***
The Executive Mansion, early Wednesday, January 21, 1953:
Although visits to two inaugural balls kept him up until nearly 2 A.M., the new President rises as usual at 7:30 and breakfasts alone in his bedroom with his customary half-grapefruit and coffee. Washington is a city of late risers, but West Point taught Ike that an early start is a virtue, and he still believes it; despite anguished protests he will schedule his weekly breakfast meetings with the National Security Council and the legislative leadership at 8 A.M., and his daily calendar will start no later than 8:30. Now, slipping into a dark brown suit and knotting a figured tie, he descends to the first floor and strides vigorously to the oval office in the West Wing, where Sherman Adams, also a lifelong early bird, awaits him. Squatting on a table behind the President’s red leather desk chair is an ornate green marble clock-barometer, bought during the Grant administration for $400. Ike sets it. He is a methodical man; he will do it every morning.
His first appointment, at 8:02 A.M., is with Brownell. They discuss a few procedural matters; the cabinet will be sworn in at 5:30 P.M. in the East Room, and Wilson won’t be able to make it because he is still selling his $2,500,000 of GM stock. (Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon will take the Senate floor today to urge that Wilson’s name be withdrawn. Morse will be a liberal thorn in the administration’s side throughout the decade, and eventually he will switch to the other party.) Brownell leaves for the Justice Department and is succeeded by Mr. and Mrs. James Bradshaw Mintener of Minneapolis. Mintener is general counsel for Pillsbury Mills. This is a social visit. Last spring he organized the Eisenhower write-in campaign in the Minnesota primary, and this is his reward.
The morning fills up with routine presidential business. Twenty-nine horsemen wearing red jackets and white caps swarm in; they are members of the Palomino Mounted Patrol of Colorado, which rode in yesterday’s parade, and each gets an Eisenhower handshake. They are followed by the Junior Police Band of Denver, shepherded by Police Chief Herbert E. Forsyth. The mail room sends up good news: yesterday’s events have inspired 1,500 congratulatory telegrams. Two Republican governors arrive for a fried chicken lunch. It is afternoon before Ike, preparing for a conference over his first State of the Union address, discovers that he doesn’t have a key to his desk.
The key is provided by Adams, who also deals with most of the paperwork which, under Ike’s predecessors, had been handled by the chief executive. With Persons and Hagerty, Adams is one of the three aides closest to the President. Except for Dulles, who can talk to Eisenhower at any time, everyone in the administration must approach the President through the former New Hampshire governor. On most matters his scrawled “OK, SA” is as good as a presidential signature. On a typical day he will handle 250 calls. Adams runs a trim ship; White House workers are warned against gossip sessions, smoking in corridors, putting their feet on desks, or other “eccentric habits” in “deportment.”
While his executive officer toils, the commander ponders larger issues and keeps himself fit. At sixty-two the thirty-fourth President of the United States is a bald, handsome, energetic, ruddy, square-shouldered man standing five feet ten inches tall and weighing 178 pounds, just six pounds over his cadet weight forty years earlier. He holds his head high, his jaw set, and his strong mouth taut. In anger he will sock his right fist into his left palm and squeeze it; in repose his expression is stern, and if he chooses to be aloof his manner can be arctic. His most striking feature, however, is his famous grin.
Hoover kept fit with a medicine ball, FDR swam, Truman walked; Ike golfs. Outside, by the White House rose garden, the United States Golf Association is installing a putting green for him, and in good weather he will make iron shots across the Mansion’s south grounds. On wet days he can swing clubs in his high-ceilinged bedroom. Directly across the hall from it he will soon convert a spare bedroom into a studio. The new First Lady gave him his first oils for Christmas after the war, and painting has become a serious hobby for him. At present he is working on portraits of his chief advisers. Democratic critics will tell how Adams, trying to handle a half-dozen crises at once, received a call from his chief asking, “Are your eyes blue?” They will remind the country that no President since Coolidge has relaxed more. An Eisenhower agenda, they will gibe, is a list of steps he will refrain from taking, and TRB will write in the New Republic: “The public loves Ike. The less he does the more they love him. That, probably, is the secret. Here is a man who doesn’t rock the boat.’”2
Like most men in public life, Eisenhower dislikes wearing spectacles. Ann Whitman, his secretary, copies manuscripts of his speeches on a special machine with outsize type. Rather than carry his bifocals in his pocket, he leaves a dozen pairs lying around the Mansion; when thoughtful he will pick one up and chew at the earpiece. Paperback westerns are still his favorite light reading. His favorite author is Luke Short, though he has also read the first two books of Bruce Catton’s Civil War trilogy, Mr. Lincoln’s Army and Glory Road, and soon he will tackle the third, A Stillness at Appomattox. At his direction the collected works of Jefferson and Lincoln have been put on his office shelves. He will dip into them when he has time. One passage from Lincoln—Volume II, 1848–1858—describes his own approach to the Presidency. He likes to quote it:
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.
In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.
