Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  Robert Stevens, who had sacrificed himself for the president, was more upbeat. “The integrity of the Army was at stake,” he told reporters. “I don’t feel like it’s at stake any longer.” He confirmed that he had no plans to resign and would serve as long as the president and Secretary Wilson believed he could be of service “to them and to the country.”36

  As the hearings ground to a halt, the columnist Roscoe Drummond asserted, “Everybody is being hurt” by the hearings, and “nobody is being really helped. The outcome can hardly fail to be inconclusive. The country is being hurt; the government is being hurt; America’s reputation around the world is being undermined; the precision fabric of a decent society is being rent.” Nevertheless, he recognized the damage to McCarthy. “Few correspondents who have followed these hearings believe that he will ever recover the political influence and the power to intimidate he has exercised so long.” He noted that “all the public opinion polls show Mr. McCarthy’s political influence declining and the public’s political distrust increasing.” Drummond hinted at the truth behind the headlines: “These hearings show Mr. Eisenhower that the President must fearlessly protect the executive branch of the government from congressional usurpation.”37

  Ike believed that he had done precisely that. As he reportedly told Stevens when McCarthy made a last desperate attempt to truncate the hearings, “We’ve got the bastard exactly where we want him.” Joseph and Stewart Alsop understood that truth, despite the wide acceptance of the mantra that “nobody won.” On the Sunday after the hearings ended, the Alsops wrote, “There is to be no more appeasing of McCarthy. On the contrary, McCarthy is to be recognized for what he is—the President’s most dangerous enemy—and treated accordingly.”38

  Eisenhower had reached that conclusion months earlier; implementing it had been more complex than either the journalists or White House staff had understood. The general in the Oval Office, the veteran of so many battles, had decided that what was required was a disciplined, deceptive campaign, agile enough to respond to new circumstances and carried out by loyal foot soldiers such as Sherman Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, Herbert Brownell, Fred Seaton, and eventually, in their own ways, Robert Stevens and John Adams. It required, in the prescient term Fred I. Greenstein coined a generation ago, a “hidden hand.”39

  Eisenhower’s news conference on June 16 lasted only twenty minutes; reporters asked no questions about McCarthy, the hearings, or the Flanders resolution. The most insistent queries were aimed at whether the president intended to run again in 1956. Ike, with a grin, called that a question that “has never yet been discussed in the White House since I have been there.” Ray Scherer of NBC quoted Sherman Adams, who had said that, besides losing Congress in November, there were “two other contingencies under which you might not offer yourself for re-election, but he didn’t name them.” “A funny thing,” Ike responded, Adams had told him that morning he probably would get a question about “two secret contingencies that I haven’t told you about, and someday I am going to tell you.” “So,” Ike concluded to laughter, “I am just as ignorant as you are.”40

  On the way back from the news conference, Eisenhower expressed his “amazement” to Jim Hagerty that the reporters had respected his edict two weeks earlier that he was not going to talk about McCarthy. That the reporters were more interested in Eisenhower’s future political plans than McCarthy’s spoke volumes about the impact of the hearings.41

  On June 19, The New York Times carried the tiniest of news stories, a few short lines buried on page seven. The previous day, Joe Welch and James St. Clair had “visited President Eisenhower at the White House.” Welch had gone to the White House “at the invitation of James C. Hagerty, White House Press Secretary, who has known Mr. Welch for several years.” That was a cover story, as Hagerty had apparently met Welch for the first time on April 2. Hagerty confided to his diary that he “got them in to see the president.” Welch told Eisenhower that “if the hearings had accomplished nothing else,” they had kept McCarthy “in front of the television sets” so the public could “see how disgracefully he acted.” Eisenhower agreed.42

  The rationale for Welch’s visit to the White House was more Eisenhowerian subterfuge. Under the guise of visiting Hagerty, Ike and the attorney could talk candidly about Joe McCarthy. And Eisenhower could perpetuate the fiction that someone other than the president of the United States had “killed” Joe McCarthy.

