American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  But the harshest test of Eisenhower’s effort to follow the high road while exploiting the low came with the revelation that running mate Richard Nixon, whom he had named in an effort to appease both Taft and the McCarthyites, possessed a “secret fund” fattened by businessmen. Although there was nothing illegal about the fund and the money had been used for legitimate campaign expenses, Nixon’s charges of Democratic corruption exposed him to fierce counterattack. First the general allowed him to twist in the wind while Republican politicians and editors—most of them from the Eastern Establishment—urged the vice-presidential candidate to quit the ticket. Then he waited until Nixon delivered a maudlin television talk about his wife and his daughters and his dog, Checkers. Only after several hundred thousand or more telegrams and letters deluged the Republican party with expressions of support did he embrace Nixon as “my boy.” The “boy” would never forgive Eisenhower for making him undergo this ordeal.

  With biting humor Stevenson dug at these open sores in the GOP, quipping after the Eisenhower-Taft summit conference that Taft had lost the nomination but won the nominee, that the general was worried about Stevenson’s funny bone but he was worried about the general’s backbone. He liked poking fun at the war between the “two Republican” parties. But the Democratic candidate had his own two parties to deal with. With some Southerners ready to bolt again, the Democrats had adopted a platform exquisitely ambiguous on the key issue of federal fair employment legislation. They had chosen as Stevenson’s running mate Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, whose record on civil rights was such that fifty black delegates had walked out of the convention. Stevenson was caught in the middle of this issue, while Eisenhower, inheriting much of Taft’s symbolic and personal support in the South, took a conservative position on civil rights but a strong stand for ownership of the oil tidelands by the states. With the prestigious Senator Richard Russell applying steady pressure from the right, and black and white civil rights liberals from the left, Stevenson hoped that he could at least sweep the South in time-honored Democratic style.

  But the South was no longer for the Democratic taking. Eisenhower proved to be the great unifier, just as his recruiters had hoped, and campaigned extensively in the South. Then, when he made the electrifying statement that he would “go to Korea”—after Stevenson had considered and rejected the idea as inappropriate for himself—election-watchers knew that the fight was over. The general swept the northern industrial states and carried Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee—but not the states of the “solid South” that had bolted the Democracy in 1948. Election analysis demonstrated that his winning margin was far more a tribute to his personal popularity than a victory for the GOP. Almost half the poor did not vote, but among the poor who did turn out, most voted for Ike.

  “Someone asked me, as I came in, down on the street, how I felt,” Stevenson told his weeping followers on election night. He was reminded of a story about Lincoln after an unsuccessful election. “He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

  The Price of Suspicion

  The Senate Caucus Room, April 22, 1954. Bathed in brilliant television lights, senators, counsel, witnesses, bodyguards huddle around a small, coffin-shaped table, surrounded in turn by several score reporters. Men who are famous—and others who will be—are there: Joe McCarthy, smiling and frowning and giggling, his face heavier and stubblier than ever, the center of exploding flashbulbs; his aide, a smooth-faced young attorney named Roy Cohn; Joseph Welch, a little-known, old-fashioned-looking Boston attorney; Robert Kennedy, the twenty-nine-year-old minority counsel. Jammed into the room are four hundred spectators, including such Washington celebrities as Alice Roosevelt Longworth and “hostess with the mostest” Perle Mesta.

  For weeks the eyes of the nation would be focused on this Senate cockpit. The formal issues seemed almost trivial, considering all the fuss: Did McCarthy and others put improper pressure on the Army in order to win preferential treatment for Private David Schine, Cohn’s good friend; did Army officials use improper methods to deflect earlier McCarthy probes? The stakes in fact were much bigger. “They ranged from the integrity of the Armed Forces to the moral responsibilities of federal workers,” in David Oshinsky’s words, “from the separation of powers to the future of Senator McCarthy,” pitting President against Congress, Republican against Republican, senator against senator.

  The subcommittee chairman rapped an ashtray, the television lights brightened, the subcommittee’s special counsel opened his mouth to speak, then:

  “A point of order, Mr. Chairman. May I raise a point of order?”

  Once again McCarthy was moving audaciously, outrageously, stealing the scene from all the others, putting himself at the center of the affair— and there he would remain day after day, exposing himself to millions of avid television watchers for 187 televised hours.

  “Point of order, Mr. Chairman, point of order.” The phrase engraved itself on the memory of a nation.

  Fifteen months after Dwight Eisenhower had taken the oath of office the shadow of Joseph McCarthy lay across his Administration. At the moment the Wisconsin senator’s target was the Army. It appeared, though, that he was attacking not only the usual suspects—Communists, fellow travelers, intellectuals, Democrats—but the very foundations of the republic: the armed forces, the Senate, the White House, even the churches. Earlier his man J. B. Matthews had charged in The American Mercury that the “largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant clergymen.”

