The Washington Post’s editorial writer echoed the “other cheek” theme with the caveat that “Senator McCarthy’s arrogance may yet save President Eisenhower from the worst consequences of his own timidity.” Eisenhower had delivered a “condemnation of sin,” but McCarthy, instead of endorsing the president’s “weaseling” principles, was “forcing on the President the fight he has so far declined to accept.”37
The most devastating response to the president’s statement was Herblock’s cartoon in The Washington Post depicting a ferocious, grinning McCarthy with a bloody meat cleaver in his hand, confronting a downhearted Eisenhower, who, pulling a white feather from his scabbard, warned McCarthy, “Have a care, sir.”38
However, McCarthy’s statement showed he had understood Ike’s hidden message. Eisenhower had gambled that blending a specific attack on McCarthy’s methods with a refusal to give the senator the attention he craved would push him over the edge of civility. The tactic had worked. In response to the president’s statement, McCarthy displayed a stunning lack of respect for General Zwicker, for the popular general in the White House, and for the presidency itself.
One newspaper got the impact of Eisenhower’s strategy partly right. The Washington Star reported that McCarthy had given the impression that “General Eisenhower may be a nice fellow but probably is not too bright.” The conclusion: “It is doubtful that a more arrogant and insulting statement has ever been made by any Senator concerning a President of his own party.”39
The following morning, Jim Hagerty noted that the president was “upset at [the] press reaction” and that the stories in The Washington Post and The New York Times had “really hit below the belt.” Hagerty had released a film to radio, television, and movie newsreels. “Hell,” he groused to his diary, “with slanted reporters, we’ll go directly to the people.”40
Herbert Brownell understood Eisenhower’s strategy; they had obviously discussed it previously. The day following the president’s news conference, the attorney general sat down with reporters for an off-the-record discussion. John Crider, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, wrote Sherman Adams that his liberal colleagues had endeavored to “pin Herb down that Ike was wishy-washy in his statement of principles in the tussle with McCarthy.” Brownell had steadfastly maintained that it was “too early to tell how effective the President’s statement was.”
Crider also reported that a colleague in charge of a national lecture agency had informed him recently that he “was amazed at the change of public sentiment” toward McCarthy. A year earlier, lecturers around the country had found it “unsafe to suggest there was anything wrong with the man.” Now audiences were asking “What are we going to do about this fellow McCarthy?” If that report was accurate, he opined, it might “confirm the correctness of Ike’s handling of the situation. . . . For him to have lowered himself to Joe’s level might have endangered his own position.” The tipping point had arrived.41
TOWARD A POLITICAL D-DAY
Eisenhower understood that he was in the early stages of all-out war. At a specially called cabinet meeting, he cautioned cabinet members to avoid blunders in the tense days ahead. They were instructed to take care not to retain subordinates who could be subject to attack but to handle their cases with “fairness, justice, and decency.” Having done so, every cabinet member was then obligated to protect subordinates from abuse and threats. In short, department heads were to clean house, be fair, protect their subordinates, and not buckle to pressure from “any source”—implying McCarthy. Eisenhower, echoing Lodge’s counsel, also instructed the cabinet members not to make political speeches, implying the need to avoid any mention of McCarthy. Instead, they should focus addresses and articles on “the positive aspects of the broad Administration program for creating a better, more prosperous and stronger United States.” He emphasized that he had done precisely that with his own statement on McCarthy and Stevens.42
On March 6, Lodge, back in New York, sat down to write a final “eyes only” report to the president, based on his notes from their discussion on March 2 and summarizing his “two months tour of duty as your adviser at the White House.” “Dear General,” he began. “The plain fact is that there is a gap in your organization because there is no one whose primary responsibility is political strategy for you.” Though Eisenhower, as president, might sometimes decide to disregard political strategy, he “should always know what it is.”
Lodge, in effect, restated a decades-old management truism, “What is everybody’s responsibility is nobody’s.” “You have delegated political strategy to everyone in general and no one in particular,” he wrote. As a result, “ideas about political strategy are put to one side and are often not even discussed.” He warned that “an opponent such as Senator McCarthy will out-think this kind of system every time. It is a system which is continually running around putting out fires after they have started.”
