Two Americans by William Lee Miller

Author:William Lee Miller [Miller, William Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95754-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Eisenhower’s version of containment contrasted itself to Truman’s by claiming to have a new approach, a New Look, at the core of which was a greater reliance on nuclear weapons and a diminished reliance on “conventional” weapons, and therefore a lower cost. Dwight Eisenhower, on coming into this new field of politics, turned out to be a wholehearted believer in annually balanced budgets and fiscal austerity. One of the significant patterns of his life starting after the war in 1946 was his acquiring a cluster of new friends among the nation’s wealthiest businessmen—the head of Coca-Cola, Robert Woodruff; the president of CBS; the chairman of the board of U.S Steel; and the president of Standard Oil. He was comfortable with them, and they shared a common outlook. Now he discovered he also shared a common outlook with the man he appointed as secretary of the treasury, an executive of the Mark Hanna company, George Humphrey, who famously said that unless the budget was balanced the United States would have a depression that would “curl your hair.” Eisenhower had not known Humphrey before bringing him into his cabinet, but he became as responsive to his views as to those of any other adviser, and he made Humphrey a member, as the treasury secretary had not been before, of the National Security Council. So the avoidance of hair-curling depressions was given voice in the highest councils of American foreign and military policy. And the budgetary restriction became a reason for the heavy reliance on nuclear weapons. Ike and his advisers believed that continuing the buildup of conventional forces that Truman had begun—after the Soviets had the bomb and the Korean War broke out—would be devastating. Eisenhower wanted a policy that could be carried out over a long period. He reduced the expenditures for defense. Every service was cut, except for the Strategic Air Command, which now moved to the center as the carrier of the atomic bombs on which policy now relied. Where Harry Truman’s last budget had asked for $41.2 billion for the Department of Defense, Eisenhower shrunk that budget to $35.8 billion and asked for only $30.9 billion for the first fiscal year for which he was responsible, 1955.

The U.S. military policy was, in a Dulles phrase, to threaten “massive retaliation”—retaliation “at places and with means of our own choosing.” Relying on the threat of nuclear weapons instead of on conventional arms meant, in another memorable phrase, “a bigger bang for a buck.”

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