by Jim Newton
After confirming Warren’s appointment on September 30, Ike explained the reasons for his choice:
From the very beginning, from the moment of the unfortunate death of my great friend, Mr. Vinson, I have been thinking over this whole thing. I certainly wanted a man whose reputation for integrity, honesty, middle-of-the-road philosophy, experience in Government, experience in the law, were all such as to convince the United States that here was a man who had no ends to serve except the United States, and nothing else. Naturally, I wanted a man who was healthy, strong, who had not had any serious illnesses, and who was relatively young—if you can call a man of approximately my age relatively young—relatively young with respect to some others that I was thinking of.
The press corps was so unsurprised by Eisenhower’s announcement that reporters barely asked about it. Instead, they focused on how the leak had been orchestrated and largely ignored the qualifications of the chief justice designate. Warren, meanwhile, assumed his new duties with alacrity. Because Eisenhower made the appointment while Congress was in recess, Warren took his seat immediately. He left California on the weekend of October 2 and was sworn in on October 5. He arrived without even a robe and had to borrow one. It was a bit long, and he stumbled over the hem on his first trip to the bench. Ike and Mamie traveled up the Hill for the event, sitting in the front row as Warren was administered the oath.
From those who praised the appointment, including his brother Milton, Eisenhower accepted compliments. To those who criticized his selection, including his brother Edgar, Ike was brusque. “To my mind, he is a statesman,” Ike lectured his older brother. “We have too few of these … Here is a man of national stature (and I ask you when we have had any man of national stature appointed to the Supreme Court), of unimpeachable integrity, of middle-of-the-road views, and with a splendid record during his years in active law work.” When Senator William Langer, North Dakota’s slightly wacky representative, held up Warren’s nomination and subjected the chief justice to a bevy of false and salacious charges, Eisenhower fumed at the attack on “one of the finest public servants this country has produced.”
Once Warren was seated, contacts between Eisenhower and him were rare but friendly. Ike invited Warren to a dinner and apologized when he was forced to miss a Court reception for Justice Burton. When Warren was confirmed, he thanked Eisenhower profusely. “No greater honor, responsibility, or opportunity in life could possibly come to me,” he wrote. “I want to say to you that the remaining useful years of my life will be dedicated to serving the cause of justice in a manner justifying the confidence you have reposed in me.”
And yet, even in those early months, there were hints of future conflicts. Eisenhower knew that the Court would soon face the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the maintenance of separate schools for black students, no matter how “equal” their facilities. He also knew that Warren’s record in that area, though by no means fully developed, suggested he would be unlikely to uphold segregation.
Eisenhower’s own musings on that topic suggested he remained ambivalent, just as Brownell had sensed when they first discussed the matter a year earlier. On July 20, Eisenhower lunched with “my great friend” Governor James Byrnes of South Carolina. Byrnes warned the president of the South’s fear of desegregated schools and its determination to resist. One of the four cases consolidated under Brown v. Board of Education arose in South Carolina, and Byrnes hinted that the wrong ruling could trigger riots. His graver fear, however, was the same one that troubled Eisenhower: What if school districts, ordered to integrate, simply closed, denying black and white children alike the benefits of a public education? A few days later, Eisenhower wrote in his diary: “Improvement in race relations is one of those things that will be healthy and sound only if it starts locally. I do not believe that prejudices, even palpably unjustified prejudices, will succumb to compulsion.” Eisenhower worried that a Supreme Court ruling that failed to acknowledge those truisms was doomed to produce defiance of the Court. “I believe that federal law imposed upon our states in such a way as to bring about a conflict of the police powers of the states and of the nation, would set back the cause of progress in race relations for a long, long time.”
