8

The Making of the West

Eastern Europe was remade by Communism, western Europe was remade by capitalism. In the 1950s and ’60s western European countries were transformed almost beyond recognition by widespread social and economic change. The pace of the change was dizzying for many. European writers and novelists, an Albert Camus in France or a Heinrich Böll in Germany, describe how quickly former lives were left behind. A Norwegian poet saw a great river that uproots everything and forces it all downstream, into a wider world. For many western Europeans, that river was the entrance to a better life: richer and healthier, with better jobs, education, and social welfare than before. Even those who deplored the loss of the old were often seen luxuriating in the new: striking French dockworkers drinking Coca-Cola, British aristocrats enjoying American-style central heating. The close encounter between the United States and western Europe set off changes, some of which seemed superficial but which would nonetheless alter the European continent forever.

Part of the reason for the success of the new were the disasters of the old. After Europe’s calamitous half century, any stability would do, even one that was imposed by outside powers through the Cold War. Although few Europeans admitted any responsibility for what had gone wrong, most still realized that continuing the way they had done before was impossible. While almost everyone wished for a welfare state in which governments influenced the commanding heights of the economy, most also believed that private enterprise should play a role in the economy of the future. Even the Left was divided on that question. The Communists, of course, wanted a transition to full government ownership of the means of production, but Socialists, Social-Democrats, and Labourites may have wanted, at times, to nationalize key services and industries, but rarely wanted the state to take over the corner store. All western European countries set out a role for the market in their economies. But they wanted capitalist successes to help the overall economy, not failures like in the 1920s and ’30s.

The rescue of capitalism in western Europe, and its expansion as integrated markets, was therefore dependent on a great deal of hybridity. Even more so than in the United States during Roosevelt’s New Deal, European governments wanted market expansion within clear rules and regulations set by the governments themselves. And while the New Deal was always presented as an emergency measure, state-controlled capitalism in Europe was supposed to be a lasting compromise between state, capital, and labor. Indeed, some of its power came from that sense of compromise, which was a faculty that had been lacking in Europe during the past two generations. Both Christian Democratic and Social Democratic politics had an appeal to national cooperation and cohesiveness as a core part of their strength.

The role of the United States in all of this was of course central, though not at all times in ways that its critics or closest supporters imagined. As we have seen, significant changes had been underway in Europe itself since the early part of the century, in social mores, products, and consumption. They had been held back by the unprecedented misfortunes of 1914 to 1953, from Sarajevo to Seoul, when disasters always seemed to be right around the corner (and often were). Compared to the Soviet role in eastern Europe, in western Europe it is much more difficult to disentangle what was US influence and what would have happened anyway. Apart from the crucial US role in helping European elites back on their feet through the Marshall Plan and defending them from what they and the Americans saw as a clear and distinct Soviet threat, it is hard to tell what came from within and what came from without.

The point about the postwar Americanization of western Europe is therefore less about its comprehensiveness than its relative suddenness. Processes of integrating US and European economies had been underway during the interwar period. But the challenges of the 1930s had held them back. US private investment in Europe was very limited (and would remain so up to the 1960s). Even though US business methods and products had proliferated in interwar Europe, knowledge about each other was strikingly deficient, especially on the European side, where US history or politics were barely understood. This was especially true in the main European countries: France, Germany, and Britain. Scandinavians, Greeks, and Italians, who were more likely to have relatives in the United States, knew more about the country. Overall it was an important relationship, but not a close one.

The concept of “The West” was therefore meaningless before the 1950s. There were plenty of public references to a common heritage: Greece, Rome, Christianity, and badly disguised remarks about race. But there were no instruments of cohesion before military, economic, political, and cultural interaction sped up in the postwar era. These placed the United States at the center of western Europe’s consumer revolution, through its music, movies, and fashion as much as through its political ideals. An imagined America made it possible for many western Europeans to escape from restrictions of class, gender, or religion. The United States was therefore part of a European revolution that was in many ways as deep, and more lasting, than the Soviet impact in the eastern half of the continent.

THERE WERE THREE main reasons why the western European economic transformation sped up in the 1950s. One was simply a catch-up created by nondevelopment in the past. Europe in 1914 had been the center of the world economy. Europeans had the desire and most of the knowledge needed to get back in the economic and technological forefront. What had held them back was bad politics, which led to catastrophes on a scale the continent had not known since the seventeenth century. There was therefore plenty of pent-up demand for housing, goods, services, and high-quality and stable food supplies. Production would get going as soon as there were credit and functional currencies. And the US presence secured both of these preconditions, fast, through the Marshall Plan, the international financial institutions, and bilateral agreements.

