Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  The afternoon of May 20, New York Times reporter William Lawrence dropped in on Hagerty to inform him, off the record, that McCarthy had charged that, by refusing to allow confidential advisers to testify, the administration was “resorting to the Fifth Amendment.” Hagerty hoped that the news would make Ike so mad that the president would let him “burn McCarthy’s ears off.” However, Hagerty’s temper cooled, and at the next morning’s staff meeting, he reported the president’s decision “not to answer McCarthy’s Fifth Amendment charges.” Ike he said, “did not want to have daily arguments with McCarthy from the White House.” Hagerty echoed the president’s persistent argument: “That would just build him up and would be what he would want.”41

  In the Sunday, May 23, New York Times, Lawrence, perhaps influenced by Hagerty, emphasized that McCarthy’s potential criminal problems arising from his use of the fraudulent letter from J. Edgar Hoover. McCarthy’s “Fifth Amendment” charge got little traction; neither did his innuendo that the administration “must have something to hide.” Back in Wisconsin, he warned the president in a speech that continued hearings would result in the “suicide” of the Republican Party. McCarthy got laughs when he characterized the president as “an honest man” who “has millions of things to do, and should not be tied up in the question of who shined Schine’s shoes.”42

  PERJURY?

  The consensus quickly emerged that Eisenhower was constitutionally within his rights to invoke executive privilege. Arthur Krock declared the action “so clearly within his constitutional province” that the subcommittee members had “quickly left the Senator from Wisconsin alone” in his demand for subpoenas for White House advisers. “The Secretary’s assertion of full responsibility,” he wrote, “both before and after the high Executive conference [on January 21], and the President’s certification of this statement, got the subcommittee’s inquiry back on the track.” Krock knew better than to accept Stevens’s statement literally; back on February 26, Richard Nixon had told Krock—off the record—about a report “two inches thick” that Eisenhower had approved using to get Roy Cohn fired. Perhaps Krock, like other journalists at the time, believed that the political demise of a demagogue like McCarthy justified casting a blind eye toward Eisenhower’s deception.43

  The resumption of the hearings on May 24 was uncomfortable for Robert Stevens. The public statement the secretary had issued on May 19 was one thing; testifying similarly under oath was another. Prior to the recess, he had flatly testified, “I don’t know who decided to prepare [the Schine report].” When McCarthy had asked if the secretary had ordered the Schine report allegations distributed to Congress and the public, Stevens had stated, “No, sir; I did not order them put out.”

  But, John Adams recalled, Stevens “had to eat his words.” Stevens stated, “The responsibility for these charges being put out is mine, completely.” Thus he fulfilled his secret agreement with Eisenhower. McCarthy hounded Stevens, declaring that the secretary either had a “bad memory” or was guilty of “perjury.” When Stevens suggested that some of John Adams’s activities related to the Schine case constituted independent actions, McCarthy pounced: “Do you expect anyone with an ounce of brains to believe that?”44

  Walter Lippmann’s column the following week stripped the artifice off the administration’s charade. Secretary Stevens, he opined, had to have been acting “under the authority of Secretary Wilson and the President.” “What then,” he asked, “was the point of allowing McCarthy to muddle up the hearings and call Stevens a liar with all the hullabaloo about whether Stevens had or had not had orders from higher up?” The columnist found it incredible that Stevens had been “treated as if perhaps he were somebody else’s Secretary of the Army.”45

  John Adams, although uneasy, did his part that Monday afternoon. When the senators asked whether Sherman Adams had ordered him to prepare the chronology, Adams called it a “suggestion” rather than an “order.” That day, following the hearing, he went to Stevens’s office to discuss his frustrations, but the secretary gave him “a drill sergeant’s dressing down” for complaining about his lot. Adams left the meeting feeling depressed. “I was alone now,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Seaton avoided me” and was always “busy.”

