Ike and McCarthy Read online

  McCarthy himself was undoubtedly the source of that false report. The implication was devastating: that McCarthy had personally persuaded Eisenhower to betray his former mentor and superior. Ike never forgot that humiliation. For decades, historians assumed that this episode proved Eisenhower’s cowardice in the face of McCarthyism, when the cause was actually Ike’s political naiveté.

  On November 4, Eisenhower won the Electoral College 442 to 89, carrying thirty-nine of the forty-eight states, including Wisconsin.

  STAFFING IKE’S POLITICAL ARMY

  Eisenhower knew that at some point he would have to deal with McCarthy; initially, he had other priorities. His longtime practice of selecting a small group of trusted subordinates to carry out special, often confidential, assignments would eventually pay off. Those men, important operatives during the campaign, would become Eisenhower’s political foot soldiers during his presidency. They included Sherman Adams, a former New Hampshire governor who became Ike’s chief of staff; Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., a New York attorney who had played a large role in engineering Eisenhower’s nomination; Brownell’s deputy, William Rogers, another New York attorney; John Foster Dulles (“Foster” to Ike), secretary of state and a former policy adviser to New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey; and former Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (“Cabot” to Ike), a major organizer of the Eisenhower for President movement. Lodge was appointed US representative to the United Nations and would serve as a confidential political adviser. James Hagerty, Dewey’s former press secretary, became Eisenhower’s spokesman and confidant in dealing with McCarthy. Eventually, Ike would recruit Fred Seaton to serve in the Pentagon. Those men shared Eisenhower’s negative view of Joe McCarthy.

  Ike also brought onboard General Wilton B. Persons (“Jerry” to Ike). He had served on Eisenhower’s staff during the war and then on the general’s NATO staff. Persons would be the White House’s chief congressional liaison, accountable to Sherman Adams but often working directly with the president. A conservative Alabaman respected by the Republican right wing, including McCarthy, Persons would serve as the protector of the fragile one-vote Republican majority in the Senate.

  Eisenhower was ready to govern. But he would never live down the egregious decision he had made to eliminate seventy-four words of praise for George Marshall from his speech on October 3, 1952.

  PART 1

  1953: PRIORITIES

  CHAPTER 1

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  THE FIRST CONFRONTATION

  “Nothing else mattered half as much as Joe McCarthy.” That was Sherman Adams’s recollection of the mood of the Eisenhower White House staff in 1953 and 1954. In that climate, numerous historians have blithely assumed that Eisenhower dithered while McCarthy’s victims suffered and that Ike’s inaction constituted cowardice in response to the demagogue’s assault on civil liberties.1

  EISENHOWER’S PRIORITIES

  The reality was more complex. Though the White House staff soon split into factions over how to deal with McCarthy, the new president was not so conflicted. Eisenhower believed in setting priorities, and his paramount priority was preventing another world war. That meant ending the Korean War as quickly as possible. He sought to blend a political party rusty at the art of governing with a determined effort to calm the fears of internal subversion.

  Ike saw Joe McCarthy as a symptom, not a cause. The public’s fears could not be defused by attacking the senator himself, only by addressing underlying realities. The new president sought credibility with the American people as their premier defender against enemies, both foreign and domestic. That task would consume most of his first year in office. Once done, if need be, the issue of Joe McCarthy could be more directly addressed.

  Ike knew he was vulnerable to McCarthy’s “guilt-by-association” demagoguery. Following the war, as military governor of the US occupation zone in Germany, Eisenhower had necessarily cultivated warm relationships with communists and Soviet leaders. His friends fretted constantly about whether McCarthy might exploit those associations. However, Eisenhower believed that prematurely addressing the McCarthy threat would probably backfire.2

  Eisenhower devised a simple prescription for dealing with Joe McCarthy in 1953: ignore him—at least in public. The senator, he wrote in his diary, “is, of course, so anxious for the headlines that he is prepared to go to any extremes in order to secure some mention of his name in the public press.” He concluded, “Nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of trouble-making as to ignore him. This he cannot stand.”3

  Hence, Eisenhower refused to use McCarthy’s name in public. He steadfastly maintained that commitment, to the consternation of friends and critics who implored him to denounce the senator. His approach was not as passive as it appeared; it was designed to get under McCarthy’s skin. To Ike, the most insulting stance he could take toward McCarthy was to say, in effect, “You don’t really matter.”

