THE EISENHOWER ERA ★^965for 1956 to unify the country. But the staunchly anticommunist southern leader
Ngo Dinh Diem, urged on by the United States, refused to hold elections, which
would almost certainly have resulted in a victory for Ho Chi Minh’s commu-
nists. Diem’s close ties to wealthy Catholic families—in predominantly Bud-
dhist South Vietnam—and to landlords in a society dominated by small farmers
who had been promised land by Ho alienated an increasing number of his sub-
jects. American aid poured into South Vietnam in order to bolster the Diem
regime. By the time Eisenhower left office in 1960, Diem nevertheless faced a
full-scale guerrilla revolt by the communist-led National Liberation Front.
Events in Guatemala, Iran, and Vietnam, considered great successes at
the time by American policymakers, cast a long shadow over American for-
eign relations. Little by little, the United States was becoming accustomed
to intervention, both open and secret, in far-flung corners of the world.
Despite the Cold War rhetoric of freedom, American leaders seemed more
comfortable dealing with reliable military regimes than democratic govern-
ments. A series of military governments succeeded Arbenz. The shah of Iran
replaced Mossadegh and agreed to give British and American oil companies
40 percent of his nation’s oil revenues. He remained in office until 1979 as one
of the world’s most tyrannical rulers, until his overthrow in a revolution led
by the fiercely anti-American radical Islamist Ayatollah Khomeini. In Viet-
nam, the American decision to prop up Diem’s regime laid the groundwork
for what would soon become the most disastrous military involvement in
American history.
Mass Society and Its Critics
The fatherly Eisenhower seemed the perfect leader for the placid society of
the 1950s. Consensus was the dominant ideal in an era in which McCarthy-
ism had defined criticism of the social and economic order as disloyalty and
most Americans located the enjoyment of freedom in private pleasures rather
than the public sphere. With the mainstreams of both parties embracing the
Cold War, political debate took place within extremely narrow limits. Even Life
magazine commented that American freedom might be in greater danger from
“disuse” than from communist subversion.
Dissenting voices could be heard. Some intellectuals wondered whether
the celebration of affluence and the either-or mentality of the Cold War
obscured the extent to which the United States itself fell short of the ideal of
freedom. The sociologist C. Wright Mills challenged the self-satisfied vision of
democratic pluralism that dominated mainstream social science in the 1950s.
Mills wrote of a “power elite”—an interlocking directorate of corporate leaders,
politicians, and military men whose domination of government and society
How were the 1950s a period of consensus in both domestic policies and foreign affairs?