by Kai Bird
For some months—and with Eisenhower’s knowledge—Army Counsel John Adams had carefully compiled a thirty-four-page chronology describing the number of occasions when McCarthy and Roy Cohn had exerted pressure on the army to give preferential treatment to David Schine, who had been drafted into the army the previous autumn as a private. Cohn had first tried to get his friend Schine an officer’s commission and, when that failed, had arranged for Schine to receive so many overnight passes that Private Schine was hardly ever on base. Lodge told Eisenhower that the Adams chronology, “if published, would have an utterly devastating effect.”56
On March 9, 1954, the Eisenhower administration finally made its move against McCarthy. The senator was invited to lunch with Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, who described the army report and then warned the senator that the chronology would be given to the press if Roy Cohn wasn’t dismissed immediately. McCarthy told Wilson that the army could go to hell. After two hours, with a pack of reporters waiting outside, Wilson emerged from the luncheon to say only that he had “no arguments” with the senator about the issue of communists in the army. To the public, of course, this looked like another surrender, since only a few days earlier McCarthy had accused the army of “coddling” communists—a charge which Wilson had then said was “just plain tommyrot.” Now McCarthy told reporters that he was only trying to help the army clean out “the few rotten apples.” He then explained that these few “undesirables” had gotten into the army in the first place as a result of a 1944 “McCloy order.” The next day the Washington Post reported that the order McCarthy referred to was a “secret order” issued on December 30, 1944, under which communists and their sympathizers were not to be discriminated against by the army unless a “specific finding” of disloyalty to the United States could be made. This time, McCarthy had his facts right, and, given the current political climate, McCloy was well aware that he was vulnerable.57
McCarthy was obviously not going to drop his charges against him, and if the senator were not diverted, the chairman of Chase National Bank might find himself being interrogated by McCarthy’s committee. Public opinion, however, was beginning to swing against the senator. The evening before McCarthy’s latest attack on McCloy, millions of television viewers had tuned into CBS’s Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” program and listened to a “report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy told mainly in his own words and pictures.” The film clips showed the senator at his worst, picking his nose, sneering at witnesses, and making crude jokes about nationally respected figures. The results were devastating: in the weeks ahead, Murrow’s CBS office received mail that ran fifteen to one against McCarthy.58
At this point, three days after McCarthy’s latest charge against McCloy, Pearson devoted a lengthy column to explaining why “revenge” had motivated McCarthy to attack McCloy. The senator, he reported, had learned that Eisenhower’s Dartmouth book-burning speech had been inspired by McCloy. Thereafter, McCarthy had sent his investigators to dig into McCloy’s career. This was how McCarthy had discovered McCloy’s association with the army order barring discrimination against communists. Pearson reported that McCloy’s decision, moreover, had been shared by Stimson, Marshall, and the entire General Staff of the army.59 These were, indeed, more or less the facts.
By now, Eisenhower must have realized that, if McCarthy was given the opportunity, he would go after the records of McCloy, Stimson, Marshall, and other prominent friends of the president. He would want to know why citizens with security files that indicated they were members of the Communist Party were allowed to fight in World War II, let alone receive officers’ commissions; and in the hysteria of 1954, safeguarding common civil liberties was not a politically acceptable reason. McCloy’s particular vulnerability was not the sole, or even the major, motivation for the president’s decision to go on the offensive, but his predicament helped precipitate the timing of Eisenhower’s decision.
So, two days after Wilson warned McCarthy about the existence of the “Adams Chronology”—the senator called it “blackmail”—the White House ordered its release to the press.60 The result was a political bombshell. Within days, the Senate agreed to hold hearings and investigate the charges against Roy Cohn. The army-McCarthy hearings began a month later.