  John Adams believed that Karl Mundt, his fellow South Dakotan, wanted to charge him with perjury. When he completed his testimony on May 24, Mundt recalled “a practice the chair had followed back in 1948.” That was when Mundt had asked Alger Hiss, later imprisoned for perjury, a question he then repeated to Adams: “I would like to ask you before you are dismissed and unsworn whether you feel that you have now had a complete and full and fair opportunity to testify before this Committee?”46

  CHAPTER 15

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  “NO SENSE OF DECENCY?”

  At the end of the day on May 24, the Army-McCarthy hearings finally returned to the subject that had launched the inquiry in the first place: the privileges sought for Private G. David Schine. Major General Cornelius Ryan, the commanding general at Fort Dix, testified that Schine had been treated as “a man apart” from other draftees. The private had been granted sixteen weekend passes for alleged “committee business,” compared to the average of three or four for other draftees.

  DROPPING CHARGES

  Then, unexpectedly, over the objections of Joe Welch and the Democrats, the Republicans voted to dismiss the charges against subcommittee director Frank Carr and Struve Hensel due to insufficient evidence. Hensel had been included based on McCarthy’s allegations that the Pentagon counsel had profited illegally while serving as a procurement office with the navy. The army had included Carr in the hope that he might be more forthcoming in testimony than McCarthy. The decision to drop the charges was another transparent attempt to truncate the hearings before McCarthy testified.

  Jim Hagerty believed the Republicans had “just cut their throats” by that action, and Eisenhower agreed. “If they were going to drop the charges on Hensel and Carr,” the president fumed, “they should have made McCarthy publicly admit then and there that he was withdrawing his charges. . . . Anything less is just stupid and cowardly.” Hagerty believed the Republicans had taken the action to get McCarthy “off the spot” because Carr might “break down” and “spill a lot of beans.” Ike was disgusted. “I hope you tell all our people at the White House,” he said, “that it’s about time they stopped trying to have me work with guys like Mundt and the rest. They’re not for us, they never were, and never will be.”1

  The next morning, Hagerty learned that Everett Dirksen, who had made so many attempts to shorten the hearings, was the architect of the decision to drop the charges. According to Charles Potter, Dirksen, who had met with the president the previous Friday, had told his colleagues they should dismiss the charges because “that was the way the President wanted it.” Furious, Eisenhower denied the story and dispatched congressional aide Jack Martin to demand that Dirksen retract his statement. Ike had stated at his news conference that the hearings should end “only after all the principals had an opportunity to tell their story openly and fully.” For the president, those “principals” included Carr and Hensel, both of whom the army’s attorneys were anxious to have testify.2

  Hagerty called what Dirksen had done a “squeeze play,” and the president agreed. To the press, Dirksen denied that dismissal of the charges by the Republicans was a “whitewash.” The Washington Post concluded that dropping the charges proved that the subcommittee, “despite Mr. Mundt’s temporary elevation to the chairmanship, remains under the influence of Senator McCarthy.”3

  JOE MCCARTHY AND ADOLF HITLER

  On May 4, McCarthy had produced without authorization a letter allegedly written by J. Edgar Hoover, placing the senator in jeopardy of possible criminal charges. When Senator McClellan suggested that both McCarthy and his informant “might be guilty of a crime,” McCarthy blustered, “If anyone wants to indict me, they can go right ahead.” Then the senator took a
momentous step; he challenged government employees to disobey their superiors and report directly to him—a clear shot at the president’s May 17 executive order. He asserted that the oath government employees took “to protect and defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic” was a commitment that “towers far above any Presidential secrecy directive.” The 2 million federal employees, he declared, should deem it “their duty to give us any information which they have about graft, corruption, communism, treason” and disregard any “loyalty to a superior officer.”4

  Eisenhower was outraged when he heard about McCarthy’s challenge to federal workers. However, his initial response the morning of May 28 was coldly methodical. He drafted a statement that was issued in the name of Attorney General Brownell. The statement, released at the White House at 11:00 a.m., declared, without mentioning the senator’s name, “The executive branch has sole and fundamental responsibility to enforce laws and presidential orders. . . . That responsibility cannot be usurped by any individual who may seek to set himself above the laws of our land, or override orders of the President of the United States to federal employees of the executive branch of government.”5

