Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  About the time that meeting began, Stevens called Senator Dirksen at home. The secretary was desperate. “I am going to have to do something,” he said. “It may get drastic.” He had been “absolutely crucified and the Services along with me.” He asked Dirksen to reassemble his senators, minus McCarthy, and issue a statement to correct what had been “so misunderstood by the press.” Dirksen asked whom the secretary had talked with; Stevens said he had told Nixon, Mundt, and Persons about the press depicting him as “a yellow-belly” who had “capitulated” to McCarthy. Dirksen responded, “Let me call Karl.”33

  Dirksen did not want to pass up the chance to work both sides of the street. He headed for the White House where, apparently at Eisenhower’s behest, he agreed to contact his Republican colleagues to see if they could agree to issue a second statement testifying to Stevens’s “integrity and ability” in dealing with the Peress issue and confirming that army officers would be treated with “proper respect.” He repeated his previous pledges to work to get Cohn fired, to end one-man hearings, and to strip McCarthy of the authority to issue subpoenas without a majority vote by the subcommittee. According to Nixon, when Dirksen attempted to secure an agreement, “McCarthy proved adamant.” The president then ordered Nixon to take charge of drafting a statement Stevens could issue from the White House.34

  “VERY MAD AND GETTING FED UP”

  By now the president was, in Hagerty’s words, “very mad and getting fed up.” That states it mildly; Eisenhower was in the midst of a full-blown presidential temper tantrum. This was, the president thundered, about “his Army” and his hatred for McCarthy’s tactics. “This guy McCarthy is going to get into trouble over this. I’m not going to take this one lying down!” He raged. “My friends tell me it won’t be long in this Army stuff before McCarthy starts using my name instead of Stevens’. He’s ambitious. He wants to be president. He’s the last guy in the world who’ll ever get there, if I have anything to say.”35

  About 9:30 a.m., Sherman Adams told Stevens to wait for a call from the White House. The frantic army secretary found the waiting unbearable; he made no fewer than ten calls to the White House. Seaton, seething about the situation, was assigned to be Stevens’s handler. Stevens had once again violated the president’s orders that Seaton was to be the designated liaison with McCarthy. John Adams recalled that Seaton had “growled” at him, “Don’t ever let this happen again. Don’t get into these things and wait until there is a mess and expect us to get you out.” Adams speculated about who “us” was—Persons, Nixon, Sherman Adams—or “the President himself?” Adams would have had no doubt had he been at the White House. The president was in command mode. At 12:35 p.m., he met off the record with Nixon, Sherman Adams, and Persons. By 3:00 p.m., he had cleared his personal schedule to address the situation, and he ordered Stevens to come to the White House.36

  Prior to departing, Stevens accepted a call from General Lucius Clay, an Eisenhower confidant. When Clay asked how he was, Stevens said, “I am a little sunk.” “Have they let you down from up above?” Clay asked. Stevens responded, “Yes, but not the Boss.” “I had everything in great shape, the flag at the mast,” he claimed. But “the President wasn’t in it in any way, shape or form.” He blamed the president’s “political advisors,” who, he insisted, had “pulled the carpet completely from under me; and they dropped it right in the President’s lap—right where I didn’t want it.”

  Clay surmised, “Mainly the Senate people?” “Yes, plus Jerry.” Clay commented that Persons “is always for armistice. I personally think this has hurt the party one hell of a lot.” Clay declared himself ready “to come down to tell the Boss my views.” Stevens responded, “Now is the time if there ever was one.” Clay decided, “I am going to have a talk with him, and I just don’t think this can be allowed to drop now.”37

  A few minutes later, Clay was on the phone to his old comrade in arms. Eisenhower was furious, ranting nonstop about “this fracas.” “None of us knew about this meeting yesterday,” he growled. “You can imagine my astonishment in reading of it this morning. Got my men in—we checked up—know that [Stevens] got agreement and assurance to say, ‘Under those conditions my boys will come down & testify like anybody else.’ He is now in state of shock & near hysteria. He made [an] error in agreeing too quickly.” Clay agreed, “They were just too smart for him.”

