid agreement with China, and he publicly denounced the Chinese communists. The Russians were upset over China's attempt at a "Great Leap Forward" and rejection of the Soviet model of socialist development. Khrushchev accused the Chinese of not properly understanding what communism was about and how it was to be built, and he ridiculed Mao's communes. The Chinese were upset with the Soviet Union for reneging on its promise to supply them with atomic weapons and for failing to support them during the Quemoy and Ma-tsu crisis of 1958 and their dispute with India in 1959. Khrushchev was afraid of the Chinese starting a war that would destroy the world. Mao had been calling the U.S. a paper tiger and Khrushchev had responded that the tiger had nuclear teeth. In 1960 Khrushchev pulled 1,400 scientists and industrial specialists from some 250 enterprises, and apparently he ordered them to bring their blueprints with them. The Chinese were mystified, and by the beginning of September 1960, Soviet diplomats and a few trade officials were the only Soviet citizens in China.

Barry Goldwater

In Washington, some conservative Republicans still saw their party as controlled by East Coast establishment moderates. Attracting attention among the conservatives was Barry Goldwater from Arizona - a senator since 1953.  Goldwater described Eisenhower as a "dime store New Dealer." He was anything but a racist, but his belief in states' rights pleased southerners trying to maintain segregation.

Goldwater was opposed to "big government." He advocated states' right-to-work laws, a reduction of public ownership of utilities, and decreases in welfare and foreign aid appropriations. Welfare he described as socialistic. He attacked subversive activities and had opposed the Senate's censure of Joseph R. MacArthur. Goldwater criticized Eisenhower for his willingness to talk to Khrushchev. He and his admirers were the counterpart of those in France who were charging Charles de Gaule with being soft on communism while de Gaulle was hoping to defuse hostilities and misunderstandings between the West and the Soviet Union.

Goldwater's aid, Brent Bozwell, wrote book for Goldwater called Conscience of a Conservative - the best selling political book since Tom Paine's Common Sense. In this and another book drawn from the writings of Bozwell, Why Not Victory?, Goldwater carried the torch for those supporting an uncompromisingly anti-communist policy. Not only was Goldwater for an undiluted conservatism in domestic policy, he wrote of the communists as having the will and the capacity "to dominate absolutely every square mile of the globe." The communist threat, he wrote, was "growing day by day" and some Americans leaders, political and intellectual, he added, were "searching desperately for means of 'appeasing' or 'accommodating' the Soviet Union as the price of national survival." Goldwater declared that the U.S. was at war with "an enemy who has never hidden his objective of destroying us and all other people who cherish freedom." Goldwater declared that "Victory is the key to the whole problem" and that the only alternative was defeat. Goldwater added that "our strategy must be primarily offensive in nature." We should, he wrote, "declare the world Communist movement an outlaw in the community of civilized nations. Accordingly, we should withdraw diplomatic recognition from all Communist governments including that of the Soviet Union." And he wrote, "We must - ourselves - be prepared to undertake military operations against vulnerable Communist regimes.".

Cold War Mindsets

By the end of the Eisenhower administration in 1961 the Russians and Americans had different explanations for the Cold War. It was commonly believed in the Soviet Union that the capitalist nations were encircling their nation and wanted to overthrow the Soviet government. People blamed the capitalist West for the Cold War, seeing their Soviet government as having consistently pursued peace despite hostility from the West. Responsibility for this hostility had class origins, specifically the work of a Wall Street elite, whose mindset at least prevailed in Washington D.C. if they were not pulling strings directly. And it was commonly believed that capitalism was crisis prone, in decline and that the future would see the success of communism, spreading here and there by the choice of local people rather than forced upon them by the Soviet Union.

In the United States, many Americans believed that the Soviet Union was trying to force communism on the world and that it was the duty of the United States to save the world from communism. Many saw international communism - including  communism in China - as a monolithic conspiracy from Moscow, that negotiating was a waste of time because nothing was going to change the devious intent of the Communists, and that only military force would deter Communists from the goal of world domination.

A few people in the United States found fault with the old Stalin regime and how it operated at the end of the war, and they saw Stalin as having broken agreements. They saw free enterprise as better than Soviet or Marxist socialism. They believed that it was the responsibility of the United States and others to respond to any military aggression but that the  was more likely to spread because of attitudes within a nation rather than by military force directed from Moscow. They they saw Soviet leaders as having a normal range of desires rather than singularly evil in their intent to spread their atheism and communism. They saw it as possible that communists preferred peace, that they preferred life to destruction and death, and in this regard these Americans saw negotiating with Moscow of possible benefit. Vice President Richard Nixon, who was running for President in 1960, had been to Moscow and knew the Russians fairly well, and he was among those holding this view. Also, he was among those who were confident that in the long run capitalism would perform better than the Soviet economic system. Agreeing with Nixon on these matters was his opponent in 1960, John F. Kennedy. Where they mainly disagreed was over a so-called missile gap claimed by Kennedy and on domestic issues.

Into the 1960s some would offer an explanation of the Cold War that put primary blame for the Cold War on the United States. They described Truman as using the U.S. monopoly on atomic bombs to intimidate the Soviet Union into withdrawing from Eastern Europe. Similar to the Marxists in the Soviet Union, some would describe those in power in Washington as having as their primary goal an economic expansion that benefited U.S. corporations. They cited U.S. support for dictators abroad for the purpose of protecting the investments of corporations, and they saw the Cold War as driven by an alliance between the military establishment and defense contractors - the military-industrial complex - which had an interest in portraying communism as a menace that needed to be countered by a strong military.

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