Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  On July 9, the day of that disillusioning NSC meeting, Ike wrote UN ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge “in the midst of a difficult day,” recalling a statement attributed to George Washington in 1789: “My movements to the chair of the government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”28

  DEPLOYING IKE’S “RESERVE DIVISION”

  On July 7, G. David Schine was notified that he would be drafted into the US Army. That seemingly small incident was destined to grow into the scandal that within a year would become the reason for the Army-McCarthy hearings.

  Roy Cohn immediately launched a frantic effort to keep Schine with him on the McCarthy subcommittee. The day after Schine received his notice, McCarthy asked General Miles Reber, the army’s legislative liaison officer, to come to his office. The senator, Reber recalled, “told me that he was very interested in securing a commission as a reserve officer in the Army of the United States for his assistant, Mr. G. David Schine.” Cohn “emphasized the necessity for rapid action.” Reber received “numerous phone calls” from Cohn urging “expedition in this case” plus additional pleas from McCarthy. About a week after their meeting, the adjutant general informed Reber that Schine was not eligible for a commission.29

  Any doubt that Eisenhower was aware of the agitation on behalf of Schine is dispelled by the fact that Cohn personally pled his case with two of Ike’s closest wartime associates. In August, he urged Undersecretary of State Bedell Smith to use his influence to get Schine a commission. Smith made phone calls to his army contacts and then informed Cohn that Schine was ineligible and no exception could be made. In response, Cohn went to the White House and asked the congressional liaison, General Jerry Persons—another Eisenhower comrade in arms—to inquire whether the navy could provide a commission for Schine. Persons called an admiral’s aide, who, treating a call from the White House as serious business, relayed the inquiry to Admiral James L. Holloway III, the chief of naval personnel. Persons received the navy’s response through the president’s naval aide, probably reflecting a presidential review: the navy would not provide a direct commission to a young man eligible for the army draft.

  Struve Hensel, the Pentagon’s general counsel, recalled that Sherman Adams had informed him about Cohn’s visit to Persons. If Adams was involved, so was the president. After all, it was the White House, where, as Adams later recalled, “Nothing else mattered half as much as Joe McCarthy.” In any event, Cohn’s pleas were rejected at every turn. That rejection would have ramifications. Washington insiders knew that, with rare exceptions, Cohn selected McCarthy’s investigative targets, and the US Army was now in his investigative cross hairs. By implication, so was the general in the White House.30

  About the time Schine got his draft notice, Eisenhower made a phone call to Fred A. Seaton in Nebraska, asking him to serve in the Pentagon. Though no direct connection between the two events can be documented, their ultimate convergence is indisputable. Seaton’s son Don recalls that his father hinted that Eisenhower’s stated reason was to “put a muzzle” on Secretary Charles Wilson, a paramount need in coping with Joe McCarthy.

  Eisenhower, the military commander, liked to put key men in position in anticipation of a battle, even when he did not know exactly how or when the clash would take place. Therefore, he asked Seaton to take a redesigned assistant secretary position in the Defense Department. Bernard Shanley called the new job “the top liaison job in the Defense Department and the Hill.” That meant Seaton would often deal directly with McCarthy. Seaton went to the White House for an off-the-record discussion with the president on July 13 and returned on July 27, the day after the Korean armistice was announced.31

  Fred Seaton was part of the Eisenhower political clan. He had grown up in Manhattan, Kansas, just down the road from Eisenhower’s Abilene. The Seatons, a newspaper family, had been active in Republican politics. Fred’s father had been a secretary to Senator Joseph L. Bristow, who had endorsed Ike’s application to West Point. During the 1936 presidential campaign, Fred had served as secretary to Alfred M. Landon, the Republican nominee. In 1937, he had moved to Nebraska to become the publisher of the Hastings Daily Tribune. After the death of Nebraska Republican senator Kenneth S. Wherry in November 1951, the governor appointed Seaton to fill the seat, but Seaton agreed not to run in 1952. However, during the year he served in the Senate, Seaton developed a friendly relationship with McCarthy. He was among those who traveled to Paris to urge General Eisenhower to run for president. When Eisenhower and Seaton met, Fred’s wife, Gladys, recalled that it was “love at first sight.” When Eisenhower agreed to become a candidate, Seaton joined the campaign as press liaison.

