by Jim Newton
Eisenhower was in fact prepared to fight, but on ground of his choosing. On March 2, he called Herb Brownell for some legal advice. What authority did the president have, Ike asked, to protect his own people? “Suppose I made up my mind that McCarthy is abusing someone,” he asked, hardly a vague hypothetical. “What is constitutional for me to do in this regard?”
While Brownell studied that question, Eisenhower laid the groundwork with important congressional leaders, asking their help to “get a better handling of things” and specifically urging Bill Knowland to keep a lid on McCarthy. He received their assurances and quietly telegraphed his mounting impatience to other key opinion leaders. “A lot of people are genuinely alarmed by what they consider to be his potential capacity for harm,” Ike said of McCarthy in a note to the chairman of the board of General Electric. To Bill Robinson, then settling into his new job as chief executive officer of Coca-Cola (succeeding another member of Ike’s Gang, Bob Woodruff), Eisenhower complained that the same media that had built McCarthy up now clamored for Ike to take him down, but he steadfastly refused to make the presidency “ridiculous” by tangling with him publicly. Worried that McCarthy was gaming for the presidency, Eisenhower vowed to deny him the chance: “He’s the last guy in the world who’ll ever get there, if I have anything to say.”
Publicly, Eisenhower continued to avoid using McCarthy’s name but signaled his displeasure with veiled—and well-received—swipes at the proceedings. His denunciation of book burning still heartened McCarthy’s critics, and he telegraphed his sympathies in other ways, too. In September 1953, investigators for the House Un-American Activities Committee uncovered a 1936 voter registration card bearing the name Lucille Ball and claiming Communist affiliation. Ball was questioned about the card in a private session and admitted that it was hers but noted that she was young at the time and had registered as a Communist to gratify her grandfather Fred Hunt, who helped to raise her. “We just did something to please him,” she insisted. The committee was satisfied with Ball’s responses, but Walter Winchell, the radio commentator, later that week broadcast the news that “the top television comedienne has been confronted with her membership in the Communist Party.”
Winchell’s accusation was false and reckless. Other than to fill out that registration card, Ball had done nothing to cement a relationship with the party and certainly was not a member in 1953. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, vigorously and persuasively rebutted Winchell’s implications; Arnaz got off the best line of the affair, introducing Lucy as “my favorite redhead, in fact, that’s the only thing Red about her, and even that’s not legitimate.” The matter blew over quickly, aided by America’s affection for Ball. More people watched the episode of Lucy delivering her baby than tuned in for Ike’s inaugural.
Still, in those days, even the taint of Communism was enough to cast a shadow across those touched by it. Friends of Ball and Arnaz mysteriously canceled social engagements, and Lucy and Desi worried that her career would suffer. To that, Ike and Mamie supplied a welcome antidote: the couple was invited to a White House dinner to celebrate Ike’s birthday. They entertained the audience and then were asked to sit next to Ike and Mamie. Desi Arnaz well understood the blessing he and Lucy were being offered. “God Bless America!” he exclaimed.
Having worked to cut McCarthy off with colleagues and opinion leaders—and having signaled his distaste for the whole ugly business—Ike now analyzed his options under the Constitution. The key question was whether the president could refuse to make his aides available to Congress if they were subpoenaed to appear. The short answer, as Brownell soon reported, was that there was no legal precedent for such an action. But there was not necessarily a bar, either, and Ike’s friends now pressed him to take the action he was contemplating. “Sooner or later—and probably sooner—Senator McCarthy will again summon … some member of the Executive Branch of the Government who should not be summoned,” wrote Paul Hoffman. “Then and there, I suggest that you issue instructions to this person to refuse the summons from Senator McCarthy and give the reasons for so doing.”
