Conservatives were not so easily hoodwinked. Walter Lippmann wrote in the Herald Tribune, “What has really happened is that both sides and all concerned have been held within a condition of mutual deterrent.” The Old Guard was another matter. As Hanson W. Baldwin explained in the New York Times, ultraconservatives had taken it as an article of faith that Korea was “the right war in the right place at the right time if we wished to stop the spread of Asiatic Communism.” They had not forgotten that the GOP platform had charged that under Truman the war had been waged by men “without will to victory” who “by their hampering orders” had “produced stalemates and ignominious bartering with our enemies.” Now Korea, like Germany, was to be cut in twain. “Truman’s war,” as they saw it, was to become “Eisenhower’s appeasement.”
Jenner of Indiana and Malone of Nevada saw the approaching cease-fire as a Chinese victory. On the Senate floor Malone asked: “Does the distinguished Senator remember any change in State Department policy… by Mr. Dulles since he has taken office?” And Jenner responded: “I have noticed no change.”
Knowland of California was asked in a broadcast interview, “Is this a truce with honor that we are about to get?” He replied, “I don’t believe so,” and predicted that under its terms, “Inevitably we will lose the balance of Asia.” In Korea General Mark Clark said, “I cannot find it in me to exult in this hour,” and General James A. Van Fleet, to whom U.N. copies of the convention would be brought for safekeeping after the ceremonies, turned away from correspondents who asked his opinion of it. “I don’t know,” he said tightly. “The answer must come from higher authority.” The makings of an Old Guard revolt were present. All that was necessary was a signal form Robert A. Taft.
None came. The Senator from Ohio had been passing through a conversion much like that of Arthur Vandenberg seven years earlier. A gadfly and obstructionist under Roosevelt and Truman, Taft was now becoming a tower of administration strength. The crisis had come on April 30, 1953, in the Cabinet Room. Eisenhower had summoned the legislative leadership to break bad news; contrary to expectations, he would be unable to balance his first budget. Originally drawn up by Truman, it had anticipated a 9.9 billion-dollar deficit. Ike could cut that to 5.5 billion, he said, but he could slice no more without jeopardizing national security. Supportive presentations followed from Secretary Humphrey; Joseph M. Dodge, director of the budget, and Undersecretary of Defense Robert M. Keyes. The gist of them was that the cost of changing the country’s static defense posture to a fluid stance, while anticipating an attack against the United States at any time, would be too expensive to permit further reductions.
Taft exploded. He lost control of himself, hammering the cabinet table with his fist and shouting in his hard, metallic voice that this Republican administration was turning out to be no different than those of the Democrats. The Pentagon was as greedy as ever. The budget would exceed 30 percent of the national income, and that was too much. Unless the government raised taxes—which at this point was inconceivable—the deficit would be outrageous. He yelled, “The one primary thing we promised the American people was reduction of expenditures! With a program like this, we’ll never elect a Republican Congress in 1954! You’re taking us down the same road Truman traveled! It’s a repudiation of everything we promised in the campaign!” Addressing Taft at last, and speaking deliberately, Eisenhower began, “There are certain essential elements in the global strategy of the United States. They are not difficult to grasp….” A concise review of cold war strategy followed.
It was a critical moment. Had Taft stalked out of the meeting, denounced the President’s budget to the press, and set up a shadow cabinet on the Hill to battle the administration’s foreign policy, Eisenhower’s legislative program would have collapsed. Old Guard sentiment was hostile to Ike anyhow; one word from the powerful majority leader would have been enough. But Taft stayed. In possession of himself once more, he merely expressed the hope for substantial reductions in next year’s budget—hopes which Eisenhower assured him were justified.
The storm had passed. Taft from that moment forward was the President’s most important champion. Privately he gagged on the terms of the Korean cease-fire, but he suppressed his feelings; in speaking to the press he was more cautious than the Knowlands, Jenners, and Malones. To be sure, he could be as blunt as ever. (He once said, “It isn’t honest to be tactful.”) He conceded that he found the prospect of a divided Korea “extremely distasteful” because it left “a condition likely to bring war at any moment” and gave the Chinese freedom to attack Vietnam. But he refused to sow discontent or counsel despair.
