The Age of Eisenhower
Page 18
In two letters, one to a former Columbia colleague and the other to his son, Eisenhower developed his position on the case. He believed that if the Rosenbergs were spared, “Communist leaders” would surely conclude that Americans were “weak and fearful and that consequently subversive and other kind[s] of activity can be conducted against them with no real fear of dire punishment.” In a striking passage in the letter to John, he wrote that the Rosenbergs had to be executed as an example to other would-be traitors. Eisenhower recalled his days as supreme commander during the liberation of Europe: “One month in Normandy, we had so many cases of assault, murder and rape that the citizens of the region were driven to desperation.” He had decided to make an example of two American soldiers, convicted of rape and murder in occupied France. “Under my direction, this was made a semi-public execution, with representatives of all units, citizens, police forces, and churches present.” Thereafter assaults declined dramatically, he claimed.
Eisenhower also swept away the argument that Ethel should be spared because she was a woman and a mother. To do that would simply invite the Soviets to deploy “only women in their spying process.” What is more, Eisenhower had concluded that Ethel “has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy ring” (a remarkable and inaccurate claim). Julius was a “weak” man, but Ethel was a “strong and recalcitrant character,” and so deserved no mercy. In the end Eisenhower advanced the argument that the Rosenbergs “exposed to greater danger of death literally millions of our citizens.” For this they would have to die.15
On the evening of June 19, 1953, after a last-minute refusal of the Supreme Court to hold up the trial any longer, and after Eisenhower declined again to intervene, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.16
IV
If Eisenhower had hoped to win plaudits from the Red hunters in his own party for his unsentimental handling of the Rosenberg case, he was soon disappointed. From the very first days of the Eisenhower administration, Senator McCarthy had set out to test the new president on the genuineness of his desire to root out subversion from government. McCarthy had a new stage on which to perform: with the Republicans in the majority in the 83rd Congress, he took over as chairman of the Committee on Government Operations as well as the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which he used to call countless witnesses and launch numerous fishing expeditions in his search for communist subversion. When Eisenhower nominated his most trusted wartime colleague, Walter “Beetle” Smith, as undersecretary of state, McCarthy told the press he would hold up the appointment because Smith had once expressed support for John Paton Davies, a former “China hand” who, McCarthy alleged, had been sympathetic to the Chinese communists. McCarthy wrote a letter to Eisenhower on February 3, 1953, stating that he was “strongly opposed” to the appointment of Harvard president James B. Conant as high commissioner to Germany because Conant had been insufficiently aggressive in rooting out communists from Harvard, professors who “have been up early every morning doing the work of the Communist Party.” Conant could not be relied upon, McCarthy said, “to safeguard the American Embassy at Bonn from Communist penetration.”17
McCarthy was toying with the new president and chose not to make a direct attack in the Senate on Smith or Conant. But he did not show any restraint when Eisenhower nominated Charles “Chip” Bohlen as ambassador to the USSR. To McCarthy, Bohlen was the epitome of the professional pin-striped Ivy League diplomat. A Harvard degree, a long career in the State Department, an interest in all things Soviet, previous service in Prague, Paris, and Moscow, and his work in setting up the United Nations in 1944–45—all this hinted at the kind of worldly cosmopolitanism that drove McCarthy mad. Worse, Bohlen had worked closely with Marshall, Acheson, and Truman, and, most damning of all, he had been present at Yalta, the much-derided 1945 meeting when Roosevelt was alleged to have surrendered Eastern Europe and Manchuria to Stalin. Bohlen, fluent in Russian and a longtime Foreign Service officer, served as a translator and adviser to Roosevelt, and it was inevitable that, given the toxicity of the Yalta connection—it was the same conference, after all, where Hiss advised the president—Bohlen was going to come under close scrutiny.
Yet in his March 1953 confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bohlen refused to be intimidated. The Yalta accords, he patiently explained, did not sell out China or turn over Eastern Europe to Stalin. At Yalta, FDR was trying to win Soviet entry into the war against Japan as well as cooperation in the newly formed United Nations. The USSR was granted a lease to Port Arthur and ownership of southern Sakhalin Island. As for Poland, the Yalta accord demanded the inclusion of democratic elements into the postwar Polish government. The Yalta agreement, Bohlen pointed out, was designed to forestall Soviet control of Poland, not surrender it. Bohlen’s firm defense of Yalta inflamed the Red hunters. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, one of the GOP’s senior leaders, called on the president to withdraw Bohlen’s name. Democratic senator Pat McCarran announced his opposition too, saying that Bohlen’s presence at Yalta “was enough” for him to vote against the man. Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan pressed the White House to withdraw the nomination. Majority Leader Robert Taft managed to stave off open rebellion by announcing his support for Bohlen and calling him “well qualified,” and Eisenhower too signaled that he was going to stand firm behind his nominee. Bohlen was, he said in a press conference, a personal friend, a good family man, and the “best-qualified man for the post.”18
But McCarran and McCarthy were not finished with Bohlen, for they knew that in conducting a security review of the nominee, the FBI had dragged out various hints that Bohlen’s brother-in-law, Charles Thayer, a Foreign Service officer who was then stationed in Munich, was a homosexual. Bohlen had known Thayer for many years and had once shared an apartment with him when both were junior officers stationed in Moscow. Thayer had introduced his sister, Avis, to Bohlen, and the two married in 1935. But rumors had circulated about Thayer, and now they wound up in Bohlen’s FBI file. Had Bohlen known of his brother-in-law’s sexuality? Was Bohlen covering up for him? Was this evidence of a homosexual ring in the State Department? Was Bohlen himself a “queer”?
