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4. The American Sublime: Eisenhower, Deterrence, and Romanticism
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158 Chapter 3 greater independence with respect to U.S. or USSR hegemony, calling into question economic dogmas, and seeking greater economic equity. Indeed, with regard to American Century–style economics, a quiet but forceful revolt against free-trade doctrine was brewing among economists inside the United Nations.107 The WEP therefore came at a time not only when the Soviets seemed to be succeeding economically but also when free trade and American prestige were under fire in the UN. To create momentum in the administration for the WEP Jackson convened under the auspices of Time Inc. a secret, off-the-record conference at Princeton in the spring of 1954—much like the one he had composed to create momentum for “psychological warfare” in 1952.108 Jackson opened the conference with a short speech in which he reminded the attendees that the president had said in “Chance for Peace” that the U.S. government was ready to help “other peoples to develop the underdeveloped areas of the world.” The offer, Jackson argued—tacitly recognizing and challenging Eisenhower’s romanticism—was an example of “the dream,” but one he complained that was without follow-through. Jackson hoped to use the gathering at Princeton to “narrow the gap between intelligent dreaming . . . and action” that had opened up under Eisenhower. Otherwise , the United States could ultimately be stuck with a militant image and expensive military-aid packages. “In other words,” he summed up starkly, “is it to be cannons, or is it to be growth? Is it to be a functioning partnership in an expanding area of freedom, or a shrinking area of freedom on the American dole? We are right up against it.”109 The United States, he argued, needed a foreign economic policy designed to marry the needs of America and Europe to those of poorer nations. I have been sitting in the Executive Office Building across the street from the White House for a year, and one thing has really struck me; that is, we have two kinds of economic headaches in the Free World. The first is countries that cannot find markets large enough for their own goods to buy what they need without our help. That is the plight of Great Britain, it is the plight of Germany, it is the plight of Japan. It is the plight of others whom we need as strong and not as resentful partners. Deeds Undone 159 Then, second, we have in the world a host of what has gotten to be underdeveloped countries that badly need exactly what Britain, Japan, Germany, and the United States can export. But because they cannot get those things, they become increasingly vulnerable politically. As I see the big job of a Foreign Economic Policy, it is to marry up these two Free World weaknesses into a functioning partnership, to make a tremendous asset out of two liabilities.110 In this way, Jackson proposed that the United States make a macrointervention in the world through a kind of political-economic matchmaking . Through capital investment, diplomatic efforts, presidential speech-making, government-coordinated publicity, and the ample use of state-private networks, he argued, the United States could turn the tide of world opinion, as well as the fortunes of the U.S. economy, in a dramatic new direction. Jackson’s belief in the feasibility of world economic matchmaking rested upon the edifice of the work of Rostow and Millikan. In an outline of the WEP the two economists expressed concern about the “terrible disparity between the U.S. and the rest of the world” economically. The American economy, in the short fifteen-year period leading up to the postwar period, expanded fivefold. Why, they asked, could not such growth be realized in economies elsewhere? In “an age of high culmination of Science and Technology” there was no reason it could not.111 Thus Rostow and Millikan evoked an older and more ambitious form of economic theorizing, inscribed preeminently in the works of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Political economy, and not simply economics, was their avowed domain.112 “Because we mention Science and Technology first,” they explained in their WEP outline, “let it not be thought that we have anything but scorn for any narrow and shallow philosophy of ‘technocracy.’” “It is not possible to label or catalogue,” they explained, “all the dynamic (and often conflicting) elements which go into the making of America and the Western World generally. But, however the causative elements...