A SMILING, DANGEROUS PRESIDENT
On February 27, when reporters asked McCarthy about his reaction to the president’s support of Stevens, he denied that there were any great differences between himself and the White House. “Eisenhower said he was against browbeating witnesses—I am too,” he asserted. Nevertheless, he called off a one-man hearing he had scheduled for the next day in New York.13
In fact, Eisenhower was covertly urging Senate leaders in both parties to curb McCarthy’s ability to conduct one-man hearings. The proposal was that the three other Republican senators on the McCarthy subcommittee “be on hand whenever the Wisconsin senator presides at a hearing.” The New York Times reported that, “according to reliable information,” the Senate leadership had launched the effort “partly because of the intervention of President Eisenhower.” Granting that he had seen some such reports, McCarthy said, “I doubt whether the President intends to prevent me from digging into Communists. I don’t think he wants to curb my powers.”14
Eisenhower tried to prepare his troops for the coming confrontation. Nixon recalled the president telling staff at lunch that his boxing instructor at West Point “used to hit him clear across the ring.” Unless he “got up smiling every time, the boxing instructor would turn his back and walk out of the room.” Some of his people, the president believed, “were actually afraid of McCarthy.” Ike “wanted to see smiling faces around him.” That fit William Ewald’s apt description years later of Eisenhower’s method of dealing with adversaries: “Don’t see, don’t feel, don’t admit, and don’t answer; just ignore your attacker and keep smiling.”15
Eisenhower delivered a comparable pep talk to Republican congressional leaders the morning of Monday, March 1. He deplored their tendency to be “grim and downhearted” regarding what had happened with Stevens, the army, and McCarthy. He urged them, “Let’s go out and grin at the world. It’s about time we developed a sense of humor.”
Eisenhower told the leaders that he anticipated numerous questions about Stevens and McCarthy at his Wednesday news conference. He “would not challenge the right of Congress to investigate” but “we can’t defeat Communism by destroying the things in which we believe”—a statement he would frequently repeat in the days ahead. He reviewed the details of Stevens’s involvement in the luncheon meeting “under a vow of secrecy,” emphasizing that Stevens “did not even tell me about it.” At the luncheon, Ike said, Stevens had agreed to a memorandum “that was terrible in its effect.”16
For all the president’s cheerleading, Nixon remembered that “by this time, Eisenhower’s reaction to the whole incident had become very emotional.” The vice president thought that Ike had been embarrassed by Stevens’s blunder and the resulting news stories and “was offended by McCarthy’s tactics, techniques, and personality.” Nixon was worried; he believed that the statement the president planned to make at his news conference “would cause Eisenhower and the party more trouble than he or his White House staff and liberal friends who were urging it could imagine.”17
To some extent, all this was a smoke screen to obscure what was going on behind the scenes. The previous afternoon, February 28, Eisenhower had met alone with Stevens at the White House; after the recent fiasco, the secretary was being kept on a short leash. Stevens had finally learned his lesson; he would no longer attempt to negotiate unilaterally with Joe McCarthy. For that meeting, the president’s appointment schedule bore a prefix rarely used in listing an off-the-record meeting—“strictly.”18
On Monday morning, Stevens followed up on his discussion with Eisenhower, discussing at length with Struve Hensel the John Adams “diary” and documents detailing the privileges sought for David Schine. Hensel had concluded that “it wouldn’t be the sensible thing to release the information” yet because the current version contained irrelevant details and some of it “was a little bit dated.” However, he worried that “the story would leak out” and was “apprehensive to the point that I am not sure we can sit on it.” Adams, he said, had given out “a lot of copies” and “every day he thinks of a new one who has seen it.” They still needed documentation and to get “all of the facts.” The men agreed that it was time to consult the commander of the operation. “Let me grab hold of Seaton and see what his view is,” Hensel concluded. Stevens concurred: “I thought maybe you and Fred would have an idea.”19
TERROR AT THE CAPITOL
That same day, the newspapers reported that the night before, Irving Peress’s home had been stoned by hoodlums. Peress angrily blamed “the terrorism that stems from McCarthyism.” He charged that “fascist hoodlums threw rocks through our windows, narrowly missing our children and endangering their lives.” Peress observed that the attackers had acted “in the true tradition of the Storm Troopers of Hitler.”20
Peress was not the only one under siege. On Sunday morning, Roy Cohn, sitting with his father in New York, read a column in The New York Times by Arthur Krock, whom Cohn characterized as a “White House confidant.” Krock wrote that the Eisenhower administration was pressing the Republican members of the McCarthy subcommittee to join with the Democrats and fire Cohn. The Eisenhower forces, he asserted, blamed Cohn for the assault on the army because of his relationship with David Schine. Most important, Krock, channeling his off-the-record conversation with Richard Nixon, mentioned “a record of Cohn’s interventions with the Army with respect to [David] Schine that will become public.” Cohn recalled Stuart Symington’s one-word warning: “Crossfire.”21
