American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  After his election “in his own right,” President Truman carried on his anticommunist campaign, holding that his “responsible” efforts might moderate or head off the “irresponsible” red hunters. In July 1948 his Justice Department won the indictment of twelve Communist party leaders, including Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall, for violating the 1940 Smith Act, which made it a crime “to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence.” The trial dragged on through most of 1949. The prosecution based its case largely on the testimony of ex-communists and on readings from “Marxist-Leninist” classics, with former Daily Worker managing editor Louis Budenz explaining that however innocent the language of the classics might appear, it had an altogether different and sinister meaning to trained communists. The twelve sought but failed to put “the Government… on trial.” The judge’s charge to the jury that there was “sufficient danger of a substantial evil” eliminated the “clear and present” test of the First Amendment from the jury’s deliberations. Conviction duly followed.

  Administration actions of this sort, however, appeared not to quench popular fears of the reds at home and abroad but to stoke them. Those fears flamed higher after the Chinese intervention across the Yalu and Harry Truman’s sacking of MacArthur for publicly advocating, against Administration policy, that the war be carried to communist China. Korea was now closely linked with “Red China.” A militant “China Lobby,” embracing such notables as Clare Boothe Luce, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and James Farley, and such publications as the Hearst newspapers and the Luce magazines, kept up a drumfire: Who lost China? Senator Taft charged that “the proper kind of sincere aid to the Nationalist Government a few years ago could have stopped communism in China,” but a “pro-Communist group in the State Department” had promoted “at every opportunity the Communist cause in China.”

  At the center of the China Lobby’s target stood Dean Acheson. This sternest of cold warriors was described in the Senate as having “whined” and “whimpered” as he “slobbered over the shoes of his Muscovite masters.” Acheson was vulnerable. Though lacking a political base of his own, he made no attempt to modify his bristling Groton-Yale-Eastern Establishment demeanor. Acheson showed his class manners and his moral code when he told reporters that he would never “turn my back” on Alger Hiss, but this only goaded his foes to a new fury.

  “I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism,” cried Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska, “and I want to shout, Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United Stales for years.”

  During the late forties the war on “reds in America” had lacked a single dominant leader—or perhaps it had suffered from too many leaders vying for headlines and photographs. Then there emerged a figure that only a movement of the fearful and the paranoid could have brought to the fore. Decades later it was difficult for historians to fathom just why an obscure junior senator from Wisconsin named Joseph R. McCarthy suddenly became the notorious spokesman and symbol of American anticommunism at home. “Tail-gunner Joe,” as he was somewhat derisively called, had won some note in 1946 by shooting down a famous senator and heir to a great Wisconsin dynasty, Robert M. La Follette, Jr. In Washington he soon won a small reputation for abusing Senate procedures, harassing witnesses, and using “the multiple untruth,” as Richard Rovere later termed it. He employed these tactics indiscriminately against advocates of public housing, communists, fellow senators.

  McCarthy had been casting about for some exploitable cause when the GOP sent him out on a routine barnstorming trip in February 1950. At Wheeling, West Virginia, he offered to an audience of Republican women the usual grab bag of parings from newspaper columns, Senate testimony, and anticommunist talks—this time a two-week-old Nixon speech, which he plagiarized. After the tired old cracks at traitors and fellow travelers and striped-pants diplomats in the State Department, McCarthy tried his version of the Big Lie. “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” he said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

  This was pretty stale talk, and the Wheeling speech itself received little press attention. But as McCarthy continued his tour and spewed out charges and numbers, he gathered more and more headlines. It was still not clear why. His Wheeling “list” had come from a 1946 letter—which he did not “hold in his hand”—to Congress from Secretary Byrnes. The letter reported on a preliminary screening, made no mention of Communist party membership, contained no names; and McCarthy had no idea how many of them were still in State. But something about this man increasingly riveted press attention—his sullen, jowly, dark-shaven features, his menacing voice, the recklessness with which he offered specific figures instead of hazy accusations.

  Indeed, he had the audacity to renew his charges on the Senate floor. Fishing papers out of his briefcase, he embarked on an eight-hour, case-by-case analysis of what were now “81 loyalty risks.” His speech was a masterpiece of distortion of a two-year-old House of Representatives report drawn from unsifted State Department files that were in turn based, in many cases, on rumor and hearsay. McCarthy promoted a suspect in the House report from an “active fellow traveler” to an “active Communist,” converted a man “inclined towards Communism” into simply a “Communist,” transformed a “friend of someone believed to be a Communist” into a “close pal of a known Communist.” Even Senator Taft called it a “perfectly reckless performance.”

  Questioned by a Senate investigating committee under the chairmanship of Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings, McCarthy twisted and parried and obfuscated. Pressed for names, he threw out those of culprits with abandon and sometimes, it seemed, at random. After a four-month investigation the committee concluded that McCarthy had perpetrated a “fraud and a hoax” on the Senate.