  EPILOGUE

  On June 11, 1954, Vermont senator Ralph Flanders had disrupted the Army-McCarthy hearings, announcing his intent to try to strip Joseph McCarthy of his committee chairmanships. When that effort failed to get traction, Flanders introduced a censure resolution, making three charges: that McCarthy had abused the Gillette-Hennings subcommittee of the Rules Committee that had investigated McCarthy’s charges against public officials (including George C. Marshall) in 1951 and 1952; that he had sent Roy Cohn and David Schine on a European trip that had embarrassed the nation and the Senate; and that he had abused witnesses, such as General Ralph Zwicker. Cohn realized that he was on a political sinking ship, and on July 20, he resigned. McCarthy called Cohn’s resignation a victory for the communists and their sympathizers. On August 2, the Senate voted 75 to 23 to form a six-member select committee to investigate the charges against McCarthy.1

  The six members of the new committee were selected by Majority Leader William Knowland and Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. The Democrats included Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, John Stennis of Mississippi, and Samuel J. Ervin, Jr., of North Carolina. Knowland selected Frank Carlson of Kansas, Francis Case of South Dakota, and Arthur Watkins of Utah, whom Knowland appointed as chairman. When Knowland informed Watkins, the senator departed the majority leader’s office “committed to an ordeal.” The new committee announced that it would add to Flanders’s charges McCarthy’s misuse of the J. Edgar Hoover letter, his invitation to government employees to provide him with classified information, and his abuse of fellow senators in the course of his investigations.2

  IN PRAISE OF MARSHALL

  Two days after the Senate approved the select committee, Eisenhower belatedly attempted to remedy the egregious mistake he had made during his 1952 campaign, when he had failed to stand up for George C. Marshall. McCarthy was still persecuting Marshall. The senator had entered a letter into the Congressional Record from Harry Woodring, secretary of war under Franklin Roosevelt, asserting that General Marshall “would sell out his grandmother for personal advantage.”

  At the president’s August 4 news conference, Edward T. Folliard of The Washington Post quoted the Woodring letter and asked, “Mr. President, what do you think of that appraisal of General Marshall?” George Marshall, Eisenhower replied, “has typified all that we look for in what we call an American patriot.” Marshall had been a soldier who said, in effect, “I am here to serve and not to satisfy personal ambition.” Eisenhower extolled Marshall’s “brilliant record, always serving to the best of his ability.” He deplored the Woodring letter, asserting that it was “a sorry reward” to suggest that Marshall “is not a loyal, fine American, and that he served only in order to advance his own personal ambitions. I can’t imagine anyone that I have known in my career of whom this is less so than it is in his case.”

  As usual, Ike delivered his statement without mentioning McCarthy by name. Perhaps he wanted to encourage the new select committee investigating McCarthy’s conduct to remember the senator’s slurs against Marshall. However, he kept the censure process at arm’s length, treating the deliberations as “a matter of the Senate.”3

  THE COMMITTEE PROCESS

  The select committee held nine public hearings between August 31 and September 13; television coverage and still photos were prohibited. On September 27, it released a sixty-eight-page report unanimously recommending censure. Once the report was released, the Senate agreed to adjourn and take up its recommendations after the congressional elections. Reflecting on his experience chairing the committee, Ar
thur Watkins wrote, “I have never suffered such intense and continuing distress.”4

  On November 2, 1954, the Democrats won both houses of Congress by narrow margins. Vice President Nixon suggested that the administration’s conflicts with Senator McCarthy had cost the support of “pro-McCarthyites” in three Midwestern states: Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. McCarthy ascribed the Republican defeat to public resentment “against the jungle war which powerful elements of this Administration waged against those of us who were trying to expose and dig out Communists.” In a postelection Gallup Poll the public rejected, 49 to 24 percent, the proposition that the Watkins committee had treated the senator unfairly.5

