Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

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  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue

  PART 1 – 1953: PRIORITIES

  1. The First Confrontation

  2. “Don’t Join the Book Burners!”

  3. “You’re in the Army Now!”

  4. The Secretary and the Senator

  5. The Turning Point

  PART 2 – 1954: MOBILIZATION

  6. “Eisenhower’s First Move”

  7. “Not Fit to Wear That Uniform”

  8. Saving Robert Stevens

  9. Eisenhower in Command

  10. A Political D-Day

  PART 3 – 1954: VINDICATION

  11. “A War of Maneuver”

  12. Countdown

  13. The Eisenhower-McCarthy Hearings

  14. Protecting the President

  15. “No Sense of Decency?”

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  To William Bragg Ewald, Jr., and Fred I. Greenstein, pioneers a generation ago in the study of Eisenhower and McCarthy

  PREFACE

  Beginning in 1950, Wisconsin’s junior senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, threw the United States into turmoil with his reckless, unsubstantiated charges that a variety of citizens, especially government employees, were Soviet agents. McCarthy’s disregard for the truth, his insatiable appetite for headlines, and his willingness to damage reputations turned “McCarthyism” into an enduring epithet in our political language.

  Yet by the end of 1954, McCarthy’s political influence had been essentially destroyed. How did that happen? The answer—fully told for the first time in this book—is that Dwight D. Eisenhower made it happen.

  Ironically, in 1953, due to Eisenhower’s election, McCarthy acquired a new platform for his crusade. The Republicans held a one-vote majority in the Senate. As a result McCarthy was appointed chair of the Government Operations Committee and its permanent investigative subcommittee. In that capacity, the senator subpoenaed witnesses, conducted one-senator hearings, accused witnesses of guilt by association and labeled as “obviously communist” anyone who dared to invoke constitutional protections against self-incrimination.

  In 1953, the nation was still at war in Korea and recovering from the traumas of depression and World War II. The Cold War with the Soviet Union created a climate of fear that was the lifeblood of McCarthyism, especially the fear of subversion. But in January 1954, that began to change. McCarthy’s prestige was at its zenith, with a Gallup Poll approval rating of 50 percent favorable, 29 percent unfavorable. But Eisenhower had concluded that the senator was more than a nuisance; he was a threat to the president’s foreign policy goals, to his legislative program, and to his party’s and his own electoral prospects.1

  So Eisenhower did something breathtaking and dangerous; he launched a clandestine operation designed to wrap a scandal around the neck of a prestigious US senator in the president’s own party in an election year. That is what the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, lasting almost two months, were really about.2

  THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

  The standard explanations for McCarthy’s political demise are well known: McCarthy, an alcoholic, did himself in; he was damaged by Edward R. Murrow’s legendary See It Now television program; his reputation was tarnished by the unsympathetic glare of the television cameras and by his confrontation with the wily Boston attorney Joseph Nye Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings. In this conventional version, the final nail in McCarthy’s political coffin was the censure vote by the US Senate on December 2, 1954, which McCarthy lost 67 to 22.

  In recent years, pro-McCarthy revisionists have attempted to repair the senator’s reputation by arguing that his political enemies destroyed him to cover up Soviet espionage in the US government. Eisenhower took the possibility of subversion seriously but firmly believed that his methods would be more effective and equitable than McCarthy’s demagogic tactics.3

  In 1984, William Ewald published a book called Who Killed Joe McCarthy? Ewald drew on an immense cache of documents that Fred Seaton, the assistant secretary of defense, had collected on President Eisenhower’s orders during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Seaton possessed thousands of pages of letters, phone transcripts, memoranda, and documents that he had taken with him when he became secretary of the interior and—when he left the government—had hauled home to Nebraska. Ewald, who worked for Seaton at the Interior Department, recalled Seaton pointing to a locked file and saying “I’ll never open that until you-know-who tells me to,” referring to Eisenhower. When Seaton died, his “Eyes Only” file was donated to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, where I have reviewed virtually every page. In addition, I have had access to documents declassified since Ewald and other leading authors on McCarthy published their books in the 1980s.4

  Joseph McCarthy’s senatorial correspondence has been sealed for the lifetime of his daughter. But my objective is to tell the Eisenhower story that has been so long neglected by historians.5

  This is a book about a particular era in US history—a time when power brokers embraced attitudes and behaviors unacceptable today. Attitudes regarding race, gender, and homosexuality have changed but, in the 1950s, gays and their relationships were not just denigrated, they were openly persecuted. Just the rumor—not the fact—that a government official was homosexual could cost that person a job. Homosexuals were widely perceived to be security risks, subject to blackmail by communists. As the reader will discover, the Eisenhower administration reflected the prejudice and discriminatory practices of the era.