The United States was also integral to providing the security needed for the economic transformation to take place. Although this need was more psychological than real—the USSR was not planning to attack western Europe—its satisfaction was still necessary in order to move forward. Too often in the past people had been told to build things up, only to see them torn down again. What Europeans needed was confidence in the future, and the US security presence supplied that, at least for the critical period when the foundations for European development had to be laid.

Finally, there was the ability to cooperate across lines that had so often divided Europeans in the past. Some of this came out of sheer need. With people on the verge of starvation, it was a lot harder to appeal for strikes and lockouts, especially when governments worked hard to integrate labor and capital through forms of social compromise. This was especially true since there was very little leadership for the substantial minority of western Europeans who distrusted capitalism altogether. Even the Communist parties had appealed for their supporters to participate in national reconstruction, and the only way they could do so was through the political and economic system devised by their governments. Gradually, the idea and practice of transnational European integration also began to take hold, providing the critical element that took western Europe from reconstruction to reemergence.

Not all of it was a success story, of course, even though in light of the experience of Europe’s previous generation it is easy to present it as such. Cold War conformity meant that dissent was sometimes suppressed. The past was often swept under the carpet, not only in Germany and Italy, but also in France, where the crimes of the Vichy government were overlaid with unifying narratives of heroic resistance. In Spain and Portugal, which were still under fascist governments, the past was not even past. There, as elsewhere in western Europe, minorities faced a harsh assimilation policy, sometimes carried out in the name of national security. Many women and young people felt that the demands of reconstruction and economic growth made it even less likely for them to have a public voice than had even been the case during wars and depression. And, most important of all, the transformation was happening only in one half of the continent, which may have made it simpler to achieve, but also created questions about its overall long-term significance.

Cold War western Europe was built on two international pillars. One was military cooperation with the United States through NATO. The other was economic and political integration through agreements among western European countries. To some extent Atlantic and European links went hand in hand. The United States had been militarily predominant in western Europe since 1944, and as NATO became more of an integrated military alliance because of the Korean War, US predominance became institutionalized. Both Americans and Europeans were careful, however, to set up deliberative bodies that conveyed the impression of a democratic alliance, in which all members had an equal say. But, besides security delivered by US military prowess, the most important European aspects of NATO were the access that member states had to buy weapons (most often through US credits) and train their own forces internationally. NATO became a school through which western European countries gradually, but increasingly, obtained the sense of a common purpose.

Not all of the military cooperation was plain sailing. One big question was what to do with West Germany. After the Korean War broke out, the Americans became increasingly insistent that they wanted West Germany to re-arm as part of the Western alliance. The Europeans, understandably, demurred. The plan they devised in 1950 to overcome the problem, the European Defense Community, which would have integrated German forces under a common European command, was far too complex to work in practice. It collapsed in 1954, when the French, whose government had originally proposed the plan, refused to ratify it. The following year West Germany joined NATO as a full member.

The other big issue was to how to handle the command of nuclear weapons in western Europe. By the late 1950s the Europeans wanted more of a say within NATO over military strategy, and especially over planning for nuclear warfare. Since 1954, based on the experience in Korea, NATO decided as part of its doctrine that it could respond even to a non-nuclear Soviet attack on western Europe by using nuclear weapons. This was in part general deterrence and in part recognition of Soviet superiority in conventional forces. Britain had become a nuclear power in 1952 and France tested its first nuclear weapon in 1960. Some political leaders, both in western Europe and the United States, wanted more nuclear cooperation in Europe, in part because they feared West Germany might also be tempted to develop its own weapons. Still, a US proposal for a sea-based nuclear Multi-Lateral Force (MLF), operated and commanded jointly by the United States and western Europeans, collapsed in 1964. The British and, especially, the French wanted to keep their nuclear autonomy. Some feared any German involvement in nuclear matters. As the US singer-comedian Tom Lehrer put it in his “MLF Lullaby”:

Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,

But that couldn’t happen again.

