Eisenhower and the Bloodguilt of the “Moderate” Emperor
Hagiography as History
There is perhaps no American president more successfully laundered by history than Dwight David Eisenhower. The popular mythology presents us with a grandfatherly figure who ended the Korean War, refused to be drawn into Vietnam, warned us against the “military-industrial complex” on his way out the door, and kept the nation at peace through the perilous middle years of the Cold War. The hagiography writes itself, and it has been written, by court historians and partisan boosters alike, for more than sixty years.
From the perspective of the Gospel, which commands us to love our enemies and to refuse the sword, this portrait is a lie. Eisenhower was not a man of peace. He was a Caesar in a dapper tie, a man who perfected the art of waging war quietly so that the American public could sleep soundly while the machinery of death ground onward. To understand Eisenhower rightly, we must strip away the mythology and look at the actual fruit of his eight years in office. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” said our Lord, and the fruit of the Eisenhower administration was coups, proxy wars, nuclear blackmail, and a permanent warfare state whose shadow still darkens the world today.
Credit Where Due: Korea and the Initial Drawdown
In the interest of honesty, I must acknowledge what Eisenhower actually did accomplish. He ended the Korean War within months of taking office, fulfilling a campaign promise and bringing home American soldiers from a grinding and bloody conflict that had already claimed some thirty-six thousand American lives and over two million Korean lives. This was genuinely good. He also presided over a significant reduction in overall military spending in the years immediately following the armistice, cutting the defense budget from the bloated heights of the Korean War mobilization. Truman’s final defense budget consumed roughly fourteen percent of GDP; Eisenhower brought this down considerably over his first years in office.
These are real accomplishments, and I would be remiss to ignore them. But they must be understood in context. Eisenhower did not end the Korean War because he had become a convert to the Prince of Peace. He ended it because it was politically untenable and strategically inconclusive. And the military spending reductions were not a turn away from the sword; they were a turn toward a cheaper sword. Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy traded expensive conventional forces for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons, the most indiscriminate instruments of death ever devised. He spent less money to acquire the capacity to kill more people. This is not the peace of the Gospel. This is the economy of empire, a cost-cutting measure in the business of death.
The Overthrow of Iran: The Original Sin of the CIA
In August of 1953, the Eisenhower administration, through the newly empowered Central Intelligence Agency, overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran. This was Operation Ajax, a joint Anglo-American plot to punish the Iranian people for the unforgivable crime of wanting to control their own oil. The British had refused to pay Iran a fair share of the revenues from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Mosaddegh had nationalized it in response, and for this act of national self-determination, he was deemed intolerable.
Eisenhower gave the order. The CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore, organized mobs, bribed generals, and placed the Shah back upon the Peacock Throne as an American client. The Shah proceeded to rule as a tyrant for the next twenty-six years, aided by the SAVAK secret police trained by American intelligence, a regime of torture and disappearance that finally broke in the fires of 1979 and gave us the Islamic Republic the U.S. now endlessly threatens to bomb.
Let us be clear about what this means. The current hostility between the United States and Iran, the very hostility that President Trump is now exploiting to justify his illegal war against that nation of ninety-three million souls, traces its origin directly to a decision made by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. Every drop of blood spilled in that long enmity is, in part, on his hands. This is not “peace.” This is the planting of dragon’s teeth.
The Overthrow of Guatemala: Blood for Bananas
Less than a year later, in June of 1954, Eisenhower repeated the trick in Guatemala. President Jacobo Árbenz, another democratically elected leader, had committed the twin heresies of land reform and daring to inconvenience the United Fruit Company, whose attorneys happened to include John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, and whose former board members included Allen Dulles, Eisenhower’s Director of Central Intelligence. The conflict of interest was so flagrant that it scarcely even qualifies as a conflict; it was simply the open operation of empire.
Operation PBSUCCESS installed Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas in Árbenz’s place. What followed was decades of civil war in Guatemala that would eventually kill upwards of two hundred thousand people, most of them indigenous Mayans slaughtered by military regimes armed and trained by the United States. The scorched villages, the death squads, the silenced priests, the raped women, the murdered children, these are the fruits of Eisenhower’s “peace.”
Dulles and Eisenhower sold this to the American public as a blow against Soviet communism in the Western Hemisphere. It was nothing of the sort. Árbenz was a land reformer, not a Soviet agent. The true motive was the protection of corporate property against the aspirations of poor people. As the Scripture says, “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Eisenhower loved Mammon more than he feared God, and Guatemala paid the price for generations.