Bohlen’s FBI file and its contents now sat at the center of a struggle between Congress and the Executive. The senators wanted to inspect the file. Herbert Brownell, the attorney general, and even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, were against it: it would set a precedent for congressional interference in Executive branch business, and in any case the FBI files were highly confidential. But McCarthy kept the pressure on. He demanded that Eisenhower “examine the entire file on Bohlen”; if he did so, he would certainly “withdraw the appointment.” Secretary Dulles declared that he had seen the FBI file and that there was nothing in it that tarnished Bohlen’s name. He asked the Senate to take him at his word, but McCarthy and McCarran accused Dulles of a cover-up. McCarthy was using Bohlen to attack Dulles and Eisenhower for being “soft” on internal security. According to the Washington columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, the Bohlen case was “war, and make no mistake about it.”19
That Bohlen had contact with, even shared an apartment with an alleged homosexual was potentially devastating in the climate of the early 1950s. Hostility toward gay men was extreme in American public life at this time, and in the context of the Red Scare, sexual “deviance” of federal employees was considered a security risk since it was assumed that gay people could easily be blackmailed. In 1950 the Senate held hearings on the matter and issued a report titled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” which concluded that homosexual conduct was “so contrary to the normal accepted standards of social behavior that persons who engage in such activity are looked upon as outcasts by society generally.” Furthermore homosexuals “lack the emotional stability of normal persons” and have weak “moral fiber,” and so could not be trusted with government secrets.20
This i
ntolerance toward homosexuality meant that the merest whiff of such behavior on the part of a high-ranking government official could be ruinous. In Chip Bohlen’s case, therefore, it was essential that the FBI file be shared with the Senate so that it could be seen just how flimsy the rumors relating to Thayer really were. Yet the constitutional prerogative of the Executive branch had to be protected. On the eve of the Senate debate on Bohlen’s nomination, Taft suggested a compromise: two senators, one from each party, would be tasked with viewing the report and informing their colleagues of its contents. Taft himself and Democratic senator John Sparkman then duly inspected the documents and found, as Taft put it, “nothing in all the testimony which would create the most remote ‘guilt-by-association’ accusation that can be thought of.” McCarthy, on the floor of the Senate, howled about a cover-up, declaring that the American people had voted Eisenhower into office to “clean house: This means get rid of Acheson’s lieutenants—including all the Bohlens.”21
Bohlen was confirmed by the Senate in a vote of 74–13. (Thayer, meanwhile, resigned from the State Department under duress.) Eleven Republican senators, in opposing Bohlen, voted against their newly elected and immensely popular president; they also voted against Taft, against Dulles, and against the privilege of the Executive to choose its own envoys. Eisenhower won, but it had cost him a great deal of bad blood with the right wing of his own party and showed that McCarthyism was in no sense diminished simply because the Republicans had taken control of the White House.
Eisenhower was personally frustrated by the Bohlen affair. He wrote to his brother Edgar at the start of April 1953 that the Bohlen file was full of “completely baseless, wholly unsubstantiated rumors that he had been associated some fifteen or twenty years ago with some unsavory characters.” McCarthy, he wrote in his diary, had stirred the pot “in order to secure some mention of his name in the public press.” But Eisenhower refused to confront the senator and his hijinks directly: “Nothing will be so effective in combatting his particular kind of trouble-making as to ignore him. This he cannot stand.”22
V
Ignoring McCarthy was not the only plan for dealing with the publicity-hungry senator. The Eisenhower administration also tried another tactic: to seize the initiative in the anticommunist crusade. On April 27, 1953, just after the Bohlen confirmation, the Eisenhower White House issued Executive Order 10450, announcing new procedures for combing out any security risks from the federal government. The order took aim not only at those with politically disloyal ideas but also those with a dubious “moral” record. Federal employees could not demonstrate “any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion.” The Red Scare had subjected the political attitudes of government employees to careful scrutiny; now their moral, personal, and sexual conduct would be supervised by the federal government for any sign of “deviance.” The Executive Order was a sober reminder that Eisenhower, for all his antagonism toward McCarthy, was determined not to be outflanked on the issue of loyalty and subversion by the right wing of his own party.23
On June 3, 1953, Eisenhower went on national television along with four cabinet members, one of whom was Attorney General Brownell. Eisenhower wanted Brownell to give the nation a report on how well the new team was doing in “keeping the internal house secure against the boring of subversives and that sort of thing.” Brownell’s statement was full of praise for the “fine investigative work of the FBI arm of the Department of Justice under J. Edgar Hoover,” as well as the administration’s new loyalty program. He stressed that the Eisenhower team’s approach to federal employee security, unlike Truman’s, was to go after people who, because of their “personal habits,” were security risks. The politically active person who had “traitorous thoughts” of course had to go. But so too did anyone “who might be subject to blackmail” due to shameful behavior. The principle of denying access to government service for allegations of immoral behavior was now a settled rule for the new team.24
