Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  CHAPTER 2

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  “DON’T JOIN THE BOOK BURNERS!”

  By April 1953, the pattern of Joe McCarthy’s relationship with the Eisenhower White House had been set. Still fixated on the State Department, he would test Eisenhower’s will with small skirmishes, preparatory to opening up a bigger, headline-grabbing investigative target.

  On March 28, the day following Charles Bohlen’s confirmation by the Senate, McCarthy announced he had negotiated an agreement with the Greek owners of 242 New York–based merchant ships to end all trade with Communist China, North Korea, and eastern portions of the Soviet Union. The agreement, he boasted, would have “some of the effect of a naval blockade.” Moreover, his representatives were “negotiating” with additional Greek shipowners in London.1

  Alarm bells sounded in the White House and the State Department. The senator’s bold interference with executive-branch authority over foreign affairs confirmed columnist William S. White’s conclusion that although McCarthy had lost the battle over Bohlen, “his war goes on.” White concluded, “Mr. McCarthy’s essential power may in no sense be lessened, and may even be increased.” At the height of the Bohlen debate, McCarthy had said to one reporter, “You wait, we’re gonna get Dulles’ head.”2

  The administration dispatched Harold E. Stassen, the director of the Mutual Security Administration (the successor agency to the Marshall Plan), to testify at McCarthy’s closed-door subcommittee hearing on the Greek shippers. Stassen reported to Secretary Dulles that McCarthy had declared that “anyone who does not agree with him is trying to kill more boys in Korea.” Stassen had shot back that McCarthy was “undermining” the administration’s efforts to make peace.3

  The White House moved quickly to rein in the situation. On April 1, Vice President Richard Nixon arranged a luncheon for Secretary Dulles and Senator McCarthy. Nixon had apparently warned the senator that he was wading into deep constitutional waters. The day before the luncheon, McCarthy had backpedaled in a letter to the president, carefully avoiding the word “negotiate” that he had so freely employed at his news conference. “No agreement as such was made with the Committee, nor did the Committee assume any obligation,” he wrote. He asserted that the agreement had been reached among the shippers “and presented to us.”4

  McCarthy emerged from his luncheon meeting with Dulles, uncharacteristically quiet. Beseieged by reporters, the secretary, he said, would issue a statement and they would have “nothing to say” otherwise. Dulles’s statement called what had happened with the Greek shippers an “informal understanding”; the shippers “had voluntarily agreed among themselves” to cease trading with communist nations. He thanked McCarthy for pledging to communicate future developments “to the proper authorities.” Arthur Krock, the New York Times pundit, noted McCarthy’s abandonment of his original assertion that he had negotiated an agreement with the shippers: “How many times can’t you mean what you said?” he asked. Columnists Stewart and Joseph Alsop read higher ambitions into McCarthy’s shipping gambit. “It is almost universally agreed,” they wrote, “that McCarthy’s objective is the Presidency and nothing less.”5

  When asked at his news conference the following day if Senator McCarthy’s agreement with Greek ship owners had “undermined”—Stassen’s word—administration policy, President Eisenhower suggested that “infringed” might be a more appropriate term. “The exclusive power of negotiating such arrangements, anything that is legal, belongs to the Executive,” he said. A “misguided” action by anyone else could not alter that. Reminded of McCarthy’s use of the term “negotiate,” at his Saturday news conference, he tersely replied, “How do you negotiate when there is nothing that you can commit?” Obtaining “promises” or “some kind of expression of opinion or intention” might take place. “But that,” he said, “in my mind, is not negotiation.”

  When asked whether he was “unhappy” with what had happened, Eisenhower snapped, “I am not in the slightest bit unhappy. . . . The mere fact that some little incident arises is not going to disturb me. I have been scared by experts, in war and in peace, and I am not frightened about this.” His subtle message to Joe McCarthy: “I am not scared of you; you, in fact, don’t matter very much.”6

  THE EISENHOWER WAY

  Eisenhower still refused to take on McCarthy in public. When supporters pressed him to abandon that approach, his response was unrelenting. “The President of the United States cannot afford to name names,” he wrote Harry Bullis, a General Mills executive. “Nothing would probably please [McCarthy] more than to get the publicity that would be generated by public repudiation by the President.” To the diplomat William Phillips, he wrote, “I deplore and deprecate the table-pounding, name-calling methods columnists so much love.” Though he might relish “a good fight,” he had learned that “such methods are normally futile.”7

  Eisenhower never repudiated his McCarthy strategy, even after leaving the White House. William Ewald, who assisted the former president in writing his memoirs, recalled an anecdote that Ike eventually deleted from the manuscript. His brother Milton had urged him “to announce to the world that I strongly disapproved of all that McCarthy was doing and all that he stood for.” Eisenhower had responded that attacking McCarthy would only “greatly enhance his publicity value without achieving any constructive purpose.” He reaffirmed his intention to publicly ignore McCarthy: “I would not demean myself or the Presidency by getting in the gutter with him.” On another occasion, Milton urged Ike to make an anti-McCarthy speech that would “tear him apart.” The president countered that such a strategy would “only backfire” and “probably draw down upon me the fury of the entire United States Senate because, let me tell you, it’s a club. No president goes around attacking one member of the Senate without having the rest of them coalesce behind him.”8

  Eisenhower’s approach to dealing with McCarthy was not nearly as passive as it appeared. He instinctively understood that treating him as inconsequential would drive the senator into self-destructive behaviors; he sensed that repeated presidential snubs over time would have a cumulative effect. There was another, pragmatic aspect to the Eisenhower strategy. Given the senator’s demagogic skills, the president knew he must avoid saying or doing anything that would make himself, not McCarthy, the issue.