  William Ewald recalled that Fred Seaton was “a smoothie,” politically astute and skillful in relations with a wide range of people. More important, he was, as Gladys Seaton put it, “wholly devoted to General Eisenhower”; Seaton quickly became known as “Ike’s trouble shooter.” The one blemish on his record was that prior to Ike’s campaign appearance in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 3, 1952, he had hinted to the press about the general’s plan to praise George Marshall, unaware that Wisconsin politicians had persuaded Eisenhower to delete those words from his speech.32

  Eisenhower needed Seaton and was determined, whatever the obstacles, to install him in the Pentagon. The man he had initially relied upon to manage McCarthy, Robert Taft, died on July 31. When the cabinet met that morning, Eisenhower decreed that “under no circumstances” should cabinet members or White House staff “give any indication of having any interest” in the contest over the majority leader’s position between California Senator William Knowland and Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen. Later that day, he issued a statement calling the passing of Robert Taft “a tragic loss to America.” Taft, he said, had served the nation “with distinction and integrity” and would be “greatly missed.” The president added: “I have lost a wise counsellor and a valued friend.” He ordered the flags on government buildings in Washington, DC, flown at half-staff. A few days later, Knowland was unanimously elected to succeed Taft as majority leader.33

  VACATION!

  On Saturday morning, August 8, the president and Mrs. Eisenhower departed the White House for National Airport. While Mamie visited her mother in Denver, Ike planned to go trout fishing and put to use the lures that had so embarrassed Jim Hagerty the previous month. Ike wrote a friend that day that although he expected “one of these never-ending emergencies could pop up its head,” he was determined “to forget all this political yammering” and “go up in the hills, fry a fish and cook a pancake; and, when I get on the golf course, try to stay under 120.”34

  The first emergency took only a few days. On August 12, the president learned that the Soviet Union had successfully tested a thermonuclear device, ending the US monopoly on hydrogen weapons. The other major event, a week later, was a coup in Iran, engineered by British intelligence and the CIA. That covert operation overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and his cabinet, restoring Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, to his throne.35

  Though Eisenhower was immersed in those events, he carved out time to nail down Fred Seaton’s new role. He confronted skepticism among White House staff about the appointment. Bernard Shanley worried that the liaison job “was a position [in] which you couldn’t win and most surely [would] lose.” Jerry Persons agreed, expressing the opinion that Seaton “was not really qualified for the job.” Shanley called the president in Colorado to express their concerns, but Eisenhower was resolute. Shanley recorded in his diary that the president “had seen Seaton and was committed to offering him the position.”36

  Secretary Wilson was also apparently reluctant; he knew the new assistant secretary would be Ike’s man, not his. By that time, neither Eisenhower nor White House staff was inclined to grant Wilson a veto. Speechwriter Robert Kieve complained that Wilson constantly “exuded General Motor-ism” and told “truly pointless” stories. He termed Wil
son “not terribly articulate,” a man who often gave “no real impression he’s been doing any productive thinking.” Eisenhower himself had become impatient with Wilson. Richard Nixon recalled Ike’s annoyance when Wilson, sitting next to him in cabinet meetings, blew smoke rings into the face of the president, who had quit smoking years earlier. Sherman Adams attempted to limit Wilson’s interaction with the president. Eisenhower told Adams he didn’t want aides “to come in here and bother me the way Charlie Wilson does. He comes in here and sits here and asks me questions about details of his own job and if he wasn’t able to do them, he shouldn’t have the job.”37