Vietnam: Laying the Powder for the Fire
The mythology also tells us that Eisenhower wisely kept America out of Vietnam. This is false. Eisenhower did not send combat troops in large numbers, but he set every piece of the board that Kennedy and Johnson would later play to catastrophe. After the French were routed at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Eisenhower refused to accept the Geneva Accords, refused to permit the nationwide reunification elections that Ho Chi Minh would certainly have won, and committed the United States to propping up the corrupt and unpopular regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in the south.
By the end of Eisenhower’s tenure, nearly a thousand American “advisors” were in Vietnam, the Military Assistance Advisory Group was operational, the CIA was running covert operations throughout Indochina, and the United States was paying roughly eighty percent of the French war’s costs before the French withdrew. Eisenhower articulated the “domino theory” that would be used to justify every subsequent escalation. He did not fight the Vietnam War, but he made the Vietnam War inevitable. When the fire came, it was because he had stacked the kindling.
Brinksmanship: Playing Dice With Creation
Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, openly proclaimed the doctrine of “brinksmanship,” the notion that a nation must be willing to go to the very edge of nuclear war in order to extract concessions from its adversaries. Dulles said this out loud, to Life magazine, in 1956. It was not a whispered strategy; it was a public boast.
Under Eisenhower’s “New Look” defense policy, the United States explicitly shifted from conventional deterrence to reliance on “massive retaliation,” which is to say, the threat to incinerate cities full of human beings made in the image of God. The American nuclear arsenal grew from roughly one thousand warheads when Eisenhower took office to more than twenty-two thousand when he left. He presided over the deployment of thermonuclear weapons, of hydrogen bombs a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He threatened their use repeatedly, over Korea, over Taiwan, over Berlin.
To hold a gun to the head of humanity and demand submission is not statesmanship. It is terrorism on a planetary scale. The “peace” of the Eisenhower years was the peace of a man holding a knife to his neighbor’s throat and daring him to move. The fact that the knife did not, by the grace of God, finally slip, is no credit to Eisenhower. It is a miracle of divine restraint upon human wickedness.
The Military-Industrial Complex: The Arsonist Warns of Fire
And so, we come to the farewell address of January 1961, in which Eisenhower warned the nation against the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” This speech is endlessly quoted as evidence of Eisenhower’s wisdom and conscience. Let’s be serious. Eisenhower built the military-industrial complex. Under his administration, defense spending averaged roughly nine to ten percent of gross domestic product, more than twice what it is today as a share of the economy. He filled the coffers of Lockheed and Boeing and General Dynamics. He approved weapons system after weapons system. He presided over the creation of the permanent war economy that has bled this nation dry ever since.
For the arsonist to warn of fire on his way out the door (when he could do nothing about it), after eight years of pouring gasoline, is not prophecy. It is confession. And a confession unaccompanied by repentance, restitution, or renunciation is not a confession at all. It is a shrug.
The Verdict of the Gospel
Measured by the standards of the world, Eisenhower was a successful president. Measured by the standards of the Prince of Peace, he was a failure of the most grievous sort. He overthrew two governments, plotted the overthrow of a third (Cuba) and condemned their peoples to decades of suffering. He committed the United States to a war in Vietnam that would eventually kill more than fifty-eight thousand Americans and some three million Vietnamese. He built a nuclear arsenal capable of ending all life on earth and he brandished it repeatedly. He entrenched a permanent warfare state that has consumed trillions of dollars and devoured the souls of generations of young men who have been sent out to kill and be killed in the name of “freedom.”
“Put not your trust in princes,” the Psalmist warns us, “nor in the sons of men, in whom there is no help.” (Psalm 146). Eisenhower was a prince of this world, a servant of empire rather than of the Kingdom, and the blood of the innocent cries out from the ground against him no less than it cries out against Obama, Trump, and Biden. The continuity of Cain stretches back further than the drone age. It runs through every administration that has worshipped at the altar of American power.
The task before us is not to rehabilitate one Caesar against another, but to reject the throne of Caesar altogether. Until we learn to see past the mythology that sanctifies our rulers, we will continue to be deceived, and the empire will continue to feed on the blood of the innocent. We must obey God rather than men.
Praise Be to God.