  In spite of his dismissive public demeanor, the president was privately annoyed at McCarthy’s antics. On April 3, the day after his news conference, Ike wrote his brother Edgar that “for the past couple of days I have been completely fed up and it is high time I was getting away from here for three or four days. Sometimes I think only a miracle will make it possible.”9

  THE TROUBLED VOICE

  Eisenhower and Dulles had handled McCarthy’s foray into negotiating shipping agreements with minimal fuss. That would not be the case with McCarthy’s assault on the Voice of America (VOA). President Truman had placed most foreign information activities, including the Voice, under the umbrella of the International Information Administration (IIA), an agency of the State Department. When Eisenhower took office, that agency had a staff of about ten thousand—around 40 percent of the State Department’s personnel—and a budget exceeding $100 million per year.10

  Early on, Eisenhower and Dulles agreed that the propaganda operation should probably have its own independent agency, outside the State Department. They had not had time to act on that perception when, on February 13—while the fight over Bohlen’s confirmation was still under way—McCarthy announced that his subcommittee would hold televised hearings into “management and subversion” in Voice of America operations. At least fifty employees had been subpoenaed, and a personnel shake-up was rumored. Following his subcommittee’s executive session, McCarthy told reporters that “there are people in the Voice of America who are doing a rather effective job of sabotaging Dulles’ and Eisenhower’s foreign policy program.”11

  McCarthy had zoned in on a particularly vulnerable agency in th
e State Department. On February 16, Secretary Dulles called Sherman Adams, “bothered” about the VOA, which was “not in very good condition and is now being investigated by Sen. McCarthy.” Speechwriter Emmet Hughes described the agency as a “soggy, fog-bound information program.” Adams ordered his deputy, Bernard Shanley, to brief Eisenhower about “the barrel of rotten apples we have in the Voice.”12

  Dulles let McCarthy’s agitation pressure him into a hasty decision on new VOA leadership. He recruited Dr. Robert L. Johnson, the president of Temple University, to take over the VOA and “help clean it up.” Johnson turned out to be a troublesome choice. He insisted on the need to “study” the VOA for sixty to ninety days, and he wanted an ironclad pledge that the agency would be separated from the State Department. Eisenhower and Dulles urgently wanted a new boss for the agency and had intended to postpone those matters until later. Somehow, Johnson misread his conversations with both men. When Eisenhower authorized the announcement of his appointment “to head and to study the entire operation of the Foreign Information Service,” Johnson threatened to back out. He did not want to “head” the agency without the preliminary study he deemed essential. The appointment was already public; if Johnson withdrew, McCarthy might subpoena the educator to testify about his misgivings.

  Eisenhower bluntly wrote Johnson that their “misunderstanding” had to be cleared up. First, no firm decision had yet been made to convert the IIA into “a separate agency of government.” Second, it was not acceptable for Johnson to “stay on some indefinite, indeterminate status for a matter of months.” The VOA needed “firm and quick direction.” Therefore, the “study function” should last “a matter of days only—not of months.” Johnson finally capitulated to Eisenhower’s wishes, but this rocky start indicated his tenure would be short and stormy.13

  Meanwhile, in reaction to McCarthy’s investigation, panic had set in among VOA’s bureaucrats and librarians in the overseas libraries. On January 30, VOA officials instructed the libraries to avoid using “materials produced by controversial persons.” On February 18, VOA headquarters sent out the first of two directives forbidding the use of any books or materials written by communists. On February 25, the VOA libraries were ordered “to destroy the July 1946 issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.” Two months later, the order went out to remove works by authors who had refused to testify about their communist affiliations, resulting in the removal of books by almost two dozen writers, including the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett.14

  As if the VOA had not suffered enough adverse publicity, on March 4—two days after Robert Johnson began his new job—Raymond Kaplan, a forty-two-year-old radio engineer, threw himself in front of a truck near Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kaplan’s suicide note, leaked to the press, attributed his action to persecution by McCarthy’s subcommittee. “Once the dogs are set upon you,” Kaplan wrote his wife, “everything you have done since the beginning of time is suspect.” Kaplan believed that suicide was the only way he could protect his wife and son from being “continuously hounded for the rest of your lives.”15

  On March 18, under Robert Johnson’s new leadership, the VOA issued instructions moderating the previous Draconian rules about books in the libraries, permitting the use of “Communist material” solely to “expose Communist propaganda or refute Communist lies.” That action brought a loud protest from Senator McCarthy, resulting in a new directive from the State Department prohibiting outright the use of writings by “Communists, fellow travelers, et cetera.”16

  At that point, the White House gambled that leaking the word that the old organization’s days were numbered would take some steam out of McCarthy’s investigation. By March 20, “authoritative sources” disclosed that the IIA would be shut down after June 30 and replaced by an independent agency outside the State Department.17

  “SCUMMY SNOOPERS” IN EUROPE

  Once the Bohlen fight was settled, McCarthy dispatched his chief lieutenants to Europe to dig for dirt on the VOA. On April 2, Dulles informed European embassies and consulates that “Roy Cohn, Chief Counsel; David Schine, Chief Consultant, U.S. Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations” would be visiting Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, Bonn, Munich, and Vienna to investigate IIA programs. The two men, the secretary’s missive said, were to be extended “all possible courtesies” by US diplomats.

