Cold war II: The Eisenhower administration, the Bandung conference, and the reperiodization of the postwar era

Diplomatic History

Volumn 30, Issue 5, 2006, Pages 867-892

  Parker, Jason ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749541269     PISSN: 01452096     EISSN: 14677709     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7709.2006.00582.x     Document Type: Article

References (111)

1. As Thomas Borstelmann reminds us in Apartheid's Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993), for most of the Third World the postwar issue was not the superpower conflict but Western colonialism.
2. Matt Connelly also argues for the importance of the "north-south" dimensions of the Cold War, in "Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence," American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 739-69.
3. Gifted practitioners such as Michael Hunt, Thomas Noer, Paul Gordon Lauren, and more recently Brenda Plummer, Thomas Borstelmann, Penny Von Eschen, Mary Dudziak, and Carol Anderson, among others, have made important contributions to this literature. Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987)
4. Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder, CO, 1988)
5. Thomas Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948-1968 (Columbia, MO, 1988)
6. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996)
7. Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997)
8. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, MA, 2001)
9. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000)
10. Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (New York, 2003).
11. See also Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany, NY, 1986)
12. Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy (Boston, 1992)
13. Michael Krenn, Race and U.S. Foreign Policy, 5 vols. (New York, 1998)
14. and Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department (Armonk, NY, 1999)
15. Brenda Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003)
16. and James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935-1961 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
17. I am indebted to Frank Costigliola for the observation that even "defined maximally" in this way, Race is a yet more expansive concept than this formulation permits. Limiting the present analysis to First-Third World relations, for example, omits racialist thinking in First-Second World affairs, as in the 1940s Anglo-American imagery of Stalin as the head of an "Asiatic," quasi-Yellow Peril. This essay relies on the insights of such scholars as Ivan Hannaford, Kenan Malik, and Nikhil Pal Singh - and on the need for conceptual practicality in advancing its thesis - for its construction of "Race." See Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, 1996)
18. Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (New York, 1996)
19. and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
20. Nehru and Sukarno, along with fellow members of the "Colombo Powers" - that is, the former colonies of Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan, which had won independence - organized the meeting for a combination of ideological and parochial reasons. See George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference (Ithaca, NY, 1956), 2-3.
21. Other contemporary works of note on Bandung include Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (New York, 1956; reprint ed., Oxford, 1995)
22. Carlos Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill, NC, 1956)
23. and G. H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London, 1966).
24. Cary Fraser, "An American Dilemma: Race and Realpolitik in the American Response to the Bandung Conference, 1955," in Plummer, ed.,Window on Freedom, 115.
25. Aside from Fraser's insightful study and one other excellent article-length exception - Matthew Jones, "A 'Segregated' Asia? Race, the Bandung Conference, and Pan-Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954-1955," Diplomatic History 29, no. 5 (November 2005): 841-68 - investigation of the Eisenhower administration's diplomacy regarding Bandung has been somewhat scarce, and has tended to treat the conference in passing as a minor event best folded into larger narratives of 1950s foreign affairs. The present essay covers some of the same ground as Fraser and Jones, though it differs in what it argues were Bandung's ultimate fruits in Eisenhower-era U.S. diplomacy. In addition to H. W. Brands and to Borstelmann, other scholars who focus on U.S. diplomacy and race relations have incorporated Bandung into their analyses.
26. See Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 167-73
27. Plummer, Rising Wind, 247-56
28. and Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 209.
29. Nicholas Tarling has used British sources to examine the place of the conference in London's foreign policy in "'Ah-Ah': Britain and the Bandung Conference of 1955," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 23, no. 1 (March 1992): 74-112.
30. Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line, 93.
31. Plummer, Rising Wind, 252.
32. The "five principles" of pancheela (alternately panchsheel or panchshila), agreed upon by Nehru and China's Zhou Enlai and meant to serve as a model for intra-Asian relations, are summed up by Jones as follows: "Respect for territorial integrity; nonaggression; noninterference in each other's internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit in relations; and peaceful coexistence." Jones, "A 'Segregated' Asia?," 851.
33. Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York, 1994), 190.