  Ike believed that McCarthy wanted to run for president in 1956. He did not intend to let that happen. There would be time in 1954, once the new administration was well established, to more directly address McCarthy’s threat to any plans Eisenhower had to run for a second term.4

  MCCARTHY’S CONGRESS

  Eisenhower, who knew the British system intimately, understood that he was not a prime minister. He could not shape or even marginally influence the organization of the 83rd Congress. The Republicans settled their leadership issues by January 2, 1953, nearly three weeks before Eisenhower’s inauguration. None of the top leaders in the Senate—Majority Leader Robert Taft of Ohio, President Pro Tempore Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, and Republican Policy Committee Chairman William F. Knowland of California—was an Eisenhower loyalist. Taft was the man Eisenhower had defeated for the Republican presidential nomination, the man regarded as the likely nominee until Ike declared his candidacy. The conventional wisdom is that Ike and Taft became good friends in 1953; however, like most political rivals, they papered over their differences with a superficial civility. Most important, Taft, as majority leader, controlled appointments to Senate committees and therefore could define McCarthy’s role in the new Congress.5

  Joe McCarthy rode into Washington, DC, in January 1953, committed to weeding out communist villains in every corner of government. Taft granted McCarthy precisely what he wanted; the chairmanship of the Government Operations Committee and therefore control of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy exploited his new status immediately. He announced that Roy M. Cohn, an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, would serve as chief counsel for the investigative subcommittee. Cohn, a twenty-five-year-old legal prodigy, had received his law degree from Columbia University at the age of nineteen, too young to take the bar examination. By 1953, he was an experienced investigator and had assisted in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been sentenced to death for espionage. At Cohn’s insistence, McCarthy added G. David Schine, the handsome son of a wealthy New York family, as an unpaid “chief consultant.” Schine’s only credential was a superficially written six-page pamphlet, “Definition of Communism,” that had been placed in the rooms of his family’s hotels. Attorney General Herbert Brownell recalled that the two men were quickly observed to be “inseparable.”6

  Dwight Eisenhower could control none of this. Furthermore, the Republican Party had only a one-vote majority—48 to 47 with 1 independent—in the Senate. That was not a real majority because the conservative wing of the party numbered eight to twelve senators, depending upon the issue. The Republican margin in the House was also fragile—221 to 211. If he wanted to get anything important through Congress, Eisenhower would have to placate the anticommunist stalwarts in both houses.7

  The Senate Rules Committee approved a fund of $200,000 for McCarthy’s subcommittee—double the previous year’s budget. The New York Times editors opined that the Senate had delivered “what amounts to a vote of confidence i
n Senator McCarthy.”8

  THE EISENHOWER ERA BEGINS

  For Eisenhower, preparing the inaugural address was a tense experience. The speech endured nine drafts—really more, given Ike’s penchant for penciled editing. He wanted “a high-level talk” that would neither attack the Democrats nor saber rattle toward the Soviets, focused on the “question of free men” more than “the current world situation.” He wrestled with “how to do it without becoming too sermon-like.”9

  At his inauguration on January 20, Eisenhower recited the difficulties the nation had endured; depression, world war, and conflict in Korea. Missing, except by allusion, was any mention of communism or the Soviet Union. Nor did he say anything about the threat of internal subversion—Senator McCarthy’s agenda. His address was a call not to arms but, in a favorite phrase he used on other occasions, to “waging peace.”10

  The next day Eisenhower arrived at the Oval Office. He recorded in his diary, “Plenty of worries and difficult problems. But such has been my portion for a long time.” This day felt “like a continuation of all I’ve been doing since July ’41.” Not quite; Ike was not experienced in party politics. True, he had demonstrated the capacity to cope with powerful, sometimes difficult personalities, including Douglas MacArthur, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and George Patton; but he had never dealt with a politician like Joe McCarthy.11

  There were already signs of trouble for Eisenhower’s Pentagon appointments. Eisenhower’s nominee for secretary of defense, Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson, the former president of General Motors, had run into trouble in the confirmation process. He had agreed to sever his ties with the company but retained stock that, if sold, would result in significant capital gains taxes. The catch was that General Motors provided equipment to the US military. At a hearing the previous week, Wilson had insisted that he perceived no conflict of interest “because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”12

  UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., complained to Attorney General Herbert Brownell that Wilson “seems to be a very arrogant man and a man with no understanding of government.” A former senator, Lodge was offended that Wilson, sitting in the president’s box at the inaugural parade, with “a loud voice and a great deal of laughter,” had compared members of Congress to “hoot owls.” Wilson, he grumbled, needed “a complete change of heart and mind; otherwise he will be unable to get any results in Congress.” The evening of January 22, Eisenhower held a contentious off-the-record meeting with Wilson, Brownell, and Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey. At 7:21 p.m., Jim Hagerty announced; “Mr. Wilson visited the President this evening and volunteered his intention to dispose of all his stock in General Motors.”13

  Robert Ten Broeck Stevens, the nominee for secretary of the army, was similarly reluctant to sever his relationship with J. P. Stevens and Company, his family firm. Arthur Krock, in The New York Times, characterized all this as “a bad start” for the new administration, contradicting Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to “clean up the mess” in Washington.14

  MCCARTHY’S SEARCH FOR TARGETS

  With his investigative subcommittee staffed and funded, McCarthy was ready to intensify his hunt for communists. The senator was impulsive, jumping erratically from one target to another. Deputy Attorney General William Rogers’s private assessment of McCarthy was critical: “Joe never plans a damn thing, he doesn’t know from one week to the next, not even from one day to the next, what he’s going to be doing. . . . He just hits out in any direction, no plan, no forethought.” McCarthy typically searched for subversion among people low on the food chain with an agenda more designed to generate headlines than to uncover genuinely subversive activity.15

