Roy Cohn believed that the administration had lost, in Dirksen, “a valuable ally in the hearings.” He later recalled seeing the senator running his fingers through his hair in obvious distress. “Roy,” he said, “I’ve just about had it with those people. I’m fed up with them. I offered them a chance to get off the hook and they were stupid enough not to take it.”45
The next day, Hagerty recorded that Ike was “getting pretty sick and tired of McCarthy.” When Jerry Persons argued that Stevens had “made a mistake” in not ending the hearings, the president “disagreed violently.” He gave Stevens credit for standing firm. “I think Stevens did exactly right,” he said. “Here he had been on the stand for thirteen days and if [this] plan [had] been successful the other witnesses, except McCarthy, would have been testifying behind closed doors. McCarthy would then be at liberty to come out of the hearings and tell reporters anything he wanted even though they had [a] transcript. He would have [a] forum while [the] Army would not. Anyway, I’m glad the Army is fighting him right down the line.” That candid rhetoric reflected presidential veto number three.46
There may have been a fourth. On November 10, 1979, a young attorney, Ann M. Lousin, was seated next to Robert Stevens at a dinner to organize the Chicago chapter of the Supreme Court Historical Society. Lousin, a graduate of Welch’s alma mater, Grinnell College in Iowa, engaged Stevens in animated conversation over drinks and dinner. Stevens told Lousin that late in the Army-McCarthy hearings, McCarthy had personally contacted him and asked for a meeting. He had asked Stevens to consider announcing that “for the security of the country, we are ending the televised hearings.” Stevens had taken the proposition to Eisenhower, who had listened. Then Ike had slapped the desk and shouted, “No! Now we have the bastard right where we want him!”47
CHAPTER 14
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PROTECTING THE PRESIDENT
The morning of Wednesday, May 12, Joseph and Stewart Alsop’s column identified “two great dangers” confronting the Eisenhower administration: “the grim crisis in Indochina” and “the domestic political crisis that is currently spilling over in the McCarthy-Army hearings.” Though Indochina dominated the opening questions at the president’s news conference that morning, the reporters quickly turned to Joe McCarthy.1
One journalist asked about the attorney general’s ruling that Senator McCarthy had released classified FBI information “without authorization.” Eisenhower responded, “Well, the question is of two parts. One involved the Senator”—as close as Ike ever came to using McCarthy’s name—but he declined to comment “on that particular incident.” Otherwise, he called any release of classified information “reprehensible,” especially “involving the security of our country.” Robert Spivack asked if the president thought that members of “this McCarthy spy network” should “be regarded as security risks?” Ike snapped, “That is a question I don’t believe I will answer.”2
JANUARY 21 RISES AGAIN
Henry Cabot Lodge was worried. On May 7, he wrote an “eyes only” letter to the president. Joe Welch had informed him that he might be called to testify “concerning a meeting which I attended in January in Herbert Brownell’s office.” He believed that such testimony “would be utterly destructive of the integrity of the presidential office” and a violation of “the spirit of the Constitution” to require testimony from a presidential adviser. Lodge intended “to decline to give testimony in that capacity.” Eisenhower assured Lodge that his position was “exactly correct” and he was certain that Herbert Brownell “would agree with this view.”3
Discussion of the January 21 meeting was something the White House wanted to avoid at all costs. It had included close advisers to the president: Brownell, Rogers, Sherman Adams, Lodge, and Gerald Morgan. That gathering had, in effect, launched the secret campaign against McCarthy, commencing the compilation of the privileges sought for G. David Schine and leading to the publicized report that had spawned the Army-McCarthy hearings. It had been, in Lodge’s words, Eisenhower’s “first move” against McCarthy. McCarthy knew about that meeting, and it was only a matter of time until he exploited it. The drama now would revolve around the effort to avoid revealing the contents of that meeting and any implication of the president’s involvement.4