We taught them a lesson in nineteen eighteen,

And they’ve hardly bothered us since then.¹

How to deal with Germany was also at the center of plans for Europe’s economic recovery. By 1950, much helped by the Marshall Plan, the western European economies seemed to have stabilized, but all of them were still far from the goal of significant and stable growth. Some European and American leaders believed that the only way such growth could be created was by closer European economic integration. One of the effects of long years of wars and depression was to have broken up the transnational markets that had helped make Europe rich in the first place. But given the status of the national economies in western Europe in the late 1940s, it was unlikely that such markets would reconstitute themselves, at least anytime soon. So, as with the national economies, governments set out to organize frameworks within which international economic cooperation (and competition) could thrive.

The road toward European economic integration was formed by the coming together of many different paths. One starting point was the institutions of the Marshall Plan itself, and especially the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. Set up in 1948 to help administer US assistance across borders, the OEEC also helped remove quotas on private trade and make currencies convertible. It also assisted in reducing tariffs and floated the idea of a customs union, which could lead to a European, or possibly Atlantic, free trade area. The latter was a step much too far for most western European politicians in the early 1950s, concerned as they were with balances of trade and currency restrictions. But combined with the security emergency of the Korean War and the growth of NATO, which from 1952 also included Greece and Turkey as members, the OEEC was a starting point for European integration on a grander scale.

Even more important was the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was formed by France, West Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries in 1951. The plan was the brainchild of the former French prime minister Robert Schuman, who also served as foreign minister from 1948–53. He and his collaborators designed a supranational authority with control of a common market in mining and steel production in all the member countries, which meant mainly in France and Germany. The ECSC was intended as an alternative to a long-term French occupation of parts of Germany to harness its industrial potential. Instead, Schuman believed, all of western Europe could benefit from cooperation between France and Germany, both in Cold War terms, by increasing and regulating strategic production, and in terms of economic development. Jean Monnet, the Frenchman who was the first head of ECSC, also made sure that it had a social purpose, through subsidies for miners and workers, and that its institutions pointed toward wider European integration in other fields as well.

The beginning processes of western European integration were created by one-third idealism and two-thirds practical necessity. It was a Cold War project from the very beginning, seeking to improve western European strategic production and cohesion while faced with the threat from the east. It also took many of its models of integration from the United States, where Monnet had spent several years. At its core it was about Europe’s economic recovery, which its founding fathers believed would be impossible without a high degree of integration. But it was also an idealistic project, created to move away from the French-German antagonism that had dominated European politics at least since 1870. Cold War pressures concentrated the minds of European policy-makers and made cooperation necessary. The form that cooperation took, for Schuman, who himself hailed from the Franco-German border areas, or Monnet, a European federalist since the 1920s, was determined by their pan-European outlooks. “World peace cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it,” began Schuman’s declaration of 1950: “The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development.… The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.… This proposal will lead to the realization of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace.”²

Although most western European leaders had reservations about the concept of a full European federation, a majority of them, especially among Christian Democrats, agreed that the ECSC created a foundation to build on. Even Winston Churchill, back as British prime minister after the 1950 elections, had called for a “United States of Europe,” though he had doubted that the British Commonwealth would be part of it. In 1956 a committee under Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak set out proposals for what a year later became the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community (EEC). The EEC built directly on the ECSC. It had the same member states and the same supranational approach to economic integration. But it had a much wider remit, and would, over the generation that followed, remake western Europe as a unifying economic zone.

The biggest Cold War problem inside western Europe was how to handle the German question. From the setting up of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, there had always been a suspicion that West German leaders would give up on Western cohesion in order to strike a deal with the USSR on reunification. The idea was not far-fetched. Mistrust of Germans, any Germans, went together with the knowledge that under Cold War conditions such a deal was the only means through which the Germans could achieve what other Europeans assumed were their most cherished aims. But the assumption of German pliability toward the Soviets foundered on the thinking of the West German Bundeskanzler (premier) Konrad Adenauer. A conservative Christian Democrat from Rhineland in the west of the country, Adenauer wanted reunification, but he wanted his Germany’s integration with the Western powers even more. Adenauer was keenly aware of how enticing the siren song of reunification, even under Communist conditions, could be to some of his countrymen. He therefore at all times prioritized cooperation with the French and with the Americans. “For us, there is no doubt that we belong to the western European world through heritage and temperament,” he had said already in his first declaration as German premier.³ And Adenauer became a constant in West German politics, remaining chancellor until 1963, when he was eighty-seven years old.