  But for many Republicans the Wisconsin senator was now changing from an embarrassment to an artillery piece in a wider war. Any Republican could use this freewheeling red hunter against the Democrats without taking responsibility for him. And conservative, isolationist Republicans could use him against moderate, internationalist ones. Soon Taft, despite private doubts, was encouraging McCarthy to “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another one.” Moderate Republicans were prepared neither to embrace McCarthy nor to join his Democratic foes. Rather they sought a middle ground that proved to be unstable. After seven moderates, headed by Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, issued a “Declaration of Conscience” that scored both Truman and the exploiters of fear, five of the seven backed away as they felt the political heat.

  That heat was rising as the elections of 1950 and 1952 neared. McCarthy received hundreds of invitations to speak for his party’s candidates, more than all other senators combined. He appeared in fifteen states, most notably in Illinois, where he backed Everett Dirksen, and in Maryland, where he opposed Tydings. In the 1950 elections Democrats kept control of both houses, but the result was seen as a stunning triumph for McCarthy, who brandished the scalps of at least five anti-McCarthy senators, including Tydings. Later election analysis deflated McCarthy’s role, but it was the perception that counted. To oppose the Wisconsin senator, it appeared, was to commit political suicide. A reporter noted in 1951: “The ghost of Senator Tydings hangs over the Senate.”

  His 1950 crusade elevated McCarthy to the high priesthood of Republican right-wing extremism. McCarthyism, said the rising young conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., “is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” The trick of McCarthy’s success was becoming clear too. He appeared to have an almost instinctive skill for manipulating the press dur
ing an age of fear. He dexterously handled the wire services, which supplied most of the country’s newspapers and radio stations with national news. He knew how to make headlines and catch deadlines; he knew that wild charges were played big while denials were buried among the want ads; he knew that the wilder the charge, the bigger the headline.

  Covering McCarthy was a “shattering experience,” remembered George Reedy of the United Press. “We had to take what McCarthy said at face value. Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho—but he was a United States Senator.” He was also both a reflector and an exploiter of the age of fear.

  It was in this atmosphere of hostility and fear that Americans entered the election year of 1952. Already the sides were lining up but more so within the parties than between them. Senator Taft, cherishing his growing image of “Mr. Republican,” had already made clear his aim to win the nomination that twice had eluded him. Harry Truman, beset by the triple charges of “K1-C2” (Korea, corruption, and Communism), was not expected to run again—unless some Dixiecrat or populist Democrat threatened to make off with the nomination. McCarthy continued to play his own game. And to the consternation of Taft Republicans, the hated “Eastern Establishment,” after losing twice with Dewey, was preparing to foist another “New Deal Republican” onto the Grand Old Party.

  That Establishment was busy recruiting its man. Dwight Eisenhower’s wartime reputation and popularity, projected through his soldierly bearing and infectious smile, made him the favorite of both Democrats and Republicans for their presidential candidate. A stint as president of Columbia University, glamorized by the New York press, followed by his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, had kept the general in the center of the public eye. By late 1951 Dewey, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, and a dozen other northeastern senators and governors were forming an Eisenhower organization and dispatching missionaries to NATO headquarters in Paris to draft their man.

  Their man was proving curiously undraftable. Appealing to his ambition was useless. He had pretty well hit his peak in history, he liked to tell visitors, when he accepted the German surrender in 1945. “Now why should I want to get into a completely foreign field and try to top that?” The old soldier, now in his sixty-second year, also had the typical distaste of the American military man for the seamy side of politics. But he also had a sense of duty, even of indispensability, and it was on these vulnerabilities that the recruiters played while the “isolationist” Taft threatened to win the nomination, the Korean War festered, and China appeared more and more “lost.” Ike wanted the expression of duty to take tangible form, however—nomination and even election by acclamation. As Taft proceeded to line up delegates early in 1952, it became clear that the convention would not draft the general. Playing on his combative instincts, the missionaries won his grudging agreement to come home and fight for his nomination.

  By late spring, when he returned home, Ike was ready for a fight, but not for the one that awaited him. Somewhat familiar with the ideological warfare between the old guard and young moderates within the GOP, he still had not realized the intensity of that conflict. It was not merely isolationists versus internationalists, or eastern and western “coastal” Republicans against midwestern Republicanism. The GOP was virtually two parties, each with its own ideology, traditions, and policies, its own leadership, electoral following, institutional foundations in federal and state governments. These two parties, one entrenched in Congress and state legislatures, the other in the federal and state executive branches, ordinarily kept their distance, but they could not escape collision in the campaign for delegates to the GOP national convention.

  The Taft and Eisenhower forces came into sharpest conflict in Texas, where anti-Truman Democrats, anti-Taft Republicans, and just plain “I Like Ike” voters sought to wrest convention votes away from the old-guard regulars. Fierce battles erupted in precinct caucuses when the regulars, many of them accustomed to holding these meetings in their front parlors, found “one-day Republicans” crowding in to vote for Ike. Some precinct bosses ousted the intruders, who then held rump caucuses out on the lawn; other “hosts” were shoved out of their own homes and had to hold their own rump meetings outside. The upshot, after the Taft-controlled state convention met, was a ferocious fight over two competing delegate slates to the national convention.

