Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
And, finally:
Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further. You have been within six feet of me, and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have brought it out. If there is a God in Heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it with you further.13 (Emphasis added.)
OUTED
Army Counsel Joseph Welch denounced McCarthy for outing Welch’s assistant Frederick Fisher as a former member of a cited front group called the National Lawyers Guild. But Welch himself had publicly confirmed Fisher’s former Guild membership weeks earlier in this New York Times story of April 16, 1954.
Subsequently, we’re told, Welch broke into tears and the audience in the Senate chamber responded with sustained applause. Thus the incident most remembered from the hearings, and generally viewed as the moral Waterloo of Joe McCarthy. The reckless evildoer had exposed young Fred Fisher and his former membership in the National Lawyers Guild, thus scarring the innocent lad forever, and the good, decent Welch had protested this shameful outing of a youthful indiscretion.
All of which seems very moving, and is invariably so treated. It looks a little different, however, when we note that, well before this dramatic moment, Fred Fisher had already been outed, in conclusive fashion, as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild—by none other than Joe Welch. This had occurred in April, some six weeks before the McCarthy-Welch exchange, when Welch took it upon himself to confirm before the world that Fisher had indeed been a member of the Guild, and for this reason had been sent back to Boston. As the New York Times reported, in a story about the formal filing of Army allegations against Cohn-McCarthy:
The Army charges were signed by its new special counsel, Joseph N. Welch. Mr. Welch today [April 15] confirmed news reports that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his own Boston law office because of admitted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell, Jr. the Attorney General, as a Communist front organization. Mr. Welch said he had brought in another lawyer, John Kimball, Jr., from his Boston office to take Mr. Fisher’s place.14 (Emphasis added.)
Giving this news item further impact, the Times ran a sizable photograph of Fred Fisher, plus a caption noting he had been relieved of duty with the Army’s legal forces. (See inset, Chapter 43.) Having caused this story to appear in the nation’s most prestigious daily and reputed paper of record, Joe Welch would seem to have done a pretty good job of outing the innocent lad from Boston. (It was undoubtedly this news story, or an equivalent, that McCarthy was asking Jim Juliana to bring him.) It thus develops that Welch himself had already done the very thing for which he so fervently denounced McCarthy. So the suspicion once more dawns, as with the “doctored” photo, that something was unspeakably evil when, and only when, done by McCarthy, but perfectly proper when done by Welch and/or his clients.
What these several episodes tell us about the moral posturing of the Army’s lawyer hardly needs much comment. There is, however, one further topic to be noted in taking the measure of Joe Welch. This was the effort of the Mundt committee to get from Welch’s clients an Inspector General’s report about the Peress case, including a list of Army officials involved in the mishandling of that matter. On this subject, as on others, the Army dragged its feet, so that four months elapsed between the date of the request and the time the report was finally delivered. Moreover, when the list was examined, it turned out to have some glaring omissions.
All this would be brought out the following year by the McClellan panel in its survey of the Peress debacle. In a scathing critique of the Army performance, the McClellan committee noted the obvious lack of candor in keeping back the IG report about the case. Even worse than the foot-dragging, however, was the deliberate withholding of the names of several officials involved in managing the Peress affair—including both John Adams and General Zwicker, among the most important players in the drama. As a result of such deletions, said the McClellan panel, “the list of 28 officials was deceptive and a gross imposition on the special Mundt subcommittee and this subcommittee.” And why had the names of John Adams et al. been omitted? The information, said the McClellan report, “was not furnished to the special Mundt subcommittee upon the advice received from the Army’s special counsel, Joseph P. Welch [sic] …on or about May 11 (1954)…” as “not pertinent to the hearings.”15 (Emphasis added.)
Thus, what the McClellan committee described as “deceptive and a gross imposition” on two committees of the Senate was the doing of the virtuous Welch, this occurring “on or about May 11,” 1954. That would have been roughly a week after the Army lawyer lectured McCarthy on the need for full disclosure of all relevant data, and the grave obligations in the solemn oath administered when the hearings started. It would appear that, in this brief span, Welch had forgotten this impressive moral sermon. Perhaps it would have helped if, as he requested, someone had read to him—slowly—the language of that oath, swearing “to tell the truth, comma, the whole truth, comma, and nothing but the truth.” But then again, perhaps it wouldn’t.
CHAPTER 43
The Sounds of Silence
WHEN Joe Welch advised his clients to withhold the names of John Adams et al. from the Mundt committee, he wasn’t doing anything especially novel, but simply following standard practice on the Army side of the proceedings. In fact, suppression of critical data on controverted issues had been a favored administration tactic in its McCarthy battles for months before this.
Not, of course, that executive secrecy was invented by the new GOP regime and its bodyguard of Harvard lawyers. Official efforts to conceal important facts of record, especially on security matters, had been made often in the past, under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Amerasia was the most flagrant instance, Truman’s secrecy order of 1948 the most far-reaching, and there were many related cases, several noted in this survey. It remained, however, for the Ike White House and Eisenhower Justice to wrap blanket gag decrees and secrecy measures in resounding phrases about the Constitution and noble objects of the framers.
