The president found reassurance in the letters he received from the public and spent an inordinate amount of time answering mail that should have been handled by his staff. He promised to buy tickets from an eleven-year-old boy raising funds for a swimming pool and reminisced about the creek where he used to swim as a lad. In a reply to the maker of Dodson’s Bird Houses and Famous Sparrow Traps, who had suggested that the White House grounds be turned into a bird sanctuary, he asked that the crackpot inventor postpone his request “for the present.”
Harding delighted in greeting visitors to the White House, shaking hands and making small talk. “I love to meet people,” he explained to an adviser who questioned the amount of time he spent at the activity. “It’s the most pleasant thing I do; it is really the only fun I have. It does not tax me, and it seems to be a very great pleasure to them.”
Harding’s fatal flaw was obviously not as classically epic as pride or ambition. It was something more innocuous, but for him equally lethal—the chronic need to be liked. It defined his presidency. Such vulnerability gave those who would take advantage of it license to use their appointed posts to whatever benefit they could. Their president would be loath to offend his friends by interfering. Friends were important to Harding. His nagging self-doubt required them, and high government posts were filled with them. They played poker together in the White House, with the Prohibition-era booze provided courtesy of good old Warren. Alice Roosevelt Longworth described it as “a general atmosphere of waist-coat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside.”
Among the players was kingmaker Harry Daugherty, the skilled, if somewhat unscrupulous, political Svengali who guided Harding from Ohio politics to Pennsylvania Avenue. Harding rebuffed warnings not to appoint Daugherty attorney general: “Harry Daugherty has been my best friend from the beginning of this whole thing . . . He tells me that he wants to be attorney general and by God he will be attorney general!”
Daugherty set up an influence-peddling office at the Department of Justice and became the subject of two congressional investigations. After resigning he was twice indicted for malfeasance during his tenure (only because the statute of limitations had expired for the real charge of accepting bribes).
There also was Harding’s affable friend Colonel Charlie Forbes, who was appointed director of the Veterans’ Bureau. Forbes convinced Harding to transfer the planning and construction of all future hospitals from the army to his department, along with the authority for purchase and disposal of veterans’ supplies. Forbes supplemented his government salary quite lavishly with hospital construction kickbacks and the sale of the veterans’ supplies for a fraction of what the government had paid for them. “I am heartsick about it,” Harding said when told of his friend’s treachery. The colonel had been a treasured favorite.
There was no warmly welcomed guest in the White House who did more to devastate the reputation of the president than his good friend Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, a passionate poker player and architect of the great Teapot Dome swindle. Harding befriended the fiery, anticonservationist senator from New Mexico when he himself was the new senator from Ohio. After he was elected president, Harding appointed Fall, “that star of a fellow,” to his cabinet. Fall’s fellow senators voted with jovial unanimity to confirm him without reference to committee. The Department of the Interior was his, and he didn’t ignore the advantage.
Although he was born in Kentucky, Albert Fall epitomized the spirit of the West. One of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” he owned a sprawling ranch in New Mexico and was a fierce and vocal opponent of the government setting aside land for conservation—including a series of oil reserves controlled by the U.S. Navy. It was one of those reserves, Teapot Dome in Wyoming (so named for its vague resemblance to a giant sandstone teapot), that gave its name to one of the greatest scandals in the nation’s history.
Fall succeeded in transferring control of several of the oil reserves, including Teapot Dome, from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. He then leased them out to the private interests of Harry Sinclair and E. L. Doheny, multimillionaire oil producers doing business as Mammoth Oil Company and Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company respectively. The leases were granted without competitive bidding, which was not illegal, but Fall received “loans” from Sinclair and Doheny amounting to $400,000 in exchange for their licenses to secretly plunder the reserves. The loans were never documented or acknowledged, which made them bribes, and Fall, the man Teddy Roosevelt once called “the kind of public servant of whom all Americans should feel proud,” came to be the first cabinet member in history to serve time in prison.
Fortunately, Harding would never know the extent of Fall’s activities. He died in 1923, before completing his first term as president. Nor would he feel the full brunt of a stunned public’s reaction to their gradual discovery of an administration teeming with dirty dealers. “No one can hurt you now, Warren,” his wife said at his casket. No one but History.
7
Joe McCarthy: Wisconsin Sleaze
Calling Joe McCarthy a common bully is a little like calling Hitler a run-of-the-mill racist. It just doesn’t do him justice. McCarthy, perhaps the most notorious demagogue of the twentieth century, exceeded the boundaries of ordinary bullies, aiming his devastating lies and distortions not just at weaker government workers, but also at some of the nation’s most powerful people—including the president of the United States. He might, then, be called an über-bully, one who smeared reputations without regard to the strength or status of his victims.