All through late 1953 and early 1954, Eisenhower fretted to Brownell about Supreme Court action that would invite southern backlash. In November, with Governor Byrnes coming for dinner the next day, Eisenhower shared his fears about schools closing. Brownell offered to reassure Byrnes, suggesting that desegregation could proceed gradually: “Under our doctrine, it would be a period of years.” Still, Eisenhower wondered whether the federal government would be forced to take over schools. As the Supreme Court deliberated over Brown, Ike became more and more worried. In January 1954, Brownell, undoubtedly tipped off by Warren, informed Eisenhower that the Court was inclined to rule on the constitutionality of segregation first, then return later to a discussion of how to remedy any constitutional violation that it found. “I don’t know where I stand,” Eisenhower replied, “but I think the best interests of the U.S. demand an answer in keep[ing] with past decisions.”
That remark leaves Ike’s ultimate view unclear but strongly suggests he would have been most comfortable with a ruling that preserved existing institutions—and thus segregation. When Brownell told him that the Court apparently wanted to defer issuing an order for as long as possible, Eisenhower laughingly said he hoped they could put it off until the next administration.
In spite of those remarks, there is no evidence in Eisenhower’s diaries, directives, or actions as president that he was racist or that he was indifferent to the suffering of black Americans. But his instinct for the middle way, so useful in matters of military and budget, was inhibiting in the area of civil rights, as was his appreciation for order. Eisenhower was a Texan by birth and a Kansan by upbringing. Many of his friends were Southerners. He sympathized with them, with their fears of letting their children share classrooms with black children, with their discomfort at upending a fragile social order.
Eisenhower described his “middle way,” as he put it to one confidant, as a rejection of extremism: “Anything that affects or is proposed for masses of humans is wrong if the position it seeks is at either end of possible argument.” That was shrewdly put, though hard to apply in civil rights. Indeed, Ike explicitly exempted “the field of moral values” from his advocacy of centrism; there, he conceded, compromise was sometimes undesirable. Blinkered by his upbringing and friendships, however, Ike ignored his own wise recognition that moral undertakings generally and civil rights specifically warranted unambiguous support rather than compromise.
And yet Ike’s record on civil rights, commencing with the nomination of Warren, helped propel the very movement that discomfited him. He relied heavily on Brownell in making judicial appointments, knowing well that the attorney general was a leading advocate of civil rights. Eisenhower appointed Elbert Parr Tuttle, John Brown, and John Minor Wisdom to the Fifth Circuit, which oversaw the Deep South, and Frank Johnson to the district court in Alabama. Those were inspired choices, and together they enforced federal protections of civil rights with great courage and fortitude. He demanded that the military fulfill its order to desegregate, announced but not enforced under Truman. He ended segregation in the nation’s capital and included a smattering of blacks in appointments to subcabinet positions, sometimes with great symbolic significance. On August 16, 1954, Ernest Wilkins, an assistant secretary of labor, was filling in for the secretary and attended that day’s cabinet meeting. It was the first time an African-American ever attended a meeting of a president’s cabinet.
History has tended to judge Eisenhower harshly in this area—perhaps too harshly. Ike’s life before the presidency gave him no history of regarding blacks as equals: he did not go to school with black classmates; his peers in the military were white; he never reported to a black man or woman. As Brownell recognized from their first conversation on the topic, Ike was unc
omfortable leading in this area. He was a man at ease with force, subtle in its use, conscious of its power to deter. He was less sure-footed in matters of moral suasion. John Eisenhower, so often the shrewdest analyst of his father, said it best: “My dad was not a social reformer. He was a commander in chief.”
Eisenhower’s achievement in civil rights, then, is not that he was moved by its morality but that he overcame his own limitations. He gave Brownell wide latitude to press civil rights from the Justice Department and to pick judges and justices who would advance the movement and protect its advocates. And when, in the end, force was required, Ike used it. It is no accident that his greatest personal contribution to the movement came in response to defiance. Then, his options exhausted, Eisenhower became the first president since Lincoln to dispatch American troops to quell rebellion in the South.
