The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  Kaghan and Frankenstein were not the only ones among McCloy’s former HICOG officials to be targeted by McCarthy. Newspaper reports in April speculated that McCarthy was also taking “special interest” in Sam Reber, now serving Conant as deputy high commissioner.9 That trusted members of McCloy’s intimate circle were being slandered was bad enough, but it was somehow worse that such careers were being destroyed in a circus atmosphere in which the brash young Roy Cohn had assumed the role of prosecutorial ringmaster and court jester.10

  McCloy did not publicly come to the defense of any of the HICOG officials forced out of office. But in mid-May, he decided to take his complaints to Eisenhower. When he called the White House and said he needed to see the president, he was quickly given a half-hour appointment for May 26, 1953. He had not seen Eisenhower since the inauguration festivities, and as was his practice, he prepared for the meeting by writing out on a yellow legal pad his “talking points.” In general, he wished to impress upon Eisenhower the damage McCarthy was inflicting on America’s reputation in Europe. But he also wanted to prod the president into making a press-conference statement defending those HICOG propaganda programs under attack from McCarthy. He handed Ike a detailed memo describing the influence of HICOG’s chain of “Amerika Haus” libraries, explaining that these libraries contained some books critical of the United States, critical of the Eisenhower administration, and even critical of McCloy’s tenure as high commissioner. The Germans, he said, who used these libraries came away impressed that these information centers were “really centers of democratic thought, of freedom.” It was “sheer poppycock” to say that such a program had been “communist inspired.”

  Regarding the Kaghan case, he defended the propaganda chief’s loyalty and, in a direct slap at Foster Dulles, complained that the “higher levels of the State Department did not help this man defend himself before the committee in spite of his long and effective service.” (By this time, Kaghan had already resigned, saying, “When you cross swords with Senator McCarthy you cannot expect to remain in the State Department. . . .”11) Citing the words of a leading German radio commentator, he warned the president that “McCarthy makes it so easy for the world to become anti-American. . . .”12 In short, McCloy argued that the White House had to do something to stop the senator from Wisconsin.

  Eisenhower didn’t dispute McCloy’s facts, but he still felt that a direct presidential response would only dignify McCarthy’s charges. So, once again, he decided to keep his silence. As it happened, on the following morning The New York Times announced that HICOG was eliminating Frankenstein’s controversial Amerika Dienst press service and closing down one-quarter of all the American libraries in West Germany.13 McCarthy had won this round. Earlier in the year, he had forced the resignation of McCloy’s popular consul general in Munich, Charles Thayer, and before the summer was out, he would also force the resignation or transfer of two other former McCloy aides in HICOG, Sam Reber and John Paton Davies. In the meantime, frightened HICOG officials began to purge Amerika Haus libraries of any books appearing on the State Department’s list of proscribed books. These included books written by Theodore White, Edgar Snow, Owen Lattimore, Howard Fast, Langston Hughes, and Jean-Paul Sartre.14

  A few days after seeing the president, McCloy was incredulous to learn from his own sources in Germany that HICOG officials had actually burned some of these books. Such a thing deeply offended his reverence for the printed word. He may have thought Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings “poppycock,” but burning the French philosopher’s books seemed an act of barbarism. Over the next few weeks, McCloy couldn’t stop talking about it. Then, on June 14,1953, he found himself at Dartmouth College, where he, his old friend Grenville Clark, Sherman Adams, the president’s chief of staff, and Joseph Proskauer, the chairman of the New York State Crime Commission, were to be awarded honorary law degrees. Eisenhower was scheduled to give a short address. Standing around with the president, waiting for the commencement ceremonies to begin, McCloy turned to Proskauer and started to tell him about how books were being burned in American libraries abroad at the instigation of Senator McCarthy. Overhearing only part of the conversation, Eisenhower moved closer to McCloy and asked, “What’s this, what’s this?”

  “I was telling about the burning of State Department books abroad,” replied McCloy.