But in the meantime, just a week after the release of the Adams Chronology, an unsubdued McCarthy told a wildly cheering crowd of South Chicago automobile dealers that he would never be a “rubber stamp” for Eisenhower. And once again he took the trouble to name McCloy as the individual responsible for allowing communists to infiltrate the army.61 The next day, on March 19, McCloy went to see Eisenhower. There is no record of what these two old friends said to each other in this moment of personal crisis, but McCloy was not one to request a meeting without having something quite clear to tell the president. The press reported that he had requested the appointment, and the White House released no details on the meeting’s agenda. The Washington Star pointedly identified McCloy as “one of Senator McCarthy’s targets in the Senator’s running battle with the Army. . . .”62
Soon, however, the Wisconsin senator’s political career would be in ruins. During the course of the seventy-two televised sessions of the army-McCarthy hearings, millions of Americans saw McCarthy up close for the first time. The climax of this piece of political theater occurred when the army’s chief counsel for the hearings, Joseph Nye Welch, interrupted one of the senator’s more slanderous tirades and asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” When it was over, a resolution was introduced in the Senate condemning the “unbecoming” behavior of the junior senator from Wisconsin. Finally, on December 2, 1954, after three days of angry debate, the Senate voted sixty-seven to twenty-two to censure McCarthy. The senator’s political career was dead, though “McCarthyism” would continue to poison the American political landscape for years to come.
While Congress prepared to hold televised hearings on the Cohn-Schine matter, a related drama was unfolding offstage. Back in December 1953, the FBI had forwarded to the White House the latest accusations against J. Robert Oppenheimer. With the exception of one item, all the charges had already been thoroughly investigated, most recently in 1948, when the Atomic Energy Commission had reviewed Oppenheimer’s record and cleared him for classified work. The only new item related solely to the physicist’s opposition on moral and policy grounds to the development of the hydrogen bomb. But his critics, including Lewis Strauss, the strong-minded chairman of the AEC, considered this an indication that Oppenheimer might have been, through all these years, a Soviet agent, and so formal charges were filed against the physicist.
On the morning of Monday, April 12, 1954, Oppenheimer appeared before a specially appointed loyalty-review board in Washington. For legal counsel he brought with him Lloyd K. Garrison, a soft-spoken New York lawyer whom Oppenheimer knew as a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Studies. Sitting in judgment were Gordon Gray, a forty-five-year-old former secretary of the army under Truman; Thomas Alfred Morgan, a retired chairman of the Sperry Corporation; and Ward V. Evans, a chemistry professor. Gray headed the board of inquiry. McCloy thought highly of both Gray and Morgan; he had worked with Morgan during the previous year as a trustee of the United Negro College Fund in New York.
As the “Gray Board” sat down to begin hearing testimony in the case, the public at large was completely unaware that charges of disloyalty had been brought against America’s most famous nuclear scientist. The veil of secrecy over the case, however, lasted hardly a day. Fearing a leak, Garrison had taken the precaution of providing James Reston with copies of both the AEC charges and Oppenheimer’s reply. Reston had promised to hold the story as long as possible, but that first afternoon Garrison received a call saying that news of the Gray Board’s existence had leaked out. The Times, Reston determined, would have to run the story.
The next morning, McCloy opened his paper to see the scandal spread across much of the front page.