In this respect, as in others, the policy being followed by the Ike administration was in jarring conflict with earlier Republican statements on the issues. In the 1952 campaign, the GOP had blasted the secrecy policies of the Truman White House and its agents. The gag order of 1948 had been denounced many times by party spokesmen as a cover-up and scandal, and there was copious evidence for such charges. However, as the various Ike-McCarthy disputes unfolded, the new administration would grow increasingly fond of Truman’s order—invoking it, for instance, to silence General Zwicker in his set-to with McCarthy, stifle witnesses from Monmouth, and withhold security records from the panel.
Also, as has been seen, the administration along the way had improvised more specific and even tougher sanctions—the sequestering of Scott McLeod, the quarantine of General Lawton. These hardball tactics were in keeping with the spirit if not the letter of the Truman order, as they involved, in one fashion or another, access to security data. These ad hoc suppressions were, however, merely prelude to a more sweeping Ike dictate, extending the code of silence in ways that Truman, so far as we know, had not envisioned.
Given the pro-McCarthy trend of the Army-McCarthy hearings in terms of substance, the reasons for this further step would no doubt have seemed compelling. By May of 1954, two related bodies of data unknown to the public, neither favorable to the Army, were pushing to the surface. The more significant of these, or at least the one that later got all the notice, concerned the high-level January meeting mentioned by John Adams, when he was told by Sherman Adams to draft the “chronology” used in the arraignment of McCarthy. The other was the Army’s stash of monitored phone calls, reflecting who said what to whom about Fort Monmouth, Lawton, the loyalty board
, Dave Schine, and so on.
On both fronts, members of the Mundt committee were pressing hard for full disclosure. Only by getting information on these items, they said, would it be possible to extract the truth from the welter of conflicting charges. This view was reinforced by other developments in the hearings. Senators Dirksen, Mundt, and Potter would all reveal that they had been approached by administration spokesmen the day after the high-level January meeting, hinting at an indictment to be issued against Roy Cohn, this linked to McCarthy’s plan to subpoena members of the Pentagon Review Board.
Dirksen testified that, on January 22, he was visited by John Adams and White House aide Gerald Morgan, both of whom had been at the meeting the day before, urging that the review board subpoenas be quashed and intimating that if they weren’t, charges against Cohn might be forthcoming. Mundt said that, on the same day, he received a visit from John Adams, urging that subpoenas not be issued, this tied to the matter of Dave Schine, which seemed to Mundt a strange “juxtaposition of…topics.”1
It thus appeared that the January meeting had been a crucial causative factor in the Army-McCarthy struggle, and that what was said and agreed to there was integral to the Mundt inquiry. However, it soon became apparent also that further information on the subject was not to be provided. On May 14, John Adams returned to tell the panel that he couldn’t give any details about the mysterious meeting, “under instructions” from the Defense Department.2 Committee members were perplexed, but would be even more so a few days later when a blanket secrecy edict was handed down, making it clear the information they sought was being withheld on orders from the highest levels.
On May 17, the White House released a letter from Eisenhower to the Department of Defense, forbidding provision of any data about internal conversations, meetings, or written communications among its staffers, with no exceptions as to topics or to people. This ukase cited the need for “candid” exchanges among executive employees in giving “advice” to one another, an elastic rationale that could be applied to any subject whatsoever. “It is not in the public interest,” said the order, that any such conversations or documents be divulged to Congress. DOD employees were thus instructed “not to testify on any such conversations or produce any such documents or reproductions.”3 (Emphasis added.)
This was accompanied by a lengthy memo from Eisenhower Justice—a history of executive secrecy orders through the ages, dating from the nation’s founding. Among the lofty precedents cited were the very Truman secrecy measures and denials the GOP had formerly protested—the 1948 gag order, the Condon case, the Remington case, concealment of the State Department security files, and others. These once-derided Truman actions were now invoked in reverent terms as instances of “the traditional executive view that the President’s discretion must govern the surrender of executive files.”4 The legal basis for this stance, given in both the letter and the memo, was the “separation of powers,” depicted as a most sacred and fundamental precept of the American system.
With this, the Mundt committee had run into a stone wall of denial, based on the broadest possible claim of privilege. The senators were less than pleased, Joe McCarthy less than others. “One of the subjects of this inquiry,” he said, “is to find out who was responsible for calling off the hearings of the Communist infiltration of the government. At this point, I feel there is no way of ever getting at the truth, because we do find that the charges were conceived, instigated at the meeting which was testified to by [John] Adams…. [That meeting]didn’t have to do with security matters….It merely has to do with why the secharges were filed.”5
The Democrats on the panel took the same position. “I shall insist,” said John McClellan, “upon making this record clear with respect to what was the result of the decisions made at that time, whether responsibility shifted from the Secretary of the Army to higher authorities. That we are entitled to know, because unless we can get that information, we will not have the evidence here upon which to make a decision that will place the responsibility.”6
There were still other troublesome questions that begged for answers. What was known about the January meeting pointed to the White House, specifically to Sherman Adams. And considering that he was the topmost staffer to the President, the further implications of that development were even more intriguing. Was it possible Sherman Adams and other high officials were concocting an indictment of a member of the Senate but that the President knew nothing of it? And even without that information, as McClellan noted, what had been depicted as a midlevel action by Bob Stevens, allegedly launching charges at his own discretion, took on a very different aspect.