  “Oh, they’re not burning books,” said the president.

  “I’m afraid they are, Mr. President,” McCloy replied. “I have the evidence.”

  Eisenhower fell silent as McCloy launched into a speech about the virtues of the American libraries: “And the value of those books,” he said, “was that they were uncensored. They criticized you and me, and Dean Acheson and anyone else in Government. The Germans knew they were uncensored and that was why they streamed into our libraries. . . .”15

  At that moment, Eisenhower was called to the podium, where he gave one of the very few speeches of his presidency in which he directly attacked McCarthyism. Speaking without notes, he specifically denounced “book burners” and told his audience of Dartmouth students, “Don’t join the book burners. . . . Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend your own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is?”16

  Even this roundabout criticism of McCarthy created a political storm. Though the president had again refrained from naming McCarthy, most newspapers reported the speech with banner headlines and left no doubt of Eisenhower’s target. McCarthy himself was furious and, according to Drew Pearson, assigned one of his staff to find out who had prompted the president to make such an attack. The information was not hard to ferret out, since McCloy himself talked widely to his friends of his own role in the speech. As a result, McCarthy’s staff quietly began an investigation of McCloy’s career, which in turn later led them to focus their attention on the issue of communist subversion in the U.S. Army.

  In the meantime, to the disappointment of McCloy and many other liberal Republicans, Eisenhower began to backtrack. McCarthy’s private protests to the White House successfully prevented the broadcast of Eisenhower’s speech by the Voice of America. Worse, only five days after his Dartmouth speech, Eisenhower told a press conference that he had not meant to urge the reading of books by communists or books that advocated revolution, nor would he tolerate “any document or any other kind of thing that attempts to persuade or propagandize America into communism.” McCarthy quickly applauded the president for this “commendable clarification.”17

  In retrospect, historians came to regard the Dartmouth speech as a precarious beginning to the end of McCarthy’s powers of political intimidation, and McCloy would always take some satisfaction in having instigated the affair. But at the time, the episode seemed merely to underscore the senator’s powers.

  Only three days after Eisenhower issued his “clarification,” McCloy came to the White House for one of the president’s intimate stag dinners. He was one of fourteen tuxedoed guests that evening. Others included such old friends as Bernard Baruch, Milton Eisenhower, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Dr. Henry M. Wriston, the president of Brown University. Seated across from him at dinner was Sid Richardson, a Texas oil man who was then one of America’s wealthiest individuals. Richardson had met Ike aboard a train traveling from Texas to Washington, D.C., in December 1941.18 The two men had kept in close touch since the end of the war, and Ike now counted the oil magnate as one of his closest friends. For years, Richardson had kept the Eisenhowers’ freezer stocked with hundreds of pounds of Texas beef, sausage, and hams.19 As president, Eisenhower consulted Richardson on oil and economic matters and used the Texan to influence the newly elected Senate minority leader, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson.20

  That evening, Richardson took an instant liking to McCloy and invited him to visit his farm in Texas. In a very short time, their friendship would also include some business dealings. But on this occasion, the dinner talk
was all politics. McCloy was seated between Milton Eisenhower and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr. The president began by asking his pastor to say grace. And then, over vichyssoise, the men discussed the Korean War and the Rosenberg spy case. The Rosenbergs had been executed two days earlier, after the president had refused to intervene, and he confessed that he had felt under great strain. Only toward the end of the evening, when the men had adjourned to Eisenhower’s study, did they discuss McCarthy. As he had before, McCloy tried to impress upon Eisenhower the necessity for defending his civil servants from scurrilous attacks. But Eisenhower once again recited the reasons why he felt it would be unwise for him to condemn McCarthy by name or get into the business of answering specific charges.21

  McCloy was not convinced, but the president sounded persuasive to Sid Richardson, who wrote him shortly afterward, “Your not having the jitters nor being scared gives me a lot of confidence. . . .” Eisenhower emphasized his determination to keep above the fray by replying, “I am going to declare my independence of partisan quarrel and let others fight such things out to the bitter death.”22

