Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  The Democrats initially sought partisan advantage and criticized Ike for his time on the links. Some portrayed him as a full-time golfer who moonlighted as president. “Ben Hogan for President,” read a bumper sticker in the 1956 campaign. “If we’re going to have a golfer, let’s have a good one.” Others joked that Ike had a thirty-six-hole workweek, which was literally true since he usually played a round on Wednesday afternoon and another on Saturday morning.7 It was President Truman—a nongolfer himself—who finally blew the whistle on such criticism. “To criticize the President … because he plays a game of golf is unfair and picayunish,” said Truman. “He has the same right to relax from the heavy burdens of office as any other man.”8 b

  It was clear that Eisenhower needed the relaxation. While Ike might delegate the details, the major decisions—and the responsibility—rested with him. The Republicans in Congress had no intention of giving up their opposition to the federal government just because their party had captured the White House. Eisenhower’s principal adversaries throughout his tenure as president were not the Democrats but the calcified wing of the Republican party, which continued to live in the shadow of Calvin Coolidge and to see Communists under every bedstead.

  “Yesterday was one of the worst days I have experienced since January 20th,” Eisenhower confided to his diary on May 1, 1953. “The difficulty arose at the weekly meeting of the Executive Departments and the leaders of the Republican Party in the Congress.” Eisenhower had explained to the GOP leadership how the forthcoming budget would reduce expenditures by $8.4 billion, but could not be cut more because of defense requirements in the Cold War.

  In spite of the apparent satisfaction of most of those present, Senator Taft broke out in a violent objection to everything that had been done. He accused the National Security Council of merely adopting the Truman strategy [and] classed the savings as “puny.”…

  I think that everyone present was astonished at the demagogic nature of his tirade, because not once did he mention the security of the United States. He simply wanted expenditures reduced, regardless.… I do not see how he can maintain any reputation for considered judgment when he attempts to discuss weighty, serious, and even critical matters in such an ill-tempered and violent fashion.

  The ludicrous part of the affair came when several of my close friends around the table saw that my temper was getting a little out of hand, and they did not want any breech to be brought about that would be completely unbridge-able. So George Humphrey and Joe Dodge in turn jumped into the conversation as quickly as there was the slightest chance to interrupt and held the floor until I cooled down somewhat.

  Taft backed down, but Eisenhower doubted if the senator was really on board.

  Of course I am pleased that I did not add any fuel to the flames, even though it is possible I might have done so except for the quick intervention of my devoted friends. If this thing has to be dragged out into the open, we at least have the right to stand firmly on the platform of taking no unnecessary chances with our country’s safety.… However, I still maintain it does not create any confidence in the reliability and effectiveness of our leadership in one of the important houses of Congress.9

  It was in the Senate that problems festered. Taft had become majority leader when the Republicans regained control on Ike’s coattails, and on most issues he cooperated with the White House. “Taft and I have developed a curious sort of personal friendship,” Eisenhower wrote a month later.

  It is not any Damon and Pythias sort of thing that insures compatibility of intellectual viewpoint, nor even, for that matter, complete courtesy in the public discussion of political questions.… The real point of difference between us is that he wants to reduce taxes immediately, believing that this is possible if we arbitrarily reduce the security establishment by [an additional] ten billion dollars. And he believes that in no other way can the Republicans be returned to the control of Congress in 1954. I personally agree with none of this.…

  In the foreign field, Senator Taft never disagrees with me when we discuss such affairs academically or theoretically. However, when we take up each individual problem he easily loses his temper and makes extravagant statements.…

  The implication of all this is that Senator Taft and I will never completely really agree on policies affecting either the domestic or foreign scene. Moreover, we will never be sufficiently close that we are impelled by mutual friendship to seek ways and means to minimize any evidence of apparent opposition.10

