The president’s irritation over this distracting issue was evident at the cabinet meeting two days later. Secretary of Defense Charlie Wilson complained of “the near impossibility of collecting data on reasons for personnel dismissals” and estimated it would cost $100,000 to develop the statistics requested by the Civil Service Commission. Ike snapped that the military had “plenty of red tape around personnel records” and “there would be notations as to the reason for the dismissal of each employee.” “Don’t tell me you can’t do it in defense,” he growled. “I invented the system. You can ask for fat, bald-headed majors and they’ll come tumbling out of the IBM machines.” The President declared, with finality, that once a report was issued on the breakdown of the 2,200, they should say, “That’s all there is, boys, there isn’t any more.”10
THE PERESS PROBLEM
The morning after Adams’s extraordinary visit to the McCarthy home, George Anastos, a subordinate of Roy Cohn, called General Ralph W. Zwicker, the commandant at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Anastos demanded the name of the “Communist captain-major-dentist-doctor” hiding at his base, resurrecting the issue Cohn had called about on January 4. When Zwicker called McCarthy’s office to validate the request, he unwittingly violated regulations by revealing Irving Peress’s name.11
On January 27, Cohn phoned John Adams and demanded that Major Peress testify in New York on January 30. “We warned you about this fellow,” Cohn growled, “and you’ve done nothing about it, and now we want him.” When Peress appeared at a closed-door McCarthy subcommittee hearing, he promptly invoked his constitutional rights. Afterward, McCarthy announced he would demand that the army court-martial an unnamed army dentist who had invoked the Fifth Amendment in a hearing. In response, Peress decided to advance the date of his request for separation to February 2. His request was granted effective that day.12
When McCarthy heard that Peress had asked to be discharged, he rushed a letter to Secretary Stevens’s office demanding that the dentist be retained for court-martial. Because Stevens was in Asia, the letter landed on John Adams’s desk. Adams investigated and determined that Peress could not be court-martialed for exercising his constitutional rights. He considered holding Peress for a few days and telling McCarthy that they were “reviewing” the situation. Then he decided “To hell with McCarthy.”13
Robert Stevens landed at Washington National Airport on February 3. Stevens had not been informed about the Peress situation. When quizzed about Peress’s discharge, Stevens said that “if this man is either a Communist or invoked the Fifth Amendment, he is not entitled to an honorable discharge.”14
The next day, Adams briefed Stevens about a contentious conversation with Frank Carr about “our Communist Major.” McCarthy, Carr had said, “is still hot under the collar” and “wanted all sorts of investigations on it.” Again, Adams demonstrated abysmal judgment, stating “I thought I would go to his house.” He was saved from that fate when Stevens apprised him that the senator had left the city on a nationwide speaking tour.15
“TWENTY YEARS OF TREASON”
Joe McCarthy was still, in Eisenhower’s words, “riding high.” The first week in February, the senator announced a nine-speech, eight-day tour, arranged and financed by the Republican National Committee. While billed as a series of Lincoln Day dinners, it resembled the sort of trip a future presidential candidate might take to test the political waters. McCarthy’s nationwide tour reflected the RNC’s judgment that, in William Lawrence’s phrase, McCarthy would be “a big gun in the Republican Arsenal” in the fall elections. The New York Times reporter concluded that the senator continued to be “one of the most powerful and feared men in the United States Senate.” By an 85-to-1 vote, McCarthy had just won $214,000 in funding for his subcommittee’s investigations. Lawrence noted that “recent public opinion polls indicate that Senator McCarthy’s political strength is increasing.”16