  McCarthy had begun his rise to prominence with attacks on the State Department, so he initially harassed John Foster Dulles’s department with small-scale accusations and investigations. However, Eisenhower urged that, for the time being, cabinet members adopt “a sympathetic attitude” toward such investigations and inform committee chairs of “constructive plans” to address their concerns. “A negative approach,” the president ordered, “was to be avoided.”16

  McCarthy quickly served notice that he had no respect for the president or his loyal subordinates. General Walter Bedell Smith had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff during the European campaign and a planner of the details of the Normandy landing. Most recently, he had served as CIA director under Truman. Eisenhower nominated Smith to be Dulles’s undersecretary of state. On Eisenhower’s second day in office, McCarthy and his allies put a hold on Smith’s confirmation, delaying it for most of a month.17

  McCarthy found an even juicier target in Eisenhower’s nomination of Harvard President James B. Conant for US high commissioner in Germany. The New York Times called Conant “a splendid appointment” and stated that “as president of a great American university and as a distinguished scholar, scientist and educator, he can count on commanding the respect of the Germans” and “the support of the whole American people.” However, three weeks later, Sherman Adams’s deputy, Bernard Shanley, confided to his diary that, due to McCarthy’s opposition, Conant’s confirmation was “in jeopardy.” On February 3, McCarthy wrote the president that he was “strongly opposed” to Conant’s confirmation and that the educator’s assertion that there were no communists teaching at Harvard showed “a woeful lack of knowledge of the vicious and intricate Communist conspiracy.” On February 4, Eisenhower called McCarthy and apparently succeeded in backing the senator off; that day, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously recommended confirmation for both Smith and Conant, who were confirmed on February 6.18

  THE BOHLEN BATTLE BEGINS

  Those skirmishes were McCarthy’s warmups for his first big conflict with Eisenhower. The United States had been without an ambassador in Moscow since September 1952, when George Kennan had offended the Kremlin by publicly comparing the Soviet Union’s repressive policies to those of Nazi Germany. Eisenhower selected Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen, a State Department Soviet expert who spoke fluent Russian. He had served in the Soviet Union and had been an interpreter and adviser at international conferences with Soviet leaders during and following World War II. The president knew Bohlen; in 1951, as commander of NATO, he had held numerous conversations with him about how to deal with the Soviets. He had found Bohlen’s attitude “tough, firm but fair.” Ike recalled in his memoirs, “I came to look upon him as one of the ablest Foreign Policy officers I had ever met.”19

  However, Bohlen’s nomination confronted a conservative backlash on his role at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Yalta, a resort city on the Crimean Peninsula in the Soviet Union, had hosted face-to-face discussions among President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin. The meeting had addressed both the reorganization of postwar Europe and the perceived need to persuade the Soviet Union to join the ongoing war against Japan. Republican conservatives, led by Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft, believed that the physically frail Roosevelt, counseled by men such as Bohlen, had signed off on the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, Eisenhower secured Taft’s agreement to lead the fight for Bohlen’s nomination; one enticement may have been Eisenhower’s appointment of his son, William Howard Taft III, as ambassador to Ireland, a choice, Ike told him, that “was based solely upon merit.” On February 27, Eisenhower sent the Senate his formal nomination of Charles Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union. The stage was set for Ike’s first major confrontation with McCarthy.20

  On March 2, Bohlen told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he would not condemn the Yalta Agreements. He asserted that the accords themselves had been reasonable but the Russians had violated them, especially in Poland. Though some senators on the committee deplored the Allied desertion of Poland to the Soviets, Bohlen pointed out that Soviet military forces had already occupied that country by the date of the Yalta conference and could not
be dislodged.21

  “A SICK FRIEND”

  Suddenly an unexpected event transformed the international situation. About two in the morning on March 4, 1953, the phone rang in National Security Advisor Robert Cutler’s bedroom. Cutler picked up the receiver to hear the voice of Allen Dulles, the CIA director: “I’ve just learned that Uncle Joe [Stalin] has had a stroke and is either dead or dying. Do you think I ought to wake up the Boss?” They agreed to wait until the president’s normal rising time and meet in the Oval Office at 7:30. On that cool, rainy day, Dwight Eisenhower entered the Oval Office wearing a brown suit and tie, his choice of color when it was going to be a “hard day.” His first words: “What do you think we can do about this?” They discussed drafts of a statement and settled on one, thoroughly edited by the president himself.22

  In his statement, without mentioning Stalin by name, the president affirmed that “the thoughts of America go out to all the peoples of the U.S.S.R.—the men and women, the boys and girls—in the villages, cities, farms and factories of their homeland. They are the children of the same God who is the Father of all peoples everywhere.” Eisenhower invoked the almighty again “to watch over the people of that vast land” and allow them to live “in a world where all men and women and children dwell in peace and comradeship.”23