But what really gave credence, to Germans and other Europeans alike, to Adenauer’s Westbindung (attachment to the West), was the extraordinary recovery of the West German economy that started around 1950. The Wirtschaftswunder, the German economic miracle, had many causes. Marshall Plan assistance and the linking of the deutschmark to the US dollar was one. The gradual integration of the West German economy into a western European framework was another. Perhaps most important was the US decision to shield the Federal Republic of Germany from the full effect of wartime debt and postwar reparations. The FRG had to pay some reparations, and the dismantling of some German industries and compensatory takeover of patents and technology continued until the early 1950s. But the cumulative burden of excessive debt never came into play. As a result, West Germany was even freer than some of its new Western partners to plan for further expansion as its economy began to grow.

The social transformation the Wirtschaftswunder created was one of the biggest stories of postwar Europe. In 1945 all of Germany was a bombed-out disaster zone. Ten years later most people had jobs that paid well enough for their families both to consume and to save. Industries and infrastructure were approaching prewar levels. Housing was being rebuilt at astonishing rates. West German banks had credit available and the country’s currency and interest rates were stable. The West German economy grew by more than 5 percent year on year during the 1950s and ’60s. It was the highest growth rate of any major European economy, more than twice that of Britain, for instance.

While structural causes explain the fundamentals of West Germany’s Cold War economic expansion, it was the psychological effects of the Wirtschaftswunder that ensured its amplification and perpetuation. It was more than a generation since Germans had last been able to believe that their own work was translatable into wealth, happiness, and stability for their families. In the 1950s, as they sensed this was at last becoming possible, they threw themselves into production with a vengeance. West Germans worked longer hours than most Europeans, and productivity expanded rapidly. As a result, their purchasing power almost doubled from 1950 to 1960, and the rapid expansion continued into the 1960s.

But Germany was not the only western European country that saw high growth rates in the 1950s and ’60s. France, in spite of the political instability of the Fourth Republic, had substantial growth, as did the Benelux countries and Scandinavia. The economic expansion in Italy was very strong, though unevenly spread in terms of rewards, both geographically and socially. Overall the effect of the economic transformation of western Europe was not just to rescue capitalism, which had seemed to be the issue in the 1940s, but to dramatically expand it as part of people’s lives. As industrialization and urbanization continued, more people were drawn into economic exchanges as workers and consumers. In 1950, a third of all Frenchmen worked the land. Twenty years later it was less than 10 percent. But, different from the late nineteenth-century wave of industrialization, there was little political radicalization. The French Communist Party lost a third of its voters during the two first postwar decades.

There were several reasons why Communism lost out as a political alternative in western Europe. Members of the Communist parties were persecuted both at work and in society as the Cold War intensified. When the crimes of Stalin and his cohort became universally known, and especially after the 1956 uprising in Hungary, the parties started to lose members. Except in Italy, where domestic inequity made up for foreign tumults, Communism was not such an attractive alternative anymore in democratic states. But the main reason for the crisis in European Communism was not so much political as social. As many western European countries began dramatically expanding social welfare for their citizens, the need for revolution seemed ever less obvious to most of the working class.

As we have seen, the origins of the European welfare state goes back to the ideological conflicts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But its main expansion was in the 1950s and ’60s. For some, including European and Soviet Communists, this was a surprising development, given the US predominance in western Europe. They had interpreted the Marshall Plan as an attempt at Americanizing the European economies, both for the benefit of US business interests and in order to push free market solutions. Instead, what western Europe got, mostly with US blessing, was state-centered solutions, in which government regulations determined the shape of the national economies. Western Europe’s postwar decades of rapid economic growth were created in an environment of state control.

The main reasons this was possible were the Cold War emergency and the lessons of the immediate past. The Cold War, both domestically in western Europe and between East and West, mandated centralized states in which quick decisions could be made for the defense of the established political order. But it also demanded that the powerful western European working classes could be bought off from industrial unrest and independent political activism through guarantees for social progress. Christian Democrats and Social Democrats agreed that part of the reason for the continent’s hitherto unhappy century was the past inability to integrate the working class into the body politic. Now firmly in power, they believed that the only way this deficiency could be remedied was through social programs that gave workers a stake in the nation. While Christian Democratic parties were closer to the national elites than Social Democrats were, at least to begin with, they both ended up putting in place large-scale social security programs, as well as government-mandated, branch-wise bargaining over wages and working conditions in industry. Limitations to the workweek, paid vacations, and regularized pensions all came out of state-imposed initiatives, as did, somewhat later, comprehensive medical and disability insurance.

