The Age of Eisenhower

by William I Hitchcock

  President Eisenhower was a hardworking man who regularly put in 9- and 10-hour days in the Oval Office. Yet politics was his job, not his life, and he insisted on frequent informal gatherings of friends and family. He kept up his card-playing, his regular rounds of golf at Burning Tree Country Club, his dabbling in paints; he even worked on his putting and chip shots on the White House lawn. When his son John returned from Korea he brought his family to visit often; the footfall of the Eisenhower grandchildren—David, Anne, Susan, and Mary Jean—could often be heard clattering through the family quarters of the presidential mansion. Eisenhower was always happy to get out of Washington; while the family farm in Gettysburg was undergoing renovations until 1955, Ike took delight in the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Franklin Roosevelt had called the place Shangri-La. This Ike vetoed (“too fancy for a Kansas farm boy”) and found a name that echoed his days in military encampments: Camp David, named after his grandson. Inevitably the president had a three-hole golf course installed. There was trout fishing in the mountain brooks nearby, a handsome stone barbeque pit to grill steaks for a few friends, and even skeet shooting—just the ticket for an avid outdoorsman. The evenings featured screenings of favorite western films. It was a middle-class paradise on a presidential scale.

  Washington society had some trouble adapting to the rather humdrum tastes of the first family. Long lunches and late nights were frowned upon; cabinet officers were expected to turn down most invitations to elegant soirees. Ike did not much like to attend parties, and elite Washington hostesses declared themselves baffled by a president who preferred to stay at home in the evenings to watch television. Ike preferred light entertainment, such as the CBS television variety show put on by Arthur Godfrey and western movies in the family quarters. The new domesticity did not please everyone. Collier’s magazine sniffed that Mamie and Ike, “living in what is probably the world’s most publicized hunk of architecture,” were “playing it strictly suburban. . . . The fact is that the atmosphere of the White House these days is more reminiscent of Dubuque than of Versailles.” And that suited Eisenhower just fine.4

  If the White House was not turned into a stage for sparkling entertainments, Eisenhower did rely heavily upon formal evening dinners with members of the “power elite.” He kept up a heavy schedule of men-only dinner parties to entertain political supporters, hear from business leaders, and receive reports on public opinion from men he had reason to trust. Each dinner followed a script: about 15 guests would arrive at 7:30 and chat casually before being seated at 8:00. A menu of national specialties, from Alaska salmon to Texas pheasant, duck, or steak, would be served. Eventually Eisenhower would steer the discussion to a particular topic that was on his mind and ask for his dinner companions’ opinions. The afterdinner conversation would end promptly at 11:00. In his first two years in office, he gave 38 stag dinners and welcomed over 550 men to these functions at the White House. Overwhelmingly the guests were drawn from the corporate and business world, as befitted a pro-business president. Others included administration officials and congressional leaders. Perhaps a tenth came from the press, and smaller numbers from universities, labor organizations, and philanthropic foundations.5

  In one crucial respect Eisenhower chose to use the White House as a public stage. On February 1, 1953, just 10 days after his inauguration, he was baptized and welcomed into the National Presbyterian Church by the Rev. Edward Elson. He remains the only president to have been baptized while in office. Although the ceremony itself was private, Eisenhower made every effort to place faith at the center of national life during his years in office, and the numbers suggest that Americans followed his lead. The 1950s was a time of extraordinary religious revival: church membership rose from 49 percent in 1940 to 69 percent in 1960. His own heart-felt prayer had prefaced his inaugural speech; his cabinet meetings began with a moment of silent prayer; he initiated the National Prayer Breakfast and welcomed Rev. Billy Graham into the White House as a spiritual adviser. He heartily approved when, in 1954, Congress inserted “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance and later made “In God We Trust” the official motto of the United States, even placing these words on the paper currency.

  Eisenhower’s own civic religion was ecumenical and inclusive. He had no interest in doctrinal differences or religious debates. His upbringing in a devout though nonconformist household of Bible readers left him with both an abiding spiritual belief and a mistrust of organized churches. But he knew that as president he must publicly proclaim his faith in God so as to encourage all Americans to do the same. For Eisenhower religious faith was the single most important distinction between the free world and the communist world. The Soviet bloc was a monstrous tyranny that sneered at spirituality. Americans, by contrast, held to the belief that every individual was God’s creation. Human rights were therefore divine and not to be trampled underfoot by an all-powerful government. Eisenhower never tired of repeating his fundamental belief that democracy, which empowered individuals to govern themselves, offered the only form of government that could fulfill God’s purpose on Earth. If the cold war was to be won, spiritual power would be every bit as important, Eisenhower believed, as material and military might.6

  II

  Eisenhower’s tastes and social outlook, his loyalties, friendships, religious beliefs, sense of right and wrong—these matter if we are to understand his handling of the greatest domestic political issue, and perhaps the thorniest moral issue, of his first two years in office: McCarthyism.

