The White House press corps battered Eisenhower with questions about the White affair at his November 11 news conference. Standing behind a desk in the ornate Indian Treaty Room of the old State Department building, he experienced “some of the roughest minutes of the Eisenhower Administration,” according to New York Times journalist James Reston. Eisenhower was compelled to admit under questioning that he had approved Brownell’s anti-Truman charge in advance. He also was forced to cut the ground from under Brownell by stating that it was “inconceivable” that Truman had knowingly appointed a spy to high office. When one reporter asked if Eisenhower was “virtually putting a label of traitor on a former president,” Eisenhower visibly tensed up and said, “I reject the premise. I would not answer such a question.” He tried to kill the clock with a rambling statement about the need to fight subversion in government while attending to just and democratic principles. But the damage was done: it was clear that Brownell’s assault had opened Eisenhower up to the charge that his Justice Department was raking through the files in search of politically damaging material against the Truman administration. “The partisan feeling here tonight,” wrote Reston from Washington, “is bitter.”30
The most incendiary criticism of Brownell’s announcement came, predictably, from Truman himself, who gave a nationally televised address on November 16 from Kansas City to rebut the suggestion that he had bungled the White case. Truman insisted that the information he had seen was not damaging enough to fire White in 1945, that an ongoing investigation at that time was still under way; and that even in 1947 a federal grand jury had tried and failed to indict White because the evidence was too flimsy. But the real issue, Truman said, going on the attack, was that President Eisenhower “has fully embraced for political advantage McCarthyism. . . . It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of due process of law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth.” Truman offered this withering barb: “In Communist countries, it is the practice when a new government comes to power to accuse outgoing officials of treason, to frame public trials for them, and to degrade and prosecute them.” Brownell was engaged in just such “political skullduggery.”31
Eisenhower had walked into a political minefield and found himself with no easy way out. Either he could press forward and engage Truman’s blistering speech; or he could backtrack and so abandon his attorney general. In his November 18 news conference he did neither. He simply refused to answer questions on the matter. But the press reported to him that Leonard Hall, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had recently stated that the communists-in-government issue was going to be the major theme of the 1954 midterm elections and that “we have not seen the end of it.” Eisenhower directly contradicted the party chairman: “I hope that this whole thing will be a matter of history and of memory by the time the next election comes around. I don’t believe we can live in fear of each other forever, and I really hope and believe that this administration is proceeding decently and justly to get this thing straightened out.” Pressed further, he said he hoped “the suspicion on the part of the American people” that the government was infiltrated by subversive elements “will have disappeared through the accomplishments of the executive branch.”32
This was a clear message to the right wing of his party in Congress. The Eisenhower administration was cleaning up the government, and as soon as possible it would declare victory in the Red-hunting effort and move on to less divisive issues. To one listener such a statement came as a direct challenge. McCarthy had no intention of ceding the role of top prosecutor to Brownell or Eisenhower. Relishing the prospect of tangling with Truman again, McCarthy pressured the television networks to let him respond to Truman’s address. On November 24, from a studio in New York, McCarthy gave a classic and outrageous performance. He scorned the “phoney, deluded, fuzzy-minded liberals in whose book it is a mortal sin ever to expose or criticize a Communist.” And he depicted Truman’s pointed attack as payback “because I took some part in the exposure of the Communist infiltration of his administration.” But attacking Truman was not the main purpose of the address. The second half of his televised remarks was aimed squarely at Ike.