Easily said, not so easily done. Although defying McCarthy on this ground appealed to Eisenhower, it also was sure to provoke a political and constitutional confrontation with an uncertain outcome. It threatened Republican unity on the eve of the midterm elections, and it risked providing McCarthy with the stage that Eisenhower had worked so steadfastly to deny him. Eisenhower considered options: perhaps, one aide suggested, the Justice Department could supply government witnesses with lawyers to accompany them; perhaps there were other protections to give subordinates. Ike bided his time.
The Army positioned, too. Rather than defensively debate their handling of Peress, Army officials prepared a counterattack. They accused McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn of attempting to use his influence to secure favorable treatment for his friend David Schine, who had recently been drafted (it was widely assumed that Cohn and Schine were homosexual, so that inquiry posed a special threat to McCarthy and his aide). They would still have to answer for Peress, but now the Army leadership had McCarthy on the defensive. There was yet another piece of deft footwork as the committee prepared to reconvene. With Ike’s encouragement, the Senate decided to televise the hearings. McCarthy readily agreed, imagining that television would deliver a national platform to him and fantasizing that he was about to vastly expand his reach and power. Eisenhower better understood the implications of that openness. Now the country would see McCarthy as he really was.
First, however, it received the stunning news that America’s preeminent nuclear scientist, surpassed only by Einstein himself, was under suspicion. While McCarthy preened before the public, serious forces had quietly gathered to deliberate the fate of Robert Oppenheimer. The hearing began on April 12, the public still unaware that anything was afoot. The cards were decidedly stacked against the scientist: Strauss had handpicked the three-man committee to hear the charges and had picked the prosecutor to bring them. He had bugged Oppenheimer’s home, his phone, and his lawyers’ offices to keep abreast of their strategy. The prosecutor was permitted to meet with the panel to review the FBI’s extensive file on Oppenheimer, while Oppenheimer’s lawyers were excluded from those sessions. When the hearing began, the members of the board had before them large briefing books, all prepared by Oppenheimer’s pursuers, none available for the defense to review.
The hearing was scheduled to open at 10:00 a.m., but Oppenheimer and his lawyers were late. Once it began, the first order of business was to read the allegations against Oppenheimer. The hearing was not styled as a criminal proceeding; Oppenheimer’s liberty was not at stake, merely his access to classified and top secret material. Though essential for his work as a government consultant, denial of access to such material would not necessarily imply disloyalty, much less espionage. Rather, the case against Oppenheimer would turn on whether the panel believed he could be trusted with secrets. In 1942, despite his flirtations with Communism and Communists, the government had cleared him for service at Los Alamos; now those same old affiliations would come under the scrutiny of a Cold War government, one implacably at odds with Communism, again in contrast to the World War II years, when the Soviets were American allies.
When the hearing convened the following morning, the entire controversy had changed. The front page of the New York Times carried a dazzling exclusive. James Reston, the paper’s premier Washington reporter and its recently named Washington bureau chief, broke the news that Oppenheimer was under investigation. Reston had known of the inquiry for weeks but had agreed to hold off reporting it at Oppenheimer’s request. With the hearings now commenced in secret, Oppenheimer released him to report what he knew. Strauss, informed that a story was in the works, gave his blessing as well. The next morning’s Times led with the Oppenheimer scoop: “Dr. Oppenheimer Suspended by A.E.C. in Security Review; Scientist Defends Record.” The subhead was even more shocking: “Access to Secret Data Denied Nuclear Expert—Red Ties Alleged
.” Beneath those headlines was a pensive picture of Oppenheimer, chin in his hand, staring blankly downward. Accompanying the article were the letter of accusations against Oppenheimer and his formal reply.
It was a world exclusive, and the members of the board—all of whom were prominently named near the top of the story—were mightily displeased. As the hearing opened that morning, Chairman Gordon Gray grilled Oppenheimer’s lawyer about who had spoken to Reston and provided him the material. “I think it only fair to say for the record,” the chairman declared, “that the board is very much concerned.” The lawyer, Lloyd Garrison, began an involved story of Reston’s inquiries and his own entry into the case when Oppenheimer himself interrupted him. “May I correct that,” he said. “I believe the initial conversation was with me.” If anything, Eisenhower was even more angry than the commissioners. “This fellow Oppenheimer is sure acting like a Communist,” he complained to Hagerty. “He is using all the rules that they use to try to get public sentiment in their corner.”