  This is a story about strategic deception, a realm in which Dwight Eisenhower was demonstrably expert. In 1944, the Allies under Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower successfully fooled the German leadership about when and where the largest military expeditionary force in human history would land in Europe. Operation Fortitude involved fake armies, dummy landing craft and airfields, fraudulent radio transmissions, and misleading leaks through diplomatic channels and double agents. Eisenhower understood that carefully planned, rigorously implemented deception could confuse an enemy until he makes a mistake; then he can be ambushed. That, politically, is what Eisenhower did to McCarthy. Only a half-dozen trusted aides knew what was really happening. Others—including most of the era’s great reporters—missed the story.6

  Much of the conventional wisdom includes the enduring myth about the Eisenhower presidency—that Ike was a disengaged, grandfatherly president more interested in playing golf than in the effective exercise of leadership. That legend—now thoroughly discredited by two decades of intensive research—was initially generated by historians who never forgave the popular general for defeating Adlai Stevenson in 1952. But in part, Ike was the author of his own myth. He was obsessive about protecting the Oval Office from anything controversial.

  In particular, critics grumble that Eisenhower failed to speak out about the great domestic issues of his time: civil rights and McCarthyism. His detractors depict him as downright cowardly in his response to the Red-baiting senator. Many would agree with the columnist Joseph Alsop, who, in 1954, after listening to an Eisenhower news conference statement intended to counter M
cCarthy, exclaimed, “Why, the yellow son of a bitch!”7

  Ike had not won the war in Europe by making speeches. He did not believe that presidential rhetoric would damage McCarthy. History shows that presidential oratory rarely results in historic change; transformative progress is most possible when a president, faced with a crisis, seizes the opportunity to exercise leadership; consider Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War or Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Depression. However, pundits persist in rating presidents for their skillful use of the “bully pulpit.”8

  Complaints that Eisenhower took too long to act against McCarthy are contrary to the facts. Any effort to destroy McCarthy during 1953 would probably have failed. There were eight to twelve senators who frequently supported McCarthy’s positions on communist subversion; therefore, the president lacked an anti-McCarthy majority. Though Democrats supported the president on most foreign policy issues, leaders such as Lyndon B. Johnson delighted in treating McCarthy as “a Republican problem.”9

  President Harry Truman had openly denounced McCarthy for three years, but his attacks had only enhanced the senator’s prestige; Ike ruined him in half that time. The Eisenhower operation against McCarthy in 1954 was not without its glitches. The general understood that in war or political conflict, a commander must constantly adjust a strategic mission to new realities. He often repeated the maxim “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”10

  In this case, the planning involved Eisenhower’s rigorous delegation of operations to a half-dozen trusted subordinates. Those men were expected, like foot soldiers in a war, to put their lives and reputations on the line to protect the president and extinguish McCarthy’s influence. Dwight Eisenhower’s deceptive operation, mediated through his trusted lieutenants, “killed” Joe McCarthy.

  PROLOGUE

  Friday, October 3, 1952, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Eisenhower-for-President motorcade was preparing to drive to the Milwaukee Arena, where General Eisenhower would climax a long day of campaigning with a 9:00 p.m. speech.

  The candidate had decreed that no candidate running for office would ride with him and Mrs. Eisenhower. Douglas Price, an aide to Eisenhower who had organized the motorcade, recalled that the decision reflected “Eisenhower’s disdain” for Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The senator from Wisconsin had not been just banned from the general’s car; he had been assigned to car number six, behind lower-ranking Wisconsin Republican officials—a transparent snub. Price was alarmed when he saw McCarthy “bolt out of car number six,” walking briskly toward Eisenhower’s car. But Price was relieved when he saw the senator “shoulder his way into a car behind Ike’s car.”1

  It had been a difficult day for the candidate. Because of his dislike of McCarthy, he had tried to avoid campaigning in Wisconsin. But he had been pressured to do so by the Republican National Committee, which was concerned about winning Wisconsin’s electoral votes. Ike was forced to campaign with the senator all day long. His brother Milton said that Ike “loathed McCarthy as much as any human being could loath another.” Eisenhower deemed McCarthy to be “a curse on the American scene, both domestically and in the world.”2

  THE RISE OF JOE MCCARTHY

  While he was president of Columbia University and, later, as commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Paris, Eisenhower had observed McCarthy’s rise. The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the communist takeover of China in 1949, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 had reinforced the public’s fear of a global communist conspiracy.

  For voters, the specter of spies in their midst was especially frightening. In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former communist, had alleged that Alger Hiss, a former adviser to President Roosevelt, had spied for the Soviets. Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury, due in part to efforts by California senator Richard M. Nixon, Ike’s subsequent vice presidential running mate. On February 3, 1950, British authorities arrested Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who had worked on the atom bomb in the United States, for channeling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

  Six days after Fuchs’s arrest, McCarthy delivered a speech at the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. The senator announced that he had “here in my hand” the names of 205 communists in the State Department. That he did not actually have those names did not trouble him. When repeatedly asked for them, he dissembled, finally reducing the number to 57. William Ewald wrote that, from Wheeling onward, McCarthy presided over “a permanent floating press conference. Lights, cameras, microphones followed him everywhere.”3