  The president fumed that “one of the worst things” was that this “happened on [the] day I came back from Cal[ifornia]. We didn’t know about the meeting, but they say I came back to tell Stevens to go.” Clay confirmed that the “initial impression” was “that you instructed Stevens to settle this thing.” Ike shot back, “Nothing could be further from the truth!”

  Then Clay warned Eisenhower, sounding much like Lodge. McCarthy, he said, had become “too powerful—people [are] scared to do anything about him. I am willing to bet he has information on honorable discharges while you were Chief of Staff.” Eisenhower denied that possibility. Clay warned the president not to underestimate the damage McCarthy’s innuendos could inflict. Ike smelled presidential ambitions in McCarthy’s actions. The senator, he grumbled, was “calling all Democrats traitors, knowing that will defeat us in the long run because we must have Democrats to win. Consequently, he will go around & pick up the pieces. He’s crazy if he believes that.”38

  The intensity of Eisenhower’s anger reverberated throughout the White House. As John Adams put it, the president’s “own White House operatives and his Senate allies like Mundt, Knowland, Dirksen, even his own Vice-President—had let him down.” Ike read with rising rage a column that alleged he was “now sharing command of the Army with McCarthy.” His wrath rose to a new level when he called for and read the transcript of McCarthy’s interrogation of General Zwicker.39

  “100 PERCENT!”

  At midafternoon on February 25, Bob Stevens left for the White House, accompanied by Fred Seaton. When they arrived, the task force was gathered in the East Wing. The group had grown to include Roger Kyes, the acting secretary of defense (Wilson was out of the city), William Rogers, Gerald Morgan, Hagerty, Persons, Sherman Adams and his assistant Bernard Shanley, and Richard Nixon. “We worked all afternoon in Person’s East Wing office,” Nixon recalled, “while Eisenhower, probably to relieve the tremendous anger he felt, practiced chip shots on the South Lawn.”40

  At Eisenhower’s direction, Nixon supervised the drafting. Stevens later described Nixon “wadding up and hurling the various drafts until the group settled on just the right mix of forcefulness and restraint.” After drafting a statement, Hagerty and Shanley argued that the president needed, in person, to “back up fully the Stevens statement.” Shanley suggested that the secretary deliver his statement in the Oval Office in Eisenhower’s presence—a proposal the president apparently vetoed.41

  Finally, about 5:30, a group including Sherman Adams, Kyes, Nixon, Stevens, and Hagerty marched up to the presidential study on the second floor of the living quarters of the White House. They presented the draft document to the president. Eisenhower reviewed the statement for a full thirty minutes, providing his own edits that, Hagerty noted, “made it stronger.” He decided that Stevens should deliver the statement himself from the White House. He authorized Hagerty to tell reporters, once Stevens read the statement, that he fully supported it.42

  About 6:15, Stevens addressed the waiting reporters. Eisenhower’s edits had eliminated any defensive or emotional statements and employed the crisp, quasi-military language characteristic of the Eisenhower writing style. Citing the memorandum of understanding from the February 24 luncheon, the secretary set out “to make certain things clear. I did not at that meeting and have not receded at any time from any of the principles upon which I stand.” It was his duty, he said, to uphold the rights of army personnel “in circumstances where they are unable to protect those rights.”

  Then came the strong, unwavering statement, employing the president’s emphatic “shall” (rather th
an “will”) to voice a soldierly statement of duty: “I shall never accede to the abuse of army personnel under any circumstances, including committee hearings. I shall never accede to them being brow beaten or humiliated.” Nor did the secretary intend that they be deprived of counsel, “as was the case with General Zwicker.” Stevens cited “assurances” he had received from the members of the subcommittee that “they will not permit such conditions to develop in the future.” Had there been no such assurances, “I would never have entered into any agreement whatsoever.” If such mistreatment happened again, the secretary made his position “perfectly clear”: “I shall once again take all steps at my disposal to protect the rights of individuals in this Department.”