Beginning at 10:30 A.M. next Wednesday, he will meet White House correspondents regularly in the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building next door. In those sessions he will often seem unaware of major events. To the embarrassment of his aides, he will admit it is true: “You’re telling me something about my own administration I never heard of,” he will say. He will dismay them with awkward straggling sentences that wander over the landscape in defiance of all grammatical and syntactic rules. Clever reporters will write an Eisenhower version of the Gettysburg address:
I haven’t checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual….
It is true that the only newspaper he usually reads is the Republican Herald Tribune. It is not true that his press conference manner is wholly inept (when Adams worries about a delicate subject before a press conference Ike will say with a wicked grin, “I’ll just confuse ’em!”) or that he spends most of his evenings watching television. His only regular TV program is the Fred Waring Show, Sunday evenings from nine to nine-thirty. He will attend the movies shown in the White House basement theater but rarely. His idea of pleasant diversion is a dinner with eight or ten congenial men in the solarium on the White House roof, with himself broiling steaks on a portable charcoal grill. Those invited to such an evening receive a note on monogrammed “DDE” stationery, usually addressed to them by their first names:
I wonder if it would be convenient for you to come to an informal stag dinner on the evening of Tuesday, May twenty-eighth. I hope to gather together a small group, and I should like very much for you to attend if it is possible for you to do so…. Because of the informality of the occasion, I suggest that we meet at the White House about seven-fifteen, have a reasonably early dinner, and devote the evening to a general chat…. I shall probably wear a dinner jacket, but a business suit will be entirely appropriate.
With warm regard,
Sincerely,
DE
Who will be invited? Not politicians; in his opinion his responsibilities require him to see too much of them as it is. Not his administrators; once he has found a competent manager for a departmen
t or a bureau he assumes that he has done his duty and promptly forgets him and it. If Ike wants the evening to end in a bridge game, he taps one of his favorite partners—General Alfred M. Gruenther of NATO; William E. Robinson, president of Coca-Cola; or Clifford Roberts, an investment banker. For general conversation the President casts a wider net, but the guest list is drawn from the same group. A U.S. News & World Report survey of “presidential playtime companions” finds only one man associated even remotely with public life, an ex-governor of Colorado. Among the others are two cattlemen, two oilmen, two distillers, two golf champions, two realtors, and three bank presidents. Businessmen prevail—executives from hotel, soft drink, publishing, insurance, home appliance, and tire enterprises—and those not in industry are established conservatives: Herbert Hoover, Douglas MacArthur, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Bernard Baruch.
What will they discuss? If this is to be their first visit, some time must be spent admiring mementos presented to the general by grateful Allied governments. There is no way to avoid them; Ike has filled the presidential apartment’s white oval study with cases displaying the awards and called it his “trophy room.”3 But in an hour the banter may run from rock gardens to modern architecture, Pat and Mike jokes, French cooking, good bourbon, Turkish baths, automobile styling, vegetable farming, Jewish humor, and poker. As a conversationalist, he prefers the specific to the general; mention McCarthy’s flouting of constitutional rights and his attention wanders, but describe a victim of witch hunts and he is with you all the way, provided, that is, you are not bitter. The venomous and mean-spirited are unwelcome here. Ike is generous, and expects his friends to be the same. Only gentlemen are admitted to these rooms. The rest must deal with Sherman Adams.
***
Robert A. Taft’s political skills had never been more masterful, or his energy so inexhaustible. He was swarming all over the Hill, organizing the 83rd Congress, outwitting his adversaries, rewarding his allies, deciding who should have which office—doing everything, in short, but painting the Capitol dome, and some days he seemed capable of that. Taft made himself majority leader and put all key committee chairmanships in the hands of his ultraconservative friends: Eugene Millikin, Styles Bridges, William Langer, Hugh Butler, Homer Ferguson, and William Knowland. The Ike-before-Chicago senators—Carlson of Kansas, Ives of New York, Duff of Pennsylvania—found themselves consigned to unpopular, insignificant duties. In cutting up the senatorial pie Taft made but one slip. He thought he had outmaneuvered Joe McCarthy into the Government Operations Committee. There, it was expected, he would spend his time poring over figures from the General Services Administration. Taft said, “We’ve got McCarthy where he can’t do any harm.”
The first gavel had hardly fallen before Joe began looking for trouble. He found it in the list of administration nominees up for senatorial confirmation. At first glance the names seemed flawless, but McCarthy could find sin anywhere. James B. Conant was Ike’s choice for high commissioner in Germany. The senator declared that as president of Harvard Conant held opinions “contrary to the prevailing philosophy of the American people.” Eisenhower wanted General Walter Bedell Smith as Undersecretary of State. Smith was a formidable figure; he had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff in World War II, and since then he had served as director of the CIA and as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Joe countered that Smith had testified at a pretrial hearing in a libel suit against McCarthy, and was known to have defended diplomat John Paton Davies despite charges made against him by McCarthy and Pat McCarran. The Senate wasn’t ready to defy a popular President on such dubious grounds. Conant and Smith were approved. But McCarthy had staked his claim. The White House had been put on notice; he meant to be reckoned with.
