journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

Cold War Threats 65
IV
The story of EDC’s convoluted origins very much belongs to the Truman administration,
as the treaty’s May 1952 signing obviously suggests. But the battle to get it
ratified took place primarily on Eisenhower’s watch, symbolized by the fact that
final coffin nails were only hammered down in August 1954. This is a part of the
saga that deserves at least brief attention here as well – for two reasons. First,
because US motives and US perspectives were continually revealed by the maneuvers
which filled the frustrating months between the treaty’s ceremonial baptism
and its painful death. Second, because the striking consistency of policy which ties
the Republicans to the Democrats in this case suggests the fundamental power of
those motives and the permeability of those perspectives.
Coming to power in January 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster
Dulles were in total agreement with the Truman administration’s staunch EDC
advocacy. This may not be surprising in view of the close connections which both
men had had with the retiring Democrats – e.g., Eisenhower’s role as NATO
Supreme Commander and Dulles’s frequent work at George Marshall’s and Dean
Acheson’s State Department – but electoral fortunes sometimes cut old ties and
induce policy amnesia. This never came close to happening in the case of EDC
because the new administration’s primary foreign policy shapers felt exactly the
same concerns and impulses as the old. All three of the forces which had initially
produced American enthusiasm for NATO strengthening and German rearmament
in the Truman years continued to fuel it.
There is certainly no doubt about the ongoing significance of a Cold War thrust.
If anything, Eisenhower and Dulles became known for adding new jolts of anti-
Kremlin zeal to US foreign policy. Nor was this image simply a product of the secretary
of state’s notorious penchant for to-the-brink denunciations of “godless communism.”
The president himself seemed to be a true crusading believer as well. In
his last public address as president of Columbia University, he girded himself for
new battles by reminding his listeners that the struggle against the Soviet Union
which he would now be directing was “a war of light against darkness, freedom
against slavery, Godliness against atheism.” Such a view was a steady companion.
Eisenhower was extremely skeptical of the talk of change in Moscow policies after
Stalin’s death, for instance. As he told British and French leaders in December
1953, at the Bermuda conference, “it was clear there had been no change since
Lenin.” He believed that the same Soviet slattern was walking the street – and that
“despite bath, perfume or lace, it was still the same old girl (...).” He was also convinced
that it remained necessary to “pull the old girl off the main street and put her
on a back alley.” 45
Western Europe and Germany were certainly on this main street and both Eisenhower
and Dulles were anxious to use EDC as a means of keeping the Soviets out
of the neighborhood. One core ingredient of the new president’s policies was his
45. Columbia University address quoted in S. AMBROSE, Eisenhower, Volume II: The President, New
York 1984, 40; Bermuda conference statement in FRUS, 1952-1954,, V, 1761.