Eisenhower 1956

The President's Year of Crisis--Suez and the Brink of War

David A. Nichols

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781439146996
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A gripping tale of international intrigue and betray-al, Eisenhower 1956 is the white-knuckle story of how President Dwight D. Eisenhower guided the United States through the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. The crisis climaxed in a tumultuous nine-day period fraught with peril just prior to the 1956 presidential election, with Great Britain, France, and Israel invading Egypt while the Soviet Union ruthlessly crushed rebellion in Hungary.

David A. Nichols, a leading expert on Eisenhower’s presidency, draws on hundreds of documents declassified in the last thirty years, enabling the reader to look over Ike’s shoulder and follow him day by day, sometimes hour by hour as he grappled with the greatest international crisis of his presidency. The author uses formerly top secret minutes of National Security Council and Oval Office meetings to illuminate a crisis that threatened to escalate into global conflict.

Nichols shows how two life-threatening illnesses—Eisenhower’s heart attack in September 1955 and his abdominal surgery in June 1956—took the president out of action at critical moments and contributed to missteps by his administration.

In 1956, more than two thirds of Western Europe’s oil supplies transited the Suez Canal, which was run by a company controlled by the British and French, Egypt’s former colonial masters. When the United States withdrew its offer to finance the Aswan Dam in July of that year, Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the canal. Without Eisenhower’s knowledge, Britain and France secretly plotted with Israel to invade Egypt and topple Nasser.

On October 29—nine days before the U.S. presidential election—Israel invaded Egypt, setting the stage for a “perfect storm.” British and French forces soon began bombing Egyptian ports and airfields and landing troops who quickly routed the Egyptian army. Eisenhower condemned the attacks and pressed for a cease-fire at the United Nations.

Within days, in Hungary, Soviet troops and tanks were killing thousands to suppress that nation’s bid for freedom. When Moscow openly threatened to intervene in the Middle East, Eisenhower placed American military forces—including some with nuclear weapons—on alert and sternly warned the Soviet Union against intervention.

On November 6, Election Day, after voting at his home in Gettysburg, Ike rushed back to the White House to review disturbing intelligence from Moscow with his military advisors. That same day, he learned that the United Nations had negotiated a cease-fire in the Suez war—a result, in no small measure, of Eisenhower’s steadfast opposition to the war and his refusal to aid the allies.

In the aftermath of the Suez crisis, the United States effectively replaced Great Britain as the guarantor of stability in the Middle East. More than a half century later, that commitment remains the underlying premise for American policy in the region.

Historians have long treated the Suez Crisis as a minor episode in the dissolution of colonial rule after World War II. As David Nichols makes clear in Eisenhower 1956, it was much more than that.

1

THE MAN AND THE MOMENT

“I believed that it would be undesirable and impracticable for the British to retain sizable forces permanently in the territory of a jealous and resentful government amid an openly hostile population.”

Eisenhower in his memoir, Waging Peace

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER was sworn in as president of the United States at 12:32 P.M. on January 20, 1953. He had won the election over the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, primarily because he was an iconic war hero, associated in the public mind with victory in World War II. Elliot Richardson, a war veteran who later led four different cabinet-level departments, sensed Ike’s mettle as a crisis leader the first time he saw him. Richardson said to himself: “This guy is a tough son-of-a-bitch!”¹

Yet, on Inauguration Day, Eisenhower avoided the grand gestures or dramatic rhetoric one might have expected from a flamboyant military figure like Douglas MacArthur. He flashed the famous smile only once during the ceremony. The New York Times described his demeanor as “grave and grim,” saying he “looked lonely and a little sad” as he assumed “a responsibility no one can bear without trembling.” Begun with a prayer, Eisenhower’s inaugural speech was a serious, almost philosophical dissertation about faith and principle. Although he was a military man to the core, he said virtually nothing about weapons and armies.²

Columnist James Reston noted that forty-one of the forty-eight paragraphs in the speech were devoted to foreign affairs. Eisenhower assured the nations in major regions of the world—Europe, the Far East, and Latin America—of American support in their quest for freedom. He did not mention the Middle East. Listening to Eisenhower’s inaugural address, Reston tried to discern whether the general was a “Europe-firster” or an “Asia-firster.” On January 20, 1953, no one thought to ask whether Ike was a “Middle East–firster.”³

“NEVER AGAIN”

Eisenhower could not have anticipated the events that would culminate in the most dangerous foreign crisis of his administration, a crisis threatening world war. Nor could he have imagined that a dispute over the Suez Canal would create a major rift with America’s closest allies and personal friends with whom he had fought World War II. Nor could he foresee that all this would occur in a year in which he would be plagued by illness, even as he was compelled to reshape American policy in the Middle East. But while Ike could not envision the coming Suez storm, he was acutely aware that he was assuming the presidency in a dangerous world still shell-shocked from World War II. Those who had endured its ravages had sworn, in effect, to “never again” tolerate the conditions they believed had spawned the conflagration.

