RN

by Richard Nixon

  When McCarthy got wind of the incident and learned of Peress’s membership in the far left-wing American Labor Party, he decided that he had hit pay dirt. He summoned Peress before a closed session of his subcommittee, where the dentist invoked the Fifth Amendment. A few days later Peress requested and received an honorable discharge from the Army. McCarthy hit the roof.

  He subpoenaed General Ralph Zwicker, the commanding general, and three other officers. In a closed session Zwicker tried to explain how Peress had merely slipped through a loophole in Army red tape. As the commanding officer Zwicker accepted full responsibility, but he refused to name any individuals involved in processing Peress’s case. McCarthy charged that Zwicker was shielding communists and said he was not fit to wear the uniform of an Army officer. He threatened to humiliate him in a public hearing the following week unless he changed his mind and decided to cooperate.

  When Army Secretary Stevens learned of the incident, he ordered Zwicker not to appear at the public session, and announced that he would testify himself.

  Once again I seemed to be the only person with enough credibility in both camps to suggest a compromise. Eisenhower was away on a golfing vacation, and I wanted to keep the situation from spilling over into a public brawl. However unconscionable McCarthy’s treatment of Zwicker may have been, the fact remained that the Army was on very weak ground as far as the Peress case was concerned. The mistake may have been understandable, but it was a mistake.

  Working closely with Jerry Persons, the White House congressional liaison officer, I arranged a meeting in my office in the Capitol. Stevens came with the Army’s counsel, John Adams. Also present were Persons, Bill Rogers, Bill Knowland, Everett Dirksen, and Jack Martin, who had been Senator Taft’s administrative assistant and was now on the White House staff.

  Both Stevens and Adams seemed to have the naïve idea that they could go in and finesse the Peress case at the outset by admitting the Army’s errors and then move on to the Zwicker incident and talk about how badly McCarthy had behaved. I said that they should certainly try to do that if they could, but I reminded them that it was McCarthy as chairman, not Stevens as witness, who would control the hearing.

  We agreed that Dirksen should try to arrange a luncheon meeting with Stevens and McCarthy for the next day.

  The luncheon was held in Dirksen’s office, next door to mine in the Capitol. The meal consisted of fried chicken, peas, french fried potatoes, and hearts of lettuce. Within a few hours, the press had tagged it the “chicken luncheon,” and that bland menu turned into one of the most controversial repasts of the 1950s.

  From the beginning the meeting was stormy. In addition to McCarthy and Stevens, only the three Republican senators on McCarthy’s subcommittee—Dirksen, Potter, and Mundt—were invited. As soon as the luncheon broke up Mundt filled me in on what had taken place. At first there had appeared to be no ground for compromise, but Mundt finally negotiated a written agreement that Army witnesses would appear and answer questions when called before McCarthy’s subcommittee. There was an understanding, not mentioned in the agreement itself, that McCarthy would treat these witnesses respectfully.

  Stevens telephoned me as soon as he got back to the Pentagon, and he seemed fairly happy with the way things had worked out. Within an hour, however, McCarthy casually told a reporter that Stevens could not have surrendered more “abjectly if he had gotten down on his knees.”

  Since the text of the Mundt agreement did not explicitly state that McCarthy would treat the witnesses respectfully, McCarthy’s remark made the agreement appear to be a complete capitulation to him. Around 11:30 that night I got a call from Stevens. He was in a highly emotional state. He said that he had decided to issue a statement the following day and then resign. I told him to quit talking about resigning and suggested that in the morning we could talk about what kind of statement could be made.

  At that point, Eisenhower returned to Washington. He immediately tried to get the luncheon participants to issue another statement that might resolve the situation. McCarthy proved adamant. The President then asked me to work with Stevens, Sherman Adams, and Jerry Persons in drafting a statement that Stevens could issue from the White House. We worked all afternoon in Persons’s East Wing office while Eisenhower, probably to relieve the tremendous anger he felt, practiced chip shots on the South Lawn.

  We took the draft to him in the Family Quarters, and he approved it. In the statement, Stevens said that he had received assurances from subcommittee members that there would be no more browbeating or humiliation of his officers and that he would “never accede to the abuse of Army personnel under any circumstances, including committee hearings.”

  A few days later, Eisenhower decided to issue his own statement on the Peress case. He mentioned his decision at a congressional leadership meeting on March 1, and I made a diary note about it:

  At the conclusion of the meeting, the President on his own initiative brought up the Stevens thing. He said that he was preparing to make the statement on it at his press conference and that one thing he wanted to say was that in fighting communism we could not destroy Americanism.

  Saltonstall [Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts] said that he thought the Army had made a mistake in not admitting its error in the Peress case. The President reacted sharply and said that the Army had admitted it in a letter to McCarthy and in a public statement.

  Saltonstall came back by saying it had not admitted it clearly enough. Knowland very emphatically defended the Senators for the action they took at the luncheon with Stevens. He said that the Army’s conduct in this case was inexcusable and that such a hearing on television would have been even worse than the situation with which we are confronted at this time. He tore sheets of paper off his note pad for emphasis. I don’t know when I have seen him quite so stirred up on a matter as he was on this one.

