Politically, the bleeding sore was still McCarthy. Eisenhower had tilted successfully with McCarthy over Chip Bohlen’s appointment as ambassador to the Soviet Union. He had countered McCarthy’s deal with the Greek shipowners, aimed at discrediting Allied trade with communist nations. Ike himself had campaigned against “book burners” and had replaced the International Information Administration, a favorite McCarthy target, with the new United States Information Agency. But he still endured McCarthy’s increasingly ferocious investigation into communist infiltration into the institution to which Ike had given his life: the US Army.
“HARRY DEXTER WHITE WAS A RUSSIAN SPY”
When Herbert Brownell took office as attorney general, he had ordered the collection and review of loose paperwork found in “desktops, cubby-holes, and closets” in the Justice Department. His aides had uncovered a cache of documents concerning Harry Dexter White, a Treasury Department official in the Truman administration who had resigned in 1947 and died the following year. The FBI had suspected White of passing sensitive information to the Soviet Union. The documents Brownell’s office stumbled upon revealed serious malfeasance by the Truman White House in handling the case.
Brownell took the “shocking” discoveries to the president and proposed that they be made public. His motivation was threefold: (1) to ensure that he could not be accused of a cover-up if he failed to reveal the truth; (2) to head off a movement in Congress “to tighten the laws relating to internal security” in a manner contrary to the administration’s program; and finally (3) to provide “an important contrast” to Joe McCarthy’s “slap-dash investigations of Communist infiltration.” According to Brownell’s memoirs, Ike responded to the proposal to go public by saying that “if I had the facts it was advisable to do so.” Brownell was scheduled to make two speeches in Chicago on November 6. He and the president agreed that the attorney general would reveal the White story at a luncheon meeting of the Executive Club in that city.2
When it came to major policy statements, Eisenhower’s subordinates were not independent agents, nor did they make speeches broadcasting important revelations without the president’s review. Brownell did more than share the facts with the president; he recalled years later that he had read the speech “out loud” to Eisenhower. Eisenhower had wanted a means of upstaging Joe McCarthy, and the attorney general had unearthed a whopper. Ike did not mind causing Harry Truman discomfort, given the former president’s partisan rhetoric during and following the 1952 campaign. The delegation framework was typical of Eisenhower: Brownell—not the president—would take any heat that the White disclosures generated.3
Unfortunately, no one with deep Washington political experience reviewed the plan, including the decision to deliver the indictment in a political rather than judicial or legislative setting. Richard Nixon, an increasingly important political adviser, was in the Far East. As Henry Cabot Lodge argued to Ike months later, there was no staff member in the Eisenhower White House “whose primary responsibility is political strategy for you.” That was an invitation to disaster, especially when dealing with McCarthy. Eisenhower and Brownell did not know it yet, but they had made a major miscalculation.4
Two days prior to the speech, Ike suffered a moment of apprehension; he knew he and Brownell were playing with fire. Once again, he contemplated the possibility that McCarthy might target for investigation his close associations with communists during and after the war in Europe. On November 4, he resurrected Arthur Hays Sulzberger’s June proposal for granting amnesty to those who had repudiated their communist associations prior to the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948. He asked that the Justice Department restudy the issue because he thought that, in the previous review, J. Edgar Hoover had assumed Ike was asking about amnesty for genuine communists, not innocent people. Eisenhower recalled that during and after the war, “many prominent officials of the Allied Governments were at that time talking in terms of support of the Soviets.” “In Washington,” he added, “there was much of the same.” Starting in 1941, he recalled, “it was a policy of our government to foster friendship with the Soviets.”
Ostensibly, Eisenhower was writing about a younger, unnamed person, not himself, but his memorandum was analogous to an alcoholic who tells a counselor, “I have a friend with a drinking problem.” That person, Eisenhower continued, “could very easily and very honestly have said many things that today would indicate or imply an unjustified support of Communism.” In spite of Brownell’s previous rejection of the proposition, the president still wanted “some formula that could be applied to cases of individuals who have never been Communists, but who had spoken favorably of the Soviets.” Apparently, Brownell responded negatively once again and Ike was persuaded not to pursue the issue.5
Despite these qualms, the president and the attorney general plowed ahead with their plans for the speech in Chicago. Brownell launched the day at the White House by releasing presidential Executive Order 10501, voiding Truman’s previous directive on how defense information was to be protected. That was the directive that had generated hot discussion at the October 30 cabinet meeting. The new order eliminated the “restricted” category the president had scorned and that, Brownell asserted, the Truman administration had used to impose “a form of censorship, unwarranted in peacetime” that could be used to cover up “derelictions.” “Derelictions” were precisely what Brownell planned to describe that day regarding the Harry Dexter White case.6
That noon, Attorney General Brownell declared, “Harry Dexter White was a Russian spy.” That fact, Brownell asserted, had been known “by the very people who appointed him to the most sensitive and important position he ever held in Government service.” White’s spying activities had been “reported in detail by the F.B.I. to the White House by means of a report delivered to President Truman.” Nevertheless, on January 23, 1946, Truman nominated White, then assistant secretary of the Treasury, “for the even more important position of the executive director for the United States in the International Monetary Fund.” The president received an updated FBI report in February 1946 and failed to inform the Senate Banking and Currency Committee in time to derail White’s nomination to the new post. On April 30, Truman had written a letter commending him for his “distinguished career” with Treasury. White died in 1948, Brownell disclosed, “without the prior Administration ever having acted on the F.B.I. report.”