At about this time reporters began to notice the change in him. For six months the majority leader had served his party’s President with distinction. His one goal since the inaugural, they wrote, had been to make this Republican administration a success. It had been a lonely struggle. Other senators on the Right were puzzled by his sense of loyalty, and to Democrats he was, as he always had been, an implacable adversary. Moreover, though none of them knew it yet, he was carrying another new burden. Over the past several weeks he had become increasingly aware that he was in ill health.
It mystified him. Before launching his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination the year before, he had submitted to a thorough physical checkup. Doctors assured him that he had never been fitter. In the first three months of the 83rd Congress he had been a legislative whirlwind. Then, in mid-April while golfing with Eisenhower in Augusta, he suffered a sharp, excruciating hip pain. During the next week he couldn’t sleep. Massive doses of aspirin were ineffective; so was a rest at White Sulphur Springs, Montana, in May. On June 12 he checked into New York Hospital for a battery of tests. He used the name “Howard Roberts.”
Physicians there prescribed deep X-rays and cortisone, put him on crutches, told him to keep his weight off his hipbone, and insisted that he relinquish the routine chores which went with being majority leader. On June 10 he delegated day-to-day decisions to Knowland. The appointment was to be considered temporary; Taft would continue to handle policy matters and attend White House meetings insofar as his treatments would permit. Before the next congressional session he expected to be back on the floor, heartier than ever. Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson was the last man to see him on the Hill. Taft waved at him and called twice, “I’ll be back in January! I’ll be back in January!”
There was something heroic about Robert Taft that June. Though in almost unbelievable pain, he dragged himself to Washington garden parties with his wife Martha, herself a cripple and almost wholly dependent upon him, rather than reveal his condition to her. Like many formidable men in public life he had always removed his stern mask when crossing his own threshold. Martha knew him as a devoted husband, and to their four sons he was “Gop,” a delightful companion on camping trips who loved to play hearts, chew nickel candy, and entertain them hours on end with his encyclopedic memory of Gilbert and Sullivan.
He reentered New York Hospital in early July. His condition then was reported to be “good.” The doctors expected him to be back at his desk by the end of the year and able to vote in close contests before then. He was to be discharged July 23. Then they suddenly announced that he needed more therapy. Signs of leukemia had appeared in blood tests. His return to Washington was postponed indefinitely.
***
Progress at Panmunjom continued to be smooth. The Chinese had just erected a new pagoda there, and on a freshly lacquered table eighteen copies of the armistice agreement were executed at 10:01 A.M. July 27 (8:01 P.M. July 26 in Washington). The signers were General William K. Harrison for the U.N., tieless and without decorations, and North Korea’s General Nam Il, sagging in a baggy tunic weighed down with medals. No words were spoken, no hands shaken, and on Rhee’s order no South Korean participated.
President Eisenhower was on television within the hour. He said, “With special feelings of sorrow and with special gratitude, we think of those who were called to lay
down their lives in that far-off land to prove once again that only courage and sacrifice can keep freedom alive on the earth.” He warned that the United States had “won an armistice on a single battlefield, not peace in the world,” and said he hoped it would convince people of the wisdom of negotiating differences instead of resorting to “futile battle.”
It was a time to review American foreign policy and strengthen the legislative role in it, but the man who would have recognized it as such, and explained it to American conservatives, lay stricken at New York Hospital that Sunday evening. At 10:30 P.M. Thursday Taft went into a coma. Thirteen hours later he was dead.
***
His departure at that juncture was a catastrophe. William S. White wrote in next morning’s New York Times, “The death of Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio has shaken the Republican party as it has not been shaken in half a lifetime. It has removed the one real bridge between the East and Midwest in the Eisenhower administration. The loss to the administration… is beyond calculation.”
It was in fact a national tragedy. The only American statesman who really understood the role of congressional prerogative and the danger of an omnipotent Presidency—the one man who could have foreseen the end of the long road running from Pusan to My Lai—was mourned on the Hill by politicians who by their very expressions of grief revealed how little they had understood him. The eulogy was delivered by John Bricker, Ohio’s junior senator. After thirty-five thousand mourners had passed through the Capitol rotunda, where the coffin lay on the black catafalque which had been used for Taft’s father and Lincoln before him, the muffled brasses of the Marine Band struck up “America the Beautiful.” Bricker said: “Senator Taft never hesitated to recommend the coercion of the law…. During life our departed leader created to himself an everlasting memorial. His services to his government, and through government to his fellow man, go on.”
