Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  Eisenhower eloquently recounted the human costs of the Cold War:

  Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.26

  When he finished, the president walked slowly into a small, private parlor. Cutler found him there, “pale, covered with clammy perspiration.” Eisenhower said he felt “chilly” but was no longer in “misery”; the pain in his gut had subsided. The papers the next day reported that the president had been ill from “food poisoning,” had had “a slight fever,” and had returned immediately to Augusta, where his physician had put him to bed. The speech drew immediate praise from members of both parties and allied leaders abroad. In the wake of such effusive praise, McCarthy was silent.27

  On the day of speech, Roy Cohn and David Schine left Belgrade for Athens. They concluded their trip on April 20 with five hours in London, where the Financial Times labeled them “scummy snoopers,” and arrived the next morning back in Washington, DC. In an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Cohn charged that the State Department had put “a tail” on them during their trip, the purpose of which “was to feed all of sorts information and stories to the hostile press so they could smear us up a little bit.” In fact, the State Department had carefully monitored their travels, with frequent reports to Secretary Dulles.28

  INTERNAL SECURITY

  Throughout 1953, Eisenhower shadowboxed with McCarthy on the issue of who could best protect the country against communist subversion. The president understood that McCarthy’s obsession with subversion was aimed, however irresponsibly, at a genuine problem. In the midst of the Cold War, the government was legitimately concerned about Soviet spies, moles, and assets. Dramatizing that concern, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been convicted of espionage in March 1951 and condemned to death. On Eisenhower’s first day in office, appeals for clemency for the couple were waiting on his desk, but he did not grant clemency.29

  In his first meeting with Republican congressional leaders on January 26, Eisenhower had announced that he would employ government personnel on a “security rather than loyalty” basis, implementing the philosophy that “working for the Government is a privilege rather than a right.” He intended to move “vigorously to establish an adequate security program,” overseen by Attorney General Brownell.30

  Ostensibly, the Eisenhower program sought to protect the legitimate rights of employees, creating hearing advisory boards whose members came from outside the agency under investigation. The columnist Walter Lippmann, a frequent Eisenhower critic, deemed the new policy an improvement over President Truman’s approach; the former president’s program had been so focused on loyalty that a negative decision in a hearing could label the employee in question, justified or not, as “a spy and a traitor.” Eisenhower’s program, treating employment as “a privilege” without explicit loyalty implications, seemed more even-handed.31

  However, the program had its dark side: if an employee were deemed a security risk “by reason of personal habits or actions,” as Brownell put it, that opened the door to wholesale dismissal of persons who were not necessarily spies. The frequently cited categories included alcoholics, philanderers, “blabbermouths,” especially homosexuals, who were perceived as vulnerable to blackmail by communist agents. Eisenhower’s program proposal was not simply a reaction to McCarthy. But Brownell recalled that, as time passed, the president would “point to his program as the best way to destroy McCarthy and McCarthyism by taking the issue of internal security away from him and dealing with it in a responsible manner.”32

  Attorney General Brownell presented the final draft of the employee security program to the cabinet on April 27. Following the meeting, the White House issued Executive Order 10450, entitled “Security Requirements for Government Employment.” The opening lines of that document were vintage Eisenhower. The national security required that all persons “privileged”—the key word—“to be employed in the departments and agencies of the Government, shall be reliable, trustworthy, of good conduct and character”—i.e., not a “security risk”—“and of complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.” The order pledged “equitable treatment” for those seeking “the privilege”—that word again—of government employment.33

  THE TAFT PROBLEM

  When he began his first year in office, Eisenhower had necessarily relied on Republican Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft to manage relations with McCarthy. He had uncomfortably witnessed Taft’s capitulation to McCarthy’s demands for investigative powers, but he had been heartened by Taft’s steadfast defense of the Bohlen nomination.

  However, in his diary, Eisenhower called April 30 “one of the worst days I have experienced since January 20th.” When he had taken office, he had ordered departments and agencies to comb through Truman’s budget for savings. That morning, he presented Republican legislative leaders with recommended cuts of approximately $4.4 billion, an accomplishment in which he took great pride.