  Jim Hagerty rose and announced, “On behalf of the President, he has seen the statement. He approves and endorses it 100 percent.”43

  CHAPTER 9

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  EISENHOWER IN COMMAND

  Dwight Eisenhower had crossed a political Rubicon with his “100 percent” endorsement of Robert Stevens’s statement. He now intended to maintain behind-the-scenes command of the confrontation with McCarthy until the battle was over. The morning of February 26, Jim Hagerty recorded in his diary, “Everybody jittery around here. Can’t beg off when going is tough.” Ann Whitman described her boss as “fretted” over four troublesome issues that day. The first two involved legislation regarding “wetbacks,” the term used in the 1950s for Mexican illegal immigrant agricultural laborers, and bills in Congress to provide funding “for school buildings throughout the country.”

  The remaining two were both critical and time sensitive. The Bricker Amendment, an attempt to circumscribe the president’s authority to make treaties and agreements abroad, authored by Republican Senator John W. Bricker (Ohio), was scheduled for climactic votes that very day in the Senate. Finally, McCarthy, the president noted in his diary, was “grabbing headlines and making people believe he is driving the Administration out of Washington.”1

  Hagerty described McCarthy’s reaction to Stevens’s statement as “pretty rough.” The senator charged that Stevens had made a “completely false statement.” He was adamant that when army officers “are not frank and truthful—whether military personnel or not—they will be examined vigorously to get the truth about Communist activities.” “If it will be unpleasant to tell the truth,” he growled, “I can’t be responsible.”

  Hagerty had fully briefed reporters on the drafting of Stevens’s statement. William Lawrence of The New York Times described the details of the White House operations, including the president spending thirty minutes personally editing the final document. His intervention, the columnist concluded, “underlined the gravity of the latest crisis” in the nation’s capital. James Reston provided more detail about how, amid the furious activity in the East Wing, “the President changed out of his brown business suit, put on his golf slacks, went out to the back lawn of the White House, and practiced his pitch shots.”2

  That was an expression of the president’s management style. When addressing a nasty problem, Eisenhower would issue orders. Then, knowing that no one could work effectively with him hovering over them, he would withdraw and leave his subordinates to their work, sometimes resorting to golf to alleviate his own tensions. Nevertheless, however much he appeared to delegate, he would have the final word. As a result, Stevens’s statement was crisp, blunt, and unapologetic. The president had validated John Adams’s observation that Eisenhower “could be in control while appearing to loaf.”3

  STATUS OF THE SCHINE REPORT

  The club in the presidential closet—the detailed account of the privileges sought for G. David Schine by Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy—commanded more of the president’s attention in the following days. Professor Fred I. Greenstein of Princeton University wrote that Lodge, Brownell, and Sherman Adams had all confirmed to him that Eisenhower “was well aware of the Cohn-Schine abuses and was countenancing the strategy of using them as the vehicle for attacking McCarthy.” Henry Cabot Lodge’s conversation with Stevens on February 24 revealed that only days after receiving it, Eisenhower had apparently ordered his man in the Pentagon, Fred Seaton, to edit John Adams’s cumbersome forty-one-page report into a form appropriate for publication. On February 26, Richard Nixon confirmed to the columnist Arthur Krock—off the record—that Eisenhower had approved using a report “two inches thick” to get Roy Cohn fired.4

  That day, General Lucius Clay revealed that he too knew about the Schine report, probably from conversation with Eisenhower. In a phone call, he urged Stevens to “let that Adams story leak out.” Stevens repeated what he had told Lodge: “That is being, you might say, staffed carefully with that thought in mind.” Clay urged that the report be released “in the next couple of days” because “right now is the psychological moment to do it; and if it is not done now, it will be too late.” Stevens responded that any decision on releasing the report would be made at “a higher echelon” but promised to pass on the suggestion.5

  As well as he knew Eisenhower, Clay did not fully appreciate his genius for timing critical operations. In fact, February 26 was not the right “psychological moment” to release the Schine report. The political storm surrounding the White House’s rescue of Stevens would have buried the story. Besides, Adams’s crude compilation was, in the judgment of Seaton and Hensel, not ready for the media. The original version contained too many land mines that McCarthy could exploit.