He drove the point home: if political strategy was “nobody’s business” in the White House, “that means that you must do it yourself.” Though Ike had rescued Stevens, he “should not have to pick up the pieces.” The fight,” Lodge concluded, “should have been McCarthy versus Stevens, not McCarthy versus Eisenhower. The fact that it is McCarthy versus Eisenhower is a major victory for McCarthy.” He expressed a grudging admiration for McCarthy, who “had his television script, press statement and everything ready to get an equal play with you on your statement.” Eisenhower, he concluded, urgently needed a single individual assigned to be the political strategist; that person “should think about nothing else.”43
In his present circumstances, Eisenhower had already accepted Lodge’s premise that “you must do it yourself.” Actually, in Fred Seaton, Eisenhower had identified a man who might eventually fill the bill—a public relations expert with senatorial experience who was committed to protecting the president. However, at that moment, Seaton was on a presidential mission that even Lodge did not fully comprehend, plotting an attack on McCarthy’s vulnerable flank, manned by Roy Cohn.
“HALF MCCARTHY AND HALF EISENHOWER”
On the day Lodge made his final report to the president, Eisenhower’s former and subsequent electoral opponent, Adlai Stevenson, made a play for the headlines. Stevenson understood that it was in his political interests to continue to tie Eisenhower to McCarthy. Stevenson was scheduled as the featured speaker at a $100-a-plate Democratic dinner in Miami, Florida. The night prior, he hinted to reporters that it was time Democrats charged the president with “full responsibility” for the actions of all Republicans, including Joe McCarthy.44
At the dinner, Stevenson was at his eloquent best. “We are witnessing the bitter harvest of slander, defamation, and disunion planted in the soil of our democracy,” he said. He called it “wicked” and “subversive”—a carefully chosen word—“for public officials to try deliberately to replace reason with passion; to substitute hatred for honest difference; to fulfill campaign promises by practicing deception; and to hide discord among Republicans by sowing the dragon’s teeth of dissension among Americans.” Stevenson excoriated McCarthy’s impugning of “the loyalty and patriotism” of Democrats with his incantation of “twenty years of treason,” delivered “under the auspices of the Republican National Committee.” “Extremism produces extremism,” he declared, “Lies beget lies.”
Stevenson proclaimed that “those who live by the sword of slander also may perish by it, for now it is also being used against distinguished Republicans.” The governor reeled off a stunning list of respected Americans hounded by McCarthy and his cronies, climaxing with “the President himself patronized.” Stevenson called McCarthyism “a malign and fatal totalitarianism” that was sweeping the country “because a group of political plungers has persuaded the President that McCarthyism is the best Republican formula for political success.”
Stevenson echoed Lincoln’s “house divided” speech with a phrase that would dominate the next day’s headlines: “A political party
divided against itself, half McCarthy and half Eisenhower, cannot produce national unity—cannot govern with confidence and purpose.”45
Back in Washington that night at the White House correspondents’ dinner, the “jittery” Robert Stevens sat with Jim Hagerty. Hagerty was keeping an eye on the secretary, who, he had noted in his diary, was “developing [a] persecution complex—highly irrational—beginning to talk himself into [a] position where he actually thinks he is [a] big hero.” That night, he found Stevens “very unstable and excited,” loudly proclaiming he was “all alone in this fight.” Hagerty thought to himself, “Someone better ride herd on him but good.”46
At another table, the president engaged in relaxed conversation with Robert Donovan of the New York Herald Tribune and Admiral Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Eisenhower was visibly pleased when Irving Berlin sang a new song, “Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army.” Reportedly, the line in the song that most amused Ike was “There’s always someone high up where you can pass the buck.”47
In fact, Eisenhower had just passed the buck down the chain of command to Strauss. Just prior to the program’s beginning, the AEC chair suggested, to Donovan’s surprise, that the journalist introduce Secretary Stevens to the crowd. Donovan looked over at Eisenhower, who had apparently planted the suggestion. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” Ike said with a grin. “If you do, I’ll be first on my feet applauding.” So Donovan asked Stevens to take a bow, and Eisenhower, The New York Times reported, “quickly joined in clapping vigorously.”48
Dwight Eisenhower had just sent another signal to Joe McCarthy.