US support for such government-centered development plans can also be explained by the Truman Administration’s realization of just how bad the situation had been all over Europe in the 1940s. If the choice was between chaos, opening up for Soviet subversion, and government-imposed order, it was not difficult to make, for Truman in Europe or for later US administrations elsewhere in the world, in spite of American ideological predilections. Many US representatives in postwar Europe (as well as in postwar Japan) had backgrounds in the United States’ own experiments with state-led initiatives during the New Deal. Granted, western European initiatives went much further toward state planning than anything implemented long-term in the United States. But, even so, Americans were not wholly unused to measures through which the state regulated economic activity. And in western Europe, for the time being, these controls made sense: limiting private profit helped secure necessary reinvestment. Providing welfare prevented political radicalization. And economic pluralism within the NATO alliance meant that US predominance became less visible, and therefore probably more effective.

US predominance was visible, and increasingly so, within the consumer revolution that accompanied western European economic growth. It was not so much that the products Europeans desired were always made in the United States. They were often produced at home or, increasingly, in Japan. But the goods and the marketing that sold them were often American in origin. For many Europeans, the United States appeared to be a highly desirable society, affluent and abundant, and always one step ahead of old-fashioned and restrictive Europe. This positive view of America seemed to increase the more Europeans got to know about the country. The expansion of transatlantic travel was important in that regard, as were plentiful US information agencies and scholarships.

Even more important was American influence in Europe through its music, movies, and fashion. Unlike the Soviet efforts at gaining a cultural influence, there was little that was centrally planned about this. The State Department and the CIA tried to make sure that “healthy” American films and literature were spread abroad, but their successes were limited. Instead, company marketing and consumer responses ruled the roost. The ability of US film studios and record producers to make their output inexpensive and plentiful, while Europe suffered all kinds of shortages, also gave imports an advantage. In 1947, for instance, only forty French films were made, while 340 were imported from the United States. Though the music of Elvis Presley or the movies of Marlon Brando or James Dean were not set up to be propaganda for the American way of life, young Europeans liked them, in part because of their rebelliousness. Wearing T-shirts and blue jeans merged a form of protest against convention with identifying with US movies. In the mid-1950s, American and European teenagers were more united by Brando than by NATO.

Where US officialdom had more of an influence was in terms of support for European organizations and institutions. Encouraged by the government, American philanthropy, such as the Ford or Rockefeller foundations, gave grants that remade many western European universities and research centers. The CIA provided funding for organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was set up to combat Communist influence among writers and artists. And government-backed links with American labor unions, to the greatest extent the AFL/CIO, helped convince some European Social Democrats that US society was less Right-wing and antilabor than what they had imagined. Even so, unofficial cultural links were more important than anything governments did to further US soft power in western Europe during the Cold War.

Changes for the European world seemed to come from all sides during the postwar era. Besides the ideological division of the continent and the increase in US influence, the gradual loss of its overseas colonies transformed western Europe. In 1945 Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands all claimed substantial overseas possessions. Around three times as many people lived in the European colonies as lived in western Europe itself. By 1965, except for those of Portugal, there were very few colonies left. The readjustment needed to facilitate this transition inside Europe—economically and perceptually—was considerable. One issue was to accommodate Europeans who returned from former colonies, or populations from the colonies who chose to remain in the metropole. Another was getting used to the much reduced global status of their own countries. For Britain and for France, especially, this was a tough transition. But keeping up the pretensions of being Great Powers demanded more than these countries could afford. “There is no way that we will take the path of least resistance and allow France to fade away,” General de Gaulle told his countrymen in 1963.⁴ In terms of world power, however, fading away is a pretty accurate description of the role of the former empires during the Cold War.

Besides the situation within the continent itself, the changes in the global economy in the mid-twentieth century also assigned Europe to a secondary role. In 1950 the United States was the hegemon of world capitalism. It produced around a third of the combined global economic output. The US dollar was the only currency used for large international transactions. The capital that went into international banks was mainly from the United States. US industries were substantially more technologically advanced and productive than those in Europe. And Americans, on average, lived longer and better lives than Europeans, in spite of the postwar western European recovery.