  On November 9, McCarthy released the text of a speech asserting that the communist party had made “a committee of the Senate its unwitting hand-maiden.” “I shall demonstrate,” he declared, “that the Watkins Committee has done the work of the Communist Party” and used “Communist methods” to manufacture “a plausible rationalization for advising the Senate to accede to the clamor for my scalp.”6

  On November 10, the day debate began on the select committee’s report, McCarthy inserted the “hand-maiden” speech into the Senate record. That day, he repeatedly disrupted the debate, raising unanswerable questions and reading from the Senate’s record and newspaper clippings. The debate became so acrimonious that McCarthy’s colleagues warned him that his harsh attacks on the integrity of the select committee might add charges to the censure resolution. Outside Senate sessions, McCarthy got under Watkins’s skin by repeatedly calling the chairman “a coward.”7

  The next day, hundreds of McCarthy supporters besieged Capitol Hill, carrying small American flags and wearing badges declaring “I like McCarthy.” They visited their senators and packed the galleries. Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts told reporters that sixty people had called on him, bearing the signatures of four thousand McCarthy supporters.8

  On November 17, McCarthy entered Bethesda Naval Hospital to be treated for traumatic bursitis in an elbow. Supporters visited him, pleading for him to do something magnanimous that might extract him from the situation. At one point Everett Dirksen thought he had persuaded his colleague to sign an apology, but McCarthy finally responded, “No, I don’t crawl. I learned to fight in an alley.”9

  But by November 29, McCarthy was ready to end the fight he knew he was losing. Expressing regret for “discourteous and offensive words,” he said he was prepared “for whatever action the Senate may take on this resolution of censure.” However, he continued, “my efforts to expose Communist infiltration in Government will continue regardless of the outcome of the censure vote.” McCarthy asked for “unanimous consent” that the debate be terminated at 3 p.m. on December 1, followed by a vote. The Senate accepted McCarthy’s proposal, although the final vote spilled over another day.10

  On December 1, huge bundles of petitions opposing McCarthy’s censure were delivered to the Capitol; armed guards stood over them with pistols drawn while samples were delivered to Vice President Nixon, the Senate’s presiding officer. That day, McCarthy’s Senate allies made three attempts to modify the charges against him. Dirksen offered a substitute resolution stating that there was no legal foundation for censure, but it was defeated 66 to 21. Mundt proposed language that “deplored and disapproved” what McCarthy had said about other senators but would not censure him; that motion lost 74 to 15. Senator Styles Bridges proposed a resolution that would have exonerated McCarthy completely, but his motion lost 68 to 20.11

  The draft censure resolution had become increasingly cosmetic. The counts against McCarthy had been reduced to three: his refusal to cooperate with the Gillette-Hennings committee investigating his charges against public officials, his “contemptuous” treatment of its members, and his “reprehensible” conduct toward Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker. Gone was any mention of the privileges sought for Private G. David Schine, the issue that had spawned the Army-McCarthy hearings. At 6:44 p.m., a preliminary vote on the first two counts passed 67 to 20. The vote on the count condemning abuse of General Zwicker was deferred until the next day.12

  That night, in a television interview, McCarthy declared, “I don’t think the American people are at all fooled. They know I am being censured because I dared to do the dishonorable thing of exposing Communists in Government.” Asserting that censure “won’t stop us,” he announced he planned to resume hearings the following week.13

  The big news on December 1 was Republican majority leader William Knowland’s announcement that he intended to vote against McCarthy’s censure. Knowland argued that censure might inhibit the investigative powers of the Senate. Jim Hagerty recalled that at that news, Eisenhower “literally hit the roof.” The president stormed, “What’s the guy trying to do? Here he personally picked the Committee to draw up the censure charges, he vouched for their honor and integrity and then he turns around and votes against them, using this phony reason of investigative curtailment.”14

