But McCarthy seemed only to relish the opportunity to engage the president in a personal confrontation. Two hours after the president’s press conference, McCarthy held a televised news conference of his own, in Room 155 of the Senate Office Building, and defied Eisenhower. McCarthy declared that he was being criticized for revealing that the U.S. Army had protected and promoted a “Communist Army officer.” As to badgering General Zwicker, McCarthy was unrepentant: “If a stupid, arrogant or witless man in a position of power appears before our committee and is found aiding the Communist party, he will be exposed. The fact that he might be a general places him in no special class so far as I am concerned.” This was just the kind of tit-for-tat exchange that Eisenhower had feared and sought to avoid, and just the kind of attention that McCarthy eagerly courted.42
McCarthy’s audacity was taking a serious political toll on Eisenhower. The senator seemed to be breaking the GOP apart, pushing the Old Guard into an open confrontation with the president. Eisenhower beseeched Knowland to control his members in the Senate. “If we pursue the course we have taken so far, the Republican Party will be wrecked,” he predicted. But Knowland, whose sympathies were with the Old Guard, was little help. The Democrats, meanwhile, were ready to pounce and exploit these fissures in the GOP. Adlai Stevenson, the nominal leader of the party, took unfeigned pleasure in attacking the president for his “timidity” on McCarthy. Speaking to southern Democrats in Miami Beach on March 6, Stevenson said that the GOP was “hopelessly, dismally, fatally torn and rent within itself. . . . A political party divided against itself, half McCarthy and half Eisenhower, cannot produce national unity or govern with confidence and purpose.” The dean of the Washington columnists, Walter Lippmann, added a scathing assessment of the state of play: “There is no doubt whatever that McCarthy is a deliberate aggressor, that he is fighting Eisenhower’s leadership and control of the party. . . . The fight is unavoidable because McCarthy refuses to be appeased. Until he is stopped and his power is checked, he will go on until he is the master of the party.” Lippmann declared that Eisenhower’s “prolonged appeasement has failed.”43
Perhaps it was Stevenson’s barbs that finally prodded Eisenhower into action, for on March 10, in his weekly press conference, Eisenhower’s comments about the troubles in the Senate were “punctuated by anger and near-bluntness,” according to Anthony Leviero of the New York Times. He declared Stevenson’s charge of a divided GOP to be “nonsense” and affirmed that Vice President Nixon would rebut Stevenson’s claims in a televised speech. Contradicting his own assertions of party unity, however, Eisenhower went on to denounce the “internecine warfare” in the Senate, and in a direct jab at McCarthy he said it was time to put aside “personal aggrandizement” and get on with crafting constructive legislation. “The President,” wrote Hagerty in his diary, was “in a fighting mood, and has had it as far as Joe is concerned.”44
Angry as he was at McCarthy, Eisenhower remained determined to avoid lowering himself to the senator’s level. Besides, he had Nixon for that sort of thing. He directed Nixon to go on national television ostensibly to reply to Stevenson’s criticisms but in fact to deliver a direct rebuke to McCarthy. On March 13, in a brilliant performance, once again carefully prepared and rehearsed yet delivered in his now-trademark conversational and apparently off-the-cuff manner, the vice president affirmed the success of the Eisenhower administration in rooting out communists from government in a manner that was “fair and proper.” Directing his remarks at McCarthy’s frenzied and undisciplined Red hunting, Nixon said, “When you go out to shoot rats, you have to shoot straight, because when you shoot wildly it not only means that the rat may get away more easily, you make it easier on the rat. But you might hit someone else who’s trying to shoot rats, too. And so we’ve got to be fair.” Nixon stated that certain “men who have in the past done effective work exposing Communists in this country have, by reckless talk and questionable methods, made themselves the issue.” When it came to hunting down the bad guys, Nixon seemed to suggest, Ike was Gary Cooper—restrained, cool, and precise—and McCarthy was the angry drunk in the street, his pistols blazing away wildly and shooting up the storefronts. Once again Nixon had proven his worth to the Eisenhower team.45
VII
Nixon’s speech marked the start of a concerted administration effort to take the offensive against McCarthy. But the real bombshell that burst on McCarthy did not come from the president or Nixon. It was delivered in the form of a dossier of material, carefully prepared by the U.S. Army, which did incalculable damage to the Red-hunting senator. The dossier had been in the works since January 21, when the army’s chief counsel, John G. Adams, alerted the White House to a pattern of pressure and bullying of the army by McCarthy and by his committee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn. The two men had been using threats and intimidation to demand that Cohn’s assistant, David Schine, who had been drafted into the army the previous November, be granted preferential treatment in the form of light duties, desk work, and plum assignments. Schine was handsome, Harvard-educated, and very wealthy; though he had no legal training, Cohn had brought him onto the McCarthy committee as a staff member and had taken him on the highly public tour of U.S. libraries overseas, when Cohn had discovered dangerous books lurking on the shelves.
