June 10, 1953: Eisenhower Fires Back at Cold War Critics

Politico: Eisenhower Fires Back at Cold War Critics
On this day in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower, a few months after taking office and with the Korean War still under way, struck back at his foreign policy critics. He opened his speech to the National Junior Chamber of Commerce in Minneapolis by characterizing the Cold War as a battle “for the soul of man himself.”

Eisenhower’s remarks were aimed at Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), the majority leader, and Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, who would retire at the end of that month as Air Force chief of staff — though he did not name either man.

Taft, who died that July, at 63, held that if efforts to reach a bargain with the North Koreans and their Chinese allies failed, then the United States should withdraw its troops from the United Nations coalition and deal with the enemy on its own.

For his part, Vandenberg opposed a planned $5 billion cut in the Air Force budget advocated by Defense Secretary Charles Wilson. The cut went into effect immediately after Vandenberg’s retirement.

The president rejected Taft’s notion that the U.S. should pursue an independent foreign policy or what one might call “the ‘fortress’ theory of defense,” as he put it. Instead, he said, all anti-communist nations needed to stand together.

“There is no such thing as partial unity,” he declared.

Eisenhower also defended what came to be known as his “bigger bang for the buck” defense theory. A few planes armed with nuclear weapons could “visit on an enemy as much explosive violence as was hurled against Germany by our entire air effort throughout four years of World War II,” he noted. A more efficient defense could be built around the nation’s nuclear arsenal rather than the kind of massive increase in conventional forces that the Pentagon brass was seeking, he maintained.

SOURCE: “EISENHOWER AND THE COLD WAR,” BY ROBERT DIVINE (1981)