Here he drew encouragement from the fact that his physical condition had improved markedly that fall of 1949, due chiefly to the finding that cortisone could dramatically improve the lives of Addison’s sufferers, whose adrenal glands do not produce enough of the hormones cortisol and aldosterone. Though it is likely Kennedy had begun taking corticosteroids periodically a number of years before, only now was the drug synthesized and declared to be broadly effective for people with Addison’s. The announcement, by researchers at the Mayo Clinic, set off a mad rush for cortisone, and the Kennedys scrambled to store away supplies of it in safe-deposit boxes around the country so that Jack would never go without.62 The drug boosted patients’ energy, muscular strength, and endurance, doctors found, and enhanced their overall sense of well-being. The mere fact of having a diagnosis also helped Jack, as he now had an explanation for at least some of the mystery illnesses he had suffered over the years—Addison’s sufferers, he learned, were particularly vulnerable to infection.
As a new year and a new decade dawned, his family and friends and associates could see it: John F. Kennedy was back, and ready to begin anew.
* When Jack asked his hosts what he could do for them to express his thanks, they politely waved him off. Sensing they had something in mind, he asked again; they broke down and asked if he would drive their children around the village in the station wagon. Soon there was the sight of Congressman Kennedy driving slowly up and down the streets, in a new American vehicle, with half a dozen or more Irish Kennedy kids crammed in the back.
SEVENTEEN
RED SCARE
Just as John F. Kennedy’s political rise coincided with the start of the Cold War, so it tracked with the beginning of an anti-Communist crusade inside America’s borders, a crusade that contained a healthy dose of partisan politics—and that had no real analogue in any other Western nation.1 Opposing the Soviet Union overseas and leftists at home became a way of corralling votes and building electoral strength, or of avoiding being labeled a Red sympathizer. As a result, the range of acceptable political discourse narrowed. By the late 1940s, the chance for in-depth discussion and criticism of policy toward the Communist world vanished as those on the left and center-left who might have articulated a different vision lost political and cultural license.2
Jack Kennedy’s political career cannot be understood apart from a close consideration of this “Cold War at home”; as such, it bears reflecting on how the situation came to be.
Already in the 1946 midterm campaign, the Republican Party had accused Harry Truman and the Democrats of weakness in the face of Communist expansionism. “The choice which confronts Americans this year is between Communism and Republicanism,” said Tennessee congressman B. Carroll Reece (who doubled as the chairman of the Republican National Committee) shortly before voting day. James Kem, a Senate hopeful from Missouri, called Truman “soft on communism.” Even Senator Robert Taft, notwithstanding his reputation for rectitude, often used the words “Communist,” “left-winger,” and “New Dealer” synonymously and charged that Democrats were “appeasing the Russians abroad and fostering Communism at home.”3 Truman and his aides, stung by their party’s losses in the election, got the message. The following spring, soon after the president announced the Truman Doctrine, his administration established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which authorized government officials to screen more than two million federal employees for any intimation of political subversion. Hundreds lost their jobs, and thousands more resigned rather than subject themselves to investigation. In the vast majority of instances there was no evidence of disloyalty.
Journalist David Halberstam’s summary is apt: “Rather than combating the irrationality of the charges of softness on Communism and subversion, the Truman Administration, sure that it was the lesser of two evils, moved to expropriate the issue, as in a more subtle way it was already doing in foreign affairs. So the issue was legitimized; rather than being the property of the far right, which the centrist Republicans tolerated for obvious political benefits, it had even been picked up by the incumbent Democratic party.”4
But it was the Republicans who proved most willing to wield the anti-Communist club, and as a result became the more skillful at it. The party was badly split, with an internationalist wing, reflecting the views of Wall Street and East Coast elites, and an isolationist one, rooted in the small towns and cities of the Midwest. The internationalists looked eastward, across the Atlantic, and had supported U.S. entry into the European war as necessary and just. More often than not, these Republicans endorsed the broad outlines of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime internationalism, and in 1940 and 1944 they endorsed GOP candidates for president who often sounded much like the president himself. And they backed with conviction the new U.S.-led postwar international order.
The other wing took a very different view: it held to the isolationist fears of being sucked into overseas squabbles, especially those involving the nefarious Europeans, and raged against FDR’s “socialistic” New Deal programs at home. To the extent that its adherents looked outward, it was to the west, to Asia; their ocean of choice was the Pacific. Even after the war, this isolationist wing of the party retained broad support—in numerical terms it may have been larger than the internationalist wing—but it lost out to the eastern elite in the selection of the party’s standard-bearer in the 1940, 1944, and 1948 elections (Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, and then Dewey again). To many heartland Republicans, Willkie and Dewey were pusillanimous copycat candidates scarcely distinguishable from their Democratic opponents, first Roosevelt and then Truman.5
Still, even the Republican right was stunned by Dewey’s loss to the supposedly hapless Truman in 1948—as was everyone in the party, and pretty much everyone outside it as well. The Democrats had been in power for sixteen years, and surely their time was up. Evidently it wasn’t. The Republicans overestimated the degree of unhappiness in the country and underestimated Harry Truman, who may have lacked Roosevelt’s charisma and patrician self-assurance but had virtues of his own: he was plainspoken, unpretentious, and decisive, and was deemed by ordinary Americans to be one of them. A high school graduate moving among the better educated, he was well read on U.S. and world history and on the shifting demands of his office. More than that, Truman was politically canny, shrewdly isolating both Henry Wallace’s left-wing campaign and Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats. The result: four consecutive GOP presidential losses became five. Roosevelt was gone, but somehow Republicans had lost yet again, conquered by the little Kansas City haberdasher, who carried twenty-eight states and 303 electoral votes to Dewey’s 189. The Democrats even picked up nine seats in the Senate.
