by Jim Newton
Eisenhower was under no illusion about the threat posed by these allegations. For months, McCarthy had been pounding about the presence of Communists in government, and the best he had been able to come up with was an obscure Asia specialist working on the margins of the State Department. This was an accusation of an entirely different order. If McCarthy seized the case before Eisenhower could act to contain it, Ike would join Truman as a dupe of Communist infiltration at the highest level of government. In fact, unbeknownst to Eisenhower, McCarthy had already caught wind of questions about Oppenheimer, but J. Edgar Hoover, again for reasons of which Ike was unaware, had succeeded in persuading McCarthy to tread lightly, at least for the moment.
At the same time, once the FBI “report” caught up with Eisenhower, he recognized that the case against Oppenheimer was far less damning than it first seemed. The information was not a new FBI analysis but rather a letter written to the bureau by William Liscum Borden, a thirty-three-year-old Democrat who had recently lost his post as executive director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy under the new Congress. He and Oppenheimer had charted sharply different views on the preeminent nuclear weapons issue of the day, whether or not the United States should build a hydrogen bomb. So fervently did Borden believe in the necessity for the weapon that he concluded that Oppenheimer’s resistance signaled a larger disloyalty. Borden undertook his own investigation of Oppenheimer’s history, and “based upon years of study of the available classified evidence,” he determined that “more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.”
Borden’s letter checked off a long list of reasons for suspecting Oppenheimer, but the majority had already been investigated when Oppenheimer was cleared for work at Los Alamos. Yes, his wife had been a party member, as had his brother and his onetime mistress; yes, he had supported Communist causes and affiliated with Communists before entering top secret service in construction of the bomb. By 1953, however, all those ties had been long broken. Borden’s evidence of Communist involvement in the postwar period was fresher, but far weaker. Indeed, his entire litany of suspicious acts by Oppenheimer from 1946 on consisted of Oppenheimer’s attempts to discourage development of the hydrogen bomb and other atomic projects. That Oppenheimer’s objections to nuclear proliferation might have been professional and principled seems not to have occurred to Borden. Instead, Borden transformed policy disagreement into suspicion of treason.
What was hidden from Eisenhower, however, was the real reason that these issues were returning to the surface ten years after they had first been examined by the U.S. government. The truth was that Borden was not acting alone; his chief but silent collaborator was Eisenhower’s friend whom he had recently appointed to head the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss.
Owlish, combative, and piercingly intelligent, Strauss was the son of a shoe wholesaler who grew up in South Carolina. His plans to attend college were derailed, first by a bout with typhoid fever, and then by his family’s need for him to help their business through a downturn. He was a gifted shoe salesman, and he helped restore the family business. That duty accomplished, Strauss chanced upon a report of Herbert Hoover’s famine relief efforts in Belgium and offered his services to Hoover as his assistant. Thus began a long and contentious career in which Strauss oscillated between public and private service—his private years characterized by a genius for investment; his public service by a ferocious belief in the secret development of American nuclear weapons.
Oppenheimer consistently foiled that effort, particularly with his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Though Strauss prevailed when Truman gave approval to the weapon, the salesman remained convinced that the scientist was untrustworthy. Strauss had watched with horror as Oppenheimer’s call for “candor” had initially found favor with Eisenhower. Strauss, denying all along that he was at odds with Oppenheimer, had tried to scuttle “Atoms for Peace” and had succeeded in dampening that aspect of the address.
Named by Ike to head the Atomic Energy Commission in May 1953, Strauss made classified material in the AEC’s files available to Borden. Strauss also moved to head off any investigation by McCarthy—not to protect Oppenheimer, but rather to preserve his own line of attack. Strauss feared that if McCarthy attacked Oppenheimer, the senator’s flamboyance would ruin the case and turn Oppenheimer into a martyr. Unwilling to risk that, Strauss took great pains, legal and illegal, to insure that he would be the one to destroy his adversary. At Strauss’s request, the FBI bugged the office of Oppenheimer’s lawyer and, later, his home in Princeton. Through those illegal wiretaps, Strauss monitored Oppenheimer’s consultations with his lawyers and insisted on leaving the taps in place even when the FBI suggested removing them.
While Strauss hemmed in Oppenheimer, Ike’s first concern was to contain any possible damage should the worst fears about the scientist be realized. Though skeptical of the charges—“they consist of nothing more than the receipt of a letter from a man named Borden,” Ike recorded in his diary—Eisenhower was not inclined to entertain any risk of espionage under any circumstances. Less than twenty-four hours after receiving Wilson’s warning, and now having read Borden’s letter, Ike instructed Brownell “to place a blank wall between the subject of the communication and all areas of our government operations, whether in research projects of a sensitive nature or otherwise.”
Although he did not know it yet, Oppenheimer was cut off. Over the next three weeks, Strauss prepared his response to the allegations he had helped to generate. Meeting with top White House officials on December 18, he proposed creating a special panel of the AEC to consider whether to renew Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The group agreed and suggested that Oppenheimer be offered a choice: he could resign and avoid the hearing, or he could fight and risk public as well as private humiliation. Three days later, Strauss presented Oppenheimer with his options and demanded a swift answer. Oppenheimer agonized—“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” he muttered after his meeting with Strauss—but elected to fight. Having made that decision, he collapsed on the floor of his lawyer’s bathroom. The hearing was set for 1954.
