WARNING SHOTS
The tone was unmistakable; in the second year of his presidency, the general had seized political command. That week, he quietly instigated warning shots over McCarthy’s head, including a flurry of proposals for circumscribing the senator’s investigative authority. Senate Majority Leader William Knowland urged an end to “one-man rule” in investigative committees. South Dakota senator Karl Mundt proposed enhancing the status of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Senator William Jenner of Indiana. Some Democrats, including John McClellan, the Arkansas senator who had led the Democrats’ July walkout from McCarthy’s subcommittee, suggested establishing a joint Senate-House committee on internal security.10
The administration’s hand in this agitation was thinly disguised. In a rare interview, Sherman Adams, the president’s front man, endorsed “a relatively permanent system for dealing with Communists.” He added, in language typical of Eisenhower, that this suggestion was not intended to “limit the latitude” of committees such as that headed by Senator McCarthy. It is unlikely Adams would have agreed to such an interview without his boss’s approval.11
The New York Times described the proposals as “a carrot and a stick” strategy, designed by the administration to push McCarthy to investigate “fields other than subversion.” The carrot would be the “juicy tax files of the Truman Administration,” a strategy Nixon and Rogers had probably previewed in Key Biscayne. The stick was “a warning that the Administration would cooperate only with the Jenner Committee in aiding inquiries on subversion.”12
The objective was to isolate McCarthy and position the president as the Republican Party’s leader on communist issues in the 1954 campaign. The Democratic leadership looked on with amusement. Lyndon Johnson, for example, stood serenely above the fray, stating that he had “nothing to say” and that McCarthy was “a Republican problem.”13
It would all come to naught. On the January 10 broadcast of Meet the Press, Knowland expressed doubt that the Senate would strip McCarthy of his authority “to investigate communism and confine himself to corruption in Government.” Eisenhower and his congressional aides had nurtured no illusions about what could be expected from the proposals to clip McCarthy’s legislative wings. The fight with McCarthy would not be won in the byzantine world of Senate committee structures, where the Wisconsin senator still held great sway.14
Unlike the president, Robert Stevens clung naively to the hope that he could make peace with McCarthy. New Jersey’s Republican senator Alexander Smith called Stevens on January 12 and asked, “Is Joe behaving?” Stevens responded, “I would say so. I have never had any trouble myself at all with Joe.” Roy Cohn, on the other hand, was “not the easiest fellow to deal with.” Stevens chose to ignore McCarthy’s continued persecution of army personnel. That very day, the papers reported that Aaron Coleman, a Fort Monmouth engineer who had worked for five years on an early-warning system against Soviet attack, had been suspended. McCarthy had threatened him with both perjury and espionage charges because of Coleman’s association with Julius Rosenberg when the convicted spy had served at Fort Monmouth.15
The Coleman situation exemplified McCarthy’s ruthless use of the subpoena. A continuing threat to the Eisenhower administration was that the senator might subpoena personnel records. On January 12, Deputy Attorney General William Rogers instructed Philip Young, the chairman of the Civil Service Commission, to refuse to honor such subpoenas on the grounds that the files contained “the result of investigations by the FBI and other investigative agencies and such disclosure might impair the work of those agencies.” That was, Herbert Brownell wrote in his memoirs, “a decisive blow” by the president to “cut off access of McCarthy’s committee to records of the executive branch.”