Eisenhower was never personally comfortable with the business of security investigations. Although he understood the political need to demonstrate vigilance against security risks in federal employ, he took pains to say publicly that he wanted to conduct investigations in a way that protected the rights of the accused. The personal attacks, innuendo, and slander that McCarthy relied upon were obnoxious to Eisenhower. When he learned that Roy Cohn, the general counsel for McCarthy’s committee on investigations, had been trolling American libraries in Europe, digging out and allegedly destroying literature from the shelves written by left-wingers and communist enthusiasts, he used a public address at Dartmouth College to denounce such paranoid behavior. Taking the podium at the graduation exercises, he spoke off the cuff:
Look at your country. Here is a country of which we are proud. . . . But this country is a long way from perfection—a long way. We have the disgrace of racial discrimination, or we have prejudice against people because of their religion. We have crime on the docks. We have not had the courage to uproot these things, although we know they are wrong. Now, [your] courage is not going to be satisfied—your sense of satisfaction is not going to be satisfied, if you haven’t the courage to look at these things and do your best to help correct them. . . . It is not enough merely to say I love America, and to salute the flag and take off your hat as it goes by, and to help sing the Star Spangled Banner.
He concluded his rambling remarks in a clear rebuke to the close-mindedness of the McCarthyites: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?”25
Yet such public expressions were all too rare. Just three days later Eisenhower replied to a letter from Philip Reed, the chairman of the board of General Electric and an adviser in the 1952 campaign, explaining why he would avoid direct confrontation with McCarthy. Reed had sent the president an anguished letter reporting on public opinion among Europeans, who saw McCarthy as “a potential Hitler . . . a typical totalitarian, a demagogue, a ruthless purger of those with whom he disagrees.” The ousting of diplomats like Thayer, the combing of libraries, and the allegations of treachery, all this was “to them a familiar and frightening scene.” Reed felt the “stature of [Eisenhower’s] administration” was “impaired” overseas, and he hoped to see “strong statements” that countered McCarthy’s allegations. Eisenhower calmly replied, “To attempt to answer in terms of personal criticism is to place yourself in the hands of the attacker.” If the president were to “point his finger at any particular individual, meaning to name anyone specifically, he automatically gives to that individual an increased publicity value. This is exactly what many people are seeking and I decline to be a party to it.” To his Abilene friend Swede Hazlett, Eisenhower explained that he would not “crack down” on McCarthy because to do so would only increase the attention paid to his scandalous activities.26
Instead of standing up to McCarthy, Eisenhower preferred to point to his own success in “cleaning up the mess in Washington.” On October 23 the head of the Civil Service Commission, Philip Young, delivered the news to the press that the administration had dismissed “1,456 subversives” from federal service. The number was never precisely explained, and the dismissed employees were not identified. What seemed to matter most was that all but five of the 1,456 were holdovers from the Truman years.27
There soon came further revelations, clearly designed to seize the communist issue from McCarthy while embarrassing the previous administration. On November 6 Attorney General Brownell—with Eisenhower’s prior approval—announced that he had information showing that Pres
ident Truman had been informed in late 1945 that a high-ranking treasury official, Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet spy, and yet the following month Truman nonetheless nominated White to serve as the top U.S. representative to the International Monetary Fund. (White served in that post until 1947, when he got wind that the Justice Department was on his trail. He died of a heart attack in August 1948.) Brownell, speaking before the Executives Club in Chicago, declared, “It is a source of humiliation to every American that during the period of the Truman Administration, the Communists were so strikingly successful in infiltrating the Government of the United States.” Brownell laid it on thick: “The records in my department show that White’s spying activities for the Soviet Government were reported in detail by the FBI to the White House.” But Truman had not acted.28
Brownell’s accusation that Truman had knowingly advanced the career of a high-ranking Soviet agent triggered what the New York Times called “the most rancorous political brawl of the year.” Of course the charges were deeply embarrassing to Truman. But Brownell’s attack on the former president was depicted in the press as a crude political ploy designed to make the new administration appear zealous in the hunt for communist subversives. Sherman Adams later admitted that the Brownell report was designed precisely to “take away some of the glamour of the McCarthy stage play” and put Ike in the limelight as the leading actor in the anticommunist drama. But the attack on Truman made Brownell look like a political hack who was using privileged access to FBI files to dredge up evidence of Democratic malfeasance. Marquis Childs, the Washington Post journalist, wrote, “Many who were behind Mr. Eisenhower in the campaign last year believed he would end the divisiveness and distrust; that he would help give America a new unity and a new confidence.” Instead the Eisenhower team widened the partisan divide.29