“A few days ago,” he said, “I read that President Eisenhower expressed the hope that by election-time in 1954, the subject of communism would be a dead and forgotten issue. The raw, harsh, unpleasant fact is that communism is an issue and will be an issue in 1954.” Eisenhower’s “batting average” in rooting out communists was quite low, McCarthy went on. John Paton Davies, whom McCarthy had hounded for alleged softness on communism, was still on the State Department payroll. More worrisome, America’s allies in Europe, many of them recipients of Marshall Plan money, continued to trade with communist China, the same nation that was still holding American prisoners of war. “How free are we when American aviators . . . are being brainwashed, starved, or murdered behind an Iron or Bamboo Curtain?” Eisenhower’s policy toward Red China and Dulles’s inability to get European allies to conform to America’s wishes were signs of “whining, whimpering appeasement.”33
Even for McCarthy this was a loopy, unhinged performance. Jim Hagerty privately called McCarthy’s address “sheer Fascism.” Yet it was perceived by Washington observers as a “blunt warning” to the president, in the words of Stewart Alsop. McCarthy made clear what he was after: not the purging of dubious employees but the “Administration’s public acceptance that he, McCarthy, is the leading symbol of Republicanism. He will be satisfied, in a word, only by the abject surrender of President Eisenhower.” Alsop grasped that the Eisenhower team had underestimated McCarthy, “as the Administration strategists who believe they could undercut him by ‘fighting fire with fire’ must surely have noticed.” An open breach between McCarthy and Eisenhower was now “inevitable.”34
Eisenhower’s advisers recognized that McCarthy had flung down the gauntlet, and some of them begged the president to pick it up. C. D. Jackson, who was at that moment toiling hard over the “Atoms for Peace” speech, argued that McCarthy had declared war on the president and needed to be hit hard. McCarthy had set himself up as the leader of the Republican Party and had called out Eisenhower for harboring communists. Ignoring McCarthy—playing what Jackson called the “three little monkeys act”—was not working, and the president had to show some leadership. In a heated phone conversation with Dulles on December 1, Jackson raged that Ike’s tepid replies to McCarthy were failing. “The Olympian dialectics are superb,” Jackson sputtered, “but when your house is on fire you don’t put it out by oratory.” The timid behavior of the White House was reminiscent of the “disastrous appeasement” of McCarthy that had started in September 1952 on the campaign trail in Wisconsin. Yet even now it was very difficult for Jackson to budge the president, especially as Vice President Nixon, Chief of Staff Adams, and Gen. Wilton “Jerry” Persons, the congressional liaison, were against any open breach with McCarthy.
On December 2, however, Dulles struck back at McCarthy, with Eisenhower’s approval, sharply denouncing McCarthy’s criticism of the administration’s foreign policy. Jackson wanted the president to back up Dulles in his scheduled news conference that afternoon, and presented a draft statement that struck at McCarthy. Eisenhower slammed the text on his desk, saying, “I will not get in the gutter with that guy”—a point that had become his guiding principle on this issue. But Jackson kept up what he called his “needling” and “goosing” and managed to get Eisenhower to agree to a mild rebuttal to McCarthy’s latest criticisms. In a prepared statement that he read to the press, Eisenhower backed Dulles and reinforced his earlier message: his administration was successfully purging the federal government of disloyal Americans and doing it through “fair, thorough and decent investigations.” By 1954 the issue of disloyalty would “no longer be considered a serious menace.” Far more important was to enact a “progressiv
e, dynamic program enhancing the welfare of the people of our country.” So fraught was the atmosphere in Washington that even this mild statement was taken by the press as a direct counterstroke to McCarthy. An editorial in the Washington Post was titled simply “Ike Takes Command.”35
VI
That surely overstated the case. In fact the president faced serious disadvantages in taking command over the anti-McCarthy forces. Perhaps most important, his own party was deeply divided over the matter. The Old Guard Republicans in the Senate shared many of McCarthy’s prejudices and fears and were sympathetic to his brand of reactionary, isolationist, conspiracy-laden, communist-obsessed, vulgar populism. Eisenhower might have had a stronger hand to play if Majority Leader Taft had not died of cancer in July 1953, just six months after the new administration took office. Taft, though ideologically at odds with Eisenhower, had played a crucial role in salvaging the Bohlen nomination and could have helped at least keep McCarthy in check. Unfortunately Taft’s successor was William Knowland, a 44-year-old from California—the youngest ever to hold the post of majority leader—and an ambitious, politically naïve, and inflexible politician who consistently disappointed Eisenhower as a congressional ally. Knowland had long been a rival of Nixon’s, and he held a grudge against the administration. Harry McPherson, a longtime staffer for Senator Lyndon Johnson, acidly noted that Knowland’s “mind had a single trajectory—flat—and a point-blank range.” He was conservative, unimaginative, bullish, and proved deeply hostile to any interference by the Executive branch in McCarthy’s Senate activities.
