Eisenhower + bags + rice.
For those of you breezing through from a Google search which contains one or more of the words Eisenhower, bags, rice, Quemoy, Matsu, Joint Chiefs, nuclear, David Albert, People Power, or nonviolence: another source purporting to verify what might or might not be the urban legend about Eisenhower deciding not to use nuclear weapons in a stand-off with China over the Taiwan Strait. (Not up to speed? Here, follow the links, don’t skip the comments. Catch up with us when you’re ready.) —The folks behind the current Rice for Peace—No War on Iraq campaign point us to a couple of interviews with Alfred Hassler, a conscientious objector during World War II who helped found the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who organized the original grain—not rice—campaign in 1954 – 55. In a 1974 interview, Hassler told this story:
There was a famine in China, extremely grave. We urged people to send President Eisenhower small sacks of grain with the message, “If thine enemy hunger, feed him. Send surplus food to China.” The surplus food, in fact, was never sent. On the surface, the project was an utter failure.
But then—quite by accident—we learned from someone on Eisenhower’s press staff that our campaign was discussed at three separate cabinet meetings. Also discussed at each of these meetings was a recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the United States bomb mainland China in response to the Quemoy-Matsu crisis.
At the third meeting the president turned to a cabinet member responsible for the Food for Peace program and asked, “How many of those grain bags have come in?” The answer was 45,000, plus tens of thousands of letters.
Eisenhower’s response was that if that many Americans were trying to find a conciliatory solution with China, it wasn’t the time to bomb China. The proposal was vetoed.
In a 1975 interview, he repeated the story in a different context:
No food was offered to China, of course, although a year later Eisenhower did give surplus grain to some East European countries. Except for one of the accidents of history, the Food-for-China campaign would have appeared to be an imaginative, colorful failure, like many another. But the “accident” was in the information, provided confidentially years later by a former colleague of Eisenhower’s, that the campaign had been discussed in cabinet meetings simultaneously with proposals from the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the bombing of mainland China. The President, said our informant, asked how many of the grain bags had been received. When he heard that there had been over 45,000 plus thousands of additional letters, he ruled against bombing—on the grounds that if so many Americans wanted reconciliation with China, it was hardly the time to start bombing it!
On the one hand, of course, we have that figure pervasive in what passes for modern journalism, the unnamed source. And in one account, he’s on Eisenhower’s press staff; in the other, he’s a former colleague. —Not necessarily a contradiction, mind, but it doesn’t fill one with confidence.
On the other hand, this is a much more creditable scenario than the sketchier (if more urgent, gripping, colorful) anecdote as written up by David Albert. No General Jack D. Rippers snarl and slaver at the situation room table in this one, determined to drop the A-bomb on those slant-eyed Chinks, while that steely-eyed un-Wolfowitz, Eisenhower, sagely gauges the American Zeitgeist by half-cup bags of grain, narrowly averting nuclear crisis twice in the Taiwan Strait. —Instead, we have a political weighing of options at one cabinet meeting; we have a course of action recommended by the Joint Chiefs perhaps contemplated (“In any combat where these things can be used on strictly military targets and for strictly military purposes,” said Eisenhower, “I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else”) but ultimately set aside—much as one might a bullet—due to the political ramifications. —Judged by the half-cup, yes, but.
Does this increased creditability make the story true?
Snopes doesn’t think so (vastly updated, so if you haven’t read it in the past couple of days, go, do so).
But! Snopes is hung up a little too much, methinks, on the idea that the original Food for China campaign was never intended by its participants to protest the possibility of war (no one ever said it did; as Jeanne d’Arc points out, the humanitarian concern is rather easily inferred and transferrable); that the original campaign was grain, not rice (which Hassler’s accounts make quite clear [despite Snopes’s protestations of their being “garbled”]—as they should, Hassler helped launch the campaign, after all; it’s only later, as the details of this progressive corner of the past have been forgotten, that the switch was rather tellingly made by those who too-enthusiastically rushed in: China, rice, get it?); and that Eisenhower was never forced to the crisis point of deciding whether or not to use the bomb, so bags of grain he’d never have seen could not have affected said decision (Hassler’s second-hand accounts are muddled, yes, but again they’re clearly about political ramifications discussed at a cabinet meeting. One can argue the nitty and the gritty of what was and was not discussed at cabinet meetings as regards the possibility of bombing mainland China in 1955, but what we manifestly have in Hassler’s accounts is not a crisis point defused, but a policy option publicly removed from play [if privately left in the chamber, under the hammer, just in case]).
In other words: because the statement “Bags of rice sent to President Eisenhower helped dissuade him from launching an attack against China” has been found false does not mean that what Hassler said isn’t true. —It’s also a somewhat less compelling and uplifting example of the discourses of the mighty shaken by the likes of thee and me, but there you are.
And whether you believe it or not—and honestly, I’m still on the side of not, albeit much more reluctantly—it has no bearing at all on your taking a half cup of rice, pouring it into a ziploc bag, squeezing all the air out of it and sealing it shut, writing “If your enemies are hungry, feed them. —Romans 12:20” on a slip of paper, putting the paper and the bag into a padded envelope and sealing it up, addressing it to President George Bush, White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC, 20500, pasting $1.29 in postage on the upper right corner, dropping the package into the mail, and emailing the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center to tell them you’ve done so.
—Heck, you might even make it into the papers.
Commenting is closed for this article.
I love it, all the more because the White House will freak and it will be a public relations disaster for them.
(Rice is a grain, neh?)
Shh. You'll spook the overly literal.
But rice IS a grain!
Dammit, now I'm spooked!
I suppose once could cut out the front of a box of rice, write "Romans 12:20" on the back and address it to the White House to avoid being tarred with the anthrax brush.
However, with PATRIOT 2: The Death of the Republic on tap, any dissent will end up with one declared an 'enemy combatant' and disappeared to a shallow grave with a bullet in the back of one's head.
We wrote about it for our newsletter, every voice.net that's out today, wednesday, and we took the take you did, that sendting rice is a symbolic act, which is meaningful. we did it a in a group 30 at my wife's churchs. 26 sent bags. we didn't feel powerless about the impending war in those moments. and that free action changed the way i and others thought about power in this historial moment. as a Mississippian i know things change when people change the way they think about power.