  Taft, who had not been previously diagnosed, died suddenly of stomach cancer on July 31, 1953, and was succeeded as majority leader by William Knowland, the senior senator from California.11 But Eisenhower’s difficulties did not lessen. Though he often disagreed with Ike, Taft’s political and intellectual stature had kept the right wing of the party more or less under control. With him gone, Joseph McCarthy and his cohorts had free rein. McCarthy, who was now chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, saw Ike somewhat contemptuously as an amiable military man who understood little about Washington politics and was at best a dupe for sinister forces in the eastern establishment. Eisenhower, for his part, never forgave McCarthy for his criticism of George Marshall and considered him a bully whose anti-Communist fervor was simply an effort to attain notoriety.

  A collision was inevitable, and it came sooner than Eisenhower anticipated. On January 21, 1953, Ike’s second day in office, he sent the Senate his nominees for subcabinet posts—the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries who ensure administration control of the executive branch. Like all presidents, he assumed pro forma confirmation. That proved not to be the case. Utilizing the arcane rules of the Senate, McCarthy put an immediate hold on Ike’s first nominee: General Walter Bedell Smith to be undersecretary of state, the senior subcabinet position. According to McCarthy, Smith was a possible Communist sympathizer and fellow traveler. As America’s postwar ambassador to the Soviet Union, Smith had defended career diplomat John Paton Davies, Jr., a member of his staff in Moscow, against McCarthy’s charges of disloyalty, and in McCarthy’s eyes that made Smith suspect as well.

  Eisenhower hit the ceiling. Not only had Smith served as his wartime chief of staff, but his political views were somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. (Smith once told Ike that he thought Nelson Rockefeller was a Communist.)12 In addition to serving as ambassador to Moscow, Smith had been the director of central intelligence. To consider him a fellow traveler was absurd. Eisenhower called Taft and told him to put a stop to the nonsense about Smith immediately. Taft did as Ike asked, McCarthy withdrew his hold, and Smith was confirmed. But the episode left a lasting scar. To question Bedell Smith’s loyalty was preposterous. Eisenhower saw firsthand the meaning of McCarthyism. In the words of one biographer, he came to loathe the senator “almost as much as he hated Hitler.”13

  No sooner was Smith confirmed than McCarthy was objecting again. This time it was to Dr. James B. Conant, the distinguished president of Harvard, whom Eisenhower had nominated to succeed John J. McCloy as American high commissioner in Germany. Any president of Harvard would probably have been suspect to McCarthy, but Conant had had the temerity of once stating that there were no Communists on the university’s faculty. Obviously he was a pinko fellow traveler. Eisenhower exploded again. This time he dispatched Nixon to call McCarthy off. Confronted with the White House’s determination, the senator backed down. McCarthy wrote Ike that he was “much opposed” to Conant but would not carry his opposition to the Senate floor because he did not “want to make a row.”14

  Senate confirmation of Bedell Smith and James B. Conant represented preliminary skirmishes. The first real battle between Eisenhower and McCarthy was joined on February 27, 1953, when Eisenhower nominated Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen to be ambassador to Moscow. A career Foreign Service officer who was fluent in Russian and French, Bohlen was currently serving as counselor in the State Department, the senior professional post. He had previously served in Moscow and was co
nsidered an authority on Soviet affairs. Because of his fluency in Russian, he had been FDR’s interpreter at Teheran and Yalta, and had served Truman in the same capacity at Potsdam. For McCarthy, that was tantamount to treason.