34. Robert McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia since World War II (New York, 1999), 84.
35. Fraser, "An American Dilemma," 118.
36. Memorandum of Telephone Call, Dulles and Robertson, 31 December 1954, Telephone Calls Series, John Foster Dulles Papers 1951-1959 (hereafter JFDP), Box 3, f: "Tel. Conversations - General November 1-December 31, 1954," Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter DDEL).
37. Dulles to Certain Diplomatic and Consular Offices, 31 December 1954, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), pt. 1, 12: 1084-85.
38. This awareness had begun before the Eisenhower administration, although events now gave it a critical mass it had previously lacked. See Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 90-114, on the Truman administration's amicus curiae support of cases leading up to the Brown decision.
39. Jones, "A 'Segregated' Asia?," 843.
40. Notes of Discussion, 5 January 1955, NSC Series, Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers as President 1952-1961 (Whitman File), Box 6, f: "230th Meeting of NSC, January 5, 1955," DDEL.
41. See, for example, Memorandum of Conversation, 9 April 1955, FRUS, 1955-1957 21: 82
42. and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change: 1953-56 (Garden City, NY, 1963), 480, 482.
43. Notes of Discussion, 5 January 1955.
44. The State Department chaired the group, which included a half-dozen agencies including Defense, the CIA, and the USIA.
45. Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 11 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, White House Office-NSC Staff Papers, 1948-1961 (WHO-NSC), Box 85, f: "OCB 092.3 [International Affairs-Conferences & Boards] (9) January 1954-April 1955," DDEL. For an excellent analysis of the centrality of psychological warfare to the Eisenhower administration's foreign policy, see Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS, 2006).
46. Report "Attachment A," "Reactions to the Afro-Asian Conference," OCB Staff, 10 January 1955, attached to Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 11 January 1955.
47. Report, untitled, OCB, 12 January 1955, Executive Secretary's Subject File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 58, f: "Indonesia (6)," DDEL.
48. Report "Attachment B," OCB Staff, no date given, attached to Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 11 January 1955.
49. Report "Attachment A," "Reactions," 10 January 1955.
50. Appendix to Intelligence Report 6797, Office of Intelligence Research (OIR), 20 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85, f: "OCB 092.3 (9)," DDEL.
51. Intelligence Report 6797, OIR, 20 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85, f: "OCB 092.3 (9)," DDEL.
52. Memorandum, "Exposing the Nature of the Afro-Asian Conference," McNair to OCB, 21 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85, f: "OCB 092.3 (9)," DDEL.
53. OCB 337 Minutes, OCB, 31 January 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85, f: "OCB 092.3 (9)," DDEL.
54. Interestingly, the document refers to the "five" as belonging to Zhou Enlai but for reasons unexplained does not note their other identity, and their true origin, as Nehru's pancheela.
55. Memorandum, Landon to OCB, 7 February 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85, f: "OCB 092.3 (10)," DDEL.
56. Ibid. The proxies would "expose the difference between [Zhou's] words of 'peaceful coexistence' and the deeds of aggression" and comment on nuclear arms tests and on Formosa.
57. Telegram, Dulles to Eisenhower, 26 February 1955, Dulles-Herter Series, Whitman File, Box 4, f: "Dulles February 1955 (1)," DDEL.
58. Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947-1964 (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 170-71.
59. Letter, Lodge to Knowland, 15 March 1955, Administration Series, Whitman File, Box 24, f: "Lodge, Henry Cabot 1955 (4)," DDEL.
60. Minutes of Discussion, NSC, 7 April 1955, NSC Series, Whitman File, Box 6, f: "244th Meeting of the NSC, April 7, 1955," DDEL.
61. Extract, OCB 337 Minutes, 1 April 1955; Attached to Memorandum, Staats to Villard, 28 March 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85, f: "OCB 092.3 (10)," DDEL.
62. Memorandum, Staats to Villard, 28 March 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 85, f: "OCB 092.3 (10)," DDEL.
63. Ibid.
64. Memorandum, Dulles to Adams, 31 March 1955, White House Memoranda Series, JFDP, Box 3, f: "White House Correspondence - General 1955 (4)," DDEL.
