stature and popularity available to rally anti-Castro
political groups. Eisenhower therefore withheld
his approval of military intervention. Castro’s
defiance of ‘Yankee imperialism’ meanwhile was
gaining much popular support throughout Latin
America. But the fuse that led to the Bay of Pigs
in 1961 had been laid.
During the two Eisenhower administrations the
credibility gap widened between the publicly pro-
fessed policy aims and the actual policies adopted
in dealing with the world’s problems. This eroded
one of Eisenhower’s main personal assets, his rep-
utation for honesty. The impact was greater on
American public perceptions and on America’s
allies than on the Soviet Union, whose leaders had
no high regard for capitalist moral protestations:
even without this credibility gap the Russians were
not willing to respond to Eisenhower’s various dis-
armament proposals as long as the Soviet Union
lagged behind in nuclear capability. But by making
the CIA the secret arm of US policies and greatly
extending its role, Eisenhower left a dangerous
legacy to his successors.
To deter communist expansion, Eisenhower
increasingly relied on allies in Asia and Europe to
help shoulder the burdens of fighting on the
ground as well as on America’s growing nuclear
armoury. By raising the possibility that the
nuclear threshold would quickly be crossed he
sought to prevent even local wars in Asia and
Europe. Nuclear weapons were stockpiled in
Western Europe, though they remained under
American control. Britain possessed its own
nuclear deterrent and France was developing an
independent nuclear striking force as well. It was
part of Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s psychological
deterrent to keep the Soviet Union, China and
the North Koreans guessing at what stage of
conflict nuclear weapons would be used. The
president was fully aware of the serious conse-
quences that would follow battlefield nuclear
exchanges and therefore regarded the mainte-
nance of local conventional forces as indispens-
able. But he hoped to build up West European,
South Korean and Nationalist Chinese forces
to obviate so far as possible reliance on Ameri-
can conventional forces. These he reduced to
strengthen the American economy, while pro-
moting alliances in Asia and in Europe and pro-
viding military and economic aid. In the last
resort the US would counter communist aggres-
sion with its own nuclear capabilities.
The US and the Soviet Union would survive if
nuclear weapons were used on battlefields beyond
their territories. But densely populated Germany,
France and Britain, Taiwan, South Korea and
Japan, where the Western bases were located and
the armed forces assembled, would be destroyed.
So the administration had to provide an alterna-
tive strategic plan, however implausible. This
Dulles did in his famous speech to the Council of
Foreign Relations on 12 January 1954, declaring
that ‘local defence had to be reinforced by the fur-
ther deterrent of massive retaliatory power’. That
last phrase, which became shortened to ‘massive
retaliation’, when coupled with other statements
that nuclear strikes would be made against targets
of American choosing, was clearly intended to
warn Moscow and Beijing that war might not be
confined to the regions that the communists
decided to subvert or attack. Thus the US implied
that a communist attack on one of its allies in Asia
or Europe would lead to an American counter-
strike against China or Russia. In due course the
Soviet Union threatened the reverse. An attack
from a European base on the Soviet Union would
lead to Soviet retaliatory attack on the US. Thus
ran the logic of nuclear diplomacy.
Tough anti-communist speeches, Dulles’s
rhetoric about American readiness to go to the
brink of war and talk of rolling back communism
were part of the psychological dimension of the
Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy. But
these robust verbal stands also had a domestic
political purpose. Despite the cuts in the defence
budget Eisenhower wished to convince Congress
and the country that this did not mean that his
administration was soft on communism. In par-
ticular, he wished to reconcile an isolationist ‘old
guard’ of conservative Republicans in his own
party who repudiated Yalta and Roosevelt’s policy
as a sell-out to Russia and blamed Truman,
Acheson and their ‘red’ advisers for the ‘loss’ of
China.
But these policies also had negative repercus-
sions abroad. Dulles was misread as being ‘trigger