  Seaton would inherit the frustrating task of dealing with the secretary of defense. The Nebraskan made a third trip to Washington, this time to discuss his new job with Wilson himself, and phoned the president in Colorado to report on the meeting. The same day, the president wrote Wilson, “This morning I had a long talk with Fred Seaton. He told me about his recent conversation with you. I am of the personal opinion that he could and would do you a very fine job as a policy man in the field of cultivating good relations for the Defense Department.” He made it abundantly clear how special the new man was to him. Seaton, Ike wrote, had traveled with him “all over the United States” during the campaign. “Not only does he have many good and useful qualities, but he is, of course, well acquainted with most of the individuals now serving intimately on my staff.” Therefore, in the event of “an emergency in the White House staff, I might have to call upon him to come in and help out.” Eisenhower bestowed a commanding general’s stamp of approval on Seaton: “I have always looked upon him as a ‘reserve division,’ ready to go into action.”38

  Ike’s artful suggestion that he might eventually want Seaton in the White House underlined Seaton’s influence with the president; Wilson was expected to take him seriously. On September 3, the White House—not Wilson’s office—announced Frederick A. Seaton’s recess appointment to a “new position” serving as the department’s principal liaison with Congress. Seaton told reporters he would “do his best” and was “deeply moved by the confidence the President and Secretary of Defense Wilson have shown in me by this appointment.”39

  DECLARING WAR ON THE ARMY

  Ike’s characterization of Fred Seaton as his “reserve division” on August 24 was timely. The president’s congressional staff had surely alerted him that McCarthy planned to launch hearings the following week on communists in the US Army. The senator gave a direct hint in a speech on August 28 in St. Louis to the American Legion National Security Commission. A month earlier he had announced, at Nixon’s behest, that he would shift his investigative emphasis from communism to corruption. Now he declared his determination to pursue communist subversion even if his probes embarrassed the Eisenhower administration. The senator ridiculed colleagues—perhaps a jab at Nixon—who were saying “Now that we’re in power why don’t you lay off! Don’t embarrass this Administration.” Decked out in a Legion uniform, McCarthy proclaimed, “As long as I am in the United States Senate I’ll guarantee there will be no protection for communism, corruption or treason. I don’t give a tinker’s dam who is embarrassed by it.”40

  McCarthy’s first hearing in search of communists in the US Army took place at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, August 31, in room 126 of the Federal Court House in Foley Square, New York City. It was a one-senator hearing, with McCarthy flanked by attorney Frank Carr (who had replaced J. B. Matthews as subcommittee executive director), Roy Cohn, and David Schine, who would not have to report to the army until November. Three army employees were slated to testify; Doris Walters Powell, a clerical worker; Francesco Palmiero, a security officer; and Albert Feldman, a warehouse employee.

  McCarthy’s interrogation of Doris Walters Powell provides a microcosm of the senator’s techniques for intimidating witnesses and converting the testimony of low-level employees into headlines. After the young woman was sworn in, McCarthy’s first words were designed to strike fear into this African American clerical worker on maternity leave. “Let me say this, Mrs. Powell,” McCarthy began. “We have information of Communist party membership on your part.” He warned her, “A number of people have come into the committee guilty of no crime except membership of the Communist party, which legally, you know, is not a crime unless the party is using force or violence in the overthrowing of the government. In the end, when they leave the committee room they are guilty of perjury. If the answer tends to incriminate you, don’t answer. Tell the truth or don’t answer.”

  The fear in Powell’s voice leaps from the pages of the transcript. “I am on maternal leave from the government,” she plaintively responded. During the war, Powell had worked as a clerk-typist for the New York War Production Board; since 1950, she had been employed at the New York Quartermaster Corps office, 111 East Sixteenth Street. When asked the nature of her present duties, she responded that she was a “procurement-clerk,” processing invoices requiring payment by the government for food for the army.