  Dulles warned the president that the nomination might be in trouble and at one point appeared ready to throw Bohlen under the bus, but Eisenhower would have none of it. “I knew Bohlen and had learned to respect and like him,” said Ike. “When I was the Allied commander in NATO … I had many conversations with him concerning our difficulties with the Soviets. So fully did I believe in his tough, firm but fair attitude … that I came to look upon him as one of the ablest Foreign Service officers I had ever met.”15 Eisenhower assumed that if he made his support for Bohlen clear, the Republicans in the Senate would fall into line. That did not happen. Not only was Bohlen tarred for having been an accomplice to the “sell out” to Stalin at Teheran and Yalta, but there was also derogatory information in his FBI security file that had been leaked to McCarthy.c

  Eisenhower, who was confident Bohlen would pass muster, overruled Attorney General Brownell and authorized two senators, one from each party, Taft and Alabama’s John Sparkman, to review the file. After reading the file at the Department of Justice, Taft and Sparkman reported that it contained nothing that should stand in the way of Bohlen’s confirmation.16

  1953 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation (illustration credit 21.2)

  Nevertheless, a bitter floor fight followed. In a lengthy Senate speech, McCarthy asserted that Bohlen had been “at Roosevelt’s left hand at Teheran and Yalta, and at Truman’s left hand at Potsdam,” and ranted about his “ugly record of great betrayal.” Senator Herman Welker of Idaho said, “Don’t send Bohlen to Moscow. Send General Van Fleet [the commander of Eighth Army in Korea] instead.” Senator Everett Dirksen piled on. “I reject Yalta, so I reject Yalta men.”17

  Eisenhower supported Bohlen with the full prestige of the presidency. “The reason I sent his name to the Senate, and the reason it stays there, is because I believe he is the best qualified man for the job,” he said at a press conference on March 26.18 The following day the Senate voted to confirm Bohlen 74–13.d The Senate’s overwhelming confirmation of Bohlen represented a major victory for Eisenhower. The president had stood up to the hysteria about loyalty and security that McCarthy and his supporters had fanned, and had obtained Bohlen’s confirmation to be his ambassador to Moscow. Bohlen was the only man remaining in public life who could be tied, regardless of how remotely, to the wartime diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt. It was a remarkable fight, and Ike stood his ground.

  “Eleven Republican senators voted against us,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary on April 1, 1953.

  I was surprised by the vote of [John W.] Bricker and [Barry] Goldwater. These two seemed to me a bit more intelligent than the others, who sought to defend their position with the most misleading kind of argument.

  Senator McCarthy is, of course, so anxious for headlines that he is prepared to go to any extremes in order to secure some mention of his name in the press. I really believe that nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of trouble-making as to ignore him. This he cannot stand.19

  McCarthy had struck out against Ike’s diplomatic nominees. The State Department’s Voice of America provided easier pickings. In February, the Government Operations Committee set out to purge the VOA’s 189 overseas libraries of the works of pro-Communist authors. McCarthy charged that the committee had found more than thirty thousand books by 418 suspect writers, including W. H. Auden, Edna Ferber, John Dewey, Bernard De Voto, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.20 Dashiel Hammett’s totally nonpolitical detective classics The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man were expunged because Hammett was a “Fifth Amendment Communist,” based on his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.21

  The committee’s principal investigators were twenty-six-year-old Roy Cohn, who McCarthy hired as chief counsel, and G. David Schine, a friend of Cohn’s whose father owned a chain of luxury hotels. Cohn’s credentials stemmed from a stint in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, while Schine was simply a nice young man on whom Cohn had a crush. The two romped through the major cities of Western Europe looking for subversive literature on the shelves of American libraries. Cohn’s attitude is best illustrated by his comment after visiting the VOA library in Vienna and the Soviet counterpart in the Russian sector of the city. “We discovered that some of the same books—for example, the works of Howard Fast—were stocked by both. One of us—the United States or the Soviet Union—had to be wrong.”22

  Eisenhower struck back on June 14. Slated to give the commencement address at Dartmouth College, Ike found himself on the platform with fellow honorary degree recipients John McCloy; Sherman Adams (Dartmouth, 1920); Lester Pearson, the Canadian minister of external affairs; and Joseph Proskauer, chairman of the New York State Crime Commission. McCloy, who was well connected in Germany after his years as high commissioner, was telling the others how books were being burned in American libraries abroad at the instigation of Senator McCarthy.