This unique position of the United States came about in a world that was primarily based on managed trade and investment. Governments set quotas and tariffs, regulated capital flows and currency levels, and decided how national incomes were to be spent. Successive US administrations pushed for trade and investment liberalization, but were careful with pushing too hard for fear that such US pressure could complicate Washington’s building of Cold War alliances with other capitalist countries. The United States therefore was at the center of a global capitalist economy that had to be managed for Cold War purposes. The reconstruction of this economic system was in the US interest, even if that meant putting aside a few of the most immediate opportunities that existed for Americans making profits overseas. The hegemonic moment for the United States was circumscribed by Cold War contingencies that spread all over the world, among which links with western Europe were central but not always decisive.

Successive US administrations believed that western European integration was in the American interest. They assisted in the recovery of the economy and strengthened the European commitment to other multilateral institutions, first and foremost NATO. The Americans were never overly concerned that a more united Europe would become a competitor to the United States. In the 1950s that did not seem likely to happen anytime soon. And the improvement in common security that came with European economic growth was more important anyway than narrow US self-interest, at least in the short run. If western Europe got richer by building large and integrated markets after American models, that was a good thing for everyone concerned. As John Foster Dulles, soon to become US secretary of state, had declared in 1948, “a healthy Europe” could not be “divided into small compartments.” It had to be organized into a market “big enough to justify modern methods of cheap production for mass consumption.”⁵

If Europeans hungered for recovery, Americans longed for stability. For more than twenty years, US voters had faced one emergency after another: the Great Depression, the New Deal, wars in Europe and Asia, and the Cold War. In 1952 they voted for stability and normality under General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first professional military man to head the US government since Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s and the first Republican president since the onset of the national crises. Eisenhower was an internationalist and a Cold Warrior who believed that the United States needed to confront the USSR and Communism worldwide. In his campaign, he had argued for the need to win in Korea and for “rolling back” Communism in Europe and Asia. But his main rhetoric was intended to assure Americans that they were safe under his leadership, and that the United States would defeat its enemies if it put its own house in order through national unity, fiscal discipline, a strong defense, and clear international priorities.

Intent to move away from the Cold War as a national emergency, Eisenhower ended up institutionalizing it as policy and doctrine. On the Korean War, the new president simply got lucky. Stalin’s death removed the last hindrance for a negotiated armistice. But Eisenhower believed that projections of US strength would prevent what he saw as Soviet adventurism in the future. Confirming Truman’s overall containment strategy, Eisenhower wanted to reinforce it by increasing US nuclear capacity and readiness. He also upgraded the CIA’s covert operations and used them to overthrow governments the president saw as inimical to US Cold War interests, such as in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala the following year. Eisenhower saw the Cold War as a total contest that would last for a long time, and in which US purpose and readiness would remain the critical element.

But the new president also believed, firmly, that the United States could fight the Cold War without making too many compromises with regard to its domestic affairs. A fiscal conservative, Eisenhower preferred developing nuclear deterrents as a less expensive alternative to large standing armies and massive amounts of conventional weapons. As Dulles explained in January 1954, “We want for ourselves and for others a maximum deterrent at a bearable cost”: “Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.… The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing.”⁶

The turn toward a policy of massive nuclear retaliation meant preparing for strategic warfare on a scale that so far had seemed unimaginable. Eisenhower set in motion a dramatic buildup of US atomic capabilities, in what he called his New Look policy. On his watch, the United States developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The Pentagon also initiated large-scale intelligence-gathering programs, including secret overflights of Soviet territory, to gather information on targeting and enemy capabilities. In addition, the administration stepped up the deployment of tactical and medium-range nuclear missiles to US bases in Europe and Asia. When criticized for the inflexibility of the US strategic stance, the president responded that the United States had effectively deterred any Soviet attack on itself or its allies. Eisenhower had no doubt that the US capacity to wage nuclear warfare against the Soviets vastly outmeasured anything they could do against the United States. His New Look policy enabled him to get deterrence on the cheap and without, the president hoped, too much of a militarization of US society.

Throughout his presidency, Eisenhower feared the political consequences of making his country into a garrison state, with its budgets geared toward military procurement and its politics dominated by foreign threats. After having been supported by Senator McCarthy in the election campaign, Eisenhower turned on him when the senator in 1954 expanded his attacks on subservience to Communism in the US Army. The president was “very mad and getting fed up—it is his Army and he doesn’t like McCarthy’s tactics at all.”⁷ By the end of the year McCarthy had been censured by the Senate and removed as a force in US politics.

