The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972
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Five weeks after the Radulovich broadcast Secretary of the Air Force Harold E. Talbott appeared on See It Now to announce that he had decided, on second thought, that Lieutenant Radulovich’s commission would be returned on the ground that he wasn’t a threat to the nation’s safety after all. It was a humiliating experience for Talbott, and it wasn’t his last; in the summer of 1955 he was accused of shady dealings with firms holding Air Force contracts, and resigned under a cloud. In 1953 the administration felt protective toward him, however, and blamed Murrow. The credibility of the press was becoming a major problem. There were other Murrows, because there were other Radulovichs.
Abraham Chasanow, a civil servant who had worked in the Navy Hydrographic Office for twenty-three years, always to the satisfaction of his superiors, was one of them. Chasanow was suspended without pay on July 29, 1953. The personnel director informed him that he had been called a security risk. Two months later a naval board examined the evidence, found it worthless, and unanimously recommended that he be reinstated. Months passed; nothing happened. By now Chasanow, having exhausted his savings, was living on loans from his wife’s relatives. On April 7, 1954, despite the lack of proof, Assistant Secretary of the Navy James H. Smith Jr. ordered Chasanow’s dismissal. The messenger who laid this news before the public—together with the background details—was Anthony Lewis of the Washington Daily News. His stories about the case won a Pulitzer Prize, vindication for Chasanow, and further alienation of Republican conservatives and the press.
The trouble, said the reporters, was that in loyalty cases the administration’s right hand sometimes didn’t know what the left hand was doing, or, if it did, didn’t care. They cited the unseemly row over the patriotism of Wolf I. Ladejinsky. The Ladejinsky incident was especially ridiculous because of his demonstrable patriotism. A militant anti-Communist and an expert on land reform, his work under MacArthur in Japan was regarded as a textbook example of how to outwit agrarian Communists. Ladejinsky’s politics had in fact been commended by Scott McLeod. All the same, Ezra Taft Benson didn’t want him in the Department of Agriculture. Benson discharged him as a security risk—whereupon Stassen cleared him, hired him with the President’s approval, and sent him off to match wits with agrarian Communists in Asia.
For Ike, the pursuit of Communists was what he called, in a favorite expression, “a can of worms.” The difficulties here, as elsewhere, went back to his campaign for the Presidency. The Republicans had said that the Democrats weren’t doing enough about spies, yet it was hard to devise a harsher internal security program than the one Truman had established in 1947. Eisenhower tried it, on April 27, 1953, with his Executive Order 10450. Under it the mere suspicion of treachery brought termination of employment. So did suspicion of a great many other deviations from the accepted norm—drunkenness, drug addiction, participation in unusual sexual practices, conviction of a felony, mental illness, membership in a nudist colony, unsanitary habits, a reputation for lying—anything, in fact, deemed “inconsistent with the national security.”
The regulation certainly thinned employee rolls. On October 23 the White House announced that in 10450’s first four months 1,456 persons had left federal service, only five of whom had been hired since Eisenhower took office. To give further evidence of progress in the struggle against world Communism the White House issued a statement pointing to the conviction of 41 U.S. Communist party leaders under the Smith Act, verdicts against two other party members for spying and one for treason, the banishment of 84 alien subversives from American soil, and the addition of 62 new organizations to the attorney general’s already bloated list of subversive organizations. In his second State of the Union message Eisenhower announced a new score. The number of “security risks” dismissed from government service, he said, had risen to 2,200. Later Nixon, declaring that “thousands of Communists, fellow travelers, and security risks have been thrown out” of government jobs, reported that 6,926 had been dropped from the payroll.
There, said delighted Republicans; it was true after all; the government had been infested with reds and pinks, and Ike had found them and booted them out. But the Democrats weren’t having any of that. They went through civil service records and found that of the workers on the first list, only 863 had been discharged. The rest had resigned or retired; they would have left anyhow. As for Nixon’s figures, only 1,743 of those dropped had been accused of disloyalty—and 41.2 percent of them had been hired by the Eisenhower administration. Stevenson guyed the Republican loyalty program as a “numbers game.” So, in private, did the President. Dulles complained to the cabinet that he found himself wasting whole evenings reading files sent to him because someone in a worker’s family—or even in his neighborhood—was reported to be a pacifist, a member of the United World Federalists, or an advocate of fluoridation.
