Winston Churchill reportedly remarked that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was “the only bull I know who carries his own China shop with him.” This characterization was understood as applying not only to the dour diplomat's style, but also to the bellicose China policy of the American president whom he served, Dwight D. Eisenhower. For two decades after Eisenhower left office in January 1961, conventional wisdom characterized his China policy as rigid, moralistic, self-righteous and narrow-minded. Eisenhower and Dulles, judged by their public statements, appeared to be slavish followers of the so-called China Lobby, a loose association of pundits, legislators and lobbyists in thrall to Chiang Kai-shek's government on Taiwan and unremittingly hostile to the People's Republic of China. The administration's refusal to recognize, deal with, or countenance trade with China, its belief in monolithic communism, and its military assistance to Taiwan, have all been blamed for a pair of military crises in the Taiwan Straits, strains among US allies, and an atmosphere of unremitting hostility between Beijing and Washington. Eisenhower's critics blamed him for bequeathing to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson a dysfunctional China policy built on fear and contributing to the US misadventure in Vietnam.
Since the 1980s, however, scholars with access to Eisenhower's presidential papers have presented a more nuanced portrait of the administration's foreign policies. Eisenhower, they showed, was no one's fool. While allowing Dulles and other officials to act as the public face of his administration, he made key decisions. A firm anti-communist, he ridiculed many of the most strident Republican anti-communists as partisan ignoramuses. He considered it possible to negotiate seriously with the Soviet Union after Stalin's death and doubted the Kremlin (or the PRC) wanted war any more than did the United States. Ike was not an intellectual and shared many racial prejudices of his era, but he believed strongly in multi-lateral institutions created after 1945, abhorred the idea of nuclear war (even as he built a huge atomic arsenal), and believed that open trade and patience would solve many of the world's problems. However, even many of these so-called Eisenhower Revisionists considered Ike's China policy a bit of a black hole from which little light escaped.
Historian Nancy Tucker has, in this lucid, well-written and thoughtful book shed welcome light on this puzzle. Supplementing US documents with British records, Chinese memoirs, interviews with several key participants, and public opinion data, Tucker shows that Eisenhower had a far more nuanced understanding of China than his public rhetoric or formal policies indicated. Not only did Dulles not lead Ike around by the nose, but the president often expressed contempt for Chiang and evinced a degree of empathy with Mao and the PRC.
In deft, clear prose, Tucker examines the president's policy-making process, his strategic view of China, his attitude towards trade and diplomatic recognition of the PRC, his misgivings about Taiwan, and his handling of the two crises in the Taiwan Straits. In every case, Tucker argues, the private Eisenhower demonstrated skill, sensitivity and a desire to avoid military conflict that few have recognized.
In ten short, closely argued chapters, Tucker dispels many of the myths about Eisenhower-era China policies. The president's sometimes blustering words about China, as during the two Taiwan Straits crises, did not reflect his actual feelings or beliefs. Ike's world view, and that of Dulles and most of the president's inner circle, was Europe-centred. China was something of an afterthought, not central to the Cold War. The administration typically threw Republican hardliners a bone by calling for “liberation” and a roll-back of communism, but had few illusions that this would occur any time soon. Tucker argues convincingly that nearly every positive thing the president and Dulles said about Chiang Kai-shek was a cover for their contempt towards the Generalissimo and his American supporters. If anything, they considered Taiwan a burden and a troublemaker and favoured something of a “two-China” policy that was anathema to the China Lobby. In addition, Eisenhower recognized the importance of foreign trade to partners like Japan and Great Britain. Although he refused to relax most controls on Sino-American commerce, the administration accepted, and sometimes even encouraged, these allies to trade with China. Far from seeing this as a threat, Eisenhower thought that trade might enmesh China in the global economy, weaken its links to the Soviet Union, and mellow its radical ideology.
Tucker criticizes Eisenhower and Dulles for both misperceiving certain realities and for lacking the courage of their convictions. Although Eisenhower approved ambassadorial talks with China after 1954, he considered these a way to distract the PRC in harmless diplomacy, not as a means for addressing serious bi-lateral concerns. China, Tucker notes, entered these discussions with serious intentions and grew frustrated and suspicious of American stalling. Neither Eisenhower nor most of his advisers took seriously the evidence of mounting Sino-Soviet friction after Stalin's death. They saw it as possible disinformation or, still worse, proof that China might be more hostile and aggressive than they imagined. This resulted in a US failure to exploit the rift among communist rivals. Also, in spite of a surprisingly flexible attitude toward the PRC among Congressional Democrats and a broad swathe of the public, the president and secretary of state had an exaggerated dread of the China Lobby. They looked back with alarm at the fate of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, both of whom were pilloried for “losing China.” As a consequence, they seldom expressed in public their own flexible instincts or acted to implement them.
As with other revisionist accounts of the Eisenhower administration, Tucker convinces the reader that the years between 1953 and 1961 were not a vast diplomatic wasteland. However, the bottom line remains, as Tucker both explains and acknowledges, that for a variety of reasons with Eisenhower's China policy, what you saw was, ultimately, what you got. There were no important breakthroughs, no courageous initiatives, and little effort to educate the public about Chinese realities. Chinese–American relations did not get much worse under Eisenhower, but they did not get much better either.