  Afterward, Eisenhower called Hagerty into the Oval Office and vented his rage at “the complete arrogance of McCarthy.” Pacing behind his desk, he spoke in “rapid fire order.” McCarthy’s challenge to federal employees to disobey their superiors, he thundered, “amounts to nothing but a wholesale subversion of public service.” Eisenhower delivered what was, for him, the ultimate condemnation. “McCarthy,” he said, “is making exactly the same plea of loyalty to him that Hitler made to the German people. Both tried to set up personal loyalty within the Government while both were using the pretense of fighting Communism. McCarthy is trying deliberately to subvert the people we have in Government, people who are sworn to obey the law, the Constitution and their superior officers. I think this is the most disloyal act we have ever had by anyone in the Government of the United States.”

  Following that angry outburst, Eisenhower cooled off, sat down at his desk, and speculated as to whether the question might come up at his next news conference; Hagerty thought it would. The rage resurfaced: “Make sure it does because I’ll tell you now what I’m going to say. I am going to tell the newsmen that in my opinion this is the most arrogant invitation to subversion and disloyalty that I have ever heard of. I am going to also say that if such an invitation is accepted by any employee of the Government and we find out who that employee is, he will be fired on the spot if a civilian and court martialed on the spot if a military man.”

  Ike and Hagerty decided that the press secretary should enlist his allies in radio, television, and the newspapers to educate the public on the issue. Late in the afternoon, Hagerty found Eisenhower chipping golf shots on the back lawn and urged him to listen to Edward R. Murrow’s radio program that night. Hagerty noted with satisfaction that Murrow and other commentators had accepted the Eisenhower-Brownell statement, treating it “quite properly as a fundamental Constitutional fight between the Administration and McCarthy.”6

  BEGINNING OF THE END

  Finally, on May 27, Roy Cohn began his testimony. On the stand, he once again described David Schine as a “hostage” to attempts to end the investigations. He cited a threat by John Adams to have Private Schine sent overseas if the investigation of the army was not terminated. Cohn repeated his charge that the Cohn-Schine report constituted blackmail. He also reinforced the allegation that Stevens and John Adams had offered to provide information on communists in the air force and navy if McCarthy would drop his investigation of the army.7

  There was a big stir when word of the Eisenhower-Brownell statement was communicated to the hearing on the morning of the twenty-eighth. McCarthy, in response, dug the hole deeper, restating his invitation to federal employees to share information. “I have stated and I will continue to state,” he declared, “that my Democrat colleagues will not get the names of the loyal Government employe[e]s who give us the evidence of threats that has been growing over the last twenty or twenty-one years.” At last, McCarthy had extended his “twenty years of treason” mantra to twenty-one years to include the Eisenhower administration. Hagerty declared in his diary that the “fight is now joined.” As he put it, “Has a United States Senator, or anyone, a right to publicly urge the formation of a personal Gestapo within the Administrative Branch of the Government, including the military?”8

  That Saturday morning, Robert Stevens met secretly with the president. Stevens, the good soldier, was still the anxious, jittery man who so frequently needed reassurance. He wanted to know what Eisenhower would think if J. Edgar Hoover testified about the “purloined” letter McCarthy had produced on May 4. Ike muttered that he was trying to keep the hearings “poison out of his system” and instructed Stevens to contact Herbert Brownell or William Rogers. He already knew that Brownell would probably not allow Hoover to testify.