That was the best Bricker could do: Taft acclaimed as a law and order man. It was an ominous sign for Eisenhower. In the months ahead the snowy-haired Ohioan would distress the administration by his advocacy of a constitutional amendment which would have sharply limited the scope of treaties to which the U.S. could be a party and the President’s authority to negotiate executive agreements. After Vietnam the measure would take on a somewhat different look, but at the time Ike believed it unwise. To Knowland he wrote:
Adoption of the Bricker Amendment… by the Senate would be notice to our friends as well as our enemies abroad that our country intends to withdraw from its leadership in world affairs. The inevitable reaction would be of major proportions. It would impair our hopes and plans for peace and for the successful achievement of the important international matters now under discussion.
Knowland didn’t see it that way. He rarely saw things Ike’s way. Over the next five years he would make the President’s weekly meetings with the legislative leadership a torment from which Ike would emerge livid, exhausted, and at times almost incoherent. Ironically, Eisenhower himself was responsible for Knowland’s succession to the role as majority leader. Once Taft was dead, custom dictated that the President, as head of the majority party, select the new Senate leader. But here Eisenhower’s concept of his office, so very different from FDR’s and Truman’s, disserved him. He firmly maintained that the Executive Department was but one of the government’s three equal branches, and that presidential attempts to manipulate the men on the Hill were in contempt of the Founding Fathers. This was what he meant when he called himself a “constitutional President.” Because of his respect for Congress, he stood aside in the days after Taft’s death. On the day of the obsequies he pointedly told the cabinet, “I want to say with all the emphasis at my command that this administration has absolutely no personal choice for new majority leader. We are not going to get into their business.”
They, however, were determined to get into his. During their long struggles against programs of the last five administrations the ultras had become skillful legislative guerrillas adept at penetrating executive agencies and making the lives of civil servants unlivable. Their chief weapon was the congressional investigation. Ike had assumed that inquiries on the Hill would be held in abeyance during his first year in the White House. In his opinion, he told the cabinet, Americans had been living too long on too high a level of tension; the endless hearings under klieg lights were unnecessary now; his administration should be allowed a period of grace to clean house. Only if it failed would Congress be justified in stepping in.
Brownell wryly observed that the 83rd was already in with both feet. These were ten separate investigations of the State Department alone; State men scarcely had time to read their mail. Ike replied that the administration must cooperate with the Hill: probably they were just checking up on Truman’s people anyway. In fact they were turning over every stone in sight, including many which weren’t in the government and some which had always been regarded as out of bounds for politicians. McCarthy was in pursuit of the Voice of America. Jenner’s Internal Security subcommittee was looking for Communists in high schools, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, now piloted by Republican Harold R. Velde of Illinois, was preparing to invade places of worship. On a radio program Velde explained that the committee had just about finished sweeping out subversives in show business. Now it was ready for a searching investigation of Christianity. The hunt, he said, would focus on “individual members of the cloth, including some who seem to have devoted more time to politics than… to the ministry.”
To the end of Ike’s life he never wavered in his belief that “our long-term good requires that leadership on the Hill be exercised through the party organization there,” but there were times when even a constitutional President must rap knuckles. “Are you in favor of the federal government, through the Congress of the United States, investigating Communism in the churches?” Eisenhower was asked at his next press conference. No, he said; houses of God were the last places to look for disloyalty; he could see no possible good in questioning their patriotism. Maybe in this instance the investigators should be investigated, he said—hard words from a chief executive who believed in leaving the legislators alone.
But Republicans were running Congress, and Republicans of a very special breed at that. At times their ultraconservatism went beyond reaction. Judgment Day was approaching for Joe McCarthy; the Senate had begun to form ranks against him. Soon every member of the chamber would be asked to choose between him and Eisenhower, and the men of the right would be revealed as enemies of the President. With the single exception of Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, every senior Republican Senate leader—Knowland, Dirksen, Styles Bridges, and Eugene Millikin—would vote for the demagogue.
