Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war: McCarthyism, Korea, and other nightmares

Monthly Review, April, 1997 by Doug Dowd

Truman, who had begun the cold war and laid the foundations for McCarthyism, could hardly have been entertained when he was accused of having given China away, and of having followed that up by placing us in an unwinnable war. One would like to have been there to hear Harry at that moment in 1952 when he was informed that McCarthy was calling for his impeachment as a traitor.

That the cold war and a belligerent foreign policy were coming to substitute for a decent concern for the society at home is suggested by the fact that even though the economy and society were moving in waves of economic well-being in his two administrations, the Truman Democrats were easily shoved out of office in the 1950s. Also, even though under Eisenhower the economy was never strongly buoyant and ended the 1950s in weakness, and his favors to big business and cronies came to be the stuff of folklore - "The New Dealers have all left Washington to make way for the car dealers," quipped Adlai in 1956 - Ike's popularity never stopped growing. There is no doubt he could have been elected to a third term, had it not by then become unconstitutional.

Eisenhower had a big grin (very important for a president), tended to speak in the endearing and stumbling ways that prefigured Reagan, was seen as having won the Big War and ended the Nasty War, liked Westerns and golf, and, like Truman - like the people of the United States, it seems - favored quick and military solutions.

Perhaps because he was an experienced soldier, Ike was not as incautious as some of our presidents have been, but he never burned the night oil searching out the complicated ways of peaceful solutions. Thus, while pushing for an armistice in Korea, he was also "unleashing" Chiang Kai-shek (by then, with U.S. permission, ruling over Taiwan - ex-Japanese-ruled Formosa), taking the chance of a full-scale war with China - and who knows who else and what else.

And it was after all "on his watch," as presidents seem to be saying these years, that we - mostly meaning the CIA - overturned the democratically elected governments of Iran and of Guatemala (1953 and 1954, respectively), if it was also his administration that broke the back of the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956.(17) In doing that, Ike not only punctured the balloon of further imperialist designs by Britain and France - vain, in any case - but also increased the relative strength and the "responsibilities" of the United States.

Already in 1957 Ike was induced by his mentor John Foster Dulles to proclaim the "Eisenhower Doctrine" - which, after giving aid to King Hussein of Jordan against a left threat, and landing 10,000 U.S. marines in Beirut against a rumored military threat from Iraq, was permitted to disappear from our language in 1959 - a change, finally, for the better.

NOTES

1. Although, as subsequent references will show, there has been an interesting and useful spate of books concerning Korea in the past ten years or so - facilitated in part by the Freedom of Information Act, in part by the diminution of the cold war itself.