Then, in the afternoon of Monday, March 1, terror struck in the spectators’ gallery of the House of Representatives. Four Puerto Ricans—three men and a woman—listened to the debate; then, suddenly, at 2:32 p.m., they brandished guns and opened fire. Bullets riddled the table of the House majority leader and the chairs around it. Five congressmen—Alvin Bentley of Michigan, Ben Jensen of Iowa, Clifford Davis of Tennessee, George Hyde Fallon of Maryland, and Kenneth Roberts of Alabama—were wounded, Bentley most critically. Capitol police quickly subdued three of the shooters, and the fourth was apprehended at a nearby bus station. “Those people just shoot wildly, just shoot into a crowd,” the president mused to Speaker Sam Rayburn. “Probably blindly insane.” Ike did not mention that, the previous November, the Secret Service had uncovered a plot by Puerto Rican extremists to harm him and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.22
Nothing upsets the Washington news cycle quite as precipitously as unexpected violence. The attack in the House momentarily pushed the Army-McCarthy contest aside. Anne O’Hare McCormick of The New York Times reflected that Americans were accustomed to hearing about acts of terror abroad. “But,” she continued, “when it breaks out in the ordinarily sedate Congress of the United States, the almost unguarded citadel of government by law, Americans are stunned and incredulous. It is as if the solid ground opened and for a shocked instant we caught a whiff of the bitter political passions boiling up in other sections of the world.”23
The columnist Walter Lippmann, in words appropriate today, noted how impossible it was “to provide perfect protection against a terrorist . . . who is willing to die in the attempt.” He could not resist tying the episode to the demagoguery of McCarthy, who “has never as yet caught an important spy, in fact any spy.” The reason, Lippmann argued, was that “McCarthy does not know, or is pretending not to know, that spies do not have red bulbs attached to their foreheads which light up and blink so that nobody shall miss seeing them.” The “important spies,” he concluded, “are people who are not easily suspected, who wear highly protective camouflage, and are not easily detected.”24
The news from the House of Representatives overshadowed other stories that would have normally commanded more attention. For example, March 1 was also the date the United States tested a deliverable hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. The predicted yield was five megatons, but the operation, dubbed “Bravo” spun out of control, yielding three times that amount. More than two hundred persons
lived in an area affected by radiation, and a Japanese fishing boat was snowed with radioactive ash.25
The administration also announced that Scott McLeod, the State Department security officer and reputed McCarthy admirer, had been stripped of his authority over personnel. The press viewed the move as a slap at McCarthy. McCarthy rose to the bait, telling the press that he had drafted a letter to Secretary Dulles asking why the action had been taken.
An easy-to-miss paragraph was tacked onto the end of the McLeod report in The New York Times. It began, “Senator Fred Seaton of Nebraska, now Assistant Secretary of Defense, spent an hour in consultation at the White House.” Reportedly, Seaton had played a prominent role in producing “the Presidential statement backing Mr. Stevens in his stand that he would not accede to any abuse of Army witnesses.” The Washington media had begun to figure out that Seaton was Eisenhower’s field general in the contest with McCarthy.26
A CRITICAL DAY: MARCH 2, 1954
Despite the terrorist attack in Congress, March 2 was a day of feverish strategizing in the White House against McCarthy. Robert Kieve noted in his diary that the issue “took up most of the discussion in this morning’s staff meeting,” focused on the president’s news conference scheduled for the following day. Sherman Adams informed the staff that the president had “very definite ideas” about how to approach the Army-McCarthy conflict and “no one on the staff is likely to influence the P[resident]’s thinking on this issue very much, nor the expressing of that thinking in tomorrow’s press conference.”
Ike made certain that his key advisers knew what was going on. National Security Advisor Robert Cutler reflected that, while he had been meeting that morning with the president, Eisenhower had radiated a “great inner calm that makes the rest of us feel like babbling children.” To Cutler, Ike had called the McCarthy-Stevens flap “a newspaper issue” that “would be quickly replaced by some other matter.” Eisenhower knew what most of the staff did not: that over at the Pentagon, Seaton and Hensel were laboring on the Cohn-Schine document that would soon become that “other matter.”27
Eisenhower actively stage-managed the buildup toward action against McCarthy. At 10:00 a.m., he met with RNC chairman Leonard Hall. Afterward, Hall met with reporters in the White House. He repeated Ike’s concern that the Stevens-McCarthy issue was diverting attention from the president’s legislative program. Hall, who had previously called McCarthy an “asset” to the party, now asserted that he could not endorse Senator McCarthy’s abuse of generals who were “fighting communism just as conscientiously as he is.”28
In the late morning, Eisenhower sat down with Henry Cabot Lodge for an off-the-record discussion, followed immediately by one with Robert Stevens. Lodge’s handwritten notes reflect the issues he discussed with the president. Hall should be replaced, he wrote, because the RNC chair’s performance often left the president “just putting out fires.” Eisenhower, he continued, had men making “strategic decisions for which they are not fitted by experience.” “The Pres[ident] must be [a] political leader,” he scribbled, but he needed help. Lodge concluded that “nothing will be solved” by putting a strong political advisor under Sherman Adams. During his two months in the White House, Lodge, an experienced political operator, had felt he “was not used & in fact excluded.” He concluded his notes with a pithy cooking metaphor: “Politics is not the frosting on the cake; it is the egg in the cake.”29