The more serious threat was that McCarthy might subpoena key personnel to testify, including advisers to the president. Eisenhower had assigned Brownell to address that danger, too. By early 1954, the Justice Department had sketched out the constitutional foundations of an executive order, subsequently labeled “executive privilege,” to protect the president, his advisers, and classified information. On January 7, the day of the president’s State of the Union address, John Adams wrote Rogers that he believed the time had come to use the executive privilege tool to thwart McCarthy’s agitation for testimony by members of the army’s loyalty panels that had cleared new employees during the Truman years. “Fred Seaton indicated to me yesterday,” he commented, “that he was going to talk about it in the White House because he feels that it would be better to attempt to get something done now, rather than when the pressure is on.”16
THE QUEST FOR AMMUNITION
Fred Seaton was now center stage on such issues. John Adams called him “a White House pet” or “the White House man at the Pentagon.” He recalled, “I have never been precisely sure of the White House role. I never was told exactly what went on ‘over there.’ ” “Over there” and “across the river” were Seaton’s euphemisms for the White House. Adams came to understand that he had been enlisted as a foot soldier in a political war, to be sacrificed, if necessary, for the greater good. As he watched the president from “across the river,” he observed, “Eisenhower’s indifference was deceptive; he could be in control while appearing to loaf.”17
The president needed more than defensive weapons, though; the situation demanded ammunition to use against McCarthy. By January 7, Seaton had apparently concluded that the silver bullet might be the relationship between Roy Cohn and David Schine. That night, he discussed Schine’s status at length with John Adams.18
The next day, January 8, Seaton called Stevens; based on his talk with Adams, he wanted to know whether the army was coddling Schine, who was scheduled to leave for Camp Gordon in Georgia once he completed basic training at Fort Dix. Seaton said he “was afraid that we would get our neck in the noose if that Schine boy was sent to a special training course for investigation.” Columnists were speculating that Schine had been granted a special deal, although the primitive IBM program for sorting out candidates listed Schine as technically qualified. “I told John [Adams],” he said, “that I didn’t believe that Schine should be kicked around.” But, he inquired, was Stevens certain that “somebody did not slip a gear on those cards?”
Stevens was indignant at the implication; the decision had been properly made, and he was prepared to let “the chips fall the way they may.” He continued, “I know the winds are going to blow, Fred, and I don’t relish it, and I don’t know what I am going to do about it.” The frustrated army secretary sighed, “You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
Seaton reminded the secretary for whom he spoke; he worried aloud that a special status for Schine “will turn out to be an unfortunate assignment” for McCarthy and the White House “because of what has taken place between the President and the Senator.” He suggested that the secretary pull rank by “looking into this thing yourself” and confirm that “you are sure of the facts.” Seaton grimly added, “I am not sure of them.”19
That same day, John Adams, in Massachusetts for a speaking engagement, was packing to check out of his hotel room. The phone rang. It was Frank Carr, Roy Cohn’s colleague on McCarthy’s staff. Carr shared news that instantly gave the army counsel a knot in the pit of his stomach: David Schine had been assigned KP duty at Fort Dix that weekend. Adams declined to intervene and asked Carr not to tell Cohn how to reach him, but Carr insisted that he had no choice. Adams called the hotel switchboard, asked the operator not to transmit any calls from New York, and hurriedly finished packing. The phone rang before he could get out the door. He picked up the receiver and said, “Hello.” Roy Cohn said, “Hello, John.” Adams hung up.20
SPARRING WITH THE PRESS
Eisenhower’s first news conference of 1954 was scheduled for January 13 at 10:30 a.m. The president normally reserved time prior to a news conference for a briefing by Jim Hagerty. However, at 9:00 a.m. that day, Seaton arrived in t
he Oval Office, followed a half hour later by Stevens. Though both meetings were off the record, Seaton undoubtedly addressed the agenda he had discussed with some urgency on January 7–8 with Adams and Stevens, including G. David Schine’s service in the army.
As a result of those two conferences, the president got only a few minutes with Hagerty before confronting reporters. His exasperation with the schedule—and perhaps with what he had discussed with Seaton and Stevens—was evident. He complained to Hagerty that “having a press conference in [the] middle of getting up [the] legislative session is damn silly.”21
That day Eisenhower emphasized to reporters his mission since January 4: pushing the administration’s program. When asked how he expected Congress to react, he responded, “Look: I want to make this very clear. I am not making recommendations to Congress just to pass the time away or to look good or for anything else. Everything I send to Congress I believe to be, and the mass of my associates believe to be, for the good of this country; therefore I am going to work for their enactment. Make no mistake about that. That is exactly what I am here for and what I intend to do.”