  At the conclusion of the meeting the President said he was going to have a talk with me about this matter and attempt to get the thing in perspective.

  By this time Eisenhower’s reaction to the whole incident had become very emotional. As an Army man he was embarrassed by the Army’s blunder and annoyed that it had been paraded through the newspapers. As party leader, he was worried about the way the issue was polarizing Republicans and giving the Democrats aid and comfort as the congressional elections approached. As President, he was offended by McCarthy’s tactics, techniques, and personality. He wanted his statement to say that those who investigated communism were as great a danger as the communists themselves, and that the methods of investigators were the same as communist methods.

  I believed that such a statement at that time would cause Eisenhower and the party more trouble than he or his White House staff and liberal friends who were urging it could imagine. A poll in January 1954 found that 50 percent of the people had a favorable opinion of McCarthy and only 29 percent had an unfavorable opinion.

  I was again able to work out a compromise, and on March 3 Eisenhower opened his press conference by reading a long statement that adopted most of my suggestions and some of my language. It said: “In opposing communism, we are defeating ourselves if either by design or through carelessness we use methods that do not conform to the American sense of justice and fair play.”

  For almost three years the leaders of the Democratic Party had stood on the sidelines, watching the Republicans slug it out over McCarthy. As Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic Leader in the Senate, put it, “I will not commit my party to some high school debate on the subject ‘Resolved, that communism is good for the United States,’ with my party taking affirmative.” But as both parties began to gear up for the 1954 elections, it became clear that the bitterly sensational Peress–Zwicker–Stevens affair had created a target of opportunity: McCarthy and McCarthyism could now safely be exploited by the Democrats.

  On March 6, Adlai Stevenson, as titular head of the Democratic Party, fired the first shot of the off-year election campaign. In a televised
speech he blasted Eisenhower’s leadership and mocked what he portrayed as his weakness in refusing to confront and control McCarthy.

  The immediate problem of who should reply to Stevenson was discussed at length during a Republican leadership meeting at the White House on March 8. Finally the President looked straight at me. “I am going to make a suggestion, even though he is present, that I think we probably ought to use Dick more than we have been,” he said. “He can sometimes take positions which are more political than it would be expected that I take. The difficulty with the McCarthy problem is that anybody who takes it on runs the risk of being called a pink. Dick has had experience in the communist field, and therefore he would not be subject to criticism.”

  After the meeting, Eisenhower took me into his small private office next to the Oval Office. He said that he would recommend treating McCarthy and Stevenson with an easy backhand rather than making them the subject of the whole speech. One of the reasons he disliked McCarthy was that he felt McCarthy was drawing too much attention away from the administration’s positive programs.

  This was not a speech I looked forward to writing or delivering. No matter how it was done, it was bound to alienate large segments of the party and large segments of the public. What it really involved was what Eisenhower himself had purposely avoided for the past two years: determining the administration’s policy on McCarthy. But now with the election coming up and the Democrats beginning to stir, it was clear that we could no longer afford the luxury of trying to deal piecemeal and behind the scenes with each new crisis McCarthy created.

  The broadcast was set for Saturday night, March 13, so I would have only five days of preparation. I wrote dozens of outlines and drafts, and by Friday morning I felt that I had condensed them into a speech that was the best that could be done in the circumstances.

  I had planned to spend Friday in seclusion going over my notes. I took a room at the Statler Hotel and left word that I was to be disturbed only in case of an emergency.

  About 10 A.M., I was informed that I had an urgent call. It was Bill Knowland, furious because someone in the White House had leaked an unflattering item about him to a newspaper columnist. He said he could not put up with such internal sabotage any longer and was going to call a conference of the Senate Republicans to submit his resignation as Majority Leader. I tried to calm him down and convince him that he should wait until after my speech before doing anything.

  I had just resumed work on the speech when a call came through from Tom Stephens, Eisenhower’s Appointments Secretary, saying that the President had just asked if I could come over to talk to him before he went to Camp David for the weekend. I walked across Lafayette Square to the White House and was immediately ushered into the Oval Office. A few days later I recalled the conversation in my diary:

  He said that first, he didn’t think I needed advice on a political speech, and that I had his complete confidence in my ability to handle it.

  He said, however, he felt that he knew what lifted people and he was convinced that it was necessary to get across to them that we had a progressive, dynamic program which benefited all the people.

  He did advise that I work a smile or two into the program. I told him that that was one of my difficulties and some people had suggested that was one thing I should try to do. He suggested I might work a smile in with regard to my comments on Stevenson. I told him that I planned to stick a few barbs into him, and then he suggested he was perfectly content that I do so but that he thought it was best to laugh at him rather than to hit him meanly.

  On Stevenson’s attack on his defense program, he said, “What qualification does Stevenson have on this subject? Who is he?”

  He pointed out that Lincoln and Washington, our two greatest Presidents, were men who were subjected to considerable attack and who never indulged in personalities. He said, “Now be sure and don’t put me on the same level, but it might be well subtly to work in that fact as you answer Stevenson.”