Though he found the news profoundly “disturbing,” he was nevertheless glad that Scotty Reston had brought out the story “before McCarthy tries to claim credit for it.” McCloy rejected out of hand the very idea that Oppenheimer might have been a Soviet agent. During the war, he had seen enough of the physicist to feel the man’s personal magnetism. “I was intrigued by Oppie,” recalled McCloy later, “and didn’t give a damn if he was sleeping with a mistress who was a communist.”63 He had seen Oppenheimer as recently as January 23, 1954, at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Study Group on Soviet-U.S. Relations.64 The Study Group—which included Averell Harriman, Dean Rusk, Robert Bowie, McGeorge Bundy, and Arthur Dean—had been meeting regularly at the Princeton Inn for almost a year. McCloy would always remember the physicist talking of the two nuclear powers trapped “like two scorpions in a bottle,” and he shared Oppie’s concern that “this awful force that we had released . . . did not become a destroyer of civilization.”65 But he was also sometimes baffled by Oppenheimer, and that morning he sat down and wrote Frankfurter a note conveying his mixed emotions about the case:
Knowing firsthand the tremendous contributions that this man made to the development of our position in atomic weapons, I can’t conceive of any real disloyalty on his part no matter what his early associations were. What always puzzles me about these scientists and intellectual cases is their disposition to play with Communist theories at the same time that they must be aware of the doctrines of controlled thought which the Communist philosophy involves.66
Still, he had no doubt that the whole affair was ridiculous. Three days later, he wrote Eisenhower, bluntly telling the president that a security investigation of a man like Oppenheimer “is somewhat like inquiring into the security risk of a Newton or a Galileo. Such people are themselves always ‘top secret.’ ” Ike lamely replied that he hoped the “distinguished” Gray Board would exonerate the scientist.67
McCloy’s attitude was not shared by many men, and fewer still were willing to defend the physicist publicly. After reading Oppenheimer’s security file in the autumn of 1952, Robert Lovett called it a “nightmare.”68 But Lloyd Garrison was able to assemble an impressive list of well-known figures to testify in behalf of his client. The list included Nobel laureates Enrico Fermi, Isidor I. Rabi, and Hans Bethe, and such policy-makers as George Kennan, Vannevar Bush, and Karl T. Compton. Toward the end of the hearings, and after all these men had testified, Garrison persuaded Gray to allow him to interrupt the presentation of the government’s case with a last-minute defense witness—John J. McCloy. (Garrison had known McCloy since Harvard Law School, and the two men now saw each other occasionally at luncheons sponsored by the exclusive “Nisi Prius” club.) This last-minute testimony produced some of the most memorable exchanges of the trial. The entire five-hundred-thousand-word transcript of the hearing was soon leaked; excerpts of McCloy’s statements were highlighted in The New York Times, and radio commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr., read large portions of the transcript over the air. To the delight of liberals and Oppenheimer’s defenders, McCloy raised issues that went to the heart of such security trials.69
He asserted there was nothing that gave him any reason to suspect Oppenheimer of disloyalty. If anything, he said, it had been his impression during meetings of the CFR’s Soviet Study Group that the physicist was more “militant” than others in the Study Group on the question of dealing with the Soviet Union. But then McCloy went on to question a basic assumption of the entire proceedings by challenging the Gray Board’s definition of security:
I don’t know just exactly what you mean by a security risk. I know that I am a security risk and I think every individual is a security risk. . . . I think there is a security risk in reverse. . . . We are only secure if we have the best brains and the best reach of mind. If the impression is prevalent that scientists as a whole have to work under such great restrictions and perhaps great suspicion in the United States, we may lose the next step in this [nuclear] field, which I think would be very dangerous for us.70
Members of the Gray Board and their counsel, Roger Robb, were greatly troubled by this argument, for it suggested that there were no absolutes in matters of security, that a value judgment had to be made on the merits of each individual. This would be a particularly difficult exercise in the case of Oppenheimer, whose personality was as complicated as the mass of contrary information contained in his thick security file. How, for instance, could one weigh the single most damaging piece of evidence against Oppenheimer, the so-called Chevalier incident? Early in 1943, one of Oppenheimer’s closest friends, the novelist Haakon Chevalier, had informed him in a casual conversation held in the physicist’s kitchen that a British chemical engineer known to both men had recently volunteered that he had a channel by which to convey scientific information to the Soviets. Oppenheimer immediately said he would have nothing to do with any such effort. Oppenheimer’s security problem arose subsequently, when it became clear that he had delayed reporting the incident. Worse, in an effort to protect Chevalier’s identity, he had lied to security officers about the details of the conversation.71
In evaluating the security risks stemming from this incident, McCloy would require the Gray Board to weigh Oppenheimer’s willingness to lie in order to protect a friend against his value to the country as a theoretical physicist. Under cross-examination, Robb countered with an analogy: did the chairman of Chase National Bank employ anyone who for some time had associated with bank robbers? “No,” said McCloy, “I don’t know of anyone.” And if a Chase branch manager had a friend who volunteered that he knew some people who planned to rob the bank, wouldn’t McCloy expect his branch manager to report the conversation? McCloy, of course, had to answer, “Yes.”