65. Memorandum, Rockefeller to Adams, 6 April 1955, OF 116-FF, White House Central File (WHCF), Box 592, f: "116-FF Asia-Africa Conference (Bandung Conference)," DDEL.
66. Memorandum of Telephone Call, Dulles and Hagerty, 11 April 1955, Telephone Calls General Series, JFDP, Box 10, f: "Tel. Calls - General March 7-August 29, 1955 (3)," DDEL.
67. Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York, 1991), 238-39.
68. Telegram, Powell to Eisenhower, 6 April 1955.
69. For a trenchant account of Powell's Bandung trip, see Fraser, "Dilemma," 133-37.
70. Quotes from Eisenhower-Dulles meeting, in Press Release, Dulles (via Hagerty), 17 April 1955, Dulles-Herter Series, Whitman File, Box 5, f: "J.F. Dulles April 1955 (1)," DDEL.
71. See footnote 4 above.
72. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, 35.
73. Wright, The Color Curtain, 13.
74. Report, OIR no. 6903, "Results of the Bandung Conference: A Preliminary Analysis," 27 April 1955, attached to Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 12 May 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 86, f: "OCB 092.3 [file #2] (2) April-November 1955," DDEL.
75. Minutes, Cabinet Meeting, 29 April 1955, Cabinet Series, Whitman File, Box 5, f: "Cabinet Meeting of April 29, 1955," DDEL.
76. Ibid.
77. Observers outside the government, such as Dulles's friend Freddie Mayer, perceived the same: "I believe we should seriously consider capitalizing on, to our future as well as our present advantage, the surprising independence, wisdom, and courage of many of the Bandung conferees." Mayer to Dulles, 23 April 1955, folder "Re: Bandung Afro-Asian Conference 1955," Box 89, John Foster Dulles Papers, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton, New Jersey.
78. Report, CA-7532, "Preliminary Evaluation of Results of Asian-African Conference," 2 May 1955, attached to Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 12 May 1955, OCB Central File Series, WHO-NSC, Box 86, f: "OCB 092.3 [file #2] (2)," DDEL.
79. Memorandum, "Post-Bandung Thoughts," Bissell (CIA) to OCB, 11 May 1955, Planning Coordination Group Series (PCG), WHO-NSC, Box 2, f: "Bandung (4)," DDEL. It bears mention that not all evaluations were so sanguine; Lebanese Ambassador to the United States Charles Malik thought that Zhou Enlai and to a lesser extent Nehru were the real "winners" at and after Bandung, although he was unable to persuade Dulles or other American analysts of this. Memorandum of Conversation, 5 May 1955, FRUS, 1955-1957 21: 96.
80. Memorandum, Staats to OCB, 12 May 1955. One of these ramifications was a lesson in what might be called Orientalist psychoanalysis. The conference swelled Asian self-esteem, and, as a result, "Asia's attitude in the future may stem somewhat less from a defensive mechanism originating in an inferiority complex and its attitude may be somewhat less anti-western and less emotional." The second was that "the free world scored a considerable substantive success, both positively and negatively." That is, the insertion of pro-Western points, such as the equation of Soviet communism with "new colonialism," and the dilution of Communist ones, were both Western victories. Third, both Zhou's "tremendous triumph" and the "personal failure of Nehru" were real; for the latter, "[he] in the near future cannot again speak with the same weight he claimed in the past." Finally, put simply, the administration's plan had worked: "The careful planning and effective briefing of our friends by the Department and Embassies, and ... the skillful maneuvers of the pro-Western delegations."
81. See Andrew L. Johns and Kathryn Statler, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War, 1953-1961 (New York, 2006).
82. Memorandum, Rockefeller to Barbour, 26 May 1955, PCG, WHO-NSC, Box 2, f: "Bandung (4)," DDEL.
83. Letter, Jackson to Luce, 13 May 1955, C. D. Jackson Papers, Box 71, f: "Luce H/C, 1955 (5)," DDEL. The "ultimate" quote is from Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (New York, 1997), 22.