Before launching his now infamous crusade against Communists and other subversives he claimed were lurking in all levels of government, McCarthy was just a poorly regarded junior senator from Wisconsin—part of the famed congressional class of 1946 that included John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.23 Aside from a few questionable financial dealings that brought him unwelcome atten-tion,McCarthy’s greatest claim to fame during his early years in the Senate was perhaps the complete ass he made out of himself during what was known as the Malmédy affair. It was a disturbing preview of the senator’s later career, although instead of chasing enemies of the United States—in this case, a group of Nazi murderers—McCarthy was actually coddling them.
The Germans in question had been tried and convicted in 1949 for the massacre of American prisoners of war five years earlier near the French village of Malmédy. The defendants claimed to have been framed by the U.S. Army and alleged their confessions had been beaten out of them. McCarthy, aghast, demanded a Senate hearing on the matter. It was quite a spectacle, with the senator from Wisconsin ranting about an elaborate conspiracy against the Nazis and the special committee’s utter indifference to it. At one point, McCarthy stormed out of the hearings, declaring dramatically that he would no longer be party to such “a shameful farce . . . a deliberate and clever attempt to whitewash the American military.” The incident failed to enhance the senator’s reputation. Clearly he needed something other than mistreated Nazis to make a national name for himself. It didn’t take him long to latch onto the threat of domestic communism as a career-making cause.
On February 9, 1950, in a speech before a Republican ladies group in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy made his debut as a Red hunter, alleging that the U.S. Department of State was crawling with Communists. “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” McCarthy gravely told the gathered women, according to a report in the Wheeling Intelligencer, “I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” It was a preposterous lie, but McCarthy clung to it with the ferocity of a rottweiler. He had finally hit upon a theme that resonated quite nicely with an American public thoroughly paranoid over mounting Soviet aggression, the emer
gence of Red China, and the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation. Joe McCarthy, once voted the worst U.S. senator in a press corps poll, was finally getting a little respect, and he was not about to let the truth interfere with that.
“McCarthy was surely the champion liar,” Richard Rovere writes in his biography of the senator. “He lied with wild abandon; he lied without evident fear; he lied in his teeth and in the teeth of the truth; he lied vividly and with bold imagination; he lied, often, with very little pretense to telling the truth.” And while his widely scattered accusations occasionally bore fruit, far more often they were total nonsense—like his charge against the Truman administration for conniving with Communists several weeks after his speech at Wheeling. “The Democratic label is now the property of men and women who have . . . bent to the whispered pleas from the lips of traitors,” he said, “men and women who wear the political label stitched with the idiocy of a Truman, rotted by the deceit of a [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson. . . .”
Indeed, McCarthy had a special loathing for Acheson, “that striped-pants asshole,” as he privately called the dapper secretary of state who he felt personified the very worst of two decades’ worth of Democratic administrations. It didn’t help that Acheson had spoken in support of Alger Hiss, who had been convicted of perjury for lying about passing secret documents to the Soviets—just the kind of ammunition McCarthy craved. Acheson and his ilk exerted “a tremendous, almost hypnotic influence” on President Truman, McCarthy charged, warning that the American people would have to suffer the consequences, including the continued growth of the “sinister, many-headed and many-tentacled monster” that was the Communist conspiracy within the government—“one which was conceived in Moscow and given birth to by Dean Gooderham Acheson.”
Whenever McCarthy uttered Acheson’s name, William White of the New York Times noted, he made it sound like an expletive. And in attacking him, he went right for the throat: “When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed Communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.” Acheson received so much threatening mail after McCarthy’s assaults that guards had to be posted at his home around the clock. The senator, always a gutter brawler, was unrepentant. Nevertheless, he was actually surprised, and even a little hurt, when he encountered Acheson one day in an elevator and the much maligned secretary of state pointedly refused to acknowledge his presence.
For his own part, President Truman believed McCarthy was all bluster, “a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.” But the once insignificant senator began to get plenty of attention after Senate Democrats called for a complete investigation of his charges concerning hidden Communists within the State Department. The Democrats had hoped the special hearings would expose McCarthy as a fraud, but instead the press was dutifully reporting almost everything he said, and the public was lapping it up. McCarthy’s popularity was beginning to soar as Truman’s plummeted.
“You are not fooling me,” McCarthy at one point challenged the committee chaired by Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat from Maryland. “This committee [is] not seeking to get the names of bad security risks, but . . . to find out the names of my informants so they can be kicked out of the State Department tomorrow.” The senator was setting himself up as a national savior, fighting a growing evil all alone. “In his own mind, it was Joe McCarthy against the world,” writes historian Arthur Herman in his reexamination of the senator’s legacy, “playing a sudden-death, high-stakes game against a Communist conspiracy that, in more expansive moments, seemed to include the entire Democratic administration and Washington establishment.” And he seemed to be winning—despite the fact that he had yet to prove a single instance of subversion within the government. When President Truman was asked at a press conference in March 1950 whether he expected McCarthy to find any Communists in the State Department, he replied, “I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.”