The censure of McCarthy removed the foremost symbol of the hysterical style of Cold War politics in the United States, though it did little to damage the anti-Communist cause. McCarthy had already become an embarrassment across the spectrum of American politics. What remained after him was still a sense of mission on a global scale, on behalf of democracy, religion, and free markets. Confronting Communism was for most Americans in the 1950s part of their country’s fundamental quality, and a campaign that had to be won at home and abroad. A very wide consensus, comprising people who would call themselves either liberals or conservatives (a distinct minority), was in favor of fighting the Cold War as part of an American undertaking to improve global affairs. The Communists, so the thinking went, were trying to take over a world that by natural direction and God-given foresight was the Americans’ to modernize and make better. The Cold War was therefore an unprecedented struggle for the soul of mankind.

For many Americans, the need to fight the Cold War abroad was allied with a sense of achievement at home. Economic conditions were improving, as were salaries, housing, and access to consumer goods. The middle class expanded rapidly, and more and more people moved out of the cities to new houses in the suburbs. Political leaders from both parties portrayed the fight against Communism as the defense of all that Americans had achieved materially, socially, and politically. Religion played an important role in Cold War rhetoric. Communism was portrayed as God-less radicalism, and clergy and religious activists who had been persecuted in eastern Europe were often brought over to the United States to bear witness to what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. A large majority of Americans believed that their families and their communities were under direct threat from Communist subversion in the United States, although not many of them could think of specific instances when such things had actually happened. Given that the Communist Party of the United States by the mid-1950s was reduced to only around five thousand active members, the chances of ever meeting one of them was indeed limited.

The stability, predictability, and caution that characterized Eisenhower’s America did not suit all Americans. Some felt, rightly, that they were excluded both from economic and social progress. African-Americans had been discriminated against ever since slavery was abolished, and neither the New Deal nor the prosperity of the 1950s did much to improve their lot. As the civil rights movement expanded, more and more people drew unfavorable comparisons between American campaigns for freedom worldwide and the obvious oppression of African-Americans and other people of color at home. Roy Wilkins, the director of the main civil rights organization, the NAACP, put it charitably, but well, when he characterized the president as “a fine general and a good, decent man, but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German today.”⁸ Diplomats from the new African states, who were subject to racial harassment and segregation in Washington and across the country, were less charitable in their reports back home.

Another group that benefitted little from Eisenhower’s Cold War America were women who wanted to construct their own lives outside the confines of family and housework. During the war many women had found rewarding jobs in industry and services. But the emphasis on family values and child-rearing during the Cold War had forced a large number out of the workplace and back to primary roles as wives and mothers. Some women found the conformity of American society during the 1950s stifling. Toward the end of the decade both female employment rates and women’s participation in organizations and in politics had begun to increase. But the biggest breakthrough came in 1960, when the contraceptive pill became widely available. Access to effective birth control, decided on by women themselves, transformed family life in Cold War America, and would gradually open up for a much more active participation in society. But social conservatives condemned the effects the pill had on population numbers and on young people’s sexual behavior. Christian preachers, both Catholics and Evangelicals, claimed that birth control was the work of the Devil, alongside Communism, “free love,” and homosexuality.

The 1950s emphasis on material well-being and social conformity led to a fair amount of restlessness, not just among disadvantaged groups. Many young people were wondering if they could do more and experience more than what was visible on the path that their parent’s generation had laid out for them. The unease was both political and cultural. Tastes in music, movies, literature, and fashion became more daring as the decade wore on. Some people wondered if they could do more for their country, including help fight the Cold War more effectively. Many liberals feared that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in the international competition for hearts and minds. The Cold War had after all been as much, if not more, of a liberal political project than a conservative one. A young Democratic senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, in 1958 claimed that President Eisenhower was more preoccupied with balancing the budget than defeating the USSR. As a result, Soviet military strength was overtaking that of the United States, creating “a peril more deadly than any wartime danger we have ever known.”⁹ The president dismissed Senator Kennedy as an inexperienced political opportunist.