Meanwhile, Eisenhower pursued legal issues relevant to his campaign against McCarthy. He called William Rogers about the president’s authority “to protect people against McCarthy,” especially personnel lower on the chain of command. “Suppose I made up my mind that McCarthy is abusing someone in a Dep[artmen]t,” he asked, “what is constitutional for me to do in this regard?” Rogers promised to deliver a memorandum by 9:30 the following morning and actually delivered two by nightfall. The first delineated the powers of the president to withhold information from congressional committees. The second memorandum traced the precedents for such actions back to George Washington.30
Finally, that same day, Lodge’s “good” thing that might set the stage for releasing the Schine report surfaced. Edward R. Murrow informed his See It Now staff that a program on McCarthy would be aired on March 9. He ended his March 2 broadcast by deploring the country’s “retreat into unreasoning fear” and pledging to “deal with one aspect of that fear next week.” By March 2, and probably before, the White House knew that Murrow was planning a television broadside about McCarthy.31
“THE YELLOW SON OF A BITCH”
At precisely 10:30 a.m. on March 3, a solemn Dwight Eisenhower stepped to the podium in the ornate Victorian-era Indian Treaty Room of the old State Department Building. James Reston described the president as “ruddy, wearing a new light gray spring suit, a white shirt and a red-and-blue foulard tie”; he was attired in patriotic colors for nonmilitary battle. More than two hundred reporters were present.32
The twenty-first-century reader will be surprised at the brevity of Eisenhower’s opening comment about the shootings in the House of Representatives. He noted the visit of the governor of Puerto Rico the previous day and expressed his regrets “at the tragic events on Capitol Hill 2 days ago.” That was all. Perhaps his calm demeanor was rooted in the fact that the perpetrators had been quickly apprehended. In any event, on this day in 1954, he had other priorities relating to the Army-McCarthy conflict.
The president launched into a lengthy statement—without using the senator’s name—about the Peress case, his “complete and full expression on one incident of recent weeks.” The army, he said, had “made serious errors in handling the Peress case,” but new procedures would prevent the repetition of such problems. He denied that he or the White House had encouraged Stevens to surrender: “Neither in this case, nor in any other, has any person in the executive branch been authorized to suggest that any subordinate, for any reason whatsoever, violate his convictions or principles or submit to any kind of personal humiliation when testifying before congressional committees or elsewhere.”
He then made three “observations.” The first was a pledge that his administration would be “unceasingly vigilant” about “subversive penetration.” The second was aimed directly at McCarthy, asserting that “we are defeating ourselves” by combating communism with “methods that do not conform to the American sense of justice and fair play.” The third stated simply that “the conscience of America,” mediated through the Congress, would determine if “we are exercising proper vigilance without being unfair.”
Eisenhower then turned to the abuse of army witnesses—again without mentioning McCarthy. He commented that, in his “many years in the Army,” he “never saw any member of the Congress guilty of disrespect toward the public servants who were appearing before him.” He asserted “that our military services and their leaders have always been completely loyal and dedicated public servants, singularly free of suspicion of disloyalty.” He soberly added that “in this tribute to the services, I mean to include General Zwicker, who was decorated for gallantry in the field.”
The president stated that he expected government employees, civilian or military, “to respond cheerfully and completely to the requests of the Congress and its several committees,” but the Congress bore the responsibility “to see to it that its procedures are proper and fair.” Finally, he cited problems confronting the nation “of vital importance” that were “both foreign and domestic in character.” He deplored any diversion from “these grave problems,” including subversion, “through disregard of the standards of fair play recognized by the American people.”
“And that,” President Eisenhower stated with an air of finality, “is my last word on any subject even closely related to that particular matter.” The president’s wishes could not have been plainer; he would not answer any questions about Zwicker, Stevens, or McCarthy.33
That was a tough prescription for journalists who had entered the room anticipating a sensati
onal presidential denunciation of Senator McCarthy. A Chicago Tribune correspondent, Willard Edwards, told William Ewald that Joseph Alsop had leaned over to whisper, “Why, the yellow son of a bitch!” Reporters like Alsop, hungering for an anti-McCarthy tirade, missed the subtlety of what they had just heard.34
“A WITLESS MAN IN A POSITION OF POWER”
McCarthy did not. He fired off an angry, insulting response: “If a stupid, arrogant or witless man in a position of power appears before our committee and is found aiding the Communist party, he will be exposed.” He took his sarcasm to a new level: “The fact that he might be a general places him in no special class as far as I am concerned. Apparently the President and I agree on the necessity of getting rid of Communists. We apparently disagree only on how we should handle those who protect Communists.” McCarthy was taunting not just General Zwicker but the general in the White House.35
The Washington press corps was severely critical of the president’s news conference statement. James Reston opined that Ike had “turned the other cheek today” and McCarthy had “struck him about as hard as the position of the President will allow.” Advance hints from the White House that the president was prepared “to put things straight” had turned out to be false; once again, Eisenhower had been “the genial conciliator.” Nor was it a surprise that McCarthy had “not only defied the President but patronized him.”36
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