The Soviet Union, after suffering an estimated 35 million casualties in the war, exemplified this syndrome. Soviet leaders had resented being forced to carry the burden of the war against Hitler until June 1944. Having fought Germany in two world wars, the Russians had blocked German reunification and set up puppet communist regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania as a buffer against future invasion.

The British and French harbored their own version of the “never again” mind-set, determined to avoid future appeasement of aggressors. Their leaders, especially Prime Minister Winston Churchill, viewed Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as a reincarnation of Hitler’s aggression. The postwar disintegration of Europe’s colonial empires only exacerbated the paranoia. Later, Churchill’s successor, Anthony Eden, would insist to Eisenhower that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the general who took power in Egypt in 1954, was, in effect, “another Hitler.”⁴

Britain’s and France’s former colonies, especially Egypt, waved the flag of rising nationalism, fiercely determined that the European powers would never again dominate their affairs. Arab nationalism had been further fueled by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, built on the resolve of European Jews to never again submit to a Nazi-like Holocaust.

While the United States emerged from the war stronger than its European allies, the Soviet Union’s postwar actions and development of atomic weapons intensified American perceptions of a worldwide communist threat. President Harry Truman, and later Eisenhower, concluded that America must never again embrace isolationism and fail to address a growing peril to world peace.

This bundle of tensions had spawned a “Cold War” almost immediately after the big war. In 1946, Churchill, while out of power, declared that an “Iron Curtain” had descended on Eastern Europe. In 1947, President Truman enunciated the Truman Doctrine to contain communism and launched the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western European economies. By Inauguration Day, Eisenhower had fully embraced the doctrine that world peace depended on American containment of the Soviet Union; indeed, a major reason Ike had decided to run for president was to defeat the isolationist wing of the Republican Party.⁵

“SLOW TO PICK UP THE SWORD”

The new president, on his first day in office, was more fully a citizen of the world than any of his predecessors. He had lived in Panama, the Philippines, England, and France. He had survived two world wars and, in the second, had commanded history’s largest military expeditionary force.

As he took the oath of office, Ike had a strategic map of the globe in his head, with the areas of potential conflict with the Soviet Union clearly delineated. Eisenhower possessed a first-class strategic intellect. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., recalled the feelings of Ike’s subordinates that “in the two-thirds of his job dealing with foreign and military affairs he knew more than all of us put together.”

Yet Eisenhower the military man was not militaristic. He did not think that there were military solutions to many problems. While prepared to exploit his military credibility in deterring the Soviets, Eisenhower viewed war with them as a last, not a first, resort. The new president was determined to talk about disarmament early and often.

Ike’s reluctance to go to war made him intensely skeptical about the wisdom of getting into “brushfire” wars, those “little wars” that he believed could escalate into global conflict.⁶ By January 20, he had already decided to end the one he had inherited in Korea, and set out to avoid any others during his presidency.

Still, given the potential horrors of nuclear war, some of Ike’s advisors thought that such limited wars were the only ones that could safely be fought. Ike thought it naive to believe it would always be possible to control a small war or even, as he put it, a “nice sweet World War II type of war.” He believed that the Soviet Union and the United States would be tempted to use every weapon at their disposal. That was a good reason, in Eisenhower’s thinking, to clearly communicate to the other side that massive retaliation would be his response to major aggression. That strategic gambit, a bluff worthy of a skilled poker player, was designed to prevent war, not cause it—to convince his adversary to join hands with him in keeping the peace. General Andrew Goodpaster, his longtime aide and friend, recalled that Ike was “slow to pick up the sword.”⁷

A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME

Still, on Inauguration Day, the Middle East was already on Eisenhower’s agenda. He had quickly decided against walking in lockstep with the British on Middle East policy. Prime Minister Churchill, who had returned to power in 1951, had visited Washington two weeks prior to the inauguration, imploring Eisenhower to support Britain in negotiations with the Egyptians regarding the British military presence in the Suez Canal Zone. Afterward, Ike expressed concern in his diary that the aging British warrior was “trying to relive the days of World War II.” Churchill, he recalled, had talked “very animatedly” about “Egypt and its future” and had particularly sought Ike’s solidarity with the British on issues regarding the status of the canal.⁸

The bone of contention was the presence of eighty thousand British troops in Egypt, stationed on a huge base in the Canal Zone. Those British forces had a long history, closely linked to Britain’s quasi-colonial domination of that country. Ever since its completion by the French and Egyptians in 1869, the Suez Canal, connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, had been a boon to European economies and a linchpin of British and French influence in the Middle East. It facilitated commerce between Asia and Europe, but its construction had required the forced labor of thousands of Egyptians, spawning a legacy of lasting bitterness toward the Europeans.

In 1875, financial problems had compelled Egypt to sell its share in the Canal Company to the British, who along with the French parlayed this stake into effective control of Egypt’s finances and government. In 1882, the British landed troops to protect the canal during a civil war in Egypt; on Eisenhower’s Inauguration Day, they were still there.