This was damaging to Oppenheimer’s case, and more so when Gordon Gray returned to the analogy a short time later in his cross-examination: “Would you leave someone in charge of the vaults about whom you have any doubt in your mind?”
McCloy was forced to say no, but then quickly interjected that, if an employee of doubtful background nevertheless “knew more about . . . the intricacies of time locks than anybody else in the world, I might think twice before I let him go, because I would balance the risks in this connection.” He then illustrated the point by revealing that as high commissioner in Germany he had given his approval to a program (later identified as Operation Paperclip) that recruited Nazi scientists for well-paid, classified work in the United States. When it came to the mind of Dr. Oppenheimer, he said, “I would accept a considerable amount of political immaturity in return for this rather esoteric, this rather indefinite, theoretical thinking that I believe we are going to be dependent on for the next generation.”72
In his summation speech, Garrison echoed this argument—indeed, made it central to his case—by pleading that “we must not devour the best and most gifted of our citizens in some mechanical application of security procedures and mechanisms.” But in the end, this reasoning convinced only one of the three members of the Gray Board. Gordon Gray and Tom Morgan concluded that Oppenheimer was a security risk. Though the physicist was a “loyal citizen” who had “an unusual ability to keep to himself vital secrets,” Gray and Morgan concluded that his security clearance should not be restored, on the grounds that “any person whose absolute loyalty to the United States is in question . . . should be rejected for government service.”73
McCloy wrote Frankfurter, “What a tragedy that one who contributed so much—more than half the bemedaled generals I know—to the security of the country should now after all these years be designated a security risk. I understand the Admiral [Lewis Strauss] is annoyed at my testimony but great God what does he expect? I was there when Oppie’s massive contribution was rendered and know there is so much more to say but what’s the use?”74
Frankfurter tried to reassure him, writing, “. . . you opened a good many minds to a realization of the profound importance of your ‘concept of an affirmative security.’ ” B
oth Frankfurter and McCloy agreed between themselves that AEC Chairman Strauss was the chief culprit in the case. Several years earlier, Oppenheimer had publicly ridiculed Strauss’s knowledge of physics before a congressional committee. The opinionated admiral had been stung by this public humiliation. In addition, McCloy and Frankfurter felt certain that the admiral’s policy dispute with Oppenheimer over the H-bomb program had colored his judgment. In their eyes, the result had been a personal tragedy for Oppenheimer, and a blot on the record of the Eisenhower administration.75
The Oppenheimer affair occurred at the beginning of the end of McCarthyism. While the Gray Board was deciding to take no notice of the “imponderables” in determining the scientist’s loyalty (Isidor Rabi called the exercise “writing a man’s life”), the army-McCarthy televised hearings were teaching America something about the ugliness associated with political witch-hunts.
McCloy fared better in the eyes of history for his role in this ugly chapter of American history than did most of his peers. Few of his colleagues in Establishment circles—Democrat or Republican—ever spoke out publicly against McCarthy. The self-defined stewards of the public interest stood by passively through most of this national trauma. Privately, they were disgusted by the methods and antics of the Wisconsin senator, and, significantly, they never took seriously the threat of subversion. But they nevertheless kept their silence, doing nothing when the targets of McCarthyism were just a few left-wing New Dealers and “popular front” intellectuals. Only very late in the game did a few of them—and, most particularly, McCloy—intervene. He gave his president blunt and forceful advice, and this made a difference. On the other hand, even McCloy hesitated too long, and sometimes coupled his criticism with ill-considered comparisons to the New Deal investigations of Wall Street. He did not publicly defend the careers or reputations of his own HICOG officers. And when he finally did go public with his views, it was in his own self-defense. For the times, however, even this limited response displayed a remarkable degree of political courage.