On tour, McCarthy repeatedly charged that the Roosevelt and Truman eras had constituted “twenty years of treason.” Richard Nixon recalled years later that the administration’s leaders waited apprehensively for the moment when McCarthy would denounce “twenty-one years of treason.” On February 5, McCarthy paraphrased Abraham Lincoln to proclaim that the Democratic Party “stands for government of, by and for Communists, crooks, and cronies.” RNC chairman Leonard Hall, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, called McCarthy an “asset” to the party in this election year. When asked whether the party, by paying McCarthy’s expenses, was endorsing the senator’s treason theme, Hall responded, “That’s right.”17
Enraged Democratic leaders challenged Eisenhower to halt the attacks on their loyalty to the country. In particular, they reacted to a speech by Sherman Adams alleging that Democrats were “political sadists,” attempting to press a “fear deal” on the country by forecasting a new depression. Jim Hagerty responded for the White House that the president’s chief of staff had been “just giving the people the facts.” Stuart Symington asserted, “There is one man in the United States who can stop that kind of talk.” The Missouri senator charged that the president’s own “false” claims about weeding out 2,200 security risks in the government was another slap at the patriotism of Democrats.18
THE PERILS OF MIMICKING MCCARTHY
Given Sherman Adams’s relationship with the president, Ike had likely approved that highly partisan speech. In any event, Henry Cabot Lodge deemed it a mistake. On February 9, he wrote Eisenhower that partisan remarks “were better made by Republican Senators and Governors rather than by those close to you.” He called it “out of character for bitterly partisan remarks to be associated with you.” When close subordinates talk about “their work or jobs, no fault can be found.” But if they want to talk politics, they should “talk pro-Eisenhower and not anti-Democrat.” Lodge attached a statement he suggested the president use at his news conference the following day, stating that the president “never enters into personalities” and was not and never had been “a narrow partisan.”19
Ike knew that Lodge was right; every time he was tempted to imitate McCarthyist tactics, it backfired. At his February 10 news conference, he followed Lodge’s prescription to the letter. Asked about members of his administration charging that Democrats were “soft toward subversives in the Government,” Ike responded, “Well, I think, first of all, it is quite apparent that I am not very much of a partisan.” He joked about the split in his own party, noting that Senator Knowland described himself “as a majority leader without a majority in the Senate.” He expressed appreciation for Democratic support for aspects of his program and concluded, “I have my own doubts that any great partisanship displayed by members of the executive department is really appropriate in this day and time.” He repeated the point: “I don’t believe in bitter partisanship. I never believe that all wisdom is confined to one of the great parties.”
Another reporter edged closer to a question about McCarthy, asking about Republican leaders who charged that all Democrats “are tinged with treason or that they are all security risks, without distinction.” Eisenhower resorted to a favorite tactic, pleading ignorance: “I have seen no such statement.” If so, it was “not only untrue, but very unwise.” Democrats, he noted, after all, had “fought for America.” Asked if that meant he would advise officials in the administration to avoid extreme partisanship, Ike responded, “That is correct.”
Robert Spivack of the New York Post zeroed in on Leonard Hall’s statement that McCarthy was “an asset” and that the RNC supported the senator’s charge of “twenty years of treason.” “Do you,” he asked, “approve of underwriting the tour or agree with Mr. Hall?” The president, James Reston reported, “was visibly impatient” at the question and the reporter’s quote of McCarthy’s slogan. Ike responded “with a light edge to his voice”: “I am not going to comment any further on that. Particularly, I have said many, many times that I am not going to talk about anything where personalities are involved. I will not do it.”20