The full effect of the defeat on the morale of the Republican Party is hard to fully recapture in hindsight. Even at the time, many observers failed to see it, not least celebratory Democrats. To many within the GOP, it seemed an open question whether they would ever win the presidency again. They seemed destined to be a permanent minority party—unless, that is, they could hit upon an issue on which to rebuild momentum. They found it in subversion. Loyalty and anti-Communism would be the watchwords, to be used to attack Democrats at every opportunity. There would be no holding back. After years in which Democrats had castigated Republican domestic priorities as cold and cruel, as benefiting the rich at the expense of everyone else, now the favor would be returned, with interest.6
The party profited enormously in this effort from the twin shocks of 1949—the Soviet detonation of an atomic device and the victory by Mao Zedong’s Communists in the Chinese Civil War. Only Americans could have caused these developments, Republican leaders charged. Soviet spies, working alongside American accomplices, must have stolen U.S. secrets and thereby drastically sped up the Kremlin’s atomic program, and the Truman administration must have “lost China” by allowing America’s longtime Nationalist ally Chiang Kai-shek to be vanquished. Robert Taft spoke of officials in th
e State Department “liquidating” the Nationalists, and charged that State “was guided by a left-wing group who have obviously wanted to get rid of Chiang and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose.”7
To the administration and its defenders, the charges were absurd. At the end of World War II, they pointed out, Chiang had overwhelming military superiority vis-à-vis his Communist foes, who were ill-equipped and undertrained. By early 1949, however, his army had withered after defeats and desertions, and he had been compelled to take refuge on the island of Taiwan. To blame his defeat on U.S. inaction made no sense whatsoever. “[The Chinese people] had not overthrown the government,” Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared. “There was nothing to overthrow. They had simply ignored it.”8 As for the GOP’s broader “soft on Communism” charge, that struck Acheson as senseless, given how many Republicans had voted against foreign aid bills and clamored for reducing U.S. standing-troop levels (by May 1949, the Army consisted of only 630,000 men), not to mention how many of them showed zero interest in committing American military power to check Communist expansion abroad.
Even so, the White House took every chance to trumpet its anti-Soviet vigilance. Rejecting calls by the likes of George Kennan and Walter Lippmann for high-level diplomacy, Truman in early 1950 gave the approval to begin work on a hydrogen bomb, the “Super,” and ordered his senior foreign policy aides to undertake a thorough review of policy. Kennan, about to leave his post as head of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, lamented the militarization of the Cold War; his successor, Paul Nitze, felt no such concern. Nitze would be the primary author of a National Security Council report, NSC-68, that predicted continued global tension with Soviet-directed Communism, in the context of “a shrinking world of polarized power.”9
The Republican attacks kept coming, and Acheson was a frequent target. With his impeccable establishment credentials—Groton, Yale, Harvard Law, Covington & Burling—and his haughty demeanor, he represented for the Republican right a much more enticing target than the midwestern, small-town, unassuming Truman.10 Acheson made things worse for himself in 1949 when he seemed to emphasize his friendship with accused spy Alger Hiss. (In fact, the two men were not close friends.) Himself an elegant, self-possessed, Ivy League–educated symbol of the establishment, Hiss had been a member of the U.S. delegation at Yalta in 1945 and later that year helped organize the UN’s San Francisco Conference (at which John Kennedy was a reporter). After the war he became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In 1948, a Time editor named Whittaker Chambers asserted that during the 1930s he and Hiss had been fellow members of the Communist Party and that Hiss (at that time working in the Agriculture Department) had passed secret government documents to him to give to the Soviets. Hiss vehemently denied it, but the young Republican congressman Richard Nixon doggedly pressed the case as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nixon’s efforts were going nowhere until microfilmed documents hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on Chambers’s farm swung the momentum against Hiss. After an initial trial ended in a hung jury, a second one convicted him, in January 1950, of two counts of perjury: for denying that he had ever given Chambers any documents and for insisting he had not seen Chambers after the start of 1937. (The statute of limitations for charges of espionage had lapsed.)*1 The case, pitting the slender, patrician Hiss, impeccable in dress and comportment, against the disheveled, portly Chambers, generated headlines for months, and Nixon emerged as a hero on the right. He declared that a “conspiracy” existed to prevent Americans from “knowing the facts.”11
All eyes now turned to Acheson, the nation’s top diplomat. “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,” he grandly told reporters after the verdict was announced. Republicans seized the opening. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin called a halt to a Senate hearing to report the “fantastic statement the Secretary of State has made in the last four minutes.” McCarthy wondered aloud if this meant that Acheson would not turn his back on other Communist sympathizers in Washington as well. Richard Nixon, meanwhile, called Acheson’s remarks “disgusting,” and subsequently referred to him as the “Red Dean of the Cowardly College of Containment.” When, a few days later, British scientist Klaus Fuchs was arrested on atomic espionage charges, it fed Republican claims of a conspiracy that needed to be exposed.12