John Adams had also been present at that meeting. As he prepared to testify, he was described by one reporter as “a man who does not get enough sleep.” Adams was a bundle of nerves. He had been convinced he was being followed and had begun switching cabs and walking through alleys. “Everyone thought their home phones were being tapped,” he recalled. Adams once accosted a man who was rummaging through his desk. He received anonymous, threatening phone calls, including a bomb threat.5
On May 12, Adams opened Pandora’s box, implicating the president and his adviser. Before testifying, he counseled with Struve Hensel. “I’m worried about it,” he told Hensel. “I don’t see any way I can keep the White House out of it if they ask the right questions.” Hensel, who had accused McCarthy of “barefaced lies,” roared, “Pull ’em all in! Why should you be stuck out there all by yourself? Hell, pull ’em all in!” That is precisely what Adams did.6
Adams began his testimony in the firm belief that “the Republican majority was more interested in saving McCarthy than in establishing the truth.” Worried that he could be charged with perjury, Adams planned to “recount, day by day, the abuse heaped on me by Cohn.” He detailed Cohn’s constant agitation about Fort Monmouth and his unrelenting pressure to grant David Schine long weekends off at Fort Dix. What had generated headlines, he later recalled, “was not Cohn’s abuse or McCarthy’s silence. It was my revelation, at the end of the day, that the White House played a role in the fight against McCarthy.” Adams described “a sudden stir in the committee room” when, referring to the January 21 meeting, he revealed the names of the people in attendance. The newspapers highlighted Adams’s testimony that “Governor Adams asked me if I had a written record of all of the incidents with reference to Private Schine.” When Adams said he had none, the president’s chief of staff “thought I should prepare one.” John Adams also testified that, afterward, participants in the meeting had visited Dirksen, Potter, and Mundt. That revelation upset the Democrats on the subcommittee. A demand to subpoena the January 21 participants was now inevitable.7
“DON’T TALK ANYMORE ABOUT THAT MEETING”
On May 13, Jim Hagerty noted in his diary that Eisenhower “feels very strongly” on the issue of subpoenas for subordinates and had declared, “This is one we will fight out right up and down the line.” Ike had ruminated whether to send Sherman Adams before the subcommittee “to give his name, his title and then refuse to answer all questions under Presidential order” or dispatch Herbert Brownell with the same message. For Eisenhower, that was the political equivalent of a prisoner of war providing name, rank, and serial number. “McCarthy,” Hagerty noted, “may be bluffing but if [an] attempt is made to subpoena White House personnel, we will fight it.”8
The president took two actions on May 13 in preparation for the looming showdown. First, he wrote Secretary of Defense Wilson, ordering him to instruct all employees who testified before the Government Operations Subcommittee “not to testify to any conversations or communications, or produce any documents” involving “official transactions between an employee of the Department of Defense and any person either within that Department or any other part of the Executive Branch of the Government.” Wilson was traveling in the Far East, but that letter would empower Acting Secretary Robert B. Anderson to silence John Adams about the details of the January 21 meeting.9
The president’s other action—a secret one—was also channeled through Anderson, who wrote Army Secretary Robert Stevens:
At the instruction of The Honorable Sherman Adams, the Department of the Army is to deliver at once to the Honorable Fred A. Seaton, Assistant Secretary of Defense, for his prompt transmittal to the White House each and all steno
graphic notes, transcriptions, or other records or memoranda concerning conversations and communications between any of the principals of the Army-McCarthy hearings, employed within this Department or within the Executive Branch of the Government, regarding any matters which are involved in the subject of inquiry before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations.