Ike fulminated in private; publicly, he said nothing. That afternoon, he threw out the first pitch at the Washington Senators’ game and stayed to watch them beaten by his favorite team, the Yankees, 5–3, in a three-hour game; in New York, the day’s most closely watched matchup, the Giants and the Dodgers, ended in a 4–3 Giants victory, with Willie Mays clobbering the winning home run.
If Oppenheimer assumed that the public would back him once it knew the facts, he guessed wrong. As Americans became aware of his connections to Communism, some naturally sympathized with the scientist. But in the inclement climate of the Cold War, Oppenheimer’s casual and continuing friendships with Communists struck many Americans as at best naive. Through that prism, Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb could appear to some as treason. Strauss and Borden, most importantly, but also more reasonable critics came to see Oppenheimer as sinister. Nor did he do much to help his case. Oppenheimer’s cold manner—his curious blend of what McGeorge Bundy described as “charm and arrogance, intelligence and blindness, awareness and insensitivity”—made him an unlikely receptacle of public sympathy. He suffered through a long, aggressive cross-examination, his strength slowly ebbing away as he endured questions about his mistress and gave up names—all of them already known to authorities—of Communists he had known. Oppenheimer’s sharp descent, from America’s most respected military scientist to a haggard and broken suspect, took just three weeks.
Reston brought the Oppenheimer story to public view, but it just as quickly retreated into the closed hearing room. From April 12 through May 6, the commissioners took testimony behind closed doors. Much mischief had already been concealed by secrecy.
By contrast, the McCarthy hearings went live on the morning of April 22. And unlike the conclusions about Oppenheimer that the public was forced to reach by his absence, its understanding of McCarthy would be enriched by observation. The senator wasted no time in making his mark. As the New York Times put it, “New and special rules failed to restrain Senator McCarthy from interrupting witnesses and other Senators whenever he wished on what he called points of order.”
General Miles Reber was the first to feel his lash as McCarthy insinuated that Reber was fashioning his testimony in order to retaliate for the committee’s investigation of his brother, who had resigned his Army commission a year earlier. There was no connection between Samuel Reber’s retirement and the McCarthy proceedings, but McCarthy asserted that the State Department had deemed him a “bad security risk,” then withdrew the question when its relevance was challenged. General Reber demanded the right to reply and vigorously denied both that his brother was such a risk and that his retirement in any way influenced the general’s testimony. Having warmed up on one general, McCarthy then proceeded to turn his fire against Secretary Stevens, the second witness to take the stand. Sarcastic, insulting, and rude, McCarthy browbeat Stevens for more than a week as millions of viewers looked on, many increasingly appalled by the senator’s behavior. The senator, who often stayed up all night drinking, was heavy lidded as well as heavy-handed, his speech thick and slow and seething. All of that was picked up by the cameras, and McCarthy’s downfall accelerated. It was, Ike confided to his friend Swede Hazlett, “close to disgusting.”
Emphasizing McCarthy’s defects were the characters of those arrayed against him. Stevens was mild, almost demure. Joseph Welch, the lawyer representing the Army, was incisive and witty. McCarthy introduced a photograph of Stevens smiling at Schine—suggesting that influence was not required to secure his special treatment—but Welch deftly demonstrated that the photograph had been cropped to excise the image of General Bradley, at whom Stevens actually was smiling. When a McCarthy aide tried to suggest that there was something unseemly about how Welch acquired the photograph, Welch baited his trap: “Did you think it came from a pixie?” McCarthy fell into it: “Will counsel for my benefit define—I think he might be an expert on that—what a pixie is?”