  McCarthy and Cohn barked questions so rapidly that Powell became confused. When she expressed her bewilderment, McCarthy pounced: “Be sure you answer the question. . . . We do have evidence here, strong evidence of activities on your part—of Communist activities. . . . We have no interest at all in having you guilty of perjury. Don’t answer unless you know what you are answering.”

  Cohn delivered the jackpot question: “Have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” Powell hesitated. “I don’t feel as though I have been—not to my knowledge.” “Do you think you might have been without your knowing about it?” Right on cue, McCarthy jumped in to advise Mrs. Powell’s attorney that he should advise his client “that we have the positive evidence—that is correct, Roy, isn’t it—of Communist activities and Communist membership. I have no interest at all in having this woman be a perjury case.” Cohn repeated, “Have you ever been a member of the Communist party?” Powell responded once again, “I don’t feel that I have been.”

  McCarthy’s premise for badgering this witness was that, between her two stints in government service, Powell had worked for The People’s Voice, an African American–oriented newspaper in Harlem that Doxey Wilkerson, an alleged communist, had taken over after World War II. McCarthy stalked his prey with his patented guilt-by-association technique. “You went to this meeting, these Communist meetings?” Powell responded, “Now I realize, yes.” When asked about attending a radical school, she recalled having attended lectures around 1946 or 1947 “on Negro history.” Cohn asked, “Do you now realize that that was a Communistic school?” “Now I realize, yes,” she confessed, but she insisted she had never attended lectures about “overthrowing the government.” “But you say you weren’t a Communist?” Powell retreated to her mournful answer: “I don’t feel I was.”

  McCarthy pressed Powell on whether she had paid “any dues to the Communist party?” Intimidated, Powell said, “I am thinking.” “You would remember if you paid them money, I assume?” McCarthy barked. Powell granted that she might have made “contributions” or given to “collections.” “Did you give [to] collections where you knew the money was going to the Communist party?” “No, I didn’t, no. Not to my knowledge that it was going to the Communists.”

  McCarthy asked if Powell had ever been “issued a membership card of the Communist party?” Roy Cohn added a sinister warning: “Be very careful.” “I received a card—something,” Powell confessed. “I had to have membership to get into a meeting where Doxey Wilkerson was attending.” Cohn asked if the card had “Communist Party” printed on it. Powell, confused, thought she had not received that kind of card.

  McCarthy moved in for the kill: “Isn’t it correct that you said before you attended this Communist meeting with Wilkerson and that you were issued a card which showed in its face that you were being given membership in the Communist party, and it had a number on the card?” Powell eventually responded “yes” but insisted, “I never signed it. I never applied. I never signed
anything.” Pressed by Cohn, she confessed that Doxey Wilkerson’s secretary had given her the card. Powell claimed she had only wanted to help with the paper “for the benefit of the Negro people”; it was later she learned that the leaders at the Voice “were found to be Communists.”41

  Afterward, McCarthy, without revealing names, informed reporters he had interrogated army civilian employees whose jobs involved handling classified information that could “tip off troop movements” but who denied their membership in the communist party. The woman, he said without identifying her, was involved with “purchasing and checking invoices” regarding shipments of food to “practically every base” around the globe. McCarthy misled reporters about the length of Powell’s interrogation, stating that she had been questioned for twenty minutes when, in fact, it had been an hour.42

  On September 3, The New York Times reported that McCarthy had “ordered” the army to produce the personnel files of the three army employees he had interrogated and the names of the loyalty board members who had approved their employment. That demand was contrary to President Truman’s 1948 executive order barring the provision of information about federal employees’ loyalty without White House clearance, later modified to require the department head’s approval. Based on that directive, the army refused to disclose the names of the individuals on loyalty boards. The army’s legislative liaison officer, General Miles Reber, stated that the issue “might have to be carried to President Eisenhower for a showdown.” Senator McCarthy, the Times reported, “conceded that President Eisenhower’s permission might have to be sought.”43