  It has long been a subject of debate among historians: How well did Eisenhower handle the “Red Scare” and its sinister impresario, Senator Joe McCarthy? Contemporary observers in the press, intellectuals across the political spectrum, and quite a few of Eisenhower’s friends and close advisers agonized over what they saw as his timid approach to the whole business. Despite his popularity and his enormous political capital, they believed, he refused to engage directly with McCarthy or to confront the paranoia the senator so effectively cultivated. By avoiding McCarthyism, some writers asserted, Eisenhower allowed it to continue unchecked. By contrast, later scholars working from the documentary record perceived a design in Eisenhower’s approach to the senator, and indeed have gone so far as to conclude that Eisenhower had a “strategy” for dealing with the relentless inquisitor. That strategy was what military theorists call the “indirect approach”: Eisenhower avoided a direct attack on McCarthy but cut off his supply lines by blocking his access to the information and people he needed to sustain his investigations. The political scientist Fred Greenstein, for example, argues that Eisenhower’s handling of McCarthy provides evidence of a “hidden hand” style of government. In this interpretation, Ike rode above the fray of politics while secretly pulling levers and using White House influence to stymie McCarthy and his allies.7

  Like most debates among historians, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other. It would be unfair to say that Eisenhower failed to confront McCarthy; he did challenge McCarthy, repeatedly, and with the broader purpose of trying to defuse the explosive Red hunter. Yet it also overstates the case to claim that Eisenhower had a strategy. Rather Eisenhower in 1953 improvised in dealing with McCarthy, at first trying to ignore him, then trying to outdo him in the Red-hunting business, then trying to seduce him with promises of new legislation to destroy communism in America. None of these tactics worked. Not until the spring of 1954, when an emboldened McCarthy turned his investigatory resources on the U.S. Army and on members of the administration, did Eisenhower choose to fight back.

  To understand his reluctance to tangle with McCarthy, consider that by the time Eisenhower came into office, anticommunism had flourished in America for over three decades. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the U.S. government had viewed communism as a sinister, secretive, revolutionary ideology hostile to freedom, to religion, and to private property—in short, entirely un-American. In the 1930s politicians hostile to the New Deal trie
d to stymie Roosevelt’s plans for social reform by invoking the specter of communism. Anxieties about subversive activities inside the country led to the passage of the Smith Act in 1940, which compelled resident aliens to register with the government and made it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government.

  In the immediate postwar years, as the reaction against the New Deal mounted, left-wing labor activities were an easy target of the anticommunist forces, and the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act required all union officials to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party. In March 1947 Truman issued Executive Order 9835, which established the federal Loyalty Review Board with a remit to purge the federal government of any “disloyal” employees. At the same time the House Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings about the alleged communist penetration in Hollywood, the labor movement, government, universities, and elsewhere. It was here that the young Nixon made his name in unmasking the communist spy Alger Hiss. In 1949 the Justice Department indicted 11 leaders of the Communist Party of the United States for violation of the Smith Act; after a year-long trial they were found guilty.

  International events, in particular the discovery in September 1949 that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb and the fall of China to communist forces the following month, heightened American anxieties. In January 1950 the country was shocked to learn that a British scientist named Klaus Fuchs, who had worked at Los Alamos during the war, had been a Soviet spy. Fuchs confessed and identified his courier, Harry Gold, who in turn led investigators to discover more atomic spies in the Manhattan Project, notably Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were indicted in August 1950. The outbreak of war in Korea completed the picture of a communist enemy that seemed to be on the march both on the battlefield and deep inside the American home front. And all this predated the arrival on the political scene of Senator Joe McCarthy.8

  Republican critics of the Truman administration—and there were many—had been employing the communists-in-government issue with great success since Nixon’s tangle with Hiss. In February 1950 McCarthy, still a relatively unknown legislator from Wisconsin, announced that he had come into possession of shocking new evidence that 205 members of the Communist Party were still working for the State Department, even though their names had been turned over to top government officials. The charge would have been comical in another time and place: McCarthy had no list of names, and he had no new evidence. But the Democrats who controlled Congress could not be complacent, and they launched hearings into McCarthy’s charges, which were soon shown to be fanciful. In response McCarthy simply made up more. Aided by key GOP senators, including Robert Taft, who took unrestrained pleasure in seeing McCarthy take on the Truman administration, as well as a press corps that never tired of covering accusations of subversion, McCarthy was able to keep his circus going for three years.9

  And he did not act alone. Congress, sensitive to the climate of fear surrounding the communist-in-government issue, passed the Internal Security Act in September 1950. Also called the McCarran Act after its chief sponsor, archconservative Nevada Democrat Pat McCarran, it gave the federal government sweeping powers to investigate allegations of subversion. It compelled communist-front organizations to register with the government, created a Subversive Activities Control Board to track down suspicious persons, and enacted an emergency detention statute that allowed the government to detain suspected spies or saboteurs. President Truman vetoed the bill, declaring, “We would betray our finest traditions if we attempted, as this bill would attempt, to curb the simple expression of opinion.” The proposed law “would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world.” But Truman stood alone: Congress swiftly and easily overrode his veto, with many Democrats voting in favor.10