  The practical effect of this, from McCloy’s point of view, was a great loss of face abroad. German visitors to America were returning home saying that it was no longer possible to have a frank discussion, that American officials were constantly looking over their shoulders to see if anyone else was listening. The New York Times suggested that Gestapo tactics were being used to root out HICOG officials suspected of subversion.23 Such reports disturbed McCloy, and in private conversations with friends in Washington and New York he blamed the secretary of state for not defending his employees. Indeed, shortly after Eisenhower’s “book-burning” speech, when he learned from High Commissioner James Conant that McCarthy intended to subpoena Glen Wolfe and other HICOG officials, McCloy went to see Foster Dulles and told him in no uncertain terms that the State Department could not allow it to happen. As a result of this meeting, the State Department informed McCarthy that it was unwilling to spend the money to have such HICOG witnesses flown back from Germany. McCloy was relieved, but thought Foster Dulles could have been much more forthright in defending his employees. Drew Pearson, not one of McCloy’s favorite reporters, got wind of these complaints and in late June published a one-sentence item in his column reporting that what McCloy had to say about Foster Dulles would “sizzle newsprint.”24

  It was true. But McCloy didn’t like to see his views appear in print, and certainly not in Pearson’s column. He promptly sat down and wrote Dulles a note that called Pearson’s report “nonsense” but also reminded the secretary, “I have said what I have told both you and the President that I think you must defend your own Department people where they have done a good job for you and I have been irritated that no one in Congress or the Government has challenged McCarthy. . . .” Dulles replied briefly a week later, only to say that he had to concentrate on larger foreign-policy problems.25 McCloy thought this quite lame.

  Shortly afterward, an incident occurred that brought home to McCloy in a personal fashion just how pervasive McCarthyism had become. In July, he learned from Bethuel M. Webster, an old friend and president of the New York Bar Association, that FBI agents were running around town asking questions about McCloy’s loyalty. Webster said agents had asked him if McCloy could be trusted with classified documents. Similar questions were being asked about former OSS chief Bill Donovan. Webster thought the FBI’s questions so absurd that he wrote Eisenhower, “I wonder if the security clearance business is not going too far.” Though Ike promised to investigate the matter, J. Edgar Hoover was commended later that same year by Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers for having blocked thirty-three presidential appointments solely on the basis of “character investigations.”26

  In McCloy’s case, there are several possible reasons for the FBI’s investigation of him in 1953. The first and simplest explanation was that he was being considered for a presidential appointment. He had, in fact, already accepted an appointment in June, to the president’s Commission on Foreign and Economic Policy. As a director of Westinghouse Corporation, he had applied for a routine clearance in order to be able to have access to classified information on the corporation’s nuclear-energy contracts. But this hardly warranted the kind of FBI scrutiny McCloy was subjected to that summer. Certainly of more interest to Hoover was that by the summer of 1953 McCloy was informally associated with the handful of men in the Eisenhower administration who were advising the president on a variety of foreign-policy and intelligence matters. Within days of the 1952 election, Hoover had approved a suggestion from one of his top aides to write up summary reports on everything the Bureau knew about “the small group of people he felt were very close to President-designate Eisenhower.”27 McCloy was on the list, and the nineteen-page report subsequently compiled on him contained a laundry list of gossip, innuendo, and unsubstantiated allegations of communist sympathies. It pulled together such highlights from his FBI file as the 1945 anonymous letter to President Truman charging McCloy with being the “vigorous leader of a pro-Communist group within G-2 [army intelligence]. . . .”28 Even worse, however, from the Bureau’s point of view, were reports that McCloy had “no love for the FBI.” Hoover himself scrawled on one memo, “. . . our relations with McCloy were never encouraging.”29