  THE DAY OF RECKONING

  Eisenhower normally conducted news conferences on Wednesday mornings. However, he scheduled one for Thursday, December 2, at 2:30 p.m., smack in the middle of the Senate’s final debate on McCarthy’s censure. He had decided, once again, to steal the spotlight from McCarthy.15

  Inevitably, a reporter asked about the censure debate. “I have no comment on that,” the president said. “This is a matter of the Senate, as I understand it, determining what is required in the preservation of the dignity of the Senate.” Another journalist inquired whether the president perceived a growing split between fervently anticommunist Republican conservatives and the administration. Ike insisted that he saw “no connection between trying to be tough on communism and still being progressive.”16

  With only three counts left in the draft resolution, the focus in the Senate turned to McCarthy’s abuse of General Zwicker. That charge was dropped after Lyndon Johnson informed Arthur Watkins that a number of southern senators opposed it. Instead, the Senate substituted McCarthy’s rhetorical abuses of the select committee, condemning him for calling it a “lynch party” practicing “deliberate deception” and “fraud” and calling the chairman “a coward.” The resolution had been reduced to a narrow recital of McCarthy’s transgressions against the dignity of the US Senate.

  Even the term “censure” did not survive the final debate. In the phrase concluding each section, McCarthy “is hereby censured” had been replaced by “is hereby condemned.” Vice President Nixon, with the approval of the body, changed the title of the resolution to conform with the use of “condemned” in the body of the resolution.

  The final vote came at 5:03 p.m.; it was 67 in favor, 22 opposed. All 22 “no” votes were Republican, half of the 44 Republican senators voting. Joe McCarthy voted “present.”17

  POSTSCRIPT

  On Friday evening, December 3, about 6:00 pm., Eisenhower called Jim Hagerty to say, “Senator Watkins got quite a kicking around on the Hill from McCarthy and his side.” The president wanted Watkins to know that “I am for him one hundred percent” and invited the senator to the White House for a personal visit. They met the next morning for about forty minutes. Watkins told Ike he would regret “to his dying day that they could not go through with censure on the Zwicker business.” The president commented that there were “a lot of misguided people in this world” and that McCarthy was only “a champion of McCarthy.”

  After Watkins left, Eisenhower and Hagerty agreed to issue a statement saying that the president had congratulated him on a “very splendid job.” Ike later told Hagerty that the news stories “were just exactly what I wanted to see in the paper, and I don’t particularly care what the Old Guard thinks about it.”18

  For McCarthy, Eisenhower’s public praise for Watkins was the last straw. On December 7 at 11:40 a.m., he walked into the first hearing of his subcommittee in months and delivered a statement. “The President of the United States,” he said, “has taken it upon himself to congrat
ulate Senators Flanders and Watkins who have been instrumental in holding up our work.” The president had praised “those who hold up the exposure of communists in one breath and in the next breath urges patience, tolerance and niceties to those who are torturing American uniformed men.” McCarthy apologized to the American people for supporting Eisenhower for president. He recalled that he had assured voters that if they elected the general, “they could be assured of a vigorous, forceful fight against Communists in Government. Unfortunately in this, I was mistaken.”19

  McCarthy had now broken openly with Eisenhower. Once again, faithful to his unwavering policy, Eisenhower did not respond. Rhetorically, he had ignored McCarthy for two years; that had always been his way of saying to the senator, “You don’t really matter.” Now, outflanked by the White House and humiliated by his senatorial colleagues, that tactical message had become unassailable fact. Joe McCarthy did not matter anymore.

  AFTER CENSURE

  Following condemnation by his colleagues, McCarthy remained in the Senate, but his influence was a shadow of what it had been. Due to the Democratic victory in November 1954, he no longer chaired a committee. “Now,” John Adams recalled, “when McCarthy stood up to speak on the Senate floor, the chamber would empty.” When he sat down with other senators in the Senate Dining Room, “his colleagues would make lame excuses and leave.” The bands of reporters who had once hung on his every word were gone.20