Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  The first hearing session was scheduled to begin at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 22. On Wednesday, The New York Times had published the procedural rules. Though he would not vote or otherwise deliberate with the subcommittee, McCarthy and his counsel “shall have the same right to cross-examine as the members of the subcommittee.” The army’s case was scheduled to go first, including a statement by Secretary Stevens. The hearings were to be televised in full on three networks plus highlights on radio and local television.36

  On April 22, at dawn, television technicians invaded the ornate marble-walled, high-ceilinged Senate Caucus Room on the third floor of the Senate Office Building. They lugged in equipment, set up scaffolds to hold bulky television cameras, and tested floodlights. Shortly before 10:00, the large oak doors were flung open and politicians, lawyers, photographers, reporters, and staff people flooded in. Built to handle an audience of three hundred, the room soon held a crowd estimated at five hundred to eight hundred.

  As the moments ticked away toward beginning, John Adams, whose professional life had careened wildly for months toward that moment, recalled the scene: “Around a coffin-shaped table sat the principals, the subcommittee, various lawyers and counsel Jenkins. At the end of the table were McCarthy, Cohn, and subcommittee director Carr, protected by two plainclothesmen. Immediately next to the McCarthy group sat the Army group, Stevens, myself, and Special Counsel Welch. A phalanx of generals sat behind Stevens. Struve Hensel, still one of the accused, sat next to us, with his lawyer.” After so many weeks, Karl Mundt was finally ready. When the red lights on the television cameras told him that America was watching, the senator, Adams recalled, “picked up a glass ashtray and rapped for order.” The time was 10:35 a.m.37

  About noon that day, the president and Mrs. Eisenhower boarded their plane back to Washington, DC. The general was ready to return to the front to oversee Operation McCarthy.

  CHAPTER 13

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  THE EISENHOWER-MCCARTHY HEARINGS

  A single word characterizes each of the key actors in the hearings drama that unfolded on April 22. “Shocked” was the word for Joe Welch, who, according to Thomas Reeves, “took one look through the doorway and recoiled in horror” at the “utter confusion” in the hearing room; it teemed with hundreds of spectators, photographers jumping “up and down to get pictures,” and television cameras following every move.1

  “Ambushed” aptly describes Karl Mundt’s feelings that day. The South Dakota senator had been drafted by the subcommittee to preside over the circus because, he believed, “behind the scenes, secret meetings at the White House and Capitol Hill were held.” He later reflected that “the Big Name actors onstage were marionettes pulled by unseen, and often unidentifiable, forces on the dark side of the curtain.”2

  “Cynical” was an appropriate word for Roy Cohn. His relationship with David Schine was being dragged through the mud. The inquiry, he wrote not long before his death, “had nothing to do with what it said it was doing.” The hearings, he believed, were not about him and Schine or his threats to “wreck” the army. “The real purpose, of the whole shebang,” he lamented, “was to wipe out McCarthy. Joe knew, I knew that.”3

  “Angry” described Struve Hensel, who had accused McCarthy of “barefaced lies” when the senator charged that Hensel had masterminded the Schine report as a means of covering up his own corruption. John Adams, sitting near Hensel, was “bitter”; the army counsel believed that he and Stevens had been set up to be sacrificial lambs. “If the fall guy role for me was hard, it was even more difficult for Secretary Stevens,” he recalled. “Jittery” was the word Jim Hagerty frequently applied to Robert Stevens, an apt description for the secretary’s emotional, often impulsive response to stressful situations.4

  After calling the session to order, Mundt presented the mission of the hearings: to determine whether McCarthy and his aides had “sought by improper means to obtain preferential treatment for one Private G. David Schine” and whether the US Army had held Schine “hostage” to force McCarthy’s subcommittee to end its investigation of communist infiltration in the army.5