The unkindest cut of all for 10450 came in a broadside from Harry P. Cain. Cain was a former Republican senator from Washington; defeated in the 1952 election, he had been appointed to the Subversive Activities Control Board as a favor to his old sidekicks on the Hill. Since they had included Jenner, McCarthy, and Dirksen, and since his own outlook had been ultraconservative, no one had dreamed that he might become a civil libertarian. Yet he did. In an emotional speech he flayed the White House for having “swung too far on the side of injustice.” The President called Cain an ingrate; Adams reminded him that he belonged to a team and should not let the side down.
But the team had not yet learned to play together. McCarthy was raising hob with the Mutual Security Administration. Secretary of the Interior McKay had drummed out the distinguished director of the Fish and Wildlife Service and replaced him with a public relations flack. Secretary of Commerce Weeks continued to play politics with the National Bureau of Standards, a sanctuary that Harry Vaughan and Donald Dawson had not dared enter, and Dr. Clarence E. Manion, a former Notre Dame law school dean and extreme right-winger who had been appointed chairman of the President’s Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, threw the White House into a turmoil by endorsing the Bricker amendment.5
The Bricker amendment had conservative chic. Some of its most ardent supporters didn’t know what was in it; they had put their names and their money behind it because in certain boardrooms and clubrooms it was the thing to do, just as backing the Liberty League had been stylish in those same places in 1936. It must be right, they felt; why else would those lobbying for it include the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Medical Association, the Committee for Constitutional Government, the Chicago Tribune, and the Vigilant Women for the Bricker Amendment—“a volunteer organization of housewives and mothers of boys overseas”—which had brought to the Hill petitions signed by over a half-million Americans?
Similarly, those opposing it must be wrong; why else would they include the League of Women Voters, the Americans for Democratic Action, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Bar Association’s Section on International and Comparative Law, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the American Association for the United Nations, and Eleanor Roosevelt?
Capital correspondents called the Bricker sortie “our greatest debate about the constitutional ordering of our foreign relations since 1788.” It probably was. Had it not been obscured by the even graver struggle between Joseph R. McCarthy and the United States government, it would have been remembered as the greatest ultraconservative travail of the decade. When introduced in the Senate on January 7, 1953, the amendment had sixty-four senatorial cosponsors—the two-thirds of the Senate needed for a constitutional amendment. Dulles’s plea that it was “dangerous to our peace and security” was ignored; after six months of begging Senate Republicans not to mortify their own President, Nixon had to tell the cabinet, “Well, there’s just no doubt there’s a lot of public support for this amendment.”
Offering amendments to the U.S. Constitution had become an ultraconservative fashion of the early 1950s. Herblock depicted it as a kind of
Scrabble. No fewer than 107 such proposals had been introduced in the 83rd Congress and referred to committees, among them one which would have interpreted treason not only as advocacy of the overthrow of the government but also of “weakening” it, “whether or not by force or violence.” Others would have put the soil of any foreign country off limits to draftees unless Congress had declared war against it; prohibited the spending of taxpayers’ money on welfare; limited new states to one senator; enjoined the federal government from meddling in any state’s right to regulate the “health, morals, education, marriage, and good order” of its inhabitants; and affirmed that “this nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of Nations through Whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”
Six of the measures had reached the Senate floor, where each of them had been approved by majority vote, and four had received the two-thirds majority needed to send a proposed amendment on to the House of Representatives. From there, provided it was supported by two-thirds of those voting, it would go on to the state legislatures. This was senatorial irresponsibility. The prevailing sophistry was expressed by Dirksen: “If the legislatures say ‘No,’ that will be all right with the junior senator from Illinois; if they say ‘Yes,’ it will also be all right with me.” Knowland took the same line. What, he asked, were the opponents of the Bricker amendment afraid of? Didn’t they trust the people’s judgment? The answer, of course, was that the founding fathers never meant Congress to be a transom through which schemes to alter the Constitution were to be passed, and that the state legislatures, lopsided with representatives of special interests and vulnerable to special pleaders, were no tribunes of the people. That reply was seldom made. Freshman Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts argued that “reluctance to amend the Constitution is one of our most valuable safeguards and bulwarks of stability,” but his colleagues were not listening to him yet.
Yalta was what the Bricker amendment was all about. The ghost refused to be exorcised. By now every informed citizen should have known what had happened in the Crimea during the first half of February 1945, but hallucinations of “secret agreements” continued to haunt Washington, kept alive by such bogeymen as William Jenner, who revealed in hushed tones that anti-Bricker forces were being masterminded by a “secret revolutionary corps” that included Owen Lattimore, Henry Wallace, Alger Hiss (who was in prison), and Harry Hopkins and Harry Dexter White (both of whom had died in the 1940s). Manion was not the only administration figure infected by the Bricker fever. In a January 29, 1954, cabinet meeting, after having listened to discussions of the amendment for over a year, Charlie Wilson volunteered that he shared the feelings of its backers that treaties should not be able to deprive people of their rights, and that conventions like Yalta and Potsdam ought to be outlawed. The President patiently explained once again that the Bricker amendment could not have prevented Yalta and Potsdam, because they had been political accords, not treaties or executive agreements.