  This kind of fight over delegates’ credentials was nothing new; indeed, Taft could remember a similar battle between his father and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Whether a party should represent the old dependables who stuck with it in good times and bad, for power or profit or principle, or the independents and volunteers and irregulars who “raided” the party either from opportunism or from idealism was one of the oldest political questions, in both theory and practice. What was new was the skill of the public relations men around Eisenhower in elevating the matter to a transcending moral issue. Soon his forces were embarked not on a messy old credentials dispute but on a crusade for moral purity, THOU SHALT NOT STEAL, proclaimed Dewey, Lodge & Co. Ike forces waved signs: ROB WITH BOB and GRAFT WITH TAFT. Eisenhower joined with his followers in denouncing the “Texas steal.” Taft offered to compromise, but how could the Ike crusaders compromise on a moral issue?

  It was one of the more spurious “moral” issues in American history, but it was nonetheless effective. The Eisenhower forces won the credentials fight at the national convention in Chicago and then, with their strength augmented, held full command. There was hell to pay. Thrusting a limp, quivering finger toward the New York delegation, Taft stalwart Everett Dirksen, senator from Illinois, from the convention podium charged Dewey with taking “us down the path to defeat.” He cried, “Don’t take us down that road again!” Conservatives and moderates blasted one another on the convention floor. But Ike had the votes. Despite a prompt and friendly visit from the nominee, Taft left Chicago a deeply embittered man. His presidential road, like Dewey’s in 1948, had come to an end. But he could not understand why. He had taken the traditional path toward the White House. He was “Mr. Republican.” He asked a reporter, “Why do they hate me so?”

  Could the two Republican parties remarry, at least for the campaign? It was a matter for negotiation. After demanding assurances from the nominee that he would exclude Dewey as Secretary of State from an Eisenhower cabinet and give the Taft forces equal representation, Taft was more conciliatory at a breakfast meeting on New York’s Morningside Heights. Eisenhower, after barely looking at it, approved a statement making “liberty against creeping socialization” the central campaign issue, promising to “battle communism throughout the world and in the United States,” and playing down the foreign policy differences between the two men.

  Democrats would have viewed Ike’s “surrender at Morningside Heights” with pleasure, except that they were plagued by their own divisions. Truman still planned not to run, but only if he could bequeath the office to an acceptable—i.e., pro-Administration—nominee. This ruled out an engaging young senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, whose chairmanship of a committee investigating crime in politics had supplied Republicans with ammunition against White House “cronies.” Southern Democrats, still angry over the President’s civil rights program, were planning once again to break out of the party tent in one direction or another. Truman’s eye lingered on Adlai E. Stevenson, whose high-toned, good-humored governorship of Illinois was drawing national attention. But Stevenson was a curious political animal—he liked being governor and had little hankering for the White House. Offered the nomination by Truman, he declined. Pressed to run by hosts of Democrats ranging from Chicago bosses to Manhattan intellectuals, he repeatedly stated that he was not a candidate. To be sure, he did not issue a “Sherman,” and some expert decoders of the Delphic utterances of politicians made much of his having said, not that he “would not” accept the nomination, but that he “could not.” Others believed he had closed the door.

  The vast
majority of the delegates hardly knew Stevenson when this slight, balding, vibrant man welcomed them to Chicago in words of polished elegance and wit that many present would never forget. Here on the prairies of Illinois, he said, “we can see a long way in all directions.” Here were no barriers to ideas and aspirations, no shackles on the mind or spirit, no iron conformity. Here the only Democratic governors chosen in a century had been John Peter Altgeld, a Protestant, Edward F. Dunne, a Catholic, and Henry Horner, a Jew. And “that, my friends, is the American story, written by the Democratic Party, here on the prairies of Illinois.”

  The delegates sat hushed, spellbound, as Stevenson turned to the Republicans. For almost a week “pompous phrases marched over this landscape in search of an idea, and the only idea they found was that the two great decades of progress in peace, victory in war, and bold leadership in this anxious hour were the misbegotten spawn of socialism, bungling, corruption,” and the rest. “They captured, tied and dragged that ragged idea in here and furiously beat it to death.…” After all the denunciations of Washington he was surprised that his mail was delivered on time. “But we Democrats were not the only victims here. First they slaughtered each other, and then they went after us.” This speech brought howls of laughter and wild applause, and helped produce Stevenson’s nomination a few days later—one of the few genuine presidential drafts in American history.

  With both nominees chosen, the election outcome turned on each candidate’s capacity to unite and mobilize his party. Eisenhower’s was the more formidable task. Placating Taft and the congressional Republicans was one thing; bringing around McCarthy and the McCarthyites was something else. Holding his nose, the general made the necessary concessions. In Indiana he shared a platform with Senator William Jenner, who had called Eisenhower’s revered boss George Marshall a “front man for traitors” and a “living lie.” In Wisconsin, under pressure from midwestern politicians and from McCarthy himself, he deleted from his speech a tribute to Marshall’s “profoundest patriotism” in “the service of America.”