  What blindsided the president was that suddenly—in Ike’s words—“Senator Taft broke out in a violent objection to everything that had been done.” The majority leader angrily called the cuts insufficient and contended that they would “insure the decisive defeat of the Republican party in 1954.” He threatened “to go on public record” against the revised budget. In reaction to “the demagogic nature” of his tirade, the president’s temper quickly reached the boiling point. However, before he could explode, others seized control of the argument, giving Eisenhower time to contain himself and prevent a “completely unbridgeable” rupture in his relationship with Senator Taft.34

  Eisenhower did not know that Taft was a very sick man. Three weeks later, the senator entered Walter Reed Army Hospital for treatment for hip pain that had first erupted after a round of golf with the president in Augusta. He was diagnosed with cancer and never returned to full-time service in the Senate.35

  The April 30 incident encouraged Eisenhower to depend increasingly on Vice President Nixon for legislative and political counsel, including coping with McCarthy. By June 1, that transition was complete. Ike observed in his diary that Taft’s “irascible” personality made him “far from being a Dick Nixon, who is not only bright, quick and energetic—but loyal and cooperative.” On June 11, California Senator William Knowland, a McCarthy ally whom Eisenhower distrusted, assumed the leadership of the Senate Republicans. As a result, the president would need Nixon more than ever.36

  BURNING BOOKS

  Eisenhower complained about June 1953 being one of the most demanding times in his young presidency. At a cabinet meeting on June 5, Eisenhower said he needed “help to keep his disposition.” He felt particularly misused by the months-long controversy over banning books in the VOA’s overseas libraries. He was no fan of censorship, and he was thoroughly irritated at how the VOA and the State Department had handled McCarthy’s effort to ban books from the shelves at the overseas libraries. On June 14, the Alsop brothers called “book-burning” in those libraries “cowardly.” That day, the president, out of patience on the book censorship issue, traveled to New Hampshire to speak at Dartmouth College’s commencement.37

  Eisenhower’s remarks at Dartmouth have been characterized as “off t
he cuff” because no speechwriter was involved. Still, he had consistently argued that a president cannot indulge in loose talk; indeed, that had been his message to friends urging him to take on McCarthy. Bernard Shanley confirmed that Ike’s “off-the-cuff speeches are pretty well considered before he makes them.” That day, Eisenhower’s revulsion at McCarthy’s call for censorship boiled over.38

  To the students, Eisenhower quoted the maxim “The coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave man dies but once.” “It is not enough merely to say I love America,” he declared, “and to salute the flag and take off your hat as it goes by, and to help sing the Star Spangled Banner.” Then he delivered the provocative declaration that would be quoted the next day around the globe:

  Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?

  The statement was transparently anti-McCarthy. Eisenhower defended dissenters; even if their ideas “are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.” White House sources characterized the president’s comments at Dartmouth as “pure, premeditated and unadulterated Eisenhower.” McCarthy delivered a witty retort. “He couldn’t very well have been referring to me,” the senator said. “I have burned no books.”39

  At the president’s news conference on June 17, UPI reporter Merriman Smith asked if Eisenhower’s remarks at Dartmouth had been “critical of a school of thought represented by Senator McCarthy?” “Now, Merriman,” the president responded, “you have been around me long enough to know I never talk personalities.” He clarified that he did not support books designed “to persuade or propagandize America into communism” and he would not “propagate Communist beliefs by using governmental money to do it.” Excluding such propaganda, he stated, “I am against ‘book burning’ of course—which is, as you well know, an expression to mean suppression of ideas. I just do not believe in suppressing ideas. I believe in dragging them out in the open and taking a look at them. That is what I meant, and I do not intend to be talking personally and in personalities with respect to anyone.”

  Robert Donovan, a New York Herald Tribune correspondent, asked whether “a controversial book” available on American bookshelves could also “be on the bookshelf of one of our libraries abroad?” “I should think so, speaking generally,” Eisenhower responded. He reminded reporters how widely it was believed that World War II had occurred “because we had failed to read Mein Kampf seriously.” He asked, “Why shouldn’t we, today, know what is going on? How many of you have read Stalin’s Problems of Leninism? How many of you have really studied Karl Marx and looked at the evolution of the Marxian theory down to the present application?” He repeated the maxim “Know your enemy.” In a veiled reprimand to McCarthy, the president concluded, “It does no good for me just to get up and shout, ‘I am against communism.’ What is it?”40

  Ike’s news conference comments were widely interpreted as Eisenhower reneging on his Dartmouth comments, but that analysis is too simplistic. He had repeated, “I am against ‘book burning.’ ” The Alsop brothers characterized the president at Dartmouth as “the real Eisenhower” and the man handling the same issue at the news conference as “the public Eisenhower.” The public and private Eisenhower were both on record saying, in effect, “I hate censorship.”41

  THE ROSENBERG PROBLEM

  The president’s other major problem that month was the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, scheduled for June 19. The couple had been convicted and sentenced to death for providing classified information to the Soviets while Julius had been employed at the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. From his first day in office, Eisenhower had been besieged with pleas to spare the Rosenbergs, partly because they had two children, ages six and ten. The president had assigned White House Deputy Assistant Bernard Shanley and the Attorney General’s Office to review “the whole record of the conviction and appeals all the way through the courts.”42