Behind Knowland stood a team of Old Guard senators who distrusted Eisenhower and the moderate leaders of the GOP. Styles Bridges, the most senior Republican in the Senate, was a true reactionary and deeply suspicious of the Eisenhower program. He became notorious for hounding a Democratic senator, Lester Hunt of Wyoming, to his death. When Hunt’s son was arrested for soliciting homosexual sex in a Washington, D.C., park, Bridges compelled Hunt to resign by threatening to publicize the case; distraught, Hunt killed himself. William Langer of North Dakota, Homer Ferguson of Michigan, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, Homer Capehart of Indiana, John Butler of Maryland, William Jenner of Indiana, and Herman Welker of Idaho—these bilious conspiracy theorists served as a gleeful cheering section for the junior senator from Wisconsin. Even Everett Dirksen, who served seven terms in the House before moving to the upper chamber, lent support to McCarthy. Dirksen’s almost comical theatricality, his goggle-eyed, bespectacled face topped by an unruly mop of gray curls, his deep baritone and love for posturing and oratory, made him much-loved by Senate colleagues. He was known mainly for changing his views on almost every issue of consequence, and he often proved helpful to Eisenhower. Yet on one issue he remained consistent: he never wavered in his support for Joe McCarthy.36
Another leading Republican antagonist of Eisenhower in this period was John Bricker of Ohio, a silver-thatched, handsome former governor who had been Thomas Dewey’s vice-presidential running mate in 1944. His obsession was the passage of an eponymous constitutional amendment to restrict the power of the president to sign foreign treaties. In these years, when FDR’s personal diplomacy with Stalin had come under attack and when the newly formed United Nations seemed to be probing into domestic matters such as racial inequality, many American legislators felt that it was important to make more precise the relative powers of Congress and the president to forge international agreements that might impinge upon domestic law, especially the rights of states. In Congress there was a surprising degree of support for the Bricker amendment, since it was seen as a way to clip the wings of a secretive or willful Executive branch like Roosevelt’s. But Eisenhower furiously resisted it, knowing it would weaken presidential powers and tip the balance of power decisively toward Congress. A long fight with the Old Guard over the Bricker amendment finally led to a narrow defeat for the proposal in February 1954, but not without creating more bad blood between Ike and his right wing.37
No wonder, then, that when Eisenhower in December 1953 sought to frame a strategy to handle McCarthy he did not plan on a frontal attack. He had too few foot soldiers from his own party to follow him into battle. Instead he turned to the man closest at hand who would be seen as a trusted emissary to the Senate’s Old Guard: the former senator and now vice president Richard Nixon. Nixon and William Rogers, the deputy attorney general, invited McCarthy to visit Nixon on vacation in Key Biscayne, Florida. The two men “double-teamed” McCarthy, urging him to continue to go after communists when necessary but to “move into some new areas lest he become a ‘one-shot’ Senator.” Perhaps he could pursue tax fraud and the like. But McCarthy could not be won over. “Frankly,” recalled Nixon, “we tried to mediate with McCarthy until we were blue in the face.”38
Eisenhower and Attorney General Brownell continued their efforts to seize control of the internal security issue. A few weeks after the Harry Dexter White case broke, Brownell began to discuss with Congress new legislation to update the 1950 Internal Security Act. He wanted to strengthen the federal government’s hand by securing legislation to allow for evidence from wiretapping by the FBI to be used in court. He also wanted legislation that would give immunity from prosecution to witnesses who helped expose communist subversion, and new tools to ban unions that were led by Communist Party activists. Brownell reported these proposals to the National Security Council on December 28, clearly as part of a strategy to seize the communist issue from McCarthy and place it into Brownell’s hands.39