  To characterize McCarthy’s approach to the hearings as “aggressive” would be an understatement. Mundt instructed subcommittee counsel Ray Jenkins to call his first witness; at that moment—seventeen minutes into the hearing—McCarthy’s nasal baritone broke the spell: “A point of order, Mr. Chairman. May I raise a point of order?” Robert Stevens and John Adams, he said, could not speak for the army because they were “Pentagon politicians.” He called it “a disgrace” and an insult to “the millions of outstanding young men in the Army” to permit those men, “who are trying to hold up an investigation of Communists, label themselves as the Department of the Army.” He got no ruling from the chair at that moment. James Reston opined the next day that McCarthy “could not help it. When the red lights on those TV cameras go on, the Senator automatically produces sound.”6

  Stevens was scheduled to testify after lunch. He stood proudly in front a phalanx of uniformed, decorated army generals, clearly visible to the television audience. A sympathetic journalist described the scene: “For just a moment, the little man with the glasses and the burlap-colored hair was bigger than anybody in the whole crowded room.” “First,” Stevens began, “it is my responsibility to speak for the Army. The Army is about a million and half men and women, in posts across this country and around the world.” “That was when,” the reporter wrote, “you could shut your eyes and almost hear the bugles.”

  McCarthy erupted, “Mr. Chairman, a point of order. Mr. Stevens is not speaking for the Army.” The magic moment was gone; Stevens “fell back into his niche as a displaced gentleman, stoutly backing his Army but somewhat embarrassed by the whole thing.” As usual, McCarthy got his way. The chair ruled that “for the purpose of this inquiry, he [Stevens] speaks for himself, for Mr. Adams and for Mr. Hensel.” That sickened John Adams. “McCarthy is in charge,” he thought to himself. “He may be sitting here along with the others being investigated, but really he’s in charge.”7

  Stevens plowed ahead, labeling as “absolutely false” McCarthy’s charge that the army had sought to “blackmail” the subcommittee into ending its investigation. He obediently repeated Fred Seaton’s formula for shifting responsibility—that the Schine report had been issued in response to senatorial requests. He called McCarthy’s “tireless effort to obtain special consideration and privileges” for Schine a “perversion of power.” Ending his statement, Stevens declared, “I am proud to have had this chance to speak for the Army today. This Army is of transcendent importance to this nation and the friends of freedom and justice and peace around the world.”8

  A PURPOSELY BUSY PRESIDENT

  “Busy”—purposely busy—was the word for Dwight Eisenhower on April 22. Though he was not in the hearing room, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop called the president “the seventh principal,” in addition to McCarthy, Stevens, Cohn, John Adams, Carr, and Hensel. However, Ike had arranged a hectic travel schedule that would make it difficult for anyone to ask him about the hearings. When his plane landed at National Airport, the president immediately motored to Constitution Hall to greet the annual convention of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Afterward, he spent less than ten minutes at the White House before flying to New York to address the annual dinner of the American Newspaper Publishers Association.9

  On that first night of the hearings, Eisenhower chose to deliver a sharply worded sermon to the publishers on the evils of sensationalism in the press. Ostensibly, the speech was not about McCarthy—but, of course, it was. Ike had often complained that the press had a guilty conscience about McCarthy. Having built him up, the media wanted the president to destroy a monster of their own making. His address was chock full of references to “the facts,” employing the term a dozen times. He accused the papers of placing “a premium upon clichés and slogans. We incline to persuade with an attractive l
abel; or to damn with a contemptuous tag. But catchwords are not information. And, most certainly, sound popular judgments cannot be based upon them. . . . Freedom of expression is not merely a right,” the president concluded, “its constructive use is a stern duty. Have we, have you as publishers, the courage fully to exercise the right and perform the duty? Along with patriotism—understanding, comprehension, determination are the qualities we now need. Without them, we cannot win. With them, we cannot fail.”10

  Ike later complained to Swede Hazlett that he had received “a number of criticisms” from publishers in attendance that night, protesting “Why should he attempt to tell us about our business?” He wished he could respond, “When have you hesitated to tell me how to run my business?” Ike argued that “any hurt feelings must be because someone felt the shoe fit—but uncomfortably.”11

  That shoe pinched Walter Lippmann’s journalistic foot. Lippmann wrote a disdainful column, referring repeatedly to Eisenhower as “the general”—never as “the president.” “The general” believed that newspapers “have made McCarthy powerful by giving too much space and too many headlines to him.” The prestigious pundit argued; “General Eisenhower is quite mistaken. . . . McCarthy’s charges of treason, subversion, espionage, corruption, perversion are news which cannot be suppressed or ignored.” He concluded, “General Eisenhower himself has a heavy responsibility for the things he complains about.”12