  On April 3, in an “eyes only” telegram, Dulles warned the chief US diplomats in Britain, France, Austria, and Germany that they had “no authority” to provide information to Cohn and Schine “re security matters or policy directives.” In particular, no information “contained in personnel security files will be divulged to investigators.” Later that day, he was infuriated to discover that Scott McLeod’s secretary had been spotted at the airport showing his “eyes only” telegram to Cohn and Schine as they prepared to depart.18

  After a brief stay in Paris, the two McCarthy aides took off for Bonn, Germany. On arrival, Cohn stated that they had already uncovered “millions of dollars’ worth of waste and mismanagement” in the IIA. The spectacle of Cohn and Schine rummaging for scandals in Germany surely concerned Eisenhower’s friends, who worried constantly about McCarthy exploiting Eisenhower’s postwar communist associations while in command there.

  Cohn and Schine’s antics in Europe also generated gossip about the men’s relationship, some of it salacious.19 One day in Bonn, the two men rushed back to their hotel to retrieve a notebook Schine had left behind. In the lobby, Schine batted Cohn over the head with a rolled-up magazine and they chased each other into Schine’s room. The hotel maid later found the room in a shambles. When asked about the incident, Cohn called the story “just one of many lies in this fantastic newspaper article.” Cohn introduced Schine as “a management expert,” saying he had “written a book about the definition of Communism,” a gross exaggeration about a six-page pamphlet. The European junket underlined a new reality: the Roy Cohn–David Schine relationship would become central to the conflict between Joe McCarthy and Dwight Eisenhower.20

  WAGING PEACE

  Dwight Eisenhower, focused on his Cold War priorities, appeared to pay little attention to the escapades of what one newspaper called the “Gold Dust Twins.”21 On April 15, when they arrived in Belgrade, Ike was working on the most important speech of his new presidency. Following the death of Stalin on March 5, Eisenhower had wrestled with options for reaching out to the new Soviet leadership. He decided to use his address, scheduled for April 16 before the annual meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, DC.

  That was a dangerous decision. Eisenhower knew his “Chance for Peace” speech would be delivered against the backdrop of McCarthy’s demagoguery on communist subversion, punctuated by headlines generated by Cohn and Schine on their European junket. On April 12, a feature-length article in The New York Times called Senator McCarthy “the most talked about man in the capital today,” next to the president. His strong opposition to Bohlen, his alleged agreement with Greek shipowners, and the hearings of his investigative subcommittee had raised his prestige to a new level. “All in Washington agree it is risky to quarrel with him,” the article concluded. In that climate, Eisenhower’s April 16 address clearly risked the charge from McCarthy that he was “soft on communism.”22

  Nevertheless, Ike stuck to his peacemaking priorities. He ruminated about themes for that speech with speechwriter Emmet Hughes. “The average citizen,” he told Hughes, “can’t—in a whole lifetime of work—earn as much money as it takes to make the jet plane that flies above his head.” He wanted to “convert all this armament spending into the things that raise living standards.” “I don’t feel like making any more speeches condemning the Russians,” the president concluded, “until I can offer some peace plan.”23

  The address took at least twelve drafts, not counting the president’s penciled edits, and was reviewed by the CIA, the Defense and State Departments, and key allies, including Wins
ton Churchill. After meeting with Eisenhower on April 12, Hughes complained to his assistant, Robert Kieve, that he had “come to the point where I just think the President’s hopeless” regarding speech preparation. Ike himself complained to Sherman Adams that “this speech preparation is too big a strain.”24

  The stress was such that Ike decided to get out of town. On April 13, he flew to Augusta, Georgia, to play golf, taking the speech with him. However, on the night of April 15, he suffered a painful abdominal attack. The morning of the speech, National Security Advisor Robert Cutler found the president “depleted and in general misery.” That night, Eisenhower moved slowly along the side of the crowded auditorium toward the podium; Cutler saw “sweat glistening on the President’s brow and cheeks.” Ike’s delivery was labored, Cutler recalled. “There was slackness in his robust voice; its hearty earnestness seemed mute. His big hands so tightly gripped the sides of the speaking lectern that I could see the whiteness of his knuckles.” During the speech, he thought the president seemed “a little dizzy and tremulous.”25

  Nevertheless, Eisenhower delivered a stirring address. “A nation’s hope of lasting peace,” he stated, “cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.” He deplored “the way of life forged by eight years of fear and force. What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road?”