Likewise, no pro-Nazi, pro-Fascist, or related items, as far as the record shows, were discovered in the catalogues or shelves of the information centers in 1953. Neither destruction of pro-Nazi materials in the postwar era, nor the subsequent absence of such materials from the reading centers, provoked a cry of “book burning” or “censorship” from civil liberties spokesmen. Such charges were reserved exclusively for the removal of Communist and pro-Red books from a program allegedly fighting Communism in Europe. As the McCarthy panel summed it up:
Americans are now asked to believe that it was good to destroy Nazi and Fascist literature, but that it is bad or a crime against culture to remove Communist books from United States Government–sponsored libraries abroad. Book-burning sauce for the Nazi goose was not sauce for the Communist gander. In our opinion, neither the propaganda of the Nazis or the Communists should be encouraged or promoted by the United States Government.14
Notwithstanding all the above, the uproar over the USIS investigation and “book-burning” charges would be effectively used against McCarthy and are used against him still. In this campaign, the publicity given the Cohn-Schine tour of Europe was the first of several adverse developments. In fanning such publicity, Theodore Kaghan and others at HICOG played a significant role, as was brought out by the hearings. In so doing, Kaghan was undoubtedly provoked by the fact that his name, and his reported failure to receive a security clearance, had surfaced in the earlier sessions on the VOA, in public testimony by Voice official James F. Thompson.
Kaghan was thus well primed for his encounter with Cohn and Schine, and when the duo embarked on their tour in April, it was Kaghan who dubbed them “junketeering gumshoes” and helped orchestrate resistance to their efforts. One HICOG technique, for which Kaghan disclaimed responsibility but in which his press officer was admittedly complicit, was to assign a full-time escort to shadow Cohn and Schine wherever they went, find out what they were doing, and alert a mostly hostile press corps to their movements.
This monitoring of Cohn and Schine resulted in close press attention all along the way and numerous adversarial questions about the purpose of their visit. When they responded to such questions, they were then attacked for “having press conferences” and shooting off their mouths to foreign newsmen. As Senator Mundt expressed it to Kaghan: “You were contributing to the very thing you criticized. I do not know whether they held press conferences, but I do know that you made it easier for them to hold press conferences by telegraphing in advance where they were going.”15
Mundt’s summary was correct, except that it understated the extent to which U.S. diplomatic personnel had organized the hostile press reception—an effort that involved not only HICOG but other officials of the State Department. Part of the story would be told by Ben Bradlee, at the time press attaché with the U.S. Embassy in Paris, who went on to media fame at Newsweek and the Washington Post. Bradlee in later years happily recalled the steps he and others had taken to organize press conferences for Cohn and Schine that were meant to be, and were, bear-baiting sessions.
As Bradlee told it, he and other Embassy staffers went out of their way to round up hostile reporters on a Paris Sunday for a merciless thrashing of Cohn and Schine. “We weren’t five minutes into it,” said Bradlee, “before [Cohn and Schine] realized it was a disaster and they realized they had been set up…There wasn’t a single question that took them seriously, not a single anything remotely like a friend in the audience…” Much pleased with this, Bradlee worked with British correspondents to orchestrate a similarly angry press turnout in London.16 Such were the services rendered by State Department officials to enhance the image of the U.S. abroad in the early 1950s. And such were the conditions in which Cohn and Schine would be blamed for holding “press conferences” in fact orchestrated by our diplomats in Europe.
The other main adverse development for McCarthy from the book probe was the work of John McCloy. Kaghan and others had been on the staff at HICOG when McCloy was commissioner there, so the revelations of the McCarthy panel inevitably reflected on McCloy. The former high commissioner was not pleased with the investigation and took steps to retaliate against it. Among these were speeches in which he deplored the excesses of congressional inquests, an obvious allusion to the McCarthy hearings. More important, and one of the best-remembered aspects of the story, was his intercession with President Eisenhower to get a public statement that would be construed (correctly) as a slam against McCarthy.
This episode occurred in June of 1953 at Dartmouth College, where Ike was to receive an honorary degree and make some remarks, and McCloy was in attendance. McCloy here took it upon himself to tell Eisenhower that books were being burned by HICOG, this allegedly caused by McCarthy, and that something drastic needed doing. This outraged the President, who included in his remarks the offhand statement: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book as long as any document doesn’t offend your ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is?”17
As a reference to the McCarthy hearings, which it was of course assumed to be, this Ike statement left a lot to be desired. The McCarthy probe had nothing to do with libraries in the United States, where Ike’s auditors might have read whatever they wished, and Eisenhower himself would go on record as saying Communist books shouldn’t be in official reading centers overseas. And if books had been burned by HICOG, this had been done by members of the executive branch under Ike himself, not by McCarthy. As an anti-McCarthy salvo, therefore, the statement was somewhat lacking in coherence. Where attacks on McCarthy were concerned, however, this was never a big problem, and the anti-McCarthy forces were effusive in their praises of Ike’s impromptu comment.