  He suggested that I tell of Hiss and my part in that case. He said, “After all, there are great numbers of people who think that McCarthy got Hiss.” He said, “I want you to know that I put you on the top of my list in Chicago because you had gotten Hiss and you had done it decently.” He said that was also the reason he had selected me to do this broadcast.

  He said, “Try to get across to the people that we are working for a program for America, and that the little snapping at our heels isn’t going to deter us.” He suggested I might get in the fact he had commanded 5 million troops in Europe.

  Stevenson’s speech had been made before a cheering partisan audience at a Democratic fund-raising dinner; it had been one of his characteristically arch performances. I decided to try to convey the opposite impression, so I spoke in a calm and low-keyed manner in front of a plain backdrop. I purposely chose simple words and graphic examples. During my preparation for the speech, I tried always to bear in mind that my primary audience was the large middle ground of public opinion that believed that, regardless of McCarthy’s tactics, there was no gentle way to deal with communists. I tried, therefore, to come up with some idea or some turn of phrase that would make my position memorable and unmistakable.

  Now, I can imagine some of you will say, “Why all this hullabaloo about being fair when you are dealing with a gang of traitors?” As a matter of fact, I have heard people say, “After all, we are dealing with a bunch of rats. What we ought to do is go out and shoot them.”

  Well, I agree they are a bunch of rats. But just remember this. When you go out to shoot rats, you have to shoot straight, because when you shoot wildly, it not only means that the rats may get away more easily—but you make it easier on the rats. Also you might hit someone else who is trying to shoot rats, too. So, we have to be fair—for two very good reasons: one, because it is right; and two, because it is the most effective way of doing the job.

  Eisenhower called me from Camp David with his congratulations. “As you know, Dick,” he said, “I am not one who likes to use flattery, but I want you to know that I think you did a magnificent job and the very best that could have been done under the circumstances.” I said that the speech would not satisfy either extreme of opinion; he replied he thought it would satisfy 85 percent of the people and that was what was important. “The people who are violently pro-McCarthy or anti-McCarthy will never be satisfied with anything except all-out war,” he said. He seemed very pleased that I had smiled a couple of times during the speech and said that at one point he had turned to the others in the room with him and said, “There’s that smile I told Dick to use.”

  At the meeting of legislative leaders the following Monday morning, Eisenhower was in the best spirits he had been in for a long time. My speech seemed to have buoyed him by giving voice to his own frustrations over McCarthy and by providing some focus for the administration’s efforts.

  The March 13 speech marked the beginning of a new phase of the McCarthy episode, a phase that turned out to be the beginning of the end. By the time the Army–McCarthy hearings began five weeks later, those who knew McCarthy said that he seemed to have fallen apart. In my diary for March 22, I recounted a conversation with Len Hall:

  Len seemed to feel that Joe was beginning to blow up and that he was in no condition whatever to attend a hearing and to participate in it.

  The same view was expressed by Karl Mundt when I talked to him on the phone. He had talked to Joe until two o’clock the night before and he said it was pretty grim with Jean [McCarthy’s wife] almost in tears, and him having very little influence due to the fact that Joe said that he knew his political life was at stake and that he was not going to agree to anything that would make it difficult for him to defend himself.

  Len Hall said when he had been in to see Joe a couple of days before, when he came up to the apartment door Joe opened it and had a gun in his hand. Apparently he was carrying one all the time because of the threats that had been made against him.

  Ma
jor shifts in public opinion now began to appear. A Gallup poll at the end of March showed that a solid 46 percent favored McCarthy and 36 percent disapproved of him. By August a dramatic reversal had occurred: while 36 percent still held firm in their approval, now 51 percent disapproved. As soon as the first cracks appeared in his public support, a startling erosion set in. Just a few months earlier the Republican National Committee had been calling McCarthy an asset to the party. Now there was an effort to write him off as soon as possible.

  For almost two months, from April 22 to June 17, the grotesque melodrama of the Army–McCarthy hearings unfolded each day in the Senate Caucus Room. Eisenhower privately called the hearings “a damn shameful spectacle,” and he urged that everything possible be done to get them over with as quickly as possible. But there was nothing we could do. The hearings became a national obsession. People stayed home from work to see the key confrontations. The posturing before the cameras on both sides repelled me, and after the first day I did not watch any of them. As I told a reporter, “I just prefer professional actors to amateurs.”

  On July 30, Vermont Republican Senator Ralph Flanders introduced Senate Resolution 301: “Resolved, That the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, is unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate, is contrary to senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned.” On August 2, by a vote of 75 to 12, the Senate adopted a resolution to appoint a select committee to consider the Flanders resolution. The committee was chaired by Senator Arthur V. Watkins, a stern Mormon from Utah. None of them, including the freshman senator from North Carolina, Sam Ervin, had taken a strong public stand on McCarthy.

  After almost a month of hearings, the Watkins Committee unanimously recommended that McCarthy be censured on two counts: for contempt of the Senate because he had refused to appear before a subcommittee investigating his finances in 1952, and for his abuse of General Zwicker. The vote was postponed until after the November elections.