When John Adams reported this to Attorney General Brownell and White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams at the January 21 meeting, the two senior advisers knew they had found dynamite. Sherman Adams directed the army lawyer to prepare a detailed account of what he knew about McCarthy and Cohn’s campaign on behalf of Private Schine. John Adams completed his report on February 2, and its contents were astonishing: in great detail Adams revealed how many times McCarthy and Cohn had badgered, harassed, and threatened him in demanding that Schine be given kid-glove treatment. Adams wrote of the “the sustained violence” of Cohn’s phone calls and described his “obscenities and vituperative remarks” as shocking and unprintable. “The most consistent remark [Cohn] made,” Adams wrote, “was that the Army was requiring Schine to eat [obscenity] because he worked for the McCarthy committee.” Cohn threatened to destroy the army through ceaseless investigations unless Schine got special treatment. “We’ll wreck the Army,” Cohn screamed over the phone at Adams. “We’ve got enough stuff on the Army to have the investigation run indefinitely.” More shocking, McCarthy was present at a number of meetings with Adams and Cohn, and he piled on, asking the army to get Schine a cushy desk job in New York City.46
On March 11 the White House sent a streamlined and cleaned-up version of Adams’s report to a number of key congressmen. At the same time the White House leaked it to the press. Sherman Adams later admitted his role in the operation: “Not entirely by accident, the Army’s report on its troubles with Schine fell into the hands of a few newspaper correspondents. . . . Their stories built up a backfire against McCarthy, as intended.” The resulting furor was dramatic and marked the beginning of the end of Joe McCarthy. The accusations were so damaging to the integrity of the Senate’s investigatory powers that the Senate itself was now put on trial. If the allegations were true, then McCarthy and Cohn stood guilty of abuse of power. Within days McCarthy was asked to step aside from his position as chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations. Senator Karl Mundt took the chair in his place and—quite unwillingly—began hearings into the army’s allegations against McCarthy. In a dramatic reversal, the senator from Wisconsin was now placed under the spotlight by the very committee he had turned into a national inquisition.47
The army-McCarthy hearings began on April 22 and were televised to a national audience that could not avert its eyes from the slow-moving train wreck of McCarthy’s self-destruction. This was not a courtroom proceeding but a congressional hearing into charges made by the army against McCarthy and Cohn. But of course McCarthy and Cohn, who acted as their own defense counsel, were free to call and cross-examine witnesses and to plant the seeds of doubt among the “jury”—namely, the millions of
television viewers. Therefore McCarthy had every reason to play to the gallery, making countercharges against the army’s staff, suggesting dark conspiracies, deploying phony documents to embarrass the army. If McCarthy was going to go down, he was planning to take the army with him. And so it went, on and on, for two months, over 72 sessions featuring 35 witnesses and creating a transcript of nearly 3,000 closely printed pages.