CHAPTER 10
* * *
* * *
A POLITICAL D-DAY
The morning of March 7, 1954, a New York Times headline declared, “Stevenson Says President Yields to ‘M’Carthyism.’ ” The status of the increasingly tense relationship between the president and the junior senator from Wisconsin remained a subject of intense speculation. Arthur Krock described the GOP as desperate to avert “an all-out conflict” between Eisenhower and McCarthy, fearing its impact on the fall elections. Eisenhower’s public support for abused officers such as Ralph Zwicker could only mean that, unless accorded adequate respect, he would order “such officials to decline thereafter to appear before McCarthy.” Krock, who knew Eisenhower better than most other journalists, recognized that, in a showdown, “McCarthy may be the one to retreat.”1
James Reston, however, concluded that Eisenhower was “playing a waiting game,” gambling “that the American people will get bored with the Wisconsin Senator or that he will discredit himself or come to an abrupt political end.” McCarthy, Reston wrote, “has already won a considerable victory” and “tilted successfully with the President himself.” He was wrong; the president was not waiting, except for the right moment—only days away—to spring his planned assault on McCarthy.2
That Sunday, Edward R. Murrow and the See It Now team reviewed a near-final edit of the program on McCarthy, scheduled for March 9. Fred Friendly, then a news producer at CBS, asked the assembled staff, “Is there anyone in this room who, in their past, has done anything that could be used to hurt Ed?” Murrow worried that he might not attract a substantial audience; CBS, though permitting the broadcast, was unwilling to finance its advertising. “I want to advertise it in The New York Times, make sure people look at it,” Murrow fretted. He eventually persuaded British media baron Sidney Bernstein and Friendly, Murrow’s boss, to finance the advertising out of their own pockets. Murrow expected no support from the Eisenhower administration. He characterized Eisenhower’s statement at his March 3 news conference as “watered-down sweet reason.” He was cynical: “The White House is not going to do, and not doing to say, one goddamned thing.”3
RESPONDING TO STEVENSON
Joe McCarthy announced that he would demand equal radio and television time to respond to Adlai Stevenson’s March 6 address. Eisenhower was not about to let that happen. At 8:15 a.m. on March 8, the impatient Eisenhower met with Republican legislative leaders and launched a discussion of who should respond to Stevenson’s Saturday-night speech. Ike started with one premise: McCarthy was not an option. He looked directly at Richard Nixon and said, “I am going to make a suggestion, even though he is present, that I think we probably ought to use Dick more than we have been.” Nixon could “take positions which are more political than it would be expected that I take. The difficulty with the McCarthy problem is that anybody who takes it on runs the risk of being called a pink. Dick has experience in the communist field, and therefore he would not be subject to criticism.”4
Sometime that morning, Eisenhower pulled the reluctant Nixon, along with Hagerty, into his private office and coached the vice president on his speaking assignment. Nixon, he said, should not attack Stevenson or McCarthy directly. The president wanted the address billed “not as rebuttal” but a talk on “Republican leadership.” Nixon was hesitant, but Eisenhower would not take no for an answer. Later, when the president heard that Nixon had expressed concerns, he phoned him. The address, he told Nixon, should not be “answering anybody—our own publicity shouldn’t mention Stevenson & McCarthy.” Nixon should be “positive,” pushing program, not personalities. Nixon, he said, should feel free to come to him “for help if necessary.”5
Hagerty recorded in his diary that, following the legislative meeting that morning, the president “called the Republican leaders into his office and laid down the law.” “Let’s stop this nonsense,” he said, “and get down to getting [our] program passed.” Hagerty described the president as “dead set [on] stopping McCarthy.” He intended to push GOP chairman Leonard Hall to request equal time from NBC and CBS to answer Stevenson, but “with party spokesmen,” not McCarthy. Eisenhower characterized McCarthy as a “pimple on [the] path of progress.” Hagerty was pleased; “Ike really made up his mind to fight Joe from now on in.”6
Eisenhower called Hall and pressed him to contact the networks immediately in order to preempt McCarthy. If the networks were reluctant, Hall was to notify the president so Eisenhower could personally “get in touch with [William] Paley and [David] Sarnoff,” his friends running CBS and NBC, respectively. “Get busy right away,” Eisenhower ordered. “This is a good job for you.” By 3:00 p.m., Hall was back in the Oval Office, reporting that he had secured radio and television time for the Republican response to Stevenson.
That afternoon, Hagerty and Bernard Shanley talked with the president as he changed clothes, preparing to practice golf shots on the White House lawn. They agreed that the next day, Hagerty should “leak” the evolving story of their action against McCarthy, underscoring the president’s press conference statement, the decision to strip Scott McLeod of authority over State Department personnel, and Hall’s achievement in denying McCarthy the chance to respond to Stevenson for the Republican Party. “Tomorrow”—March 9—would be a providential day to send the message that Eisenhower, in Hagerty’s words that morning, had “made up his mind” to go after Joe McCarthy.7
The administration was prepared to announce another action designed to get under McCarthy’s skin. In 1953, when he had raised a fuss about allegedly procommunist books in overseas libraries, McCarthy had offered to provide copies of his own books. On March 8, Theodore Streibert, the USIA director, sent the senator a letter stating that, following “a careful review of your books,” the agency had found that “they are not well adapted to the special purposes served by our overseas libraries.” Hagerty would save the public announcement for a moment when he thought it would do the most damage to McCarthy.8
Eisenhower managed to squeeze time into this hectic day to respond to Henry Cabot Lodge’s March 6 report, urging him to appoint a full-time political strategist to the White House staff. “You can get no argument from me when you advance this contention,” he wrote. The merits of Lodge’s argument that, without such a person, “you must do it yourself” had been obvious that very day. Eisenhower lamented that
the administration had “so much to be bragging about” and regretted “that we allow situations to arise where we have to go around wearing sack cloth and ashes.”9
About 6:00 p.m. the evening of March 8, Robert Stevens answered a call from Senator Stuart Symington. Symington, not one to mince words, stated, “I would like to see the report on Schine sometime, if the Army is willing to release it.” Stevens replied, “Stuart, I doubt very much that they are.” His use of “they” underlined the fact that he was not in charge of the project. He told Symington said that the report was not quite “pulled together.” Symington growled, “I understand it has been pulled together, and I don’t want to see it pulled apart before we get a chance to look at it. Naturally, it is of great interest to us.” Again Stevens hedged, saying “I doubt very much whether it would be available, Stuart.” When he continued to respond ambiguously to the senator’s entreaties, Symington asked whether he needed to go to “a higher authority?” Stevens danced around that possibility, stating that the report was “a hell of a lot of stuff.” Finally Symington gave up for the moment and asked that his request be kept “private between you and me.”10
Symington was not wrong about the status of the project. By the time he called Stevens, the thirty-four-page, carefully edited report was virtually complete. His call was most likely the result of a purposeful leak designed to create the appearance that senators—not the army or, more important, the White House—were forcing release of the report.
Symington was not the only senator who had been primed to seek a copy of the Schine document. That same evening, Defense Secretary Wilson, apparently at the instigation of Fred Seaton, phoned Senator Charles Potter, telling him about the Schine report and that the Democrats were demanding copies; he urged Potter to make his own formal request. In response to Wilson, Potter wrote him that night, seeking “all the facts” regarding attempts to gain “preferential treatment for Private Schine.” Showing how closely the White House was monitoring the operation, Sherman Adams informed Jim Hagerty about Potter’s request. “That ought to kick up [a] fuss,” Hagerty surmised, “and start [the] ball rolling to get rid of Roy Cohn.” John Adams sarcastically recalled how “miraculously” Potter’s letter had appeared on the desk of the secretary of defense. “This was,” Adams concluded, “a phony exercise.”11
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