Thus began the impoundment of documents that Fred Seaton would thereafter retain.10
The issue of the January 21 meeting haunted Eisenhower’s cabinet meeting on the morning of Friday, May 14. Ike said he was “quite clear in his own mind” that testimony should not be allowed regarding “security information or other basic national interests” and—the linchpin—“personal advice exchanged between superior and subordinate in the Executive Branch.” Such advice was “a privileged matter,” and cabinet members should cite his orders against testifying “about advice offered in a personal relationship.” Referring to the January 21 meeting, he said that a subpoena might be issued for the president’s staff. Though Ike wanted “to avoid a major fight between the Executive and the Legislative” based on “the captious challenge of one Senator,” he drew a constitutional line: the president would protect “the privacy of personal advice.”11
That morning, as John Adams prepared to depart the Pentagon for Capitol Hill, Fred Seaton called. “Don’t talk anymore about that meeting. These are orders. Written instructions will follow.” Adams’s anxiety escalated; while he was testifying on May 13, his car, parked in front of his apartment building, had been stolen. Now, on May 14, he was being ordered to go back to the hearing and refuse to talk.12
At the hearings, the senators—especially the Democrats, angry that the Republican senators had known about the January 21 meeting and they had not—were ready to pounce. One reporter called the scene at the May 14 hearing “the strangest since the hearings began.” Another concluded that the administration’s instruction to John Adams not to talk about the meeting “appeared likely to unite the committee Republicans and Democrats in a challenge to the Executive Branch.”13
Stuart Symington opened that confrontation. “Why was Ambassador Lodge at the meeting on January 21?” he asked. Adams responded, “I don’t know, sir. I did not arrange for his presence.” At that moment, Joe Welch objected, stating Anderson’s order: “This was a high-level discussion of the executive department and this witness has been instructed not to testify as to the interchange of views on people at that high level at that meeting.”14
Symington asked where Adams had gotten his instructions to refuse to talk. Adams said he had received them from Acting Secretary of Defense Robert B. Anderson; he did not mention Fred Seaton. “Clearly the finger was beginning to point at the White House,” Adams recalled. “A constitutional confrontation loomed.” Adams himself had no doubt about the real origins of the order: “I had been gagged, of course, because the White House wanted to stay out of this unseemly brawl.”15
Senator McClellan demanded that the witnesses at the January 21 meeting “be subpoenaed and brought here to tell what they know about it.” He wondered if there had been “someone higher” than John Adams or Robert Stevens “directing their actions” and whether McCarthy and his aides had been “smeared.” Symington agreed that the January 21 meeting had been “perhaps the most important conference of all because it is where much, if not most of all this business started.”16
Suddenly, Everett Dirksen announced that he wanted to testify about the visit John Adams and Gerald Morgan had made to his office on January 21. Adams endured “a moment of terror.” Dirksen, to Adams’s surprise, had kind words for both Morgan and him, but McCarthy smelled blood. He asked Dirksen if that had been “the moment of blackmail,” when Adams had threatened to release the Schine report unless the committee quashed the subpoenas for loyalty board members. Adams, “paralyzed with fright,” thought he “was going to have a heart attack.” He saw himself being “indicted for perjury . . . Dirksen had only to say yes to McCarthy, and I could go to jail.”
Dirksen, Adams recounted, “went right up to the edge—and pulled back.” He found his memory “slightly vague” and was not sure he had learned “that a report was going to be circulated.” Adams had been saved by a single word: “report”; at that point, there had, strictly speaking, been no report, only a verbal account. Mundt and Potter testified similarly. All three Republican senators declined to validate McCarthy’s claim that Adams’s sharing the allegations about Schine constituted “blackmail.”17
“I’LL FIGHT THEM TOOTH AND NAIL”
When gearing up for a major action, Ike often resorted to golf. At midafternoon on Friday, May 14, he and Jim Hagerty headed for Burning Tree Country Club. There they discussed the status of his legislative program, the situation in Indochina, and the Army-McCarthy hearings—especially Senator McClellan’s “threat to subpoena White House staff members and bring them before the Committee.” The president, Hagerty recalled, “would not stand for this one minute.” Those were his “confidential advisors,” and “Congress had absolutely no right to ask them to testify in any way, shape or form about the advice they were giving to him at any time on any subject.” Ike thundered, “If they want to make a test of this principle, I’ll fight them tooth and nail up and down the country. It is a matter of principle with me and I will never permit it.” He said he would again “tell all members of the staff to keep out of this controversy, to have nothing to say on it.” The president decreed that that Hagerty would be “the spokesman on all questions dealing with McCarthy.”18
The next day, the newspapers highlighted the “gag order” the White House had imposed on John Adams. William Lawrence noted that “efforts to find out whether President Eisenhower himself gave the orders for Mr. Adams not to testify were unavailing.” Jim Hagerty had responded “No comment” to that “and all other questions dealing with the McCarthy-Army controversy.”