For a president notorious for scrambling his syntax, those carefully rehearsed lines were incisive and emphatic. Then New York Post reporter Robert Spivack asked a question that moved Ike to resort to his characteristic fog of words; he requested a breakdown of the 2,200 persons the president had stated the administration’s security program had separated from government employment. Ike danced around the question. “No detailed report has yet been made to me,” he said and shifted the responsibility to the Civil Service Commission. That agency, he explained, had dropped more than 180,000 people, “so this 2200 is not a great number.” He granted that some of the 2,200 had resigned without knowing they were targeted for dismissal, but, he concluded, “Those 2200 have gone in one form or another.”22
Eisenhower had underestimated the fallout from his foray into the numbers game. The day after the president’s news conference, White House counsel Bernard Shanley complained in his diary about a late-in-the-day, contentious two-and-a-half-hour meeting, held “because there was much carping and criticizing by the Democrats that we could not substantiate our figure of 2200 security risks among people who had been separated from the Government.” He noted that “this statement was in the Union message.” Democrats had charged that the 2,200 number included alcoholics and “perverts.” Eisenhower acquired an unwanted ally in the controversy when McCarthy insisted that “practically all” of the 2,200 had been removed “because of Communist connections and activities of perversion.”23
Ike did not intend to abandon the other plank of the anticommunist program he had staked out in his State of the Union address. On January 12, the day before his news conference, he sent Brownell a legislative proposal “to create a commission to study the question of outlawing the Communist Party.” Brownell would subsequently oppose outlawing the party on grounds that such a law could be “construed as an arbitrary exercise of legislative power, violating the due process protections in the Constitution.” He also feared that such a law would drive the movement underground and “increase the already difficult investigatory job of the FBI.”24
At the time, Eisenhower was indulging in crass political calculation. He wanted to exploit the issue in the 1954 congressional elections. As stated in his State of the Union address, he intended that loss of citizenship would apply only to any citizen “who is convicted in the courts of hereafter conspiring to advocate overthrow of this government by force or violence.”25
TIGHTENING THE STRATEGIC CIRCLE
Inexplicably, the day after he met with the president on January 13, Stevens called McCarthy. The secretary said, “I would like to have a little visit” and wondered if “it would be in or out of order to buy you a cocktail?” McCarthy responded, “I would favor that very much.” They agreed to meet at 5 p.m. Why that meeting—especially the day after Stevens had met with the president? It is doubtful that Eisenhower asked Stevens to do it; he knew how naive the secretary was about McCarthy. In any event, Stevens had realized that the administration’s approach to McCarthy, personified in Fred Seaton, had changed. The secretary liked to cast himself as the man on the white horse, riding in to salvage the situation. He had apparently decided to make another stab at peacemaking.26
That day, John Adams stopped by the Capitol to see the man he had hung up on a week earlier: Roy Cohn. David Schine would end his duty at Fort Dix the next day. Following a two-week leave, he would be assigned to Camp Gordon, Georgia, for possible training as a military police officer. Adams reluctantly informed Cohn that Schine might be assigned overseas after he finished his training. Cohn’s response was heated. “Stevens is through as secretary of the Army,” he snarled. Adams asked, “Really, what’s going to happen if Schine gets an overseas assignment?” “We’ll wreck the Army,” Cohn shot back. McCarthy, he said, had “enough stuff on the Army” to run an indefinite investigation. They would smear the army in every way possible. Cohn angrily denounced that “lousy, double-crossing Stevens.”