Back in his office Ike raged, “I’m so sick of this I could scream! The whole damn thing is senseless and plain damaging to the prestige of the United States. We talk about the French not being able to govern themselves—and we sit here wrestling with a Bricker Amendment.” He had been going to the mat with it ever since his pre-inaugural cabinet rehearsals in the Commodore Hotel. At that time the idea had appealed to him. He had been caught up in the indignation at stories of FDR and Stalin carving up the world (somehow Churchill’s presence was always forgotten), and he believed—as Bricker said he did—that resentment of the treaty-making process might be turned against the United Nations. The amendment sounded plausible; the United States would be insured against the possibility that an inept chief executive and a slumbering Senate might usurp the constitutional rights of the people and the individual states.
Then Dulles studied it. The more he thought about it, the more alarmed he became. Bricker’s real hostility seemed to be toward all treaties and executive agreements. One of his remedies was to transfer the power to make them from the White House to the Hill. As Dulles saw it, this would mean that other governments would doubt the sanctity of treaties with the United States; what one Congress could do, another Congress could undo.6 Eisenhower began to change his mind about the proposal. His complete conversion to the anti-Bricker camp was the byproduct of a tangential dispute over the so-called Status of Forces agreements. Under them, foreign governments were given legal jurisdiction in cases of offenses committed by American servicemen who were not acting in the line of duty. (The classic example was that of a U.S. soldier in Japan who fired an empty mortar shell at a group of women and killed one of them.) Ultraconservatives felt strongly that the armed forces should have complete jurisdiction over all American troops overseas. As it happened, Eisenhower knew more about Status of Forces treaties than anyone else in Washington, because as commander of NATO he had drafted some of them, negotiated them, and then kept watch over those administering them. He tried to explain their theory and practice to Knowland, but the majority leader flared up. Pounding the table he roared, “A young man drafted in peacetime, sent overseas against his will, assigned to a duty—by God, I don’t think he ought to be turned over for trial! He’s wearing the uniform of our country. I wouldn’t want my son treated that way!”
Bricker felt the same way. His real motives were unmasked in an emotional attack on two State Department men. They opposed his amendment, but that was not why he went after them; they had testified for the NATO Status of Forces agreement, and he chastised them on that. It was a tactical error. The President was listening. Ike had already set the best constitutional lawyers he could find to work on the amendment. To his dismay they now reported that under it the United States could not have entered NATO. It specified that unless the Constitution assigned a specific matter to Congress, the Senate was powerless to act upon it. Such a treaty could become law under Bricker only if it was approved by legislation in each of the states. This, said Eisenhower, would permit state legislatures to renounce American treaties.7 The President and his Secretary of State would, Ike said, be faced with the “impossible task of representing forty-eight governments.”
The Bricker showdown came on February 26, 1954, at the end of a stunning sequence of parliamentary maneuvers. Bricker was defeated in the Status of Forces fight. To save his face, Ike proposed a mild procedural measure; when treaties came up votes would have to be recorded; they could not be shouted through. Bricker rejected the gesture. On February 25 his amendment fell short of the two-thirds vote; 50 senators were for it and 42 opposed.
Here, in the last desperate hour of the struggle, was a tragic incident. Chairman Walter George of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee drafted an amendment similar to Bricker’s. It deserved serious attention. Not all Bricker supporters were irresponsible. One of them was Frank E. Holman, a former president of the American Bar Association. The ABA Committee on Peace and Law Through the United Nations had been behind Bricker, too, and so had some constitutional scholars. That did not make it good legislation, but it did suggest that amid all the clamor there were a few voices worth listening to. Since FDR’s arrival in Washington the powers of the Presidency had grown to dismaying size. A chief executive with Eisenhower’s scruples would not abuse them, but as subsequent events were to demonstrate, later inhabitants of the White House were not so circumspect. Furthermore, George was not just offering a restylized, Simonized Bricker amendment. His language was carefully drawn. It was more temperate than Bricker’s, and he had omitted Bricker’s notorious “which” clause, proscribing congressional action in matters beyond its delegated powers. That had been the sticking point for Ike, the provision that would have required that certain treaties be approved by the states. Without it, the heart of the administration’s case against Bricker was gone. George’s measure was farsighted in many ways, but because it, too, would have restricted presidential freedom in foreign policy, the White House decided to resist it.8