Some of the same—and some of the opposite—could be said for Eisenhower’s role in toppling Mossadegh. There, Ike moved boldly. But, as with his nomination of Warren, the consequences of American action in Iran were only vaguely imaginable in 1953. In one sense, the coup was alarmingly easy to execute, despite a fundamental error in the intelligence that produced it. One common thread throughout the CIA report, Roosevelt’s firsthand account, the original documents of the era, and Eisenhower’s later reflection is the unswerving conviction that Mossadegh was moving the nation into the Communist orbit and that he would have delivered it to the Soviet Union—either by design or by inadvertence—had the United States not intervened. The evidence for that premise remains shaky at best.
Moreover, success in Iran sweetened Eisenhower’s taste for covert action, with complex consequences. In Iran—and later, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Congo, among other places—covert action offered a way to check Communism while avoiding a frontal confrontation with the Soviets or Chinese. In Cold War terms, that could seem prudent as it checked a menace without resort to ultimate force. But it substituted one version of colonialism with another, more subtle variant, relying as it did on the notion the U.S. reserved the right to chart the courses of smaller nations. The resulting resentments haunt international relations even today.
What was true and apparent at the time, however, was that Mossadegh was careering toward a calamity with no sure sense of direction or purpose. It was the United States—at Eisenhower’s specific instruction—that pushed him over the precipice, but his escalating conflict with the Shah could just as easily have presented the Soviet Union with its pretext for invasion or coup. The long-view consequences of the CIA’s work in Iran have been profound and unsettling: in the crowds that swirled through Tehran that summer was a cleric by the name of Ruhollah Khomeini, then fifty years old, whose enmity toward the United States ripened during the Shah’s long reign. Viewed through our contemporary prism, then, the insult to the Iranian people and their faith inflicted by American intelligence agents in 1953 seems a deep and costly one. But so, too, could the alternatives have shadowed the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, if the Soviet Union controlled Iran and the Persian Gulf through the heart of the Cold War. Instead, Iran lay safely nestled within the American orbit for the balance of Eisenhower’s tenure, indeed, for the rest of his life. When Ike finished Mandate for Change in 1963, he was able to write, with evident satisfaction, of Mossadegh’s surrender—“in pajamas,” Eisenhower added, vindictively—and to conclude that the coup’s success was self-evident: “For the first time in three years, Iran was quiet—and still free.”
7
Security
Few events in politics are genuinely inevitable. Too much rides on the decisions of calculating men and women. Sloppy thinking and writers postulating the inevitable in retrospect merely prove the power of cliché rather than destiny. Certainly, the break between President Eisenhower and Senator McCarthy was hardly inevitable; to the contrary, it was eminently avoidable. They shared, after all, two common foes: President Truman and the threat of domestic subversion. Eisenhower was disgusted by McCarthy’s methods, but he never doubted that there were Communists working in the United States and that party members and their allies were actively trying to undermine American security.
Joe McCarthy could have given Ike a wide berth, could have cooled his zeal once Truman left office. But he so enjoyed the limelight that he was unwilling to drop the one cause that had brought him national attention. And Ike found McCarthy, in the end, impossible to ignore. So they collided, and the ramifications of that collision reverberated long and loud.
General Eisenhower and Tail-Gunner Joe had sparred during the 1952 campaign, when McCarthy’s supporters baited Ike into his worst blunder of that season, his refusal to give Marshall the full support he deserved. Eisenhower later insisted that he had not “capitulated” to McCarthy, but he knew he had let his mentor down. “If I could have foreseen this distortion of the facts, a distortion that even led some to question my loyalty to General Marshall, I would never have acceded to the staff’s arguments, logical as they sounded at the time,” he wrote. That was defensive. The error was his, and he knew it.
By the time of Ike’s election, McCarthy was well along on his rampage. After his broad assertions of Soviet spies at work in the U.S. government, he needed to produce names. First, he coyly announced that he had the identity of the “top Russian espionage agent in the United States” but declined to reveal it. Then he disclosed it to senators in a closed meeting and held an off-the-record meeting with reporters where he also divulged it, but since he refused to be quoted, the alleged agent’s identity became the source of fiery rumor. McCarthy’s unlikely target, as it was eventually revealed, was Owen Lattimore, a mild Asia specialist traveling in Afghanistan. Told of the accusations against him, Lattimore cabled back that the senator’s “rantings [were] pure moonshine.” He finished up his UN work in Kabul and headed home.