George Sokolsky, McCarthy’s muezzin, charged that under Eisenhower the Republican party “has gone so modern that it is indistinguishable from the New Deal,” and Colonel McCormick had tried to read Ike out of the party in the Washington Times-Herald the morning after his inaugural. Most publicists were on the President’s side, however. Seven months after Taft’s funeral the Times-Herald was absorbed by the Washington Post, a very different kind of newspaper, which observed sharply that “Senator Knowland does not seem able to separate administration objectives from his own pet phobias.” Business Week commented that “it is only natural for people to ask themselves whether Republicans are equal to the responsibilities of power,” and Roscoe Drummond wrote in the New York Herald Tribune of a new sort of “mess in Washington.”
What is to be the consequence, what is to be the political harvest of this heedless divisiveness, this feuding, this name-calling, this miasmic preoccupation with bitter negative controversy within the Republican Administration?… The effect of this new kind of “mess” is to exhibit the Republican Government as quarrelsome, unproductive and legislatively nearly impotent.”
There were days then when capital correspondents wondered in print whether the federal government was becoming an exercise in self-parody. Here was Wi
lliam Knowland, the helmsman of the Senate, pounding away at the President on the urgent need to institute a full naval blockade of the Chinese coast and vetoing Paul Nitze, Wilson’s choice to be his Assistant Secretary of Defense for Foreign Affairs, on the ground that as a member of the State Department Nitze had been one of “Acheson’s architects of disaster.” Here was Everett McKinley Dirksen triumphantly tacking a rider on an appropriations bill to provide that should Peking be admitted to the United Nations, all U.S. contributions to the U.N. should be terminated instantly. Five drafts of the rider passed the Senate, five times the President took up his pen, five times he put the pen down saying he couldn’t live with this and still conduct foreign affairs. The impasse was broken by Styles Bridges’s resolution asserting it to be the “sense of Congress” that Red China should forever be barred from U.N. membership. It passed both houses unanimously—the unanimity in the Senate being recorded approvingly by Vice President Richard M. Nixon. The height of these follies was reached when Hubert Humphrey drew up a bill making membership in the Communist party a felony. This had to be changed—it would have destroyed the McCarran Act, which required Communists to register, by making registration self-incriminating and thus evadable under the Fifth Amendment—but CP membership was nevertheless outlawed. Attorney General Brownell was horrified. The bill was still unconstitutional on at least six counts, and it canceled out several existing anti-Communist laws. Nevertheless, no one on Capitol Hill in the early 1950s was prepared to explain a no vote to his constituents. Humphrey’s absurdity passed the Senate 79–0 and the House 265–2.
Apart from the coming struggle with McCarthy, that first year of the Eisenhower Presidency was his worst in Washington. Foster Dulles, prompted by Scott McLeod, was sacking seasoned foreign service officers on the flimsiest of pretexts. State’s passport office, now headed by Frances G. Knight—like McLeod a McCarthy appointee—was looking into the loyalty of Edward R. Murrow. Murrow’s unpopularity in ultra circles arose from his October 20, 1953, See It Now CBS-TV program broadcast, in which Murrow described the plight of a University of Michigan senior named Milo Radulovich. After eight years of active duty in the Air Force Reserve, Radulovich had suddenly been classified as a security risk. He was accused of violating Air Force Regulation 36–52 by close association with “Communists or Communist sympathizers.” Stripped of his lieutenant’s rank, he was dismissed from the service, making him, in the political climate of the time, virtually unemployable. His case had been heard by a board of three colonels. The Air Force had produced no witnesses, specified no charges, had refused to identify the lieutenant’s accuser, and had kept the evidence it said it had in an envelope which had remained sealed during the hearing. Murrow found out what was in it. The persons with whom Radulovich had been in close association were his father and his sister. Their questionable activity was reading a Serbian-language newspaper. The newspaper was published in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had broken with Moscow five years earlier, but the Air Force was taking no chances; it wanted no officers whose relatives read a journal using a foreign language which might be spoken by people who had once admired the late Joseph Stalin.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 100