Welch happily answered: “I would say, senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.” Gay-baiting was hardly an attractive response to red-baiting, but this was powerful theater, and Welch was the better actor.
A few blocks away, the Oppenheimer panel wrapped up testimony and took a ten-day break after hearing from its last witness. Oppenheimer waited nervously at home, Strauss eagerly in Washington.
Back up on Capitol Hill, the sparring continued into May, when Eisenhower finally played the card he had held so closely for weeks. The witness was John Adams, the Army’s lawyer, who took the stand to corroborate Stevens’s account of the pressure brought by Roy Cohn to secure desirable assignments for Schine. In the course of testifying, he was asked about a meeting on January 21 at the office of Herbert Brownell, the attorney general, at which strategy for the hearings was discussed. Senator Stuart Symington inquired about the role played in it by Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But Adams refused to answer, saying he had been instructed by Robert Anderson, the deputy secretary of defense, not to reveal details of that meeting. Adams said he believed Anderson was acting under instructions to deliver that message, but he did not know who issued the original order. He was asked to inquire during the lunch break but returned without an answer. The hearings then ended for the week.
That night, Eisenhower addressed the fifth annual Armed Forces Day dinner at Washington’s Statler Hotel. Departing from his text, he spoke of the nation’s inner strength and virtue: “We know we value the right to worship as we please, to choose our own occupation. We know the value we place on those things. If at times we are torn by doubts by unworthy scenes in our national capital …” At that reference to the McCarthy hearings, the audience began to clap and shout approval. Ike stood without speaking for a full half minute. Then he continued: “We know that we are Americans,” he said. “The heart of America is sound.”
When the hearings reconvened on Monday, May 17, Adams carried a letter, addressed to Secretary Stevens, dated that same day and signed by Eisenhower himself. After acknowledging the right of Congress to convene hearings and pledging to supply information to such inquiries, Stevens read the heart of Eisenhower’s order: “Because 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, and because it is not in the public interest that any of their conversations or communications, or any documents or reproductions, concerning such advice be disclosed, you will instruct employees of your Department that in all of their appearances before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Operations regarding the inquiry now before it, they are not to testify to any such conversations or communications or to produce any such documents or reproductions.” In short, no one who counseled Eisenhower was to divulge those conversations. Or, as he bluntly put it: “Any man who testifies as to the advice he gave me won’t be working for me that night.”
That was a bald assertion o
f a power that Ike may not actually have possessed, but it served its purpose. The committee hearings were canceled for a week, and McCarthy was confronted at last by public presidential opposition. It was, McCarthy said, an “Iron Curtain” that blocked further inquiry. Others welcomed it as overdue. “By his statement of yesterday the President has finally recognized [his] responsibility in unmistakable terms,” the Times editorial board wrote. Eisenhower’s claim of executive privilege did not shut down McCarthy completely—when the session resumed, he attempted to enlist government workers to report subversives directly to him, angering Ike further—but the senator’s investigation was now no longer ignored but actively opposed by his president.
During the recess forced by Eisenhower’s invocation of presidential privilege, the Oppenheimer board returned its verdict. To the surprise of few—certainly not Oppenheimer—the panel recommended that he lose his security clearance. By a vote of 2–1, it concluded that the inventor of the American atomic bomb could not be trusted with American secrets. That vote, like the rest of the hearing, was taken in secret. A month later, the full Atomic Energy Commission convened in public and reviewed the findings. The full commission voted 4–1 to uphold the board. Oppenheimer lost. The New York Times had warned at the outset against any “implication of disloyalty because a scientist (or anyone else, for that matter) expressed his honest opinion, which later turned out to be unpopular or erroneous.” Now, however, the paper weighed the evidence and applauded the commission for having uncovered “substantial defects of character.” The board’s work, according to the Times, was performed by “four experienced and able commissioners.”