>
> On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, SA wrote:
>
>> On Eisenhower - he was certainly the ideal candidate for the SACEUR
>> job in 1951, but if he hadn't been available they would have found
>> someone else and I don't see why NATO wouldn't have survived his
>> absence...
>
> My impression is the opposite. IIRC, the only thing the NATO council
> of ministers agreed on at that point was that Eisenhower be the head,
> and if he hadn't accepted, it might well have gone kaput. My
> impression is further that everything more concrete after that point
> was due to his initiative. It wasn't clear at first whether it was
> going to have any substance at all, or just be a rubber stamping
> legitimation device, like the OAS. Not only was there no agreement,
> there was very strong and principled opposition from the French,
> Belgians, etc. who didn't want to arm Germany, and the Taft
> Republicans, who didn't want to station any troops. It was he who
> decided that it had to be a dedicated 40 division army, and that
> therefore the German troops had to be part of it, and got everyone to
> accept it. The Europeans then almost revolved when he left to run for
> President. They were naturally assuaged when he won, but then he had
> to conquer the Taft Republicans. (And if he hadn't run, it might
> possibly have been Taft who became president. He certainly would have
> been the Republican nominee.) He had to win them over in the teeth of
> them trying to not only stop NATO but stop the president from ever
> making such a treaty again, in the form of the Bricker Amendment.
> Whether Adlai could have won them over, or commanded the respect of
> all the key Europeans, seems very questionable.
This is a little too Great-Man-Theory-of-History-ish for me. Yes, Eisenhower's reputation as the conqueror of Germany helped assuage Europeans nervous about German rearmament. But the problem of European reluctance was more apparent than real -- or, to put it more precisely, it was politically unpopular to be for German rearmament, so politicians pretended to be against it, even though the key players were privately for it. This is something that recent research has demonstrated. See these two papers by Marc Trachtenberg here:
"France and the German Question, 1945-1955" [with Michael Creswell], Journal of Cold War Studies 5:3 (Summer 2003) (with responses and a rejoinder) (pdf version of article)
"America, Europe, and German Rearmament, August-September 1950" [with Christopher Gehrz], Journal of European Integration History 6:2 (December 2000), 9-35 (pdf version).
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/cv.html
SA