The serious reckoning was over the appointment of Charles E. Bohlen to the Moscow embassy. Bohlen was important to Eisenhower and Dulles. He was the State Department’s authority on the Soviet Union. In that role he had served as FDR’s interpreter at Yalta, and anyone associated with that hated name was anathema to the Republican Right. In hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee Bohlen steadfastly refused to condemn the Yalta Conference. He even defended it against its senatorial critics as having been in the best interests of the United States at that time. With that, the gauntlet was down. Power was at stake; somebody had to lose.
The ultraconservatives subjected the Bohlen nomination to a rising stream of abuse. Bridges told the Senate that the Moscow appointment should go to “a deserving Republican.” On March 20 McCarran charged that R. W. Scott McLeod, a McCarthy man who had been appointed the State Department’s security chief, had been “unable to clear” Bohlen on the basis of “information received by the FBI”; McLeod had been “summarily overridden” by Dulles. The secretary immediately denied it. Later in the day McCarthy called Dulles a liar and demanded that he testify under oath. He said he knew what was in Bohlen’s file, and that calling him a security risk was “putting it too weak.” By now McLeod was distraught. Trapped between warring giants, he sought refuge in the White House. It was all a grotesque mistake, he told Adams and Persons. He had merely called Dulles’s attention to certain “derogatory material” in Bohlen’s FBI file. McLeod offered to resign, but Adams told him that if he did, the already unpleasant situation would only seem worse.
Dulles assured the Foreign Relations Committee that FBI investigators had “no doubt” of Bohlen’s loyalty, but to the Senate ultraconservatives even a conservative Secretary of State was suspect. The only solution was for Taft and Sparkman of Alabama, who had been Stevenson’s running mate, to form a two-man commission and study the FBI’s Bohlen file together. On March 25 Taft reported their findings to the Senate:
There was no suggestion anywhere by anyone reflecting on the loyalty of Mr. Bohlen in any way or any association by him with Communism or support of Communism or even tolerance of Communism…. There was not any suggestion that would in my opinion create even a prima facie case or a prima facie charge of any ill doing on the part of Mr. Bohlen.
Nevertheless, McCarthy still wanted Bohlen’s scalp. Eisenhower told White House correspondents that the diplomat’s name would remain before the Senate. America’s best interests would be served by the appointment, and that, said the President, was that. Responsible Republicans were left with little choice. Taft’s personal opinion of Bohlen was low, but as majority leader he could hardly lead a revolt against Ike, especially since the evidence all ran the other way. With his great strength in the Senate he put the nomination through, 74 votes to 13.
At a glance McCarthy seemed to have sustained a defeat. Actually it was the other way round. The issue had divided Taft’s forces; he didn’t want to see another like it, and he sent Ike the price of his support: “No more Bohlens!” The President’s aides had come to the same conclusion on their own. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin senator planned fresh outrages. In all Washington, it seemed, there was not one Republican prepared to defy Joseph R. McCarthy.
***
Forming battle lines against him, the new administration was weakened by several unwise campaign promises. The party platform adopted in Chicago had been a hodgepodge reflecting two decades of broken hopes, myths nursed in defeat, and promissory notes for heavy Republican contributors. One of them pledged Eisenhower to return rich submerged coastal lands to the states. The President redeemed it in full, despite a Wayne Morse filibuster, but his prestige suffered; he had entered politics as a crusader, and the quarrel over tidelands oil was no crusade. At George Humphrey’s urging he met another campaign commitment on February 6, ordering an immediate end to wage controls and removing from controls a vast range of consumer goods, including meat, furniture, clothing, meals in restaurants, and almost all articles sold in retail stores. Then Humphrey also demanded tighter federal credit and a deep cut in defense appropriations. Here, too, Ike acceded, disappointing consumer advocates and paving the way, it later developed, for recession in late 1953 and the first half of 1954.
Republican myths
were wildest in foreign affairs. Taiwan was the subject of one. In sending ships and planes to Korea on June 27, 1950, Truman had also declared:
The occupation of Formosa by Communist forces would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to the United States forces pursuing their lawful and necessary functions. Accordingly, I have ordered the Seventh Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa. As a corollary of this action, I am calling upon the Chinese government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland. The Seventh Fleet will see that this is done.
Acheson had called this “neutralizing” Formosa. The Republican ultraconservatives disapproved of it. In their view measures to neutralize Chiang Kai-shek were neither sensible nor loyal to the United States. Against all evidence, they were convinced that Chiang could easily defeat Mao Tsetung’s armies now, and that keeping him bottled up on the island was part of a sinister conspiracy. As a demonstration of their faith in Kuomintang arms, McCarthy, Knowland, and Bridges attended a formal dinner in the Chinese embassy and joined in the shouted Nationalist pledge, “Back to the mainland!” They stood up to do it, and the Chinese ambassador applauded vigorously.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 98