  It was not as though the President had ignored the matter; it had been a source of attention, irritation, anger. But he had tried to defuse McCarthy rather than confront him. Ike’s 1952 running mate, after all, had savaged Stevenson as an appeaser who “got his Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” In his Checkers speech, Nixon had attributed his slush-fund woes to those who had opposed him “in the dark days of the Hiss case.” Later Nixon had charged that Stevenson “has not only testified for Alger Hiss, but he has never made a forthright statement deploring the damage that Hiss and others like him did to America because of the politics and comfort they received from the Truman Administration and its predecessors.” To McCarthy these were weasel words. He had shown Nixon the real stuff, castigating Stevenson as the candidate of the Daily Worker and supporter of “the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation.”

  The President raged at McCarthy privately but would not openly take him on. “I just will not—I refuse—to get into the gutter with that guy,” he said to intimates. Moreover, he did not want to jeopardize his right-wing support in the Senate. A Republican White House, he hoped, would reassure and tame the Wisconsin “trouble-maker.”

  Such hopes were dashed within a month of Eisenhower’s inaugural on January 20, 1953. Using as his vehicle the previously sleepy Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, stacking it with loyal Republicans and dominating it as chairman, McCarthy went off on a rampage against the State Department, charging sabotage in State’s Voice of America program, discovering communism in the Overseas Libraries Division, taking up cudgels against Eisenhower’s friend Charles Bohlen, FDR’s translator at Yalta. When the new President proposed Bohlen for ambassador to the Soviet Union—a cold war nomination, considering Bohlen’s record— McCarthy was infuriated. Bohlen was “at Roosevelt’s left hand at Teheran and Yalta,” he said. Dirksen orated: “I reject Yalta, so I reject Yalta men.” After the “Yalta man” was confirmed Taft told the President, “No more Bohlens.”

  It was a severe burden on Eisenhower and the nation he now led that this legacy of the past rested so heavily on his Administration. Not since Herbert Hoover, at least, had a new President been better prepared to be Chief of State and chief foreign policy-maker. He had helped shape some of the nation’s key policies abroad, such as its military and economic linkages with Western E
urope. He had been trained from his West Point days to be a leader—to take charge, to plan ahead, to unite diverse men in common effort, to be consistent and persistent, to be “fair but firm.” More and more distanced from Truman and the Democracy during the 1952 campaign, he was eager to launch new initiatives toward world peace and national security.

  He had a typical piece of “Ike luck” when Joseph Stalin died only six weeks after he took office. Stalin had appeared increasingly paranoid during his last years; now he was succeeded by a collective leadership that seemed more moderate. Eisenhower’s own collective leadership was bolstered by Republican majorities in House and Senate. Taft’s election as Majority Leader in the upper chamber gave promise of a continuing collaboration between the President and the legislative leader who had fought him for the nomination and then fought for him in the election campaign.

  To throw off the burdens of the recent past—the spiral of fear, the freezing of attitudes, the rigidification of policy—Eisenhower needed a Secretary of State who could devise and carry out fresh initiatives. His selection of John Foster Dulles seemed irreproachable, indeed almost inevitable. Grandson of a Republican Secretary of State under Harrison and nephew of a Democratic Secretary of State under Wilson, member himself of the American delegation to the Versailles peace conference of 1919, Dulles embodied the American foreign policy tradition. He was the one eastern internationalist whom Taft had approved for the job. To be sure, many found Dulles a windbag, a bore, and a prig. But the President could overlook such qualities in a man who seemed able to unite the two Republican parties and to make a fresh start in foreign policy.

  The fresh start was slow in coming. Dulles seemed to maintain the worst of the Truman-Acheson cold war posture rather than shifting it. Like Acheson, he “approached relations with the Soviet Union as a zero-sum game,” according to Gaddis Smith. “A gain in power for the United States was good. A gain for the Soviet Union was bad. An outcome of any issue that was advantageous to both sides was hard to imagine.” The President could—and occasionally did—rein in his secretary. But Dulles was everlastingly at it, day after day, in speech after speech, junket after junket.

  His rhetoric far surpassed his chiefs. Eisenhower in his inaugural address warned that because “forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history,” it was all the more urgent to seek peace, especially since “science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.” Dulles in this same month of January 1953 declaimed that Soviet communism viewed people as “nothing more than somewhat superior animals,” and that as long as communism held such conceptions, there could not be “any permanent reconciliation.” He saw an “irreconcilable conflict.” In the following months Dulles did more than negotiate with the hard-liners in Congress and in the country—he often represented them in Administration councils. Time and again he threatened to lay a blighting hand on the President’s hopes and initiatives.

  Thus Dulles’s calls for liberation of Moscow’s satellites and for “massive retaliation,” which evoked countervailing fear and hostility in the Kremlin, went far beyond the President’s vague calls for freedom for the captive peoples. At a time when Eisenhower was seeking to lower tension between the two sides in Korea and stabilize the front, Dulles was siding with Rhee’s demands for reunification (under him) after a massive new “preemptive” strike to the north. At a time when Eisenhower was seeking to strengthen Western European unity and even help shape a “United States of Europe,” his Secretary of State was threatening that the United States might go it alone. At a time when his chief was denouncing “book burning” in a speech at Dartmouth College (though he backed off a bit later), Dulles was still pressing for the clearing out of suspect volumes in overseas libraries. At a time when the President sought some stabilization of relations between Peking and Chiang’s new government on Taiwan, Dulles favored “unleashing” the Nationalists for some kind of offensive on the mainland.