McCarthy had opened with explosive charges, delivered behind the safe veil of leaked remarks or congressional immunity. Now confronted with Lattimore himself, McCarthy retreated to safer ground, downgrading his attack to suggest that Lattimore was merely a “bad policy risk.” He pooh-poohed his own earlier assessment by saying he had perhaps “placed too much stress on the question of whether or not he has been an espionage agent.” Lattimore thus confronted shifting allegations, and unlike those who would follow him, he had no example of how to respond. With the help of his brilliant counsel, Abe Fortas, Lattimore elected to take on McCarthy directly. He testified in an open Senate session and blisteringly condemned the campaign against him. He even wrote a book about the experience while it was still under way. Ordeal by Slander was a thorough, steadfast, and principled defense of an individual against an unprincipled government adversary.
“We are in one of those national crises in which the fundamental cause of liberty will either be seriously impaired or renewed and strengthened, depending on what we do,” Lattimore argued and warned. “To break the grip of fear we must revive both the letter and the spirit of the Bill of Rights.”
McCarthy was unmoved. The FBI had compiled a flimsy collection of innuendo and suspicion. Lattimore was said to have denigrated Chiang Kai-shek in 1948, to have employed a Chinese economist who was “without a doubt a member of the Communist Party,” and to have spoken to groups of a “questionable nature.” The bureau’s files did include one more troubling, if uncorroborated, allegation: a confidential informant told agents on December 14, 1948, that the head of Soviet military intelligence named Lattimore as a Soviet operative, one of two working in Asia. Other informants questioned that information, but it supplied grist for McCarthy.
The senator cherry-picked the FBI report and pressed forward, punishing Lattimore for his defiance. Lattimore fought off one inquiry after another and was charged with perjury. Ultimately, he was exonerated, but only after many years and much pillory. In the meantime, McCarthy was emboldened. Having tasted fame, he was unwilling to cease, notwithstanding the election of a Republican president.
His first overtures were
tentative, as Eisenhower and McCarthy measured each other. Ike congratulated McCarthy on his Senate victory and referred cautiously to the nation’s vote of confidence in “our crusade.” Before Inauguration Day, McCarthy warned John Foster Dulles that his committee intended to investigate the State Department’s filing system. Dulles welcomed the notice and the investigation, saying he “wanted all the help he could get.”
Encouraged, McCarthy ventured a bit further. He conveyed through a close friend, the crusading journalist George Sokolsky, that he intended to press the case against the Voice of America, supposedly a safe haven for Communist infiltrators. Again, the message was delivered gently: Sokolsky was an old friend of Dulles’s, having counseled him during Dulles’s brief Senate tenure. Moreover, the new secretary of state was an icon of American anti-Communism, convinced that Communist infiltration in government posed a genuine threat to national security. Though he declined, for instance, to cast aspersions on the loyalty of American socialists, he refused to employ them in State Department policy-making positions.
Those initial parries, however, were followed by something far more ominous. McCarthy wheeled against Charles E. Bohlen, the administration’s nominee to serve as American ambassador to the Soviet Union. There were warning signs from the beginning that his nomination would run into trouble. Bohlen had served as a translator at Yalta, long a bane of anti-Communist conservatives who accused FDR of betraying Western interests to Stalin in the 1945 talks. Though Bohlen was a peripheral actor in those negotiations, his mere presence made him vulnerable, as Lattimore’s experience demonstrated. Eisenhower recognized that Bohlen’s Yalta connection could create controversy, but he worked to head it off, securing Senator Robert Taft’s promise to support the nomination by insisting that if Republicans defied their party’s leader on a matter this public and this early, “it would be a serious blow to the President’s prestige,” as Adams put it. The warning deterred Taft, but not McCarthy.