  Nevertheless, Eisenhower did not intend to remain in Washington and field questions about the hearings. He arrived back at the White House at 11:30 p.m. and departed the next morning for Kentucky to visit Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace en route to Augusta, Georgia. The president spoke movingly there of Lincoln’s “forbearance in the extreme—patience,” paying indirect homage to his own approach to Joe McCarthy.13

  That exit allowed Ike and Hagerty to avoid questions on the big news the second day of hearings, when Stevens revealed that he possessed the transcript of a phone call from McCarthy seeking privileges for David Schine; indeed, the army had fifty to a hundred such transcripts. The room shook with laughter when Stevens recalled McCarthy’s wisecrack that Roy Cohn “thinks that Dave ought to be a general and operate from a penthouse on the Waldorf-Astoria.” The news of the phone transcripts set off hours of wrangling that resulted in the passage of a motion to subpoena the documents in question.14

  INDOCHINA IN CRISIS

  The crisis in Indochina, where the French were on the verge of defeat, was an unwanted passenger on the president’s plane. John Foster Dulles informed Eisenhower that the French foreign minister, Georges Bidault, was “a man close to the breaking point.” Bidault believed that the only alternatives were using B-29s to bomb the Viet Minh rebels at Dien Ben Phu or give up and negotiate an armistice. Eisenhower was forced to truncate his trip and return to Washington on April 25 to address what Jim Hagerty called a “situation getting very grave.” Arriving back in Washington at 9:15 p.m., the president read updated reports on Indochina deep into the night. Hagerty noted pessimistically that the French expected Dien Bien Phu to fall within a week.15

  On Monday morning, April 26, Eisenhower plunged into meetings, with Indochina—not the Army-McCarthy hearings—the main item on the agenda. The president confirmed that the French forces at Dien Bien Phu “could not hold out for more than a week and would fall possibly sooner.” No mention was made of an unspoken issue: if Eisenhower could be blamed for losing Indochina to the communists, McCarthy could exploit that issue, just as he had charged General George C. Marshall with the loss of China.

  In spite of his preoccupation with the crisis in Indochina, the hearings were on the president’s mind. He complained to congressional leaders that he feared that the American people would conclude that Congress is focused on “nothing but McCarthy.” “The worst thing about this McCarthy business,” he said, “is that the newspapers are all saying that the leadership in the Republican Party has switched to McCarthy and we are all dancing to his tune.”16

  “Worried” was the word for Fred Seaton, the president’s man in the Pentagon, in the wake of the subpoena for the Pentagon’s monitored telephone transcripts. Seaton fretted on his personal notepad about whether the subpoena was aimed at “ALL monitored conversations.” He was relieved when Attorney General Brownell advised Sherman Adams that the transcripts should be limited to the principals in the hearings and, in particular, urged that the administration deny any demand for “telephone conversations with the White House or the Department of Justice.” Limiting the transcripts to the “principals” in the investigation—McCarthy, Stevens, Cohn, John Adams, Carr, and Hensel—conveniently left out Fred Seaton.17

  DOCTORED EVIDENCE

  On April 27, at McCarthy’s urging, Ray Jenkins asked Stevens if he had asked Private Schine to pose for a picture with him. Stevens could not recall. Jenkins produced a 14-by-20-inch photo showing the two beside Stevens’s plane in Fort Dix, New Jersey; the secretary appeared to be smiling at the private. The next day, only seconds after the session began, Joseph Welch signaled Chairman Mundt. “Mr. Welch, a point of order?” Mundt asked. Welch responded, “I don’t know what it is but it’s a point of something.” Granted permission, he continued, “My point of order is that Mr. Jenkins yesterday was imposed upon and so was the Secretary of the Army by having a doctored or altered photograph produced in this courtroom as if it were honest.”18

