Q: One other attractive aspect to Eisenhower of this "New Look" policy is
an economic one. He thinks that the Democrat - the Truman - defense policy is
way too expensive, and he sees the "New Look" as a way to bring the defense
spending down to a more manageable, sustainable level. Tell me about
Eisenhower's ideas with regard to the health of the economy and national
security.
JLG: Well, I think if you were to get at the heart of Eisenhower's strategy, it
is the strategy of how you make containment work for the long haul. And his
criticism of the Truman Administration's strategy, particularly NSC-68, was
that it was going to bankrupt the country. And Eisenhower wasn't sure which
was worse: the bankruptcy of the country or a victory for Communism. And in a
way, the bankruptcy of the country would be a victory indirectly for Communism,
in Eisenhower's thinking. So what he's looking for is a way to get off this
crash-spending basis, to find a way to sustain containment over the long haul
at bearable cost, so that you don't wreck the American economy in the process.
And really, this is what's at the heart of the "New Look", and nuclear weapons
are only one component of it.
Q: So you have Eisenhower coming into office and pretty much saying, "Well,
the next war, if there is another worldwide conflict, it's inevitably going to
go nuclear." He makes statements along the line that, "Well, nuclear
ammunition is essential like any other ordnance." But a couple of years into
his presidency, these H-bombs really seem to have an impact on his
thinking.
JLG: Well, Eisenhower is an extraordinarily complex individual, and historians
have not yet completely fathomed his depths, it seems to me. Eisenhower was
perfectly capable of saying on one day in the National Security Council that if
war came with the Soviet Union, we should immediately simply bomb the Kremlin,
go to the head of the snake, cut it off. On the very next day, in the National
Security Council, he'd talk about the possibility and in fact the need to
abolish nuclear weapons altogether. So Eisenhower's operating at several
different levels here, and he puzzled his own aides; he puzzled the adversary,
no doubt; he puzzled his own advisers, and he certainly has puzzled historians
as well.
My own guess on this, my own estimate is that Eisenhower never wanted to use
nuclear weapons and never thought that a war could be fought and won with
nuclear weapons. But at the same time, he was painfully aware of the danger of
building up conventional weapons, in terms of the economic burden that would
cause, but also the danger that when you do build up conventional weapons,
you're tempted to find places to use them, as the Kennedy Administration later
did in Vietnam. I think Eisenhower is grasping for a way to deter all war, and
I think that the way he's trying to do it is to make the point that any war
would become total war. That's his declaratory policy. And the idea is to
make that prospect so frightening that there will be no war at all. I think
this is really what was going on in his mind. I have no way to prove this, but
after years of thinking about this, this is what I think the evidence points
toward.
Q: And he succeeded.
JLG: He succeeded, up to a point. He succeeded in the sense that there were no
wars that broke out on his watch, of any significance. But at the same time,
it's an exceedingly high risk strategy. And particularly it's high risk when
you consider what I think is the greatest failure of the Eisenhower
Administration with respect to nuclear weapons, which is the "sorcerer's
apprentice" syndrome, you might say, with regard to the production of nuclear
weapons. He did not stop the process of building H-bombs. By the time the
Eisenhower Administration left office, we had thousands of these things. And
the war plans, the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP), provided for using
all of them at once. Now, this could not be more at odds with Eisenhower's own
thinking about the ecological consequences of nuclear weapons. And how
Eisenhower could sit there and think in those very progressive terms, think in
terms that sound very good even today, as we contemplate these kinds of
ecological sensitivities, how he could sit there and do that while at the same
time allowing SAC [Strategic Air Command] and General LeMay to be piling up
thousands up weapons and devising war plans that would involve the use of these
weapons simultaneously, is very difficult to fathom. And I think it's the
single greatest failing of the Eisenhower Administration. And I think it
raises real questions about how risky this strategy was. Eisenhower was very
lucky that we didn't have something break out on his watch, because he might
not have been able to control what then happened, if we had had to deploy
forces.
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