  Hoover was also aware that McCloy was frequently consulted by C. D. Jackson, the newly appointed chief of the Psychological Strategy Board, a White House agency that Hoover regarded as a rival intelligence group. As such, McCloy was privy to some of the nation’s best-kept secrets. Jackson had worked under McCloy on psychological-warfare operations in North Africa during the war; subsequently, he had returned to his job in the Time-Life conglomerate as Henry Luce’s right-hand man. From his present job in the White House, he was dedicated to rousing the intelligence community to action-oriented covert operations. In addition to Jackson, Hoover was well aware that McCloy was closely associated with Allen Dulles, John Bross, William Bundy, and other CIA officials.30 Hoover instinctively tried to keep tabs on any rival intelligence organizations. And since Joe McCarthy in the summer of 1953 was also investigating the CIA, Hoover had one more reason to scrutinize McCloy’s file.

  The best explanation for Hoover’s interest in McCloy lies in the politics of McCarthyism. The FBI chief and McCarthy were by now good friends. They regularly lunched together at Harvey’s Restaurant in Washington. Two of McCarthy’s top investigators were former FBI agents. Roy Cohn himself first met J. Edgar Hoover during the Rosenberg trial, and later remarked in his memoirs that he had always been able to work “well and closely with older, powerful men” like the FBI director.31 Furthermore, McCarthy’s own staff members have since said that the FBI regularly gave Roy Cohn access to confidential Bureau reports on various individuals.32 Hoover’s security file on McCloy, as mentioned earlier, also contained a copy of his 1946 memo to Truman advising the president that McCloy was alleged by FBI sources to be a member of a communist spy ring in Washington. It is not known whether Hoover leaked this particular memo to McCarthy; some of the relevant FBI papers are still classified. But, gauging by the senator’s subsequent attacks on McCloy later that year, it is entirely likely that Hoover gave McCarthy portions of McCloy’s file and confirmed leads developed by Cohn.

  In any case, by the summer of 1953, Hoover certainly was aware that McCarthy had begun digging into McCloy’s background. (Drew Pearson later reported that McCarthy’s boys were even looking into such mundane things as whether Ellen McCloy had used her HICOG chauffeur for personal business.) There were plenty of men in Washington and New York who were willing to feed McCarthy’s suspicions about McCloy. Westbrook Pegler, the conservative columnist, didn’t hesitate to voice his suspicions about McCloy to Lew Douglas himself. Pegler couldn’t understand how McCloy could have retained Benjamin Buttenwieser in his job as deputy high commissioner in Germany “after B and his wife, both, had shown sympathy almost to point of affection for Alger Hiss.”33


  While these right-wing Republicans were trying to tag McCloy—at the very least—as insufficiently anticommunist, the Chase National chairman was doing his best to find private funding for various covert operations then funded by the CIA. In his opinion, one of the worst features of McCarthy’s investigations was the harm they could inflict by exposing or terminating some of Washington’s most promising covert operations. He had always encouraged the propaganda activities of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, the branch of the Agency that was then funding the Congress on Cultural Freedom (CCF). As high commissioner, he had sanctioned the founding of this organization in West Berlin’s Titiana Palace Theater in June 1950. Since then, the CCF had sponsored dozens of successful anticommunist cultural events across Europe and was now publishing some twenty generally highbrow periodicals designed to influence European intellectuals. These included such magazines as Encounter in London, Socialist Commentary and Der Monat in Germany, Forum in Vienna, Tempo Presente in Rome, and numerous others. None of these publications could survive without Agency funding. Because these periodicals attempted to appeal to the non-Marxist left, they published material written by socialists and did not automatically support every aspect of U.S. policy. It was easy to see that McCarthy would have a heyday if he was allowed to investigate any of these CIA operations. McCloy feared that the senator’s attacks on the U.S. propaganda apparatus in West Germany threatened to disrupt the subsidies given numerous West European publications and such CIA entities as Radio Liberation and Radio Free Europe.34