Ike was worn out, too. Oppenheimer, Bermuda, and “Atoms for Peace” unfolded within a single month. He pushed himself almost to “the point of exhaustion,” but he ended the year in an upbeat mood. Looking back, he confided in a Christmas note to Swede Hazlett, he found “moments of real satisfaction that have made all the rest of it seem worthwhile.”
The year closed out with the normal press of business. The cabinet and the NSC held their regular sessions. Eisenhower met with legislative leaders to discuss the St. Lawrence Seaway, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, public works and farm programs, and the coming budget. He shuffled ideas and drafts for the State of the Union and happily embraced one piece of advice. He would deliver a “message of hope,” a reminder that despite difficulties for some, “there is a clear prospect of encouraging opportunity for the betterment of all groups, classes and individuals.”
The holidays offered a few moments of respite, and Ike enjoyed them. Tom Stephens arranged a series of performances at the White House Christmas party—though it was meant for the staff, Ike and Mamie dropped in—and the president was delighted. Even irritations seemed more amusing than disabling. France elected a new president, and Eisenhower cabled his congratulations to the winner, René Coty. He then wrote to Al Gruenther, stationed in Paris. “In view of the number of people I have known in the various French governments, it is exasperating to find out that they picked the one I cannot remember meeting.” Ike added: “That’s the French of it.”
On Christmas Day, Ike and Mamie departed for Augusta. The year ended quietly on the golf links and with cheerful gatherings of staff and friends. For a few days, Oppenheimer and McCarthy, covert action, nuclear weapons, civil rights, economic recovery, and the mysteries of the Soviet Union all receded. Though not for long.
8
“McCarthywasm”
Brothers can argue about almost anything, and Little Ike and Big Ike were no exception. Through the first year of Little Ike’s presidency, his brother Edgar badgered him over a deeply divisive proposal to amend the Constitution. Sponsored by Senator John Bricker of Ohio, the measure tapped a vein of Republican dogma left over from the party’s long ostracism during the FDR presidency. There lingered an abiding suspicion from the Yalta Conference that the president would abuse his power to make foreign treaties and might straitjacket domestic policy or overwhelm states’ rights. An agreement, for instance, to honor human rights abroad might constrain the criminal sentencing systems adopted in various American states.
To remedy that, Bricker introduced an amendment intended to circumscribe the reach of foreign entanglement. If approved by two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the state legislatures—the president himself has no role in amending the Constitution—the Bricker Amendment would block any treaty that conflicted with the Constitution; Congress would acquire the power to regulate all treaties and other executive agreements. Treaties would only affect “internal law in the United States” if their provisions were specifically enacted by separate legislation. The proposed amendment was first introduced in 1952, during the final year of the Truman administration; the Senate failed to enact it, and Bricker reintroduced a slightly rewritten version as Senate Joint Resolution 1 at the beginning of the 1953 session.
There was room for honest disagreement, but the debate surrounding it was soon swamped in emotional dispute over distrust of the presidency and the right of states to resist federal preeminence. Among those who felt most strongly—and who lobbied Eisenhower most avidly—was his brother Edgar. In March 1953, having just returned from Ike’s inauguration, Edgar wrote two letters, four days apart, vigorously championing the Bricker Amendment. Without it, he said, the states would be at the mercy of foolish foreign agreements. Imagine, Edgar argued, if the United States’ ratification of a human rights treaty pending at the United Nations stipulated certain protections for new mothers. That could require states to pay for milk for mothers who could not breast-feed and compensate mothers who could the same amount in order to prevent unequal treatment. “Just how silly can you get?” Edgar asked. The same week, he wrote again, this time quoting John Foster Dulles on the power of treaties—Dulles had since recanted a statement in which he suggested that treaty law could override the Constitution. Edgar complained that his nonlawyer brother was not heeding his recommendation: “I think that someone is giving you bad advice.”
Ike was used to his brother lecturing him, but his patience with the issue—and with Edgar’s presumptuousness—wore thin. “You seem to fear that I am just a poor little soul here who is being confused and misled by a lot of vicious advisers,” Ike sarcastically replied, adding that while Bricker might marshal some legal support for his arguments, the counterarguments were stronger. Moreover, he pointedly reminded his big brother that neither Bricker nor Edgar “has had any experience in conducting difficult negotiations looking toward the necessary and essential Executive agreements.” That still didn’t silence Edgar. As they continued to spar, they also argued over Earl Warren’s appointment to the Court and Edgar’s general concern that his brother was leading the nation toward socialism.
