ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores the Eisenhower administration and the perceived lessons of China policy derived from the Truman administration. Eisenhower was greatly influenced by the politics of China in the United States and the role of anti-Communism in government. To avoid the troubles of his predecessor, the president, guided by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, invited the China lobby into his administration, reinforcing pro-Chiang Kai-shek policies at State and in the National Security Council. This act completed the institutionalization of an aggressively anti-PRC mandate in the White House. China policy thereafter was closed to initiative taking. Further, despite advocating a policy of official confrontation, masked in unofficial conservatism, the intended result proved dangerously counterproductive. Massive Retaliation, employed to reinforce US deterrence, was adopted at the cost of information and analysis. This took place even as limited war was encouraged on the mainland. The implications played out in the first offshore islands crisis. As the chapter illustrates, signals were confused and misread, assumptions about mainland intentions and capabilities were poorly addressed, and misperception abounded. Eisenhower and Dulles set the United States unintentionally and unnecessarily on a path to nuclear war with only a negative peace to show for it.