In July 1950, the Tydings Committee issued an interim report that stated McCarthy had imposed a “fraud and a hoax” on the Senate with his unfounded allegations. “Starting with nothing,” the report said, “Senator McCarthy plunged headlong forward, desperately seeking to develop some information which, colored with distortion and fanned by a flame of bias, would forestall the day of reckoning.” Uncowed as usual, McCarthy called the report “a green light for the Reds.” Stepping up his fight, he went after a genuine American hero.
General George C. Marshall had served as chief of staff of the U.S. Army during World War II, building perhaps the greatest fighting force in history. Under his command, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur led American forces to victory in Europe and the Pacific. After the war, while serving as Truman’s third secretary of state (before Acheson), he pushed for the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, that helped check the spread of Communism in Western Europe and later earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. At the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he became secretary of defense. Historian David McCullough writes that Marshall was often compared to George Washington, “a figure of such flawless rectitude and self-command he both inspired awe and made description difficult.” Churchill called him “the noblest Roman.” Joe McCarthy called him a traitor: “A man steeped in falsehood . . . who has recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience . . . [part of] a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man . . . [one in whose activities can be seen] a pattern which finds his decision maintained with great stubbornness and skill, always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin.”
McCarthy’s attack on Marshall showed that no one was safe from his assaults. By late 1952, however, the Truman administration was coming to a close, and someone else was going to have to suffer the senator’s outrageous slings and arrows. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president, was a natural target. McCarthy at one point called him “Alger . . . I mean Adlai,” and declared that he would “continue the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation.” But the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, once the supreme Allied commander in World War II, also seemed intimidated by McCarthy’s power.
This was made sadly apparent when Eisenhower was preparing to campaign in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin. There had been much speculation that Ike was going to repudiate McCarthy’s attacks on his old boss, George Marshall. “Just you wait till we get to Milwaukee, and you will find out what the general thinks of Marshall,” Eisenhower’s campaign manager told reporters, hinting that McCarthy was in for a stinging rebuke. Indeed a paragraph praising Marshall “as a man and as a soldier, . . . dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America” had been drafted as part of Eisenhower’s planned speech. It was never delivered. Instead, Ike sounded a lot like Joe McCarthy in the speech he did give, declaring that the Communist penetration of the government “meant—in its most ugly triumph—treason itself.” McCarthy was of course delighted with the speech, and vigorously shook Eisenhower’s hand at its conclusion. Others were appalled. “Yesterday could not have been a happy day for General Eisenhower,” the New York Times editorialized, “nor was it a happy day for many supporters.”
Though Eisenhower came to loathe McCarthy and his methods, even if he did agree with him in principle, he was reluctant to tangle with him after he became president—at least not directly. The senator had become far too powerful, and was shielded by the support of millions of Americans. “I just won’t get into a pissing contest with that skunk,” the president told friends. Eisenhower believed the best way to fight this enemy was to ignore him. “This he cannot stand,” Ike wrote in his diary. Given enough time, he believed, McCarthy would destroy himself. The president would not have to wait much longer to prove this point.
On the surface, in 1953, McCarthy seemed invincible. He chaired the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and made it his personal fiefdom. With a staff that included chief counsel Roy Cohn, soon to be an instrument of his downfall, and assistant counsel Robert Kennedy, whose father was an avid supporter of the senator and got his son the job, McCarthy went on a Red-hunting rampage. There were investigations of the State Department (an old favorite), the Voice of America, the Government Printing Office, and the United Nations, among others. He even planned to target the CIA, “a breathtaking choice,” writes Arthur Herman. “The notion of Joe McCarthy pawing through the intelligence agency’s files and personnel records made not just administration officials but many senators blanch.”
The White House ordered McCarthy to back off, which McCarthy reluctantly did. But he still stood in the way of the Eisenhower administration on several key issues, including the nomination of Charles Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow. The president was furious. “McCarthy has the bug to run for the presidency in 1956,” he fumed to his staff, adding with an angry slap to his knee, “The only reason I would consider running again would be to run against him.” But any hopes Joe McCarthy may have harbored for the White House, or even another term in the Senate, were severely diminished when he and his staff took on the U.S. Army. It was this confrontation that ultimately destroyed him.
The assault on the army was classic McCarthy. At one point, for instance, he lashed out at General Ralph Zwickler, a war hero and field commander during the Battle of the Bulge. McCarthy called him a protector of Communists “unfit to wear [his] uniform.” What the senator failed to realize, though, was that the army was preparing a counterattack of its own, focusing on the activities of chief counsel Roy Cohn. It seems Cohn had a crush of sorts on another McCarthy staff member, David Schine, and was upset when Schine got drafted into the army. Cohn was determined to get his pal special treatment and went all the way to the secretary of the Army to see that he did. Not one to have his will thwarted, Cohn became enraged when he found out Schine’s weekend passes were to start on Saturday rather than Friday night as he had requested. In a snit, he called the army’s chief lawyer, John Adams.
A Treasury of Great American Scandals Page 19