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On their way back from the news conference, Eisenhower, thoroughly annoyed, told Jim Hagerty, “Press conferences are really a waste of time. All these reporters are interested in is some cheap political fight. It’s too serious a time to have that sort of stuff as the major problem of our times.” He sighed. “What a life.” Nevertheless, Henry Cabot Lodge read the papers the next day with satisfaction. He praised the president for demonstrating that “the Presidential press conference is an educational force, because you got precisely the ideas you wanted into the opening paragraphs of the news stories.” That night, McCarthy responded to the president’s statements, saying he had “no plans for a major change in my line of speeches.” Asked if this meant he was defying the president, he insisted he was not and that Eisenhower was “doing a good job.”21
However, earlier that day in California, the senator had charged that President Eisenhower was “grossly in error” for not cutting off aid to allies, notably Great Britain, for trading with Communist China. George Sokolsky, the pro-McCarthy radio commentator, warned John Adams that McCarthy, so enthusiastically received in San Francisco, would become increasingly difficult “because he’s got California.” A few days later, Sokolsky advised Adams that “Joe’s got Texas now.” That sounded like a politician’s campaign manager counting big states for a presidential run.22
However much he avoided mentioning McCarthy in public, Eisenhower was active behind the scenes. After his February 10 news conference, he met alone with Robert Stevens. Ostensibly Stevens was reporting on his Far East trip, but the president spent most of the time coaching Stevens on how he should respond to the Peress matter in a McCarthy subcommittee hearing. The secretary, Eisenhower said, should admit any error, give the committee “every pertinent fact, leaving nothing more to be uncovered,” explain how the mistake had occurred, take “full responsibility,” and, finally, express his confidence “in the efficiency and loyalty of the Army and stand on that.” Following those obligatory statements, Stevens “was not to placate or appease anyone or degrade himself in any way.” If any “browbeating” occurred, Ike said, Stevens “should leave the hearing and inform the chairman that he would return only when he could be assured of courteous treatment.” After that grilling in the Oval Office, Stevens could have nurtured no doubts as to who was in command of the response to McCarthy’s charges.23
EISENHOWER AND LINCOLN
February 12 was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, a time to invoke the sixteenth president’s eloquent call for “malice toward none and charity for all.” In spite of Eisenhower’s counsel to avoid extreme partisanship, The New York Times headlined a news article “Attacks Continue.” Still, his closest lieutenants were being more careful. Vice President Nixon urged the Republican Party to “avoid indiscriminate attacks on Democrats as a group.”
McCarthy was not listening. Early in the week, he charged that the “Democratic Administration over the past twenty years has deliberately and knowingly allowed Communists to take any position in Government they desired.” He called again for a blockade of the coast of China and demanded that the allies stop the “blood trade” with the communists.24
In the February 14 New York Times, James Reston contemplated “the Lincoln Spirit in 1954,” contrasting Eisenhower and McCarthy. Given the Democratic dominance in the country, the Republicans could win in the fall only by identifying an “additional element” that would draw voters to their cause. Reston gave Eisenhower credit: “He has ended the bloodshed in Korea. He is trying to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union. He has not put class against class or party against party, or tried to destroy the social and economic gains of the last twenty years. In short, he believes that peace and unity, which the nation did not have in the last years of the Truman Administration, are that ‘other element’ that will provide the margin of Republican victory.”
On the other hand, Reston wrote, McCarthy “believes that the best defense in politics is a good offense” and that “by attacking and attacking” on the issue of Communist subversion, the GOP could win. His conclusion: “Unable to get the President to come down to Senator McCarthy’s level, or to get the Senator to go up to the President’s, the political strategists in the party have decided to travel both roads at the same time.”