That case, he concluded, “is illustrative of why the present Administration is faced with the problem of disloyalty in Government.” One of Eisenhower’s first acts in January had been to order each agency “to weed out” security risks, including “those whose personal habits and activities made them prey for subversive elements.” The attorney general asserted that “fourteen hundred fifty-six persons have been ejected from Government service because they were found to be security risks.” “President Eisenhower,” he proudly proclaimed, “is cleaning up the mess in Washington.”7
A war of words had been launched; White House Press Secretary Jim Hagerty confirmed that Eisenhower had approved the speech in advance, saying “The President told the Attorney General it was his duty to report it to the American people.”
Truman’s initial response was to call Brownell’s charges “purely political” and claim that, as soon as his administration had learned about White, “we fired him.” Hagerty retorted that “Mr. White was not fired, he resigned” and Truman’s statement was “not true.” Truman countered that “White was fired by resignation.” Then Hagerty read aloud Truman’s letter of April 30, 1946, in which Brownell had quoted praising White for serving with “distinction” in his Treasury post. Next, South Carolina governor James F. Byrnes, who had been Truman’s secretary of state at the time, confirmed that Truman had seen the FBI report while White was in the midst of the confirmation process for the IMF position.8
Almost overnight, Brownell’s speech ignited what the attorney general called “a storm of controversy.” Eisenhower’s personal secre
tary, Ann Whitman, noted in her diary that the “H. D. White bombshell exploded in full fury. A sorry mess. Personally I am convinced the boss did not have any inkling of [the] tempest to be aroused.” Neither did the attorney general; his daughter Ann recalls that, years later, Brownell stated that “the only thing he regretted in public life was delivering the Harry Dexter White speech.” The columnist Marquis Childs called the speech “a two-edged sword,” and the columnist Arthur Krock branded it a “bombshell with a tendency to kick back.”9
However authentic Brownell’s charges were, he and Eisenhower quickly lost control of the story. Truman’s combative denials, even when false, made such a sharp-edged attack on a former president appear unseemly. As the New York Times’ editors opined, “Attorney General Brownell has made a poor choice of timing and of method in reopening the case” in a fashion that might provoke a “reckless renewal of McCarthyism.”10
On Tuesday, November 10, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed former President Truman. In a speech that night, he defended his record on anticommunism and condemned the administration for “yielding to hysteria rather than resisting it.” He castigated “fake crusaders who dig up and distort records of the past to distract the attention of the people from political failures of the present.”11
By the morning of Wednesday, November 11, the backlash had spread to the Republican ranks. The HUAC chair, Republican representative Harold H. Velde of Illinois, backpedaled on his subpoenas in response to pressure from House Republican leaders and White House staff. Brownell softened his stance with a statement citing “laxity” by the Truman administration rather than any hint of treason. The attorney general asserted that he had “no intention of impugning the loyalty of any high official of the prior Administration.”12
A FRACTIOUS NEWS CONFERENCE
The Harry Dexter White case dominated the president’s November 11 news conference. Brownell had accused the former Democratic president of harboring a communist spy. Eisenhower was determined to distance himself from the issue, even if it left his attorney general out on what Brownell called “the proverbial limb.” Ironically, Brownell was present to witness what New York Times columnist James Reston called “one of the stormiest White House news conferences of recent years.” Merriman Smith asked for the president’s reaction to “ex-President Truman having been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Affairs Committee.” That gave the president an opening to deliver his prepared statement.
“I can’t say a great deal about this,” he began, giving the impression that he had not been deeply involved, a 180-degree shift from Jim Hagerty’s assertion that the president had approved the speech. The attorney general, he said, “reported to me that there were certain facts that had been coming to light in his Department that he felt should be made available to the public, and that he felt moreover it was his duty to do so. He told me that they involved a man named White, a man whom I had never met, didn’t know anything about. I told him that he had, as a responsible head of Government, to make the decision, if he felt it was his duty to make these things public to do it on a purely factual basis. He did tell me that the information had gotten to the White House, and that was all. So that was my last connection with it until this incident occurred of which you speak.”
Having painted a picture of personal ignorance, Eisenhower asserted that he did not want to criticize Congress “for carrying out what it conceives to be its duty.” Regarding the Truman subpoena, he stated, “I would not issue such a subpoena.” A reporter asked if Eisenhower believed that “former President Truman knowingly appointed a Communist spy to high office?” Ike called that “inconceivable.”