  Eisenhower looked at the nervous, exhausted man in front of him. Stevens, almost heroically, had done what the president had asked, at the risk of his reputation and a charge of perjury, by taking sole credit for the Schine report. Perhaps the general recalled talking with soldiers fresh from battle; he suggested that Stevens and his family “go away for a vacation after this thing is over.”9

  The columnist Roscoe Drummond believed the last days of the Eisenhower-McCarthy confrontation had arrived. In his May 31 column, he wrote, “The most significant political fact in Washington today is that President Eisenhower and Senator McCarthy have reached an open breach.” He argued that no other interpretation was credible in the face of “the cold, blunt, explicit reply of the White House” to the senator’s call for employees to feed him information, regardless of presidential orders.10

  That evening Eisenhower was scheduled to deliver a speech at the Columbia University bicentennial celebration dinner in New York City. He was still seething about McCarthy. While preparing his remarks, the president told Hagerty that he intended to make it “a finished fight with McCarthy” over the senator’s call for federal employees to provide him with information. He “believed the question was a fundamental Constitutional one and [he] was going to the people with it.”11

  Eisenhower’s speech that night was chock full of barbs at McCarthy but, as usual, couched in principle, without mentioning the senator’s name. The president warned against confusing “honest dissent with disloyal subversion” and issued a clarion call to “drive from the temple of freedom all who seek to establish over us thought control—whether they be agents of a foreign state or demagogues thirsty for personal power and public notice.” He concluded that whenever citizens come to “view every neighbor as a possible enemy . . . a free society is in danger.”12

  When Hagerty released the president’s speech, the wire services pressed him as to whether Eisenhower had been talking about McCarthy; Hagerty declined to comment. He noted in his diary that the speech had gotten a “wonderful reception” at the dinner, interrupted twenty-five times by applause. The president had sat at the same table with William Paley, the president of CBS, who pledged he would give orders to all his newscasters on radio and television to plug the speech.13

  FLANDERS STRIKES AGAIN

  On May 28, in the midst of the president’s rage over McCarthy’s challenge to federal workers to betray their superiors, Eisenhower had asked Hagerty if they could “feed a speech to Senator Potter to be delivered on the floor of the Senate on this subject?” Instead, the White House repeated the successful pattern of the second week in March, when Senator Ralph Flanders and Edward R. Murrow had set the stage for the issuance of the Schine report by the army.

  At Hagerty’s instigation, Murrow used his May 28 radio program to defend the president’s response to McCarthy’s challenge to government employees to violate the orders of their superiors. The White House apparently decided that Senator Flanders, Sherman Adams’s good friend, was the better choice for the speech Ike wanted. Fl
anders needed no encouragement; he was eager to go after McCarthy once again.14

  On June 1, Flanders rose in the Senate and denounced McCarthy as a “menace.” In language that echoed Eisenhower’s private rant to Jim Hagerty, he accused McCarthy of acting like Hitler. Flanders’s attack made some listeners wince, particularly when the senator addressed the subject most Washington pundits and politicians had avoided. “The real heart of this mystery,” he stated, “concerns the personal relationships” between Roy Cohn and David Schine. He noted that Cohn seemed to have a “passionate anxiety” to keep Schine as a staff person. “Why?” Flanders asked provocatively. “Does the Assistant [Cohn] have some hold on the Senator?”15

  Cohn was deeply offended by the speech. He was convinced that Flanders had used the word “passionate”—along with the Vermont senator’s questioning what “hold” Cohn had on McCarthy—to suggest homosexual relationships. “McCarthy was aware of the homosexual stories [about himself],” Cohn wrote, “and he laughed them off.” Cohn connected Flanders’s innuendos to Joe Welch’s use of “fairy” in his exchange with McCarthy on April 30 over the cropped photograph of Schine and Stevens.16

  At his news conference on June 2, Eisenhower implemented a milder anti-McCarthy strategy than he had threatened in his Oval Office rant. He reminded reporters that “a few days ago,” the attorney general, “at my direction, prepared a statement with respect to Executive responsibility in maintaining the proper and constitutional division between the authority and responsibilities of the Executive and the Legislature. At my direction, Mr. Hagerty published that. Now, that constitutes the last word I have got to say on this subject, unless something happens that makes me think I have to say something more.” One reporter ignored the president’s prohibition; twenty minutes into the session, he asked whether the president thought McCarthy was hurting his program. Eisenhower swallowed, glared at the journalist, and called for the next question.17