With the Bricker Amendment still on the table in early 1954, Edgar warned that he was hearing more and more reports that Ike had become enamored of the New Deal policies he had once deplored—Social Security, farm subsidies, and an internationalist foreign policy—and that he had fallen into the company of old Dewey supporters, the last a snarling accusation from a conservative Republican. Ike responded sternly, saying that normally he would shrug off “a communication which contains all the hackneyed criticisms and accusations palpably based on misinformation and deliberate distortion.” He was replying only, he said, because he was annoyed to have “one brother that seems always ready to believe that I am a … helpless, ignorant, uninformed individual, thrust to dizzy heights of governmental responsibility and authority, who has been captured by a band of conniving ‘internationalists.’ ” Even that didn’t shut Edgar up, but it did make the point.
If anything, Edgar’s lobbying seemed to harden Ike’s opposition to the amendment, which he became increasingly convinced would handcuff the president and undermine America’s ability to enter into alliances and treaties—a threat to Ike’s existential internationalism. It was tiresome, he acknowledged. “Never have I in my life been so weary of any one subject or proposition,” he told Edgar in February. The amendment itself wound its way through a complicated series of votes and amendments. One was intended to soften the language to make clear that it would only bar treaties that conflicted with the Constitution. For a time, it seemed that might resolve the matter, as supporters had argued that such a clarification was all they sought. When Bricker refused to back that change, however, the lines were drawn. The Bricker Amendment failed a series of close votes in early 1954. Finally, on February 25, it was defeated. A proposal that Ike warned “would have spelled tragedy for the future of America” never again resurfaced as a serious notion. What’s more, Ike won his argument with his brother. When Edgar wrote after the vote to complain that someone in the White House had tried to suggest a break between them on the issue, Ike refused to give in. He had never made a secret of their difference on the amendment, Ike explained, and had said so publicly. “I’m sorry you are upset about it,” Eisenhower wrote, “but the explanation is as simple as that.”
The Bricker Amendment was only one bit of carryover business from 1953. There were others, none more closely watched than Ike’s duel with McCarthy. In June, the two had almost reached a breaking point, when Eisenhower responded to McCarthy’s campaign to rid American libraries abroad of suspicious books by urging Dartmouth students not to join the book burners. Eisenhower’s subsequent silence made it seem as though he had returned to ignoring McCarthy; in fact, he was quietly but methodically isolating the senator.
In early 1954, McCarthy appeared to be gaining, not losing, steam. He had ended 1953 with his renewed attack on the State Department and Davies, hardly new terrain but worrisome in that it was now Eisenhower’s leadership, not Truman’s record, that captured the senator’s attention. Moreover, the still-secret investigation of Oppenheimer hovered over the administration, threatening to become public at any moment and offering McCarthy a chillingly rich target. Eisenhower publicly expressed the hope that Communists in government would not dominate the 1954 campaign, but taking that issue out of the debate would deprive McCarthy of his reason for being; neither he nor his allies could tolerate that. The Wall Street Journal captured the issue’s threat to Eisenhower with the headline of its lead editorial on November 23: “Accessory After the Fact.” The paper’s editorial board warned Eisenhower not to minimize the serious and continuing issue of subversion. “The answer,” the Journal editorialized, “is not to hush the whole matter up and forget it.” Two days later, McCarthy pointedly rejected Eisenhower’s attempt to talk down the threat of subversion and its relevance to the campaign. “The raw, harsh, unpleasant fact is that Communism is an issue and will be an issue in 1954,” McCarthy said.
Then he pivoted ominously on the institution closest to Eisenhower, the U.S. Army. McCarthy’s inquiries had revealed that an Army dentist, Irving Peress, had refused to sign a loyalty oath and yet been promoted during his time at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. In high dudgeon, McCarthy summoned Peress, who refused to answer questions and was then honorably discharged from the service. McCarthy moved up the chain of command and hauled into the hearings General Ralph Zwicker, a former colleague of Eisenhower’s from the war years and currently the commander at Camp Kilmer. In one ill-tempered hearing after another, McCarthy bludgeoned Zwicker with the repeated question: “Who promoted Peress?” When Zwicker tried to deflect the inquiry, McCarthy sneered: “Anyone with the brains of a five-year-old child can understand the question.” Still, Zwicker refused to hand over names to the
senator, prompting the furious McCarthy to exclaim: “Then, General, you should be removed from any command.” Fed up with McCarthy’s mistreatment of his subordinate, Robert T. Stevens, the secretary of the Army, ordered Zwicker to cease cooperation with the committee and said he would testify instead.
With that, the political leanings of a now-discharged Army dentist vaulted to the top of the nation’s agenda and threatened a full-blown test of the separation of powers. Stevens, in good faith, accepted an invitation from McCarthy to head off that confrontation. They talked over lunch in the Capitol on February 24 and cut a deal: McCarthy would stop badgering witnesses, and Stevens would permit Zwicker to return to the stand and provide the committee with the names of those involved in Peress’s promotion. Although McCarthy feigned friendship with Stevens—he once told the secretary that it would be easier to investigate the Army if he weren’t so fond of Stevens—the senator promptly double-crossed him. They emerged from the allegedly private lunch to a klatch of alerted reporters, and McCarthy announced that Stevens had relented and allowed Zwicker to return. He never mentioned that he, too, had made concessions.
“Stevens Bows to McCarthy at Administration Behest,” the