In July 1952, a military junta, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Naguib, had seized power in Egypt, dethroning King Farouk. The new government’s leaders immediately began to agitate for the removal of the British forces. Difficult negotiations were already underway when Eisenhower took office and Churchill wanted the new president to commit the United States to full participation.⁹

Three days after Eisenhower was inaugurated, President Naguib escalated the rhetoric about the British occupation of the Canal Zone, publicly calling for the Egyptian people to “get rid of the last traces of British Imperialism” and swearing that “after this day, no tyrant will ever establish himself upon our soil.” Eisenhower had already reached a firm conclusion that “it would be undesirable and impracticable for the British to retain sizable forces permanently in the territory of a jealous and resentful government amid an openly hostile population.”¹⁰

Eisenhower was knowledgeable about the Arab world, partly due to his oversight of World War II operations in North Africa. He understood that the Middle East, as the repository of the world’s largest known petroleum reserves, was essential to the survival of Western Europe in the Cold War contest with the Soviet Union. Ike embraced a strategic reality, starkly expressed in his memoirs: the Suez Canal was, he wrote, “the most important waterway in the world.”¹¹

Keeping the canal open in time of war had been an overriding European priority for decades. Eisenhower anchored the legal foundation for his approach to the strategic status of the Suez Canal in two documents, both formally ratified by nations that utilized the canal. The first was the Convention of 1888 signed by the maritime nations, pledging to “guarantee, at all times, and to all Powers, the free use of the Suez Maritime Canal.” That agreement assumed that British troops would continue to protect the Canal Zone.¹²

The second agreement was signed in 1950 in the aftermath of the war to establish the state of Israel, fought against five Arab states—Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The United Nations–sponsored armistice in 1949 authorized temporary borders that were the catalyst for repeated violent incidents and reprisals. A particular problem was the Gaza Strip, a small finger of land bordering Egypt, Israel, and the Mediterranean. The Egyptians were granted temporary oversight of Gaza, setting the stage for almost constant conflict with Israel.¹³ Given this volatile situation, the British, French, and Americans signed an agreement in 1950 (known as the Tripartite Declaration), attempting to avoid an arms race in the Middle East by prescribing limits on the provision of arms to the protagonists and pledging assistance to any Middle East nation threatened by aggression.¹⁴

A third legal reality would inform Eisenhower’s view of the Suez Canal in the years ahead. In the words of Attorney General Brownell, “The entire length of the Canal lay within Egyptian territory.”¹⁵

On February 24, 1953, Eisenhower called a special meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) to discuss the British-Egyptian negotiations and Prime Minister Churchill’s demands for American involvement. Ike told the group that he was “puzzled” by Churchill’s expressions of “extreme urgency” regarding the role of the United States in the negotiations. Noting some “frightening phraseology” in Churchill’s correspondence, Ike worried aloud that Churchill was “trying to tie our hands in advance.”¹⁶

A PLANNER-PRESIDENT

Ike’s reliance on the NSC points to the best framework for understanding Eisenhower’s leadership, especially in foreign affairs. He was a planner. That was how he had risen in the military, not by battlefield exploits; Ike never commanded troops in combat. Goodpaster recalled that Eisenhower divided long-range planning and policy development from day-to-day operations because, he said, paraphrasing Ike, “If you try to combine the two, operations will eat up the long-range planning.”¹⁷ The NSC was his vehicle for handling the latter.

The NSC had been established by the National Security Act of 1947, and its statutory members included the president, vice president, secretaries of state and defense, and director of the Office of Defense Mobilization. Depending on the subject under discussion, the president could invite other cabinet members and advisors to attend, usually including the secretary of the treasury, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the director of Central Intelligence (DCI), who, under Eisenhower, normally started NSC meetings with a briefing. Eisenhower underscored the importance he attached to the NSC in his first State of the Union message on February 2, 1953, saying that, “in these days of tension,” it was important that the NSC “perform effectively.” “I propose,” he stated, “to see that it does so.”¹⁸

Unlike his predecessor, Ike intended to chair most meetings of the NSC. That did not mean that the NSC made decisions; Eisenhower did that. He recalled that “a vote was never taken” among its members. Ike said he did not hesitate “to take a different cours...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Map of the Middle East
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: The Man and The Moment
• Chapter 2: Crises of The Heart
• Chapter 3: Back in The Saddle Again
• Chapter 4: The Candidate
• Chapter 5: A Tangle of Policy and Politics
• Chapter 6: Trouble Over Aswan
• Chapter 7: A Growing Rift
• Chapter 8: Betrayal of Trust
• Chapter 9: Double-Crossing Ike
• Chapter 10: Days of Crisis
• Chapter 11: A Perfect Storm
• Chapter 12: A Reluctant Withdrawal
• Conclusion: Waging Peace in The Middle East
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Photo Credits
• Index
• Copyright