  Eisenhower intended that the release of the Schine report wait until it was in pristine form, for the moment that Lodge called “good”—the tipping point when public and congressional opinion would be primed to take a fresh look at the Wisconsin senator. Ike once explained to his brother Milton in another context, “I have believed it wise, if not almost necessary, to retain as long as possible a position of flexibility—that is, to wait until the last possible moment before announcing any positive decision.”6

  However, Eisenhower had decided who would be his lightning rods for this operation. John Adams learned from Struve Hensel that his role in the preparing the Schine report would be only supportive. “I knew then that the decision had been made,” Adams concluded. “The Army was going to counterattack against McCarthy, and my diary was the ammunition, and Stevens and I were obviously going to lead the charge.”

  To play his sacrificial role, Adams had to be squeaky clean. He recalled that Seaton had the FBI investigate “if there were any skeletons in my closet they might have missed on earlier security checks.” They found none, but the inquiry made him nervous. When Seaton informed him that “the FBI hadn’t found any dirt on me,” Adams asked to see the report. Seaton responded, “Oh no. It’s confidential.” Adams glumly concluded that “it was all arranged.” Years later, the army counsel was still bitter that he “was not included in any of the conferences at which my fate was decided.”7

  The right moment for release of the Schine report hinged in part on other matters, above all the outcome of the debate over the Bricker Amendment to the Constitution in the Senate. The amendment had been introduced in 1951. The best-known version declared that no treaty could be implemented by the government unless Congress passed enabling legislation; it also placed limits on executive agreements. Truman had adamantly opposed this infringement on the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy, and Eisenhower, the most international of modern presidents, opposed it as well. Eisenhower had accused Bricker of being “almost psychopathic on the subject.”8

  On February 25, the day of Eisenhower’s rescue of Robert Stevens, the vote was 50 to 42 on Senator Bricker’s version, well short of the two-thirds required for a constitutional amendment. However, back in January, Democratic senator Walter F. George of Georgia had introduced an amendment that, although more moderate, would still limit the president’s authority to make executive agreements. Eisenhower noted in his diary on February 26 that George’s amended version appeared to have the necessary two-thirds vote for p
assage.9

  However, it failed, thanks in part to Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, Sherman Adams’s good friend; their close relationship had developed when they were neighboring governors in New Hampshire and Vermont. Flanders, who was secretly planning a public attack on McCarthy, had been on record supporting a modified amendment similar to that proposed by Senator George. Surprisingly, he reversed himself and voted against the amendment on the final ballot. That reflected Flanders’ growing alliance with the White House.

  However, even with Flanders’s opposition, the vote tally moved toward a successful two-thirds outcome. Suddenly, just as the roll call neared its completion, Harley Kilgore, a West Virginia Democrat who was apparently inebriated, staggered into the chamber and cast his vote against the George amendment. That made the final vote 60 to 31 in favor (senators present and voting); the proposed constitutional amendment had failed.10

  With a Bricker-type amendment off the congressional agenda for the remainder of the year, the Eisenhower forces could turn their attention more fully to McCarthy. In Ralph Flanders, they had found the “friendly senator” that Lodge had told Eisenhower would be essential to setting the stage for a counterattack.11

  Those clandestine plans were not visible to the press, which assumed that rhetorical denunciation of McCarthy—something Eisenhower would never do—was imperative. Robert Stevens, a Washington Post editorial concluded, was not at fault in the situation. “The real and inescapable issue is McCarthyism and the Administration’s relation to it.” Eisenhower, though “personally repulsed by the gangrenous infection,” had been counseled “that he must not tangle frontally with McCarthy unless he is sure he can win.” The editorial called on the president to “disavow, in the most unequivocal terms, McCarthyism and everything it stands for.” The editorial quoted a Balkan proverb: “You are permitted in a time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.” It concluded that if Eisenhower chose to “walk with the Devil”—meaning McCarthy—“he will walk alone.”12