  Given McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade, any leniency toward the Rosenbergs could be political dynamite. Ike later explained to his cabinet that he had rigorously reviewed the evidence based on four criteria: whether the verdict had been unanimous, whether the country might benefit if the Rosenbergs provided evidence against other spies, whether there was “sufficient substance to the crime to warrant the death penalty,” and “the psychological effect in the world at large if the Executive were to reverse the decision of the Judiciary in this case.”43

  On February 11, Eisenhower had issued a statement he had drafted himself. The Rosenbergs, he said, had been “tried and convicted” for “conspiring to share secret atomic information relating to the national defense of the United States.” Their crime “could very well result in the death of many, many thousands of innocent citizens.” Having uncovered no “new evidence” or “mitigating circumstances,” he concluded, “I have determined that it is my duty, in the interest of the people of the United States, not to set aside the verdict of their representatives.”44

  However, Eisenhower’s statement did not close the door on the possibility of clemency; he had indicated to the cabinet his willingness to reopen the case if, at any time prior to execution, new evidence or new considerations warranted. As the execution date drew near, Eisenhower was hounded by advocates for mercy. He met with four clergymen on June 15—the day after his Dartmouth speech—and responded to their plea: “If I were in the place you men are in, I would be doing the same thing you are doing, asking for clemency for these people; but I am not in your position and I can’t get up and walk away as you are going to.”45

  Once again, Eisenhower’s aides found no new evidence to vindicate the Rosenbergs. Ike wrote a long letter to his son John, sharing his discomfort amid “a very considerable amount of furor.” Eisenhower had been intensively lobbied with pleas for mercy because one of the condemned was a woman and “because of the two children of the couple.” However much he brooded as the day of execution drew near, Eisenhower embraced “the hope that it would deter others.” Then, on June 17, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas granted a temporary stay of execution. Allen Dulles told his brother, Foster, that the justice’s action put the matter “in a hell of a mess.”46

  The day of the executions—Friday, June 19, 1953—Eisenhower held a 10 a.m. cabinet meeting. Though McCarthy was not mentioned, the specter of what he might do about delay of the executions or clemency hovered over the meeting. The president said he could not “remember ever a 48-hours where he felt more in need of help from someone—more intelligent than I.” Central to the discussion was the fact that other spies—including Klaus Fuchs, whom the British had sentenced to fourteen years in prison—had not been executed. Then there was David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, who had testified against the couple and whose life had been spared. Henry Cabot Lodge stated that he believed that the difference “can be easily explained.” Eisenhower responded, “Not easily for me.”47

  After the meeting, Foster Dulles called Herbert Brownell. They had planned to attend a baseball game that night, but Dulles concluded that they “had better not go,” both for their own safety and because of how it would look if they were photographed “enjoying themselves together while the execution was taking place.”48

  Later that day, the full Supreme Court declined to support Justice William O. Douglas’s stay of execution. That afternoon, Bernard Shanley took the final draft of the president’s statement into the Oval Office for his signature. While Eisenhower was on the phone on another matter, Sherman Adams whispered to Shanley that Et
hel Rosenberg’s mother was seeking to speak to the president. Without informing the president, they had her escorted to the attorney general’s office.49

  Eisenhower’s statement repeated his previous conclusion that “the Rosenbergs have received the benefit of every safeguard which American justice can provide.” He asserted, “By immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world. The execution of two human beings is a grave matter. But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.” He concluded, “I will not intervene in this matter.”50

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were pronounced dead at 8:16 p.m. Eastern Time.51

  CHAPTER 3

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  “YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW!”

  It had been a “week of trouble,” Eisenhower told his cabinet a few days after the Rosenberg executions in June. South Korean president Syngman Rhee was resisting the negotiation of an armistice in Korea; Winston Churchill had suffered a stroke; and Robert Taft was gravely ill. The president—perhaps arguing with himself—reminded the cabinet members that “long faces do not win battles.” Eisenhower did not know that by the end of summer, Senator Joseph McCarthy would be hounding the US Army for communists.1

  By mid-1953, McCarthy had honed a formidable arsenal of techniques for turning fear into headlines. Employing his subpoena power, he could compel testimony, under oath, from nearly anyone with short notice and without a vote by his subcommittee members. He repeatedly conducted one-senator hearings, ignoring the Senate’s tradition of requiring a quorum of the committee’s membership before holding hearings. The senator made shrewd use of senatorial privilege, which immunized him against libel when he made outrageous statements on the Senate floor, during a committee hearing, or to the press.