84. Abbott Washburn, Oral History Interview, DDEL, cited in Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 22.
85. Report, Murphy to Rockefeller, 19 August 1955, PCG, WHO-NSC, Box 2, f: "Bandung (1)," DDEL.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Letter, Jackson to Rockefeller, 26 April 1955, CDJP, Box 91, f: "N. Rockefeller," DDEL.
89. Oral History, Andrew Goodpaster, OH-477, 35, Oral History Collection, DDEL.
90. Memorandum of Conversation, Eisenhower and Malcolm Muir, 25 May 1955, Diary Series, Whitman File, Box 5, f: "Whitman Diary May 1955 (2)," DDEL.
91. Letter, Jackson to Jessup, 5 October 1955, folder "Jessup, J.," Box 63, CDJP, DDEL.
92. Letter, Powell to Eisenhower, 8 December 1955, Subject Series, WHCF (Confidential File), Box 70, f: "Department of State November-December 1955," DDEL.
93. On Powell's reception upon returning to Congress, see Singh, Black Is a Country, 178.
94. Brands recounts the short career of this idea, but a brief recap suggests its larger meaning. H. W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947-1960 (New York, 1989), 117-18.
95. Memorandum of Conversation, Dulles and Macmillan, 16 November 1955
96. and Memorandum of Conversation, Dulles and Lange, 27 October 1955, Subject Series, JFDP, Box 7, f: "Policy of Independence for Colonial Peoples," DDEL.
97. Memorandum, Dulles to Hoover, 23 November 1955, White House Memoranda Series, Box 3, f: "White House Correspondence - General 1955 (1)"
98. and Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, Dulles and Rusk, 21 November 1955, Telephone Calls Series, JFDP, Box 4, f: "Tel. Conversations - General September 1-December 30, 1955 (3)," DDEL.
99. Others included revision of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC) and renewed consideration of Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood. Memorandum, Hanes to McCardle, 6 December 1955, Special Assistants Chronological Series, JFDP, Box 9, f: "Macomber-Hanes Chron. December 1955 (3)," DDEL. The quote specifically refers to the AACC revision.
100. Memorandum of Conversation, Dulles and Rusk, 6 April 1956, Subject Series, JFDP, Box 7, f: "Policy of Independence for Colonial Peoples," DDEL.
101. Report, "U.S. Foreign Policy and the Problem of Social-Political Change," Policy Planning Staff (PPS), 28 January 1956, Record Group (RG) 59 Lot Files - PPS 1956, Box 106, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland (USNA).
102. Speech, Eisenhower to Editors Society, Washington, DC, 21 April 1956, RG 59 Lot Files - PPS 1956, Box 106, NA.
103. The British embassy in Washington reported that the changes in American thinking were a mixed bag. Some voices, including influential commentators such as Marguerite Higgins, were now blasting colonialism more stridently: "[Although] the State Department [also] has its share of historic American anticolonial feeling but it has been our impression that there is an increasing understanding ... of the true position of [the European] colonies. Independence before a colony is ready for it is recognized as a danger." British Embassy-Washington to Foreign Office (FO), March 1956, FO 371/120328, United Kingdom National Archives (UKNA), Kew, England.
104. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, 16.
105. Memorandum, Lodge to Eisenhower, 26 June 1956, General Correspondence and Memoranda Series, JFDP, Box 2, f: "Strictly Confidential - L (2)," DDEL.
106. Letter, Jackson to Heilperin, 18 July 1956, CDJP, Box 69, f: "Log 1956 (3)," DDEL.
107. Notable recent works include Fawaz Gerges, The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics, 1955-1967 (Boulder, CO, 1994);
108. Ray Takeyh, The Origins of the Eisenhower Doctrine: The U.S., Britain, and Nasser's Egypt, 1953-57 (New York, 2000)
109. Cole Kingseed, Eisenhower and the Suez Crisis of 1956 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1995)
110. and William R. Louis and Roger Owen, eds., Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences (New York, 1989).
111. Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India's Economic Development, 1947-1963 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), 137-38, cited in Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation-Building" in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 27.