Nor was it just about Communism. Conservatives saw in the Hiss verdict a validation of what they had long been saying about elitist, overeducated, big-government-loving eastern sophisticates. “For eighteen years,” Senator Karl Mundt, Republican of South Dakota, thundered, the nation had “been run by New Dealers, Fair Dealers, Misdealers, and Hiss dealers, who have shuttled back and forth between Freedom and Red Fascism like a pendulum on a cuckoo clock.”13
II
The Hiss verdict came on January 21, 1950. Truman announced his hydrogen bomb decision on January 31. The Fuchs arrest occurred on February 3. And on February 9, Joe McCarthy gave a speech that hit like a thunderclap and cemented his place in U.S. history textbooks forevermore. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, before the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club, McCarthy declared, “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” He had no evidence, either then or in the days that followed, when in his speeches the number dropped to fifty-seven, then rose to eighty-one, then became “a lot.” McCarthy in fact had no list, and almost certainly had no proof that anyone in the State Department actually belonged to the Communist Party.14
It’s not even clear that McCarthy had any real interest in either espionage or Communism. “Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx,” journalist George Reedy, who was later an aide to Lyndon Johnson, memorably remarked. Facing lagging popularity at home in Wisconsin and the prospect of a tough reelection battle two years away, McCarthy needed an issue with which to revive his political fortunes.15 He felt sure he’d found it. He was at bottom a salesman, an actor, someone for whom accuracy mattered far less than attention, and he had a talent for imagining subversion and conspiracy and for humiliating the scared and vulnerable. A lazy man unwilling to do the work required to back up his claims, he relied on allusion and inference. But he was also shrewd: he understood the resentments and fears that existed just below the surface in many people—resentment of the elites, fears of the other—and indeed felt them himself.16 Like all demagogues, he knew that people sought simple answers for why the world seemed not to be going their way, knew that he could captivate them by appealing to emotion rather than intellect. And he understood that merely by making bombastic claims he sent the message that there must be some truth to the claim that the government was teeming with traitors secretly taking orders from the Kremlin.17
McCarthy’s timing was right, moreover, for the national fever that had been building for years rose sharply with the twin shocks and the espionage cases. And indeed, McCarthy’s Wheeling remarks and those that immediately followed (in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno) gained him the headlines he craved—reporters knew both that he was a shameless fabulist and that sensational stories sell papers. (The wilder the charge, the bigger the headline.) Rarely did journalists press him to back up his claims with evidence. He moved copy; that was all that mattered.18
Still, the reporters who covered him could see what he was doing, could see that he always kept his claims deliberately vague, that he cared only about gaining publicity, which meant issuing a steady stream of new claims, new accusations. When caught in a lie, he never apologized or recanted; he attacked his accuser or simply moved on to another target.
“Talking to Joe was like putting your hands in a bowl of mush,” said Reedy, who found the experience of covering McCarthy for the United Press so loathsome that he quit journalism.19 Insecure and eager to please, and saddled with a serious drinking problem (he liked nothing more than to pal around with reporters in bars in the evenings), McCarthy was perfectly willing to give the pressmen around him a story when they needed one, if necessary by conjuring up some new charges. If the reporters wanted to know what the party leadership was contemplating on this or that issue, McCarthy happily called up Senator Taft’s office and asked him questions while the journalists listened in silently on an open receiver.20
“McCarthyism” was the name later given to the senator’s antics, a term signifying a ruthless search for Communists, publicly and with little or no evidence, and in a manner that savaged the reputations of its targets. So ubiquitous did McCarthy become that it was easy to forget that the phenomenon had existed before him—since 1946–47 in its new incarnation, and in a different, lesser form since an initial “Red Scare” immediately after World War I. But undeniably, the Wisconsin senator gave this second Red Scare added fuel.
McCarthy’s position was further strengthened by the sudden outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula in late June 1950. Colonized by Japan in 1910, Korea had been divided in two by the Soviet Union and the United States after Japan’s defeat in 1945, with the Soviets in control of the land north of the thirty-eighth parallel and the Americans in charge in the south. The division was supposed to be temporary, but as Cold War tensions deepened, the split persisted. Both the North’s Communist leader, Kim Il Sung, and the South’s president, the U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee, sought to take control of a reunified Korea. Kim struck first; on June 25, after securing the reluctant approval of Stalin and Mao, he sent his troops across the parallel into the South. In short order they captured the southern capital of Seoul and appeared well positioned to march all the way down the peninsula and hand Kim control over the entire country.21
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