  “What’s this?” asked Eisenhower. “What’s this?”

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

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

  “I’m afraid they are, Mr. President. I have the evidence. And the value of those books that are being destroyed was that they were uncensored. They criticize you and me and anyone else in government. The Germans knew they were uncensored and that’s why they streamed into our libraries.”23

  Eisenhower sat quietly reflecting on what McCloy had said. When his time came to speak he discarded his prepared text and spoke extemporaneously. “Old soldiers love to reminisce,” said Ike, “and they are notoriously garrulous.” The graduands guffawed at the unmistakable dig at Douglas MacArthur. Then Eisenhower turned serious. “Don’t join the book burners,” he said. “Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend your own sense of decency. That should be the only censorship.… How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is?”24

  There was little doubt about Eisenhower’s target. Telegrams and messages pouring into the White House backed the president ten to one. On Capitol Hill, reaction was mixed. “He couldn’t very well have been referring to me,” McCarthy deadpanned. “I have burned no books.”25

  Eisenhower’s Dartmouth College speech notwithstanding, McCarthy had a pernicious impact throughout the government. Several of Eisenhower’s cabinet appointees—Arthur Summerfield and Sinclair Weeks, for example—initially were strong supporters of the senator, as was General Jerry Persons, Ike’s congressional aide. The Loyalty Review Board appointed by President Truman worked overtime to discover Communist sympathizers on the federal payroll. American employees of international organizations were caught up in the net. Ralph Bunche of the United Nations, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for negotiating an armistice between Israel and the Arab states, was investigated by the board as a dangerous leftist.

  When Eisenhower learned that the FBI was collecting information branding Bunche a Communist, he was appalled. “I am willing to bet he’s no more a Communist than I am,” Ike told cabinet secretary Max Rabb.

  “I feel very strongly about this,” said the president. “Bunche is a superior man, a credit to our country. I just can’t stand by and permit a man like that to be chopped to pieces because of McCarthy feeling.”26

  Eisenhower asked Bunche how he could help, but Bunche was confident he could handle the matter himself. He was called before the board to answer accusations on several occasions. One hearing was shortened to enable Bunche to keep a dinner appointment. He had been invited to dine at the White House with the president.27 Eisenhower offered no direct help, but the symbolism was unmistakable.
On May 28, 1954, the Loyalty Board unanimously found that Bunche was above suspicion and that his loyalty to the United States was not in doubt.

  Eisenhower declined to attack McCarthy publicly. First, he believed that McCarthy was the Senate’s problem, and it would do no good for him to become embroiled in an internal Senate dispute.e More important, he believed McCarthy only sought notoriety, and if the president attacked him, that would serve the senator’s purpose. There was also the possibility that by attacking McCarthy, he would make the senator a hero in the eyes of some. Far better to work behind the scenes. Given enough rope, McCarthy would someday hang himself. “I just won’t get into a pissing contest with that skunk,” Ike told his brother Milton.28

  Eisenhower’s luck ran true to form. At the end of 1953, McCarthy’s approval ratings had reached an all-time high of 50 percent in the Gallup poll.29 Encouraged by that showing, McCarthy unleashed his committee’s investigative team to rout out Communists in the United States Army. Informed by one of his many spotters that an Army dentist at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, was a member of the American Labor Party (a Trotskyite group on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations), the senator launched a full-scale investigation. The officer in question was Captain Irving Peress, a dentist at Camp Kilmer’s reception center for inductees, who had been drafted into the service for two years under the doctor draft law. Peress had refused to sign a loyalty oath, and the Army’s adjutant general was preparing his discharge papers. Before the discharge came through, McCarthy interrogated Peress, who invoked the Fifth Amendment and declined to testify. McCarthy demanded that Peress be court-martialed. Peress requested an immediate discharge and the Army complied, routinely promoting him to major in the process—as the doctor draft law required.