The situation escalated from bad to worse. Just before Stevens left for a trip to the Far East on the seventeenth, he and Adams learned that Schine’s tour in Georgia would last five months, not the eight weeks they had mistakenly anticipated. When Frank Carr called on another matter, Adams asked how Cohn was taking that news, only to learn that Cohn did not know. Adams recalled that Carr’s delivery of that information to Cohn, who was vacationing at a Schine-owned hotel in Boca Raton, Florida, “was a declaration of war to Roy Cohn.” Within ten minutes, the enraged counsel called Adams demanding to know if the news was accurate. Seven hours later, he was back in Washington.27
As the anniversary of his inauguration approached, Eisenhower took time in his diary to contemplate his first year in office. The conflict with McCarthy hovered over his comments. He found the press corps in constant violation of the adage “Always take your job seriously, never yourself.” Reporters, he noted, were “concerned primarily with personalities” and infatuated with gossip. Though his relationships with congressional leaders “have been on the whole better than I anticipated,” Ike regretted that, following Taft’s death, “no one of real strength has shown up on the Senate side.” He found Majority Leader William Knowland “helpful and loyal, but he is cumbersome.”
Eisenhower acknowledged, in almost clinical fashion, the hostilities he had encountered from the Republican Party’s reactionary wing. He had been aware, even before running for office, “of some of the deep-seated differences that would separate me, in the event of a successful election, from some of the House and Senate leaders.” He recalled that Democrats seeking to recruit him to run for the presidency had argued “that I would be further separated in political philosophy from such people as Senators Jenner, McCarthy, Millikin, Bridges, Langer and others than I would the Democratic leaders.”28
MCCARTHY MAKES A MOVE
On January 19, McCarthy launched a new phase in his investigation of communists in the army. Frank Carr called John Adams to inform him that by two o’clock that day, five members of army loyalty boards would be expected to appear before Senator McCarthy to testify. If the board members did not show up voluntarily, McCarthy would subpoena them. Adams believed it was no accident that this action took place the morning after Cohn, angry over the status of Schine, had returned from Florida. “The McCarthyites planned to use the Loyalty Boards,” he concluded, “as a weapon to punish the Army for mistreating Schine.” Stevens was out of the country, so the army’s counsel was responsible for a decision. Adams’s reaction: “I was damned if I would send them into McCarthy’s star chamber.” An hour later, Carr called to ask if the board members were coming. Adams’s response was “no,” that only he would appear. “Joe doesn’t like to be surprised,” Carr warned Adams. “You better go see him first.”
Adams hurried over to the Senate, where he buttonholed McCarthy before the senator’s 2:00 p.m. hearing. When Adams pleaded for
withdrawal of the demand that the loyalty board members appear, McCarthy growled that he was through negotiating with the army. He “issued an ultimatum to me in front of the press, which was duly printed in newspapers throughout the country,” Adams recalled. McCarthy gave Adams until Friday, January 22, to produce the individuals he wanted; if he did not, McCarthy would issue subpoenas for five members, requiring them to testify at 10:00 a.m. on Monday, January 25.
Then McCarthy added a sly wrinkle: he would interrogate the board members not only about the loyalty program but about graft and misconduct in their ranks, a more legitimate role for his subcommittee. He would not permit them to be accompanied by counsel representing the army, nor would he accept their refusal to speak based on “a blanket reference to Presidential directives”; if they tried that, they would be required to cite specific sections of the law. If not satisfied with their answers, McCarthy said, he would cite them for contempt as he would any board members who declined to appear.
Adams rushed back to the Pentagon and gathered all the army employees he could reach who had ever served on a loyalty board. He instructed them not to respond to any subpoenas from the McCarthy committee and to bring them to him. Then he reached out for help, calling Deputy Attorney General Rogers. In a memorandum, Adams told Rogers “unequivocally” that he intended “to direct them not to answer the subpoenas,” but he would need “assistance outside the Pentagon.” He asked for a meeting with the attorney general, and Rogers agreed to arrange it. Adams later claimed that he had told Rogers, “Either stand up now, or the press will say that the Eisenhower administration had backed down before McCarthy. The Army can’t do it alone.”29
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