Among the spectators was President Eisenhower, who felt no need to intervene now that the Senate had seized control of the McCarthy affair. To tangle with McCarthy directly, he wrote to Bill Robinson, would “make the presidency look ridiculous.” He preferred to let the Senate look ridiculous, and indeed Ike told Swede Hazlett in the midst of the hearings, “It saddens me that I must feel ashamed for the United States Senate.” In his press conferences Eisenhower tried to stay above the fray and affected disinterest in the hearings. On May 12 for instance, he told reporters he “was going to take a little vacation” in discussing McCarthy and ignored questions asking him to comment on the hearings.48
But Eisenhower could not completely insulate himself from the proceedings. In his testimony of May 11, army counsel John Adams had inadvertently revealed that the army’s now-famous report revealing a pattern of bullying from Cohn and McCarthy on behalf of Schine was in fact the brainchild of Sherman Adams and that he had discussed the matter on January 21 with Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, Herbert Brownell, and William Rogers. Clearly the damaging report on McCarthy had originated not in the army but in the White House itself. The trail was leading back to Eisenhower, and McCarthy caught the scent like the bloodhound he was. It seemed likely that McCarthy would now move to subpoena Eisenhower’s principal advisers and cabinet members.
Eisenhower had anticipated this and had been accumulating expert advice on the constitutional question of whether the Executive branch was obliged to submit to congressional investigation. He had asked for a detailed report on the matter from Assistant Attorney General Rogers as far back as March 2. Now, after a weekend golf game at Burning Tree with Hagerty, Ike said he was ready to make his move. On May 17, in a bold preemptive strike on McCarthy, Eisenhower issued a remarkable statement asserting the privileged nature of White House conversations. He explained that “it is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the Executive Branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters” without those conversations being subject to congressional scrutiny. Therefore he blocked all employees of the Department of Defense, including John Adams, from discussing in the hearings any “conversations or communications” that constituted confidential advice to the president or to his advisers. The January 21 meeting was off limits, as were any other conversations in the White House on the McCarthy affair.49
Two days later Eisenhower brilliantly explained to the press that his order asserting executive privilege was designed not to cut off information but to keep the hearings from becoming a fishing expedition. “Far from trying to get any investigation off track,” he said with no hint of guile, “I was merely trying to keep it on the rails.” It was important, he stressed, that “the public know the facts.”50
With Eisenhower’s order blocking testimony by Executive branch personnel, the army-McCarthy hearings became a fruitless sideshow. The army’s charges had embarrassed McCarthy, but McCarthy’s vigorous and crafty defense showed the army was a bungling bureaucracy, prone to personnel errors and bad judgment. Yet the hearings served one crucial purpose: by putting on national television the brutish, hostile, sneering, and demagogic style of Joe McCarthy, they fatally damaged the senator’s reputation. He liked to portray himself as a heroic underdog, daring to challenge the hidden conspiracies and underhanded dealings of a faceless and immoral government. But after two months of pointless outbursts, threats, and farcical allegations, McCarthy looked fatigued, wounded, even broken. It was only a matter of time before the senators themselves, so unwilling to oppose McCarthy when he was popular but so finely attuned to the shift in public opinion, turned on him.
It is sometimes said that Eisenhower played the pivotal role in destroying McCarthy. That is too generous an assessment. The Adams report on Cohn’s abuses of power, combined with the president’s statement on executive privilege, certainly stymied McCarthy. But these were tactical, parliamentary maneuvers, designed less to hurt McCarthy than to shield Eisenhower. The closest the president came to attacking McCarthyism directly was a speech at Columbia University’s bicentennial celebrations on May 31, 1954. Ike wanted to use the occasion to strike out in favor of freedom of thought, and his team of speechwriters prepared a soaring address, whose peroration was aimed clearly at McCarthy. “If we allow ourselves,” he told the audience, “to be persuaded that every individual, or party, that takes issue with our own convictions is necessarily wicked or treasonous—then indeed we are approaching the end of freedom’s road. . . . Our dedication to truth and freedom, at home and abroad, does not require—and cannot tolerate—fear, threat, hysteria, and intimidation.” The speech was interrupted by applause 25 times.51