But McCarthy would not go away, nor would he be appeased, bullied, or intimidated. In the spring of 1954 the long-simmering contest between Eisenhower and McCarthy finally boiled over. The crisis came over McCarthy’s growing interest in the security procedures of the U.S. Army, of all things. Since the fall of 1953 McCarthy had been holding hearings into allegations of communist sympathies at the Army Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey—the same institution where the doomed Julius Rosenberg had worked during the war. McCarthy suspected that the spy ring that had harbored Rosenberg might still be operational there. The secretary of the army, Robert Stevens, tried to reassure the senator that the espionage problem had already been investigated and the facility at Fort Monmouth had been cleared. McCarthy doubted it and pledged to pursue the matter. In the process of gathering information about the army’s security and loyalty review procedures, he stumbled across the curious case of a dentist named Irving Peress. (Like Julius Rosenberg, Peress was Jewish and had attended New York’s City College.) Peress was drafted into the army in 1952 and given the rank of captain, but when he was reviewed for security clearance, he refused to fill out various forms about his political views, which were indeed far left. The army, moving in a plodding bureaucratic fashion, eventually found Peress to be a security risk and recommended that he be discharged. But the army took almost a year before acting on his case, and by that time Peress had actually been promoted to the rank of major.
How could the army have promoted a known communist? The explanation of bureaucratic bungling would not satisfy McCarthy; he imagined a conspiracy at work to protect Peress and possibly others. Perhaps Camp Kilmer, where Peress was stationed, was a hotbed of communists. On February 18, 1954, McCarthy called before his subcommittee Gen. Ralph Zwicker, Camp Kilmer’s commanding officer. McCarthy baited and taunted the general, a distinguished career army officer who had earned decorations for valor on Omaha Beach on D-Day. McCarthy accused him of protecting communists under his command; furious because of Zwicker’s unhelpful answers, McCarthy declared him unfit to wear the uniform of a U.S. Army officer.
The incident caused an uproar and led Secretary of the Army Stevens to inform McCarthy that no further military officers would appear before his subcommittee unless the senator gave assurances that they would be treated with respect. But Stevens, a wealthy businessman and textile merchant with no political experience, was not cut out for this kind of brinkmanship. McCarthy, in league with Senators Dir
ksen and Mundt, invited Stevens to lunch in Dirksen’s office on February 24 and after two hours of wrangling, threats, and cajoling, forced him to backtrack from his firm position. He would in fact agree to turn over to Congress the names of any army officials involved in the Peress case. The press promptly reported this outcome as an abject surrender to McCarthy by Stevens. A shaken Stevens telephoned Nixon and Hagerty and offered to resign. McCarthy was triumphant and defiant.
Eisenhower’s improvisational responses to McCarthy—avoid him, then appease him, then steal from him the role of chief anticommunist prosecutor—had failed. Fifteen months into the Eisenhower administration, McCarthy was as strong as ever. Ike was furious at McCarthy’s handling of Stevens and his reckless assaults on the army. “I’m not going to take this one lying down,” he fumed in the Oval Office to Hagerty. On March 1, speaking to Republican congressional leaders, he asked why more was not being done to rein in McCarthy and firmly stated, “We cannot defeat Communism by destroying the things in which we believe.” Privately he lashed out at the Old Guard, seething, “We just can’t work with fellows like McCarthy, Bricker, Jenner, and that bunch.”40
Hoping to diminish the impact of the Peress issue, Eisenhower drafted a statement that he read to the press corps on March 3, in which he acknowledged that the army had made an error in failing to expel the communist-leaning dentist. However, the president added, members of the administration who were working in good faith would not “submit to any kind of personal humiliation when testifying before congressional committees.” He went on to give a lengthy and firm statement of support for army officers, including General Zwicker, whose “courage and devotion have been proved in peace as well as in war.” The badgering of witnesses and the impugning of their character must stop, and Ike put the Republican leadership on notice that it was their job to make it stop. “In opposing Communism,” he stated, “we are defeating ourselves if either by design or through carelessness we use methods that do not conform to the American sense of fair play.”41
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