While more sinned against than sinning in these proceedings, the McCarthy forces made some PR gaffes that didn’t help things. One was in going after Dashiell Hammett, the famous mystery writer, whose books were widely featured in the information program. There were certainly grounds for objecting to Hammett, a hard-core Stalinist active in pro-Red causes who took the Fifth on relevant questions before McCarthy. Among his other ventures, Hammett had been part of a group that went bail for convicted CP leaders, and had gone to prison for refusing to answer questions about that project. He was, in addition, active at this period churning out propaganda pieces promoting Communist and pro-Soviet notions.
McCarthy’s position was that, given all the above, the United States shouldn’t be featuring Hammett in official information centers overseas, no matter how acclaimed the writer. That view had some abstract merit, but McCarthy’s focus on the author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man provided a convenient handle to critics of the probe to trivialize the issue and say books with no Cold War implication were being banished. It would have been the better part of wisdom for McCarthy to steer clear of Hammett.18
In another dubious move, McCarthy brought the editor of the New York Post, James Wechsler, to appear before the panel. Under other circumstances, Wechsler would have been a logical witness in the hearings, as he had a strongly pro-Red background in the 1930s and his books were among those in the reading centers. However, he was also a virulent press critic of McCarthy, so his appearance was inevitably seen as, and no doubt was, a McCarthy effort at retaliation.
In these hearings, Wechsler gave as good as he got, arguing that he was now a tough-minded anti-Communist who had repudiated his pro-Red past, and presenting articles he had written to prove this. McCarthy retorted that Wechsler had a consistent history of attacking the FBI, disparaging ex-Communist witnesses such as Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley, and defending the likes of William Remington (all of which was true). Wechsler was given latitude to respond at whatever length he chose, and fully availed himself of the privilege (a privilege McCarthy never enjoyed in the then-liberal pages of the Post).*258 19
However, nothing McCarthy would say or do could cancel the impression that he was s
imply using the hearing to attack a journalistic critic, and for that reason, as with Hammett, should never have had the editor before the committee. Beyond which, there were other negatives for McCarthy in this particular set of hearings. Among these was the fact that they occasioned a serious breach between McCarthy and Democratic members of the panel, as Stuart Symington and to a lesser extent Henry Jackson took up the cudgels for Wechsler. Like the Ike “book-burner” speech, it was a harbinger of future trouble for McCarthy. He was now stockpiling enemies at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
That said, there is copious evidence that the USIS investigation was far from being the fiasco portrayed in the usual write-ups. The problem in the reading centers and related programs was real, and the investigation McCarthy conducted went a long way to expose this. The point, however, would be buried beneath the avalanche of ridicule stirred up by such as Kaghan, Bradlee, and McCloy, and repeated ever since in discussions of McCarthy.
CHAPTER 36
Scott McLeod, Where Are You?
AT THE advent of the new administration, the Republican Party was split along divergent fault lines. Some of these were institutional—as in executive against Congress; some regional—as in the agricultural West/Midwest against the mostly urban North and East; others of a tactical nature—as in how best to get the message over to the public. All of this was standard fare for any administration of either party, and not especially surprising.
In the intramural Republican struggles of the 1950s, however, there was another kind of party schism that went beyond the usual turf wars. This was in essence a battle for the soul of the GOP, the values it espoused, and its role in our political system. Stated in simplest terms, the question was whether the party should present itself as a sharply etched alternative to the Democratic program or as an approximation of it, give or take a few distinctions.
Within the White House and in the Eisenhower Cabinet, there were divisions on many topics relating to this larger issue. Some of Ike’s advisers, as might be expected in a Republican administration, were of conservative bent, while others of more pragmatic temper tried to downplay internal conflicts, just trying to advance a common program. But there were still others who pushed hard for liberalization, wanted a more leftward stance on issues, and sought an open break with conservatives in Congress. These attitudes inevitably dictated differing views on what to do about the problem of Joe McCarthy.
A retroactive close-up of this internal struggle would be provided by Ike speechwriter Emmet Hughes, on loan to the White House from the Time-Life empire. In a breezy memoir of the 1950s, Hughes described the players in the new administration, competing forces in the Cabinet, and links between these groups and elements in Congress. He made it plain that he and C. D. Jackson, a fellow Time-Life alum, were the most zealous advocates of a more liberal GOP, though by no means alone in talking up such notions.
Hughes would provide startling insight into his own ideas and motives, and the nature of his influence, in some amazingly candid comments. “I was, and am,” he wrote, “of the generation of the New Deal…While accidents of age and wartime duty and foreign assignment kept me from voting in any national elections until 1952, I would have voted, without exception, for all Democratic candidates for the presidency…In terms of American politics, I most commonly found myself a comrade, in purpose and temper, of the Democrats—and not the more conservative ones. I still do.”1
Hughes would back these views with specific and often caustic comments on policies and people. He was, for instance, contemptuous of John Foster Dulles (“a surfeit of abstractions and generalizations”), State Department security chief Scott McLeod (“an aggressive superpatriot”), and Ike’s conservative Treasury Secretary George Humphrey (“intellectual baggage unencumbered by complexities”)—while manifesting his great regard for FDR and the New Deal heritage in general.2
Given these liberal and pro-Democratic leanings, the question perforce arises as to what Hughes was doing in a Republican White House—much less presuming to sit in judgment of GOP Cabinet members or other leaders of the party. To find the answer to this puzzle, it’s useful to recall that, in the 1950s and for a while thereafter, there was indeed an effort under way to new-model the GOP in the image of its opposition. After so many years of Democratic rule, it was argued, the Republican Party could no longer tread the conservative path preferred by the old bulls in Congress.3
The vogue of this conception may seem odd today, looking back on the Goldwater-Reagan risorgimento that turned the GOP into a staunchly conservative party in both presidential and legislative circles, then carried it on to election wins at state and federal levels. However, such ideas were fairly trendy in the 1950s and early ’60s, promoted in major press outlets, and embodied in the presidential hopes of such media-favored liberal GOPers as New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and New York City mayor John V. Lindsay. It was all very New York/East Coast/establishmentarian, and nicely underscored the concept of policy continuity with the Truman-Acheson era. The presence of Emmet Hughes in GOP regalia, and the views that he advanced, were aspects of this project.