Of course Ike would not mention McCarthy by name. He set a tone, however, and others now moved to take their place by his side. On June 1, the day after Eisenhower’s Columbia speech, one of the sharpest attacks on McCarthy ever made was read out on the floor of the Senate by a venerable and largely unknown conservative Republican from Vermont named Ralph Flanders. He seized the moral high ground and beckoned others to follow. A 73-year-old mechanical engineer and bank president, impeccable in his Yankee reserve and disgust for McCarthy’s foul antics, Senator Flanders chose to denounce McCarthy in public in words that Eisenhower would never dare utter. Speaking to a dead-silent Senate chamber, just steps away from a furious and seething William Knowland, Flanders pulled no punches, declaring that McCarthy’s “anti-communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority.”52
It was the start of a patient and successful effort by Flanders to urge his Republican colleagues to be rid of McCarthy and his poisonous behavior. On June 11 Flanders introduced a resolution to strip McCarthy of his chairmanships; on July 20, gaining some momentum, Flanders called for the outright censure of McCarthy. Months of bitter infighting among Republicans postponed the vote, but finally, on December 2, a resolution of condemnation passed, 67–22, all the Democrats voting in favor, and all the nays coming from the unrepentant and anti-Eisenhower phalanx of the Old Guard, McCarthyite to the bitter end.53
VIII
How then to assess Eisenhower’s role in the denouement of McCarthyism? Certainly the president played his hand well, supervising the accumulation of evidence in the Adams dossier and wielding executive privilege like a drawbridge, swiftly pulled up to stop the attacking hordes. But he was always on the defensive. From mid-1953 on, Eisenhower spoke out against the excesses of McCarthyism without mentioning McCarthy himself. His speeches were often elliptical, hortatory statements and were largely ineffective, too bland to rally others to his cause and too opaque to hurt McCarthy. Indeed it cannot be said that Eisenhower showed much moral courage in confronting what he knew to be a reprehensible demagogue who was holding Congress hostage to his personal crusade against subversives. Ike had approached McCarthy as an experienced prizefighter might have assessed a hard-punching brawler: he played rope-a-dope until McCarthy, exhausted and out of ideas, lowered his guard. Then Eisenhower struck with a series of powerful jabs. But he did not land the fatal blow. Rather McCarthy was undone chiefly by his own reckless behavior, his lies, his aggression, and his limitless appetite for cruelty. Eisenhower protected himself and the presidency from the worst of McCarthyism, but it was the Senate itself that finally brought McCarthy to heel, stripping him of his committee posts, condemning him for his disreputable behavior, and, worst of all, ignoring him. Within a few years his self-loathing and heavy drinking killed him off for good.
The demise of McCarthy did not put an end
to Red hunting, however. On the contrary, the Eisenhower administration had long stipulated that it could clean up the government using legal methods. As the army-McCarthy hearings came to their miserable and anticlimactic end in late June, Eisenhower pressed ahead with his own anticommunist agenda, happy to embrace the political benefits of being tough on alleged subversion. At the very moment that Ike was extolling the virtues of freedom of thought in his Columbia address, one of America’s greatest free thinkers, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was being slowly cut to ribbons in an excruciating secret hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission.
To read the transcripts of the Oppenheimer hearings held by the Personnel Security Board of the AEC is to see McCarthyism at work without McCarthy. Oppenheimer, the crucial figure in leading the wartime research project that developed the atomic bomb, had been directing the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton since 1947. He also served as the chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, and in this role he expressed support for the international control of nuclear energy and raised doubts about the moral desirability of building a hydrogen bomb. He grew uneasy about the arms race and hoped that science could be turned away from its wartime function as an adjunct of the national security state. But by 1953 powerful institutional and bureaucratic interests wanted to see nuclear weapons produced at breakneck speed; Oppenheimer’s counsel of caution was now considered suspect, perhaps “disloyal.” In December 1953 the FBI turned over to the AEC old evidence, much of it accurate, about Oppenheimer’s sympathy and support for left-wing causes dating back to the 1930s. In another time, perhaps, decade-old allegations of left-wing attitudes might not have amounted to much. After all, few could doubt that Oppenheimer had proved his patriotism during the war by guiding the production of the atomic bomb. Yet the administration knew that if they were seen as shielding Oppenheimer, they would be vulnerable to accusations of a cover-up of subversion. The issue was “real hot,” “the biggest news we’ve had down here yet,” wrote an anxious Jim Hagerty in his diary.54
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