Meanwhile, Eisenhower made a decision; the executive privilege order Herbert Brownell and William Rogers had been refining since late 1953 would be issued on Monday morning, May 17. He and Mrs. Eisenhower departed for Camp David on Saturday morning, leaving the team—Sherman Adams, Brownell, Assistant Attorney General Lee Rankin, and other White Houses advisers—to put finishing touches on the order. Sherman Adams scheduled breakfast with the president and the team for 7:15 a.m. Monday morning to review the document.19
That weekend, Walter Lippmann called McCarthy’s threat to subpoena White House advisers another episode in “one of the great constitutional crises of our history” involving “flagrant and systematic trespass upon the constitutional prerogatives of the President, and it goes on and on because he does not defend his rights.” Arthur Krock wrote that “the issue has been brought close to the President’s person by the revelation that John G. Adams is under high Executive instruction to withhold certain facts that the entire subcommittee considers to be relevant.” However, the columnist concluded, “As yet the President is aloof.”20
Behind the scenes, Eisenhower was anything but aloof. An unnamed Republican Senate leader stated that he expected President Eisenhower to prevent his advisors from testifying; then “the fat will be in the fire.” The May 16 New York Times quoted Karl Mundt to the effect that the Eisenhower administration “might be on sound ground” in refusing to give details about the January 21 meeting. McCarthy blustered, insisting that it was “urgent” for the subcommittee to “get a complete story about the Justice Department’s part” in the January 21 meeting; he supported McClellan’s demand that the participants be subpoenaed. Mundt again demonstrated his feeble grasp of the situation, predicting that the hearings could now “move a lot more rapidly” and end “in the next ten days or less.”21
On Monday morning, the president met with his advisers over breakfast to review the written order. Ike read the letter, approved it, and said he would sign it at 8:30 and send it immediately to Robert Anderson, the acting secretary of defense, authorizing Hagerty to release
it to the press at 9:00 a.m. The attorney general’s ten-page memorandum, designed to accompany the letter, traced the precedents for executive privilege from George Washington through Harry Truman. The Republican congressional leaders were scheduled to meet right after Eisenhower signed the letter. The president said he would present the letter to them as an “accomplished fact” so they could not oppose it or insist on changes.
At that meeting, Eisenhower grumbled that he had attempted to stay out of the “damn business on the Hill”; however, it was “the threatened subpoena of his confidential advisors that made it necessary for him to act.” He explained his action, which was not open for discussion: “I have issued instructions to the Secretary of Defense which order him to keep confidential any advisory discussions in the administrative side of this government.” The president was blunt: “Any man who testifies as to the advice he gave me won’t be working for me that night.”22
EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE
The same morning, John Adams prepared to step into an army car outside the Pentagon to transport him to the hearings. He was handed an envelope with two documents in it: the president’s letter and the attorney general’s memorandum, with instructions to read the letter at the hearings. Adams resentfully concluded that the president “was invoking Executive Privilege to shut me up.” To be precise, it was to shut him up about the January 21 meeting. Eisenhower had not mentioned that meeting to the congressional leaders. That was because—something the president was loath to admit—it had been his meeting, although he had not been present. However much the White House sought to deny it, that meeting had generated the decision to develop the Cohn-Schine report that had eventually led to the Army-McCarthy hearings. Now the president and the attorney general had skillfully buried that fact in constitutional principle.23
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