Outside the environs of the White House, there were other influences of like nature. Among the most important of these was the already noted John McCloy, variously head of the Chase Manhattan Bank and Council on Foreign Relations, among many other weighty titles, who had served as assistant secretary of war under FDR and as high commissioner of Germany under Truman. McCloy was close to Dean Acheson, a fellow graduate of Harvard Law, and had played a significant role in policy episodes of the New Deal era.
McCloy was the quintessential establishment figure, with high-level contacts in the GOP as well as in the Democratic party. Eisenhower liked him and reputedly wanted him to be Secretary of State, but had been dissuaded on the grounds that McCloy’s New Deal and Acheson ties would be red flags to the still-vigorous old bulls in Congress. McCloy nonetheless remained in close touch with Ike and with such of his top advisers as C. D. Jackson, a New York acquaintance of long standing. McCloy, as his biographer puts it, was “Ike’s wise man.”4
McCloy’s wisdom on the foreign policy side was very much of the Acheson school, and his appointments at HICOG were in keeping with this background. Among his staffers there were Theodore Kaghan, Charles W. Thayer, Samuel Reber, Lowell Clucas, and—a true blast from the past—John Paton Davies. All of these had been, or would become, targets of McCarthy. So in addition to disagreements on the issues, McCloy had some very specific reasons not to like McCarthy. The “book-burning” episode was but one example of McCloy’s wielding backstairs influence adverse to McCarthy and conservative interests in general.
Suggestive of McCloy’s clout was his recommendation that James B. Conant, former president of Harvard, be named as McCloy’s own successor at HICOG. Conant was yet another establishment figure who wore several hats—scientist, educator, administrator, politician. He had been a major player in the nuclear program in World War II and was, like McCloy and Acheson, an admirer of J. Robert Oppenheimer, guru of that operation. Conant continued his nuclear interests in the postwar era, and with McCloy and Oppenheimer had helped shape the Acheson-Lilienthal plan for global sharing of the atom. He was also identified with liberal domestic causes, mostly dealing with education.
To Joe McCarthy and other conservatives in Congress, the appointment of the ur-liberal Conant signaled obvious continuity with the Democratic program rather than the Republicans’ promised changes. McCarthy accordingly planned a speech, written by the young conservative author William Buckley, in opposition to the nomination. However, these were early days yet and McCarthy was persuaded by Senator Taft to withhold his fire in the interest of party unity. The Conant speech was not delivered.5
More troubling than the Conant appointment was the soon-to-follow Ike decision to name Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen as America’s new ambassador to Moscow. Few choices could have been more indicative of solidarity with the New Deal outlook. A career diplomat and longt
ime Russian expert, Bohlen had been a favorite of Harry Hopkins and was linked closely with the Hopkins appeasement policy toward Moscow. Bohlen had served at the wartime conferences in Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam and was a favored Acheson colleague at State, where he had risen to the role of counselor formerly held by Benjamin Cohen. It was testimony to the power of State’s entrenched bureaucracy, as well as to more general leftward pressures on the GOP, that such an appointment could be engineered under the new regime, and suggestive of Eisenhower’s views that he would make it.
Short of naming Acheson himself, it would have been hard to come up with a nominee more offensive to conservatives in Congress. Thus, two months into the Ike age, a small mutiny developed as McCarthy and several others voiced displeasure with the nomination. To quell the outbreak, the White House enlisted the reluctant help of Senate Republican leader Taft and his deputy, William Knowland (R-Calif.). Both were staunch conservatives and anti-Communists who had no more use for Bohlen, Yalta, and the Acheson foreign policy than did McCarthy, and had made this plain in many statements.
Both were, however, loyal party stalwarts and grimly agreed to carry the nomination forward in the Senate. To do otherwise, they reasoned, would badly damage the new administration at the very outset. Thus, in one of the richer paradoxes of that day, support for the Hopkins/Acheson holdover Bohlen would become a test of Republican “unity,” with two prominent GOP conservatives in the forefront. This would be sufficient to ensure approval of the nomination, whatever Republican senators thought about its merits (which was nil). Enough would grit their teeth and “support the White House,” along with Democrats who actually supported Bohlen, to guarantee his confirmation.
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