Reston succinctly summarized the situation: “As it is now, the President is trying to produce confidence in the face of the Soviet menace, and McCarthy is stirring up fear; Eisenhower is trying to draw the parties together, and McCarthy is setting them apart; Eisenhower is urging cooperation with the allies, and McCarthy is attacking their policies and purposes; Eisenhower is trying to bury the past and McCarthy is trying to resurrect it.” What Reston called “the Eisenhower Faith” was closest to Lincoln’s “spirit of moderation and generosity” and could potentially provide “the decisive political element.” McCarthy was arguing that “the Lincoln spirit is not enough. And the ironic aspect of it is that many of the politicians, Democrat as well as Republican, seem to agree with the Senator.”25
The issues that burdened the president did not diminish. At a February 15 meeting with Republican congressional leaders, Ike grumbled that Senator William Langer of North Dakota was “dragging his feet” on the nomination of Earl Warren to be chief justice of the Supreme Court. He fretted about the deteriorating situation in Indochina, where an anticolonial war was under way, noting that the French wanted twenty-five planes and four hundred technicians. Eisenhower had sent ten planes and two hundred mechanics whom he had ordered be withdrawn by June 15. At the previous meeting, he had stated that he was “frightened about getting ground forces tied up in Indochina.” Still, he lamented, “We can’t get anywhere in Asia by just sitting here in Washington and doing nothing—My God, we must not lose Asia.” But Ike’s deadline for withdrawing the technicians underlined his unspoken judgment; if the French had not turned the tide of battle by then, the war would soon be over.26
LEAKING THE SCHINE STORY
G. David Schine had completed his basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on January 16; his two-week posttraining furlough ended on the thirtieth. The army announced that Schine was being transferred to Camp Gordon, Georgia, “for evaluation and disposition.” When asked, McCarthy stated that he did not know of any special treatment for Schine.27
Meanwhile, since the January 21 meeting in Brownell’s office, John Adams had been responding to Sherman Adams’s instruction—it felt like an order—to develop a full record of the privileges sought for Schine. On February 3, he completed his first edition of the Schine records. Not quite trusting the White House, he sent the documents first to William Rogers, not Sherman Adams, telling him it was “the only copy which is leaving my possession.” He included the memorandum “which reports on an evening meeting I had with McCarthy about 10 days ago.”28
Rogers apparently alerted the White House. Sherman Adams called the army counsel the afternoon of February 16 to find out why the White House had not yet received the report. John Adams immediately dispatched a copy to the chief of staff. The president was leaving for the West Coast the next day, and Sherman Adams’s call may have reflected Ike’s desire to see the report before he departed.29
About that time, Joseph Alsop, the Washington Post journalist, visited John Adams’s office seeking information about the army’s conflict with McCarthy. Alsop claimed he had been “sent” by Henry Cabot Lodge. That was significant, given how closely Lodge was advising Eisenhower about the politics of the situation. Given that stamp of approval, John Adams reached into his desk drawer, took out the summary he had compiled on Sherman Adams’s orders—forty-one pages long—and handed it to Alsop. “It would be quicker and more accurate if you just read this,” he said. He insisted that the information be kept off the record, a condition Alsop accepted and honored. Alsop read the documents right there, “snickering from time to time.” After he departed, Adams had a momentary qualm of conscience; what had he done? He decided that there was “no use being just a little bit pregna
nt” and called in three other reporters, showing them the documents “under the same conditions I had established with Alsop.”
Adams thereafter gave himself credit for putting “a bomb out there, ready to explode.” In any event, the word was spreading. Senator Potter told Senator Symington about “a document” he had seen in the Pentagon. Adams learned that Alsop had told Fred Seaton about seeing the documents, saying “there are lots of them floating around.”30
By February 17, Eisenhower was desperate to escape from Washington. He startled the assembled reporters by strolling into his 2:00 p.m. news conference two minutes early. He apologized for “trying to compress my schedule today. I hope, the Lord willing, in about an hour to be on my way to Southern California.” Eisenhower was in no mood for serious discussion. He touched on two frothy subjects, the plan of England’s queen mother to visit the United States and the price of coffee. CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr asked if the president was satisfied with his remarks at the last news conference on “extreme partisanship.” Ike refused to bite: “Well, I have no particular profound comment to make on that question.” He had presented his views “about extremism of any kind in this political world, and I didn’t particularly offer advice to anyone.” The reporters got the message and did not return to that subject.
To Ike’s irritation, the fuss over the 2,200 government dismissals was still on their minds. When asked if he wished to comment on the Civil Service Commission’s projected report, he tersely responded, “Well, no.” Then Eisenhower turned to Jim Hagerty, feigning a lack of knowledge about a matter about which he was fully informed: “Didn’t you tell me that the Civil Service Commission, I think, is going to have a preliminary statement on this thing sometime—today is it?” Hagerty replied, “Yes, four o’clock.” The president repeated, as if that were news to his ears: “Four o’clock.” He added that “their final answer,” not the preliminary report, “will take a little bit of time to compile.” The news conference ended after only twenty-two minutes. Ike was out the door, heading to California to play golf and clear his head after a tumultuous six weeks.31
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