Raymond Brandt from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked, “Were you consulted while plans were being laid to bring the White story out?” Ike responded with a brusque “No.” A report had been made to him about “certain information that the Attorney General considered it his duty to make public, and he did mention the word ‘White,’ although as I say, I didn’t know who White was.” Later, regarding the FBI report on White, Eisenhower insisted that Brownell had “never told me” that President Truman actually had seen the FBI papers, only that “they went to the White House. Now, that is all he ever told me.” Brownell sat and listened in discomfort; he later recalled, “That wasn’t so.”13
When pressed as to why Brownell had presented the evidence before a group rather than a grand jury or a committee of Congress, Ike responded, “The Attorney General is here to answer it himself. Let him answer it.” A reporter shot back, “He has refused to answer questions, you see.” The room erupted with laughter. Another reporter chimed in, “It is true that Mr. Brownell is here, but he won’t see reporters. I wonder if we can ask you to exert your influence to get him to see us”; that spawned another round of laughter.
The president pushed his attorney general as far away as possible. “I am not going to give him orders as to methods in which he handles responsibilities of his own office,” he said. Brownell’s revelations had “aroused tremendous interest. Now we will see how he handles it, and I am not going to color his case or to prejudice his case in advance in what I say about it.” Brownell was out on a limb, truly alone.
Finally, when a reporter asked if Brownell had told the president that the FBI report had called Harry Dexter White a spy, Ike, clearly irritated, reprised his opening statement, almost verbatim, concluding “You have to follow your own conscience as to your duty. Now that is exactly what I knew about it.” Merriman Smith mercifully ended the session: “Thank you, Mr. President.”14
“Some of the roughest minutes of the Eisenhower Administration were over,” James Reston reported. A little later on the day of the news conference, the president went to Arlington National Cemetery for an Armistice Day ceremony. When the smiling Eisenhower exited, he noted that he had just come from a press conference where “all they wanted to ask me about was the White case.” The president added with a grin, “That Brownell can sure stir things up.”15
Rumors of a rift between Eisenhower and his attorney general became inevitable. The next day at his cabinet meeting, with Brownell in attendance, Ike attempted to put that allegation to rest. “I called him before the Press Conference to consult on what I would say,” he said. Brownell, the loyal soldier, stated that the president had “helped greatly” with his press conference comments and had put the issue “back on track.” Ike confessed to the attorney general, “I committed you to putting out facts.” Brownell responded that they had managed “to make [the] point it got to the White House,” a fact “pretty well accepted now.” Ike expressed amazement at the press’s “unanimity” in defending the past administration and White.16
James Reston headed his next column, “All Lose in White Case.” Reston’s losers included Brownell, Truman, Congress, US prestige abroad, and—above all—Eisenhower. Remarkably, the experienced reporter swallowed Eisenhower’s deceptive scenario: “Mr. Brownell knew the implications of his speech but he did not explain them to the President. He asked for the green light and the President gave it to him without inquiring into what was happening.”17
Years later, in his memoirs, Eisenhower further narrowed his personal involvement with the White case, confining his role to a “phone conversation” about Brownell’s plan to make the speech. Indeed, there had been a phone call—more than one—plus extensive personal interaction that Ike chose to ignore. No other single episode reflects more vividly how Dwight Eisenhower authored his own myth as a not-in-charge president, so widely accepted by historians for decades.18
“THE ADMINISTRATION HAS FULLY EMBRACED . . . MCCARTHYISM”
It was Harry Truman’s turn to take the stage. On November 12, the former president declined to comply with the HUAC subpoena, citing “universally recognized constitutional doctrine.” He was scheduled to speak on radio and television on November 16. The day of the Truman speech, the White House issued two statements, in the words of The New York Times, “disassociatin
g President Eisenhower further from the political free-for-all started by his Attorney General’s charges.” The first maintained that the president had not seen or approved an advance copy of the speech, a pointless distinction since the attorney general recalled having read the speech to Eisenhower. Jim Hagerty stated that he had received a copy but had not shown his copy to the president; that appeared to contradict the press secretary’s November 7 statement that the president had “approved” the speech in advance. The second statement cited Ike’s memoir, Crusade in Europe, to prove—reports to the contrary—that he had not met Harry Dexter White when discussing the future of Germany in 1944 with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.19
That night, Truman demonstrated that he had not lost his political touch. Herbert Brownell, not Ike, was the villain, he claimed. The attorney general had “lied to the American people,” making “false” and “phony” charges in asserting that Truman had purposely promoted a spy. He had “degraded” the administration of justice with “cheap political trickery,” and “deceived his chief as to what he proposed to do.” The former president claimed he had learned about White’s possible treason too late to derail his confirmation to the IMF, but he had downgraded the appointment from a managerial position to simple membership on the board of directors. Truman’s defense was that he had permitted White to take the position in order to camouflage a continuing FBI investigation. “It is now evident,” the former president concluded, “that the present Administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism.”20
In spite of testimony by J. Edgar Hoover contradicting Truman’s account of an ongoing FBI investigation, Truman had won the public argument. James Reston concluded, “Personalities have overwhelmed principles. The primary issues of Communist infiltration in the Government and the Attorney General’s use of the F.B.I. files in a public luncheon club speech have been smothered in yards and yards of cotton-wool.”21
Ike and McCarthy Page 10