Some other puzzling questions were raised by Democratic members. Symington wanted to know what U.N. Ambassador Lodge was doing at such a meeting, which apparently had nothing to do with the United Nations. Told by Army Counsel Welch this was off-limits because of the high-level nature of the confab, Symington asked: “Does that mean we are going to get the information about the low level discussions but not about the high level discussions?”7 Now, with the Eisenhower order, the answer to that was clear: The committee would get neither.
McCarthy, as might be expected, had still other concerns and questions. All the legal/constitutional arguments and precedents to back up the secrecy edict were coming from Eisenhower Justice. But, McCarthy observed, both Attorney General Brownell and his deputy, William Rogers, had been present at the very meeting now ruled off-limits for discussion. In essence, therefore, Brownell and Rogers were propounding and defending an order that covered up their own behavior. Wasn’t this, McCarthy rhetorically wondered, a self-evident conflict of interest?
These were significant issues that might have prompted similar questions from an inquisitive press corps. Traditionally, when faced with official efforts to withhold the facts on controverted topics, the instinct of the press has been in favor of disclosure—a well-known trait of the profession. Where Joe McCarthy was concerned, however, the usual rules went out the window. As observed by journalist Clark Mollenhoff, who covered these hearings and later wrote a seminal book about the underlying issues, there was a prevailing view among his colleagues that “anything that is bad for Joe McCarthy is good for the country.” If McCarthy was against it, they were for it.8
In keeping with that maxim, Ike’s gag order, far from being assailed or questioned, was met with effusions of highest praise by leading members of the press. Especially voluble were those twin towers of elite opinion, the New York Times and Washington Post. According to the Times, a comprehensive secrecy order of the sort proclaimed by Ike was just the tonic needed by our body politic—a long-overdue rebuke to a pushy, interfering Congress. The real issue, said the Times, was “an attempt on the part of the legislative branch in the person of Mr. McCarthy to encroach upon the executive branch”—an affront to be resisted to the utmost.
The Post was equally supportive of the secrecy edict, using phrases that would read strangely down the road when the issue was something other than McCarthy. “It is absurd,” the Post opined, “to suppose that any congressional committee could compel this testimony if the President should decide to forbid it…. The President’s authority under the Constitution to withhold from Congress confidences, presidential information, the disclosure of which would be incompatible with the public interest, is altogether beyond question.”9
While the main subject of these exalted claims was the January meeting, the still mostly secret hoard of monitored phone calls was not forgotten—especially not forgotten at the White House. The Mundt committee had voted to subpoena these records on April 23, but as the weeks rolled by the subpoena had not been honored. And, as would later be revealed, some decisive steps were taken by executive fiat to make certain that it wasn’t. On May 13, administration agents were ordered, on the double, to gather up the monitored phone transcripts and related data from the Pentagon and hustle them over to the White House. (This too in emulation of precedents from the Truman era, when the
State Department security files were handled in like fashion.)
The purpose of this further secrecy measure would be described by William Ewald, an Ike aide who conducted an extensive study of the telephone transcripts and what had happened to them. “Neither the public nor most of the participants ever knew the contents of these documents,” said Ewald, “because for reasons of strategy in the conflict, they were locked up in the White House by order of the President…Instantaneously, all relevant records in the Pentagon were gathered up and spirited across the Potomac to the White House against the possible threat of their being subpoenaed, on McCarthy’s demand, by the investigating Senate committee.”10
In this preemptive strike, the guiding hand of Sherman Adams was again apparent, as the removal was done on his specific order and the documents delivered to him personally at the White House. Nor were the reasons for this much in doubt. As seen, the small sampling of monitored calls made public wasn’t supportive of Stevens-Adams, was indeed more helpful to McCarthy than to Stevens. The obvious inference had to be that any further calls the White House was concealing would be even less useful to the Army. Impounding the records, followed by Ike’s all-concealing order, would prevent any new embarrassment of this nature. As Ewald summed it up:
…by May 17, the transcripts had not been delivered to the committee. Then came the President’s directive, slamming down the portcullis. The impounders had moved with dispatch and secrecy and effect. The long contemporaneous record—day by day, minute by minute—of the Army’s fecklessness and compliance—a record that took the edge off the stridency of their charges and undercut many assertions in Stevens’ testimony—that record would remain sealed…. The portcullis had indeed slammed down, and it slammed down just in time for the Army.11
Blacklisted By History Page 72