Eisenhower has rightly been praised for moving the United States away from the political hysteria of the early Cold War. But if the president was not a Cold War hysteric, neither was he someone who could conceive of a world without the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower lacked the imagination and the political will to think about ending the Cold War after Stalin’s death. When the new Soviet leaders attempted to normalize their relations with the West, through ending the Korean War, reducing their troop levels in Europe, and talking about peaceful coexistence, the US president hesitated. John Foster Dulles and his brother, the CIA director Allen Dulles, believed that Khrushchev’s charm offensive was just that: an attempt at getting the West to lower its guard while the Soviets increased subversion worldwide. Given the strength of anti-Communism at home, not least in his own party, Eisenhower did not want to risk useless meetings with the Soviets. Even the old Cold Warrior Winston Churchill encouraged the president to extend a hand to the Soviets. “Would it not be well,” he asked Eisenhower in April 1953, “to combine the re-assertions of your and our inflexible resolves with some balancing expression of hope that we have entered upon a new era. A new hope has I feel been created in the unhappy bewildered world. It ought to be possible to proclaim our unflinching determination to resist communist tyranny and aggression and at the same time though separately to declare how glad we should be if we found there was a real change of heart and not let it be said that we had closed the door upon it.”¹⁰ But Eisenhower did not believe the motives of the Soviet leaders had changed much, and resisted any pressure for a summit meeting until mid-1955.

The 1955 Geneva discussion among the leaders of the wartime alliance was the first such meeting since 1945. Eisenhower had agreed to the summit because of Soviet willingness to support both a settlement in Indochina and the reunification of Austria, which had been divided into occupation zones since World War II. Though the conversations were civil, no major breakthroughs were had. The Americans concluded, somewhat correctly, that the power struggle among Soviet leaders after Stalin was still ongoing. When meeting with the Soviet premier, Nikolai Bulganin, President Eisenhower “raised the question of the satellite [states]”: “He explained that there were literally millions of Americans who had their roots and origins in Central Europe. The status of the satellites was a matter of very genuine concern to him. This was not a question on which we could be silent. Bulganin indicated that it was a subject which it would do no good to pursue at this conference: it would require time and an improvement in the atmosphere.”¹¹

The Hungarian revolution at the start of Eisenhower’s second term led to a severe setback in East/West relations. It was not until the end of his presidency that Eisenhower began thinking about possible changes in his Soviet policy. In his 1959 State of the Union address he spoke at length about strengthening the institutions of peace, and the following year, his last as president, Eisenhower agreed to a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Paris in May. The purpose of the conference was to discuss a reduction of tension in Europe, and predominantly the German issue. Eisenhower also hoped that by setting the summit in Paris, he could help bring the mercurial de Gaulle, now back as president of France, into a united NATO approach to the Soviets on European security problems. With some of his closest advisers, Eisenhower had begun to prepare a more positive response to Soviet proposals of a ban on testing new types of nuclear weapons. The president may have hoped for a breakthrough in these negotiations in Paris.

If so, Eisenhower never got the chance to test Soviet intentions. On 1 May 1960, the Soviet air force shot down an American U-2 spy plane, which had been traversing the USSR on its way from Peshawar in Pakistan to Bodø in Norway. Khrushchev was furious. But the Soviet leader also knew how to play to the gallery. While the Americans, awkwardly, were trying to lie about it being a meteorological mission gone wrong, the Soviets put the pilot, who had been rescued, on show in Moscow. Gary Powers admitted he had been on an espionage flight for the CIA. Khrushchev relished the propaganda bonanza. But he could not make up his mind about cancelling the Paris summit, which began two weeks later. In the end Khrushchev flew to Paris, but under pressure from party hardliners, he at the last minute refused to meet Eisenhower. Already under fire from the Chinese for being weak on imperialism, the Soviet leader could not risk having a summit meeting under these circumstances.

China and Asia were very much on the minds of leaders both in the USSR and the United States as Eisenhower’s presidency drew to a close. The US president felt that he had solidified the West and given it a common purpose on which to confront the Soviet Union and its allies. But he was much less certain about US positions in Asia. The president feared the expanding power of China, and believed Beijing would attempt to spread Communism to Southeast Asia. “If the Communists establish a strong position in Laos, the West is finished in the whole southeast Asian area,” Eisenhower told his chief advisers just before stepping down.¹² He gave little credence to reports of a fundamental and lasting Sino-Soviet split. The Cold War in Asia “is like playing poker with tough stakes and… there is no easy solution,” the president told his successor, John F. Kennedy, when he met him at the White House in January 1961.¹³ Eisenhower lamented “the Communist influence on Chinese troops, pointing out their ability to get much higher morale among the under-developed peoples than seemed to be the case of the Western Allies.”¹⁴ Having secured the West, the United States seemed about to open a new chapter in the Cold War.