  It was not that Dulles vetoed or openly sabotaged the President’s plans and policies—in general, Eisenhower stayed on top of his Administration. Rather the Secretary of State frustrated that part of Eisenhower that wished to mobilize the forces for peace in the world and amplified that part of Ike that was a cold warrior. It was the old story of the “pragmatist” feeling his way, exploring opportunities, trying out initiatives, all the time that his true believer of a Secretary of State was scaring the adversaries— and even more the allies—half to death.

  The tumultuous Middle East offered Eisenhower ample opportunity for “pragmatic” action. When Iran’s Prime Minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, appeared soft on communism—he had accepted financial support from Moscow and political support from the Communist party in Iran—Eisenhower authorized a CIA-financed coup that drove Mossadegh out of office in 1953 and put Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi on his path to the throne. While the Administration was eager to help United States oil interests, Eisenhower’s central motive was the “Soviet threat”; Eden reported to Churchill after a talk with the President that he “seemed obsessed by the fear of a Communist Iran.” When the pro-Western government of Lebanon appeared likely to collapse in 1958 amid Christian and Moslem rioting, Eisenhower sent Marines into the country. In both cases the President had responded to what he perceived as a Soviet threat expressed directly or through “puppets”; in both cases he and his advisers miscalculated, for the real threat was militant Middle Eastern nationalism.

  Still, Eisenhower’s main accomplishment in his early years as President was what he did not do. After visiting along the Korean front lines, viewing the misery of the soldiers and sizing up the formidability of the mountainous terrain, he did not order an attack to the north. When the Chinese communists began to bombard the islands of Quemoy and Matsu off their coast late in the summer of 1954, the President rejected the advice of Air Force and Navy chiefs that the United States, together with Chiang, carry out bombing raids—including atomic bombing—on the mainland. Repeatedly, when the French were facing defeats in Indochina at the hands of the communist-led Vietminh, he resisted urgings of Vice President Nixon, of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and—off and on—of his Secretary of State to intervene with conventional and even atomic arms. “Five times in one year,” observed his biographer Stephen Ambrose, “the experts advised the President to launch an atomic strike against China. Five times he said no.”

  Eisenhower’s ability to say no to new departures in domestic policy as well as to adventurism abroad, his endless search for compromise and consensus, his acceptance of Establishment values led contemporary observers to describe his Administration derisively as the “bland leading the bland.” By the 1980s historians were treating him more favorably, as fresh data revealed what political scientist Fred I. Greenstein termed his “hidden hand” legislative and political tactics, his effort to give a New Look—more atomic firepower, expanded Air Force, less cost for conventional arms—to his foreign policy, his concept of leadership as raising followers above their individualistic, short-term goals to embrace long-run moral goals. His main failing—lack of strong, consistent policy direction stemming from inability to link broad ends to explicit and specific means—reflected central ambiguities in this man of war who was also a man of peace.

  Above all, in his presidency, a man of peace. For Eisenhower had to live with the horror of atomic war as few others did. On a June evening in 1955, as he was leaving the Oval Office, an aide hurried toward him to blurt out the fearful words—the enemy had attacked the United States—fifty-three of the biggest cities had been devastated—vast numbers were fleeing— there were uncounted dead—fallout had spread over the country. Casualty estimates were stupefying—up to 60 or even 100 million.

  It was a mock exercise, of course—part of Operation Alert, an effort to simulate a real atomic attack. The President had instructed that he not be told in advance when the exercise would be mounted. If he “survived,” he a
nd his cabinet would be evacuated to a secret site in the Carolina mountains.

  To build peace, time for Dwight Eisenhower ran short. Twelve weeks before he took office a hydrogen device as large as a two-story house, weighing some sixty-five tons, and almost a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, had obliterated a Pacific island a mile wide. Twelve weeks after taking office the President told a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors that in exchange for certain Soviet concessions, including agreement on a “free and united Germany” and the “full independence of the East European nations,” he was ready to sign an arms limitation agreement and to accept international control of atomic energy under a “practical system of inspection under the United Nations.” He warned of a life of perpetual fear, of enormous financial costs. Struck even as he spoke by an intestinal attack that brought sweat, chills, and dizziness, he clung to the rostrum and went on:

  “This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” The cost of one heavy bomber equaled that of two fully equipped hospitals. A single fighter plane cost a half-million bushels of wheat. “This is not a way of life at all”—“it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

  Late in August 1953 Moscow announced that it had tested an H-bomb. Before the United Nations in December the President proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union contribute part of their nuclear stockpiles to an international atomic energy agency. To this “Atoms for Peace” proposal the 3,500 delegates responded with a prolonged ovation, but the Russians, fearing it would enable the Americans to get ahead of them, answered with long stalling tactics. On March 1, 1954, the United States exploded a nuclear device on Namu Island in the Bikini atoll. The stupendous fireball lighted the skies for a hundred miles around; the wave of radiation sickened Marshallese on the islands and Japanese on an unlucky fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon. By now the H-bomb was becoming central to Western strategy; Britain and France would have the bomb before the decade was over.