  The electoral appeal of the communist issue became apparent in November 1950, when the GOP picked up five seats in the Senate and cut the Democratic lead to two; in the House the Republicans picked up 28 seats. These results inoculated McCarthy from any charge that his anticommunist antics were harming the GOP: quite the contrary, he was manifestly helping his party and landing body blows on the Truman administration. He carried on his attacks on Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, George Marshall, and others associated with what McCarthy labeled a foreign policy of appeasement of the Soviet Union, cowardice toward Red China, and treason of their own nation. Privately many Republicans worried that McCarthy was debasing the Senate and would soon harm the party, but publicly few leaders wished to gainsay the Wisconsin senator. Eisenhower had tried to avoid commenting on McCarthy while running for office in 1952. He did not like to deal in “personalities,” he had said. Besides, McCarthy was a fellow Republican, and a popular one at that. The tactic seemed to work. Not only was McCarthy reelected in November 1952, but the Senate passed into Republican control by a razor-thin majority of two seats.

  Eisenhower and Nixon had won the election in part on a pledge to sweep the communists and the crooks from government. Far from seeking to halt McCarthyism, Eisenhower stated his intention to adopt a policy of vigilance and ruthlessness toward domestic subversion. Upon entering the White House he found waiting for him an opportunity to administer a firm hand in such matters.

  III

  Julius Rosenberg, an electrical engineer and ardent communist since the 1930s, had been identified during the investigation of Klaus Fuchs as a key figure in an atomic spy ring. During the war Rosenberg’s brother-in-law, David Greenglass, a U.S. Army engineer, was assigned to work at the most secret American scientific project: the atomic bomb research effort at Los Alamos. Rosenberg, delighted by this turn of events, enticed Greenglass to pass along any information he could find that might be useful to the Soviet Union in its own search for the atomic bomb. Greenglass complied and passed some secrets to Rosenberg and to a courier named Harry Gold. (The value of this information remains disputed.) Questioned by the FBI in June 1950 about these activities, Greenglass swiftly confessed and also named his brother-in-law as part of the spy ring. But Rosenberg, when picked up by the authorities, did not confess. The FBI, hoping to ratchet up the pressure, arrested his wife, Ethel, on flimsy charges of helping him.

  Ethel turned out to be a feisty woman and strong communist who refused to turn against her husband under questioning. Accused of typing up some of the notes for Julius that had been secreted out of Los Alamos, she steadfastly disavowed any role in espionage. There now opened one of the most celebrated trials in American history, in which Greenglass became the star witness against his own sister and his brother-in-law, supporting the government’s case that the husband-and-wife team had helped the USSR get the atom bomb. Following their trial in March 1951, a jury found the pair guilty, and the judge in the case, Irving Kaufman, promptly issued death sentences for both.

  The harsh sentences set off an international outcry. The court in its zeal had gone too far, many believed; at least Ethel, the mother of two children who was only peripherally involved, should be spared. During the two years of appeals that followed, many activists in the United States and especially abroad clamored for leniency in the case, calling on President Truman to commute the sentence. The State Department prepared a summary of the European press showing that while the far left was predictably vehement in its denunciations of the verdict, even the noncommunist press was calling for mercy for the condemned pair. In France, Belgium, Italy, and West Germany, centrist writers and political figures cast doubt upon the guilt of the Rosenbergs and argued that, in any case, the American government should not succumb to the hateful passions of the anticommunist frenzy.11

  President Eisenhower remained unmoved. He was inclined to follow the previous administration’s position: the case had been tried, it had been reviewed, and justice had been done. To overturn the sentences would be to interfere in the workings of American justice, something he found abhorrent. Besides, the case, he told the cabinet, was “clear cut.” On February 11, 1953, Eisenhower issued a statement that h
ad actually been drawn up by the Truman White House: there would be no act of executive clemency in the case. The crime of passing atomic secrets to the USSR was heinous, involving “the deliberate betrayal of the entire nation” that could “result in the death of many, many thousands of innocent citizens.”12

  Thousands of letters and telegrams poured into the White House, asking the president to stay the execution. Seven thousand protestors thronged the gates of the White House and held a silent vigil on the National Mall. The eldest Rosenberg child, Michael, sent Eisenhower a poignant handwritten note in childish cursive, asking, “Please let my mommy and daddy go and not let anything happen to them.” Sophie Rosenberg, Julius’s mother, begged Eisenhower to show mercy to “an old woman whose days are spent in weeping.”13

  Yet Eisenhower never wavered. The reasons are not hard to divine. He believed above all that the accused were surely guilty of espionage (and Julius’s guilt was later confirmed by declassified materials). The case had been tied up in the courts for two years, and every appeal had been heard. The Rosenbergs had had their day in court. But there was also a powerful institutional momentum that carried Eisenhower along. His administration was composed of hawks who were determined to show no mercy toward subversion, lest they be tarnished with the “pink” brush that had been used on the Truman administration. Attorney General Herbert Brownell later confirmed Ike’s view that clemency for the Rosenbergs “would have been interpreted as a tremendous victory of Communist propaganda.” Eisenhower’s adviser C. D. Jackson put it in the most vulgar way possible: the Rosenbergs “deserve to fry a hundred times for what they have done to this country.”14