  In 1951, McCarthy attacked George C. Marshall, Eisenhower’s wartime boss and military mentor, who had served President Truman as secretary of state and defense. On June 14, on the floor of the Senate, McCarthy effectively charged Marshall with treason. “It was Marshall,” the senator intoned repeatedly, who had supported Josef Stalin’s demands at the postwar conferences, delivered China to the communists, and drawn the dividing line at the 38th parallel in Korea, setting the stage for the North Korean invasion. McCarthy accused Marshall of spearheading “a conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.” McCarthy converted that speech into a book entitled America’s Retreat from Victory: The Story of George Catlett Marshall.4

  Eisenhower was incensed about McCarthy’s assault on his colleague. On August 22, 1952, at a news conference in Denver, the general was asked about charges that George Marshall was a traitor. He rose from his chair, marched to the center of the room and declared, “There was nothing of disloyalty in General Marshall’s soul. . . . If he was not a perfect example of patriotism and loyal servant of the United States, I never saw one.” He concluded, “I have no patience with anyone who can find in his record of service for this country anything to criticize.”5

  On October 2, Eisenhower campaigned across Illinois, arriving in Peoria that afternoon, preparing to campaign in Wisconsin. Earlier that day, a plane carrying Governor Walter Kohler of Wisconsin and Senator McCarthy touched down in Peoria. That evening, Ike reluctantly agreed to meet with McCarthy in his hotel room. He chose not to reveal what was said in that meeting. Two aides, Tom Stephens and Kevin McCann, sat nearby. Stephens recalled hearing nothing, but McCann, years later, near death, thought he remembered that “the air turned blue” and that he had never heard the general “so cold bloodedly skin a man.” That account is open to question. Wisconsin was a pivotal state in the campaign, with twelve electoral votes. However much Ike detested McCarthy, he was unlikely to have confronted the senator so harshly prior to campaigning with him the next day. When McCarthy emerged from the meeting, a New York Times reporter, William Lawrence, asked him what had happened. “We had a very, very pleasant conversation,” McCarthy responded, noting that he planned to introduce the general the next day in Appleton, the senator’s hometown. However, in Appleton, following McCarthy’s introduction, Eisenhower made no mention of McCarthy or support for the senator’s reelection campaign. That foreshadowed his strategy as president: he would refuse to use McCarthy’s name in public.6

  A REGRETTABLE DECISION

  As his car moved through the streets the night of October 3, Eisenhower was still smarting from a painful experience on the campaign train that afternoon. Aware of his animosity toward McCarthy, Governor Kohler had asked to see an advance copy of his speech. Reading it, he discovered a paragraph—seventy-four words long—praising the patriotism of George C. Marshall.

  Eisenhower was looking forward to sticking a rhetorical thumb in the senator’s eye as McCarthy sat on stage in Milwaukee. The paragraph was simple and straightforward, noting that there had been “charges of disloyalty” against Marshall and concluding “I know him, as a man and a soldier, to be dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America.” Kohler feared that offending the senator could cost Eisenhower the state’s electoral votes. He quickly enlisted allies, including Sherma
n Adams, Ike’s chief aide on the campaign train, and convinced Adams that including the paragraph would reap more trouble than it was worth.

  Adams arranged a meeting with Eisenhower. After listening to the argument, Ike interrupted, “Are you telling me this paragraph should come out?” “Yes,” responded Adams. “Take it out,” Eisenhower snapped. When Gabriel Hauge, a speechwriter, accosted the candidate to confirm the news, Ike growled an angry “Yes!” Eisenhower, Hauge recalled, “was purple down to the root of his neck, and glowering.”7

  An experienced world leader but an inexperienced party politician, Eisenhower capitulated, failing to express support for the man who had made him a wartime leader. Fred Seaton, the Nebraska publisher handling the press for the campaign, had been unaware of Ike’s decision to drop the seventy-four words. He had already hinted to New York Times reporter William Lawrence that a paragraph praising Marshall would be in the address.8

  That night, Eisenhower delivered a fervent cold warrior’s speech, sounding much like McCarthy. He deplored how communism had “insinuated itself into our schools, our public forums, some of our news channels, some of our labor unions, and—most terrifyingly—into our Government itself.” He decried subversion in “virtually every department, every agency, every bureau, every section of our Government.” He castigated a government run by men who “condoned the surrender of whole nations to an implacable enemy,” with that enemy “infiltrating our most secret counsels.” Those who had allowed this to happen, he declared, were guilty of “treason itself.” After the speech, Eisenhower tried to avoid McCarthy but McCarthy aggressively pushed into the general’s presence and forced him to shake hands.9

  The next morning, William Lawrence’s report in The New York Times stated that although Ike had been unenthusiastic about campaigning with McCarthy, “General Eisenhower did bow to the Wisconsin Senator’s urging and eliminate from his Milwaukee speech tonight a defense of his old friend and chief, General of the Army George C. Marshall.” According to Lawrence, Eisenhower had informed McCarthy at their Peoria meeting of his intent to praise Marshall. McCarthy had allegedly told Eisenhower that “he had no particular objection to General Eisenhower’s saying anything he wished to say, but he believed a defense of General Marshall could be made better before another audience.”10