  The public relations officer at McGuire Air Force Base had found the original photograph, which included a third person, Colonel Jack Bradley. The picture showed Stevens smiling at Bradley, not Schine. Welch’s instinct for the jugular was fully on display: “I charge that what was offered in evidence yesterday was an altered, shamefully cut-down picture so that somebody could say to Stevens, ‘Were you not photographed alone with David Schine?’ ” The Democrats demanded “the facts,” and Jenkins, embarrassed, dismissed Stevens and called to the stand the man who had given him the doctored photograph—Roy Cohn—who claimed not to have known about the alteration.19

  Finally, on April 30, the seventh day of the hearings, James Juliana, a McCarthy aide, took responsibility for the photo but insisted he had not been ordered to cut out Bradley. Welch prodded Juliana about the origins of the photograph. “Did you think it came from a pixie?” he asked, slyly alluding to the fact that the photo had been prepared on Roy Cohn’s orders. McCarthy saw a chance to disrupt the questioning and asked, “Will the counsel for my benefit define—I think he may be an expert on that—what is a pixie?” Welch responded, “Yes, I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?” As the room erupted in laughter, McCarthy shot back, “As I said, I think you may be an authority on what a pixie is.”20

  That laughter reflected the fact that the hearings were already steeped in innuendo. In the 1950s, “fairy” was a common pejorative term for “homosexual.” Welch had subtly reminded the crowd of the whispered story behind the privileges sought for Schine. McCarthy’s snide rejoinder suggested, “You must be one too.”

  Regardless of the facts about the Cohn-Schine relationship, numerous participants in the Army-McCarthy drama believed the men were lovers. Fred Seaton retained, in his “Eyes Only” document collection, a handwritten note on his official notepaper, bearing the name, address, and phone number of a former chauffeur of Schine. The man had apparently volunteered, if needed, to testify about driving Cohn and Schine on trips between Fort Dix and New York and claimed that there had been “sex acts in the back of the car.” Though the chauffeur never testified, Seaton’s retention of the document reflects how far the Eisenhower forces contemplated going to defeat Joe McCarthy.21

  Then a second piece of doctored evidence surfaced. The afternoon of May 4, with Stevens testifying, McCarthy reached into his briefcase and produced a document dated January 26, 1951, apparently dictated by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The senator alleged that the letter disclosed possible espionage at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey
, but the army had paid no attention to the warning. Welch stated that “the mere fact that we have an impressive-looking purported copy of such a letter does not impress an old-time lawyer.” He shrewdly added, “I would like to have Mr. J. Edgar Hoover say that he wrote the letter and mailed it.”22

  The next morning, McCarthy’s attempt to align himself with the popular FBI director exploded in his face. Robert A. Collier, a ten-year FBI veteran, testified that Hoover had flatly denied that the letter was authentic. The paragraphs in the McCarthy letter were apparently drawn from a longer memorandum Hoover had dictated on the date in question. Collier reluctantly agreed with Welch that the document was “a carbon copy of precisely nothing” and “a perfect phony.”23

  The Eisenhower forces piled more humiliation on the senator. When Chairman Mundt asked the attorney general whether the entire Hoover memorandum could be released, Brownell ruled against it and, in effect, charged McCarthy with “unauthorized use” of confidential FBI reports. Welch grilled McCarthy about how he had secured the “phony” letter, expressing “an absorbing curiosity to know how in the dickens you got hold of it.” When McCarthy refused to answer, Welch reminded the senator that he had sworn “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” McCarthy would admit only that it had come from a confidential informant. In effect, he invoked his own version of the constitutional amendment he loved to vilify: the Fifth.24

  THE SPECTER OF PERJURY

  Then Robert Stevens got blindsided. On May 4, Arthur Krock, in The New York Times, questioned the accuracy of Stevens’s testimony. The army secretary had testified that following his lunch agreement with the Republican senators on February 24, “I went back to the office and then I went home. And I don’t think I saw anybody, except some of my own staff that afternoon.” Krock resurrected a February 26 James Reston column that detailed how, in fact, Stevens had met with a group that included “Acting Secretary of Defense Kyes, Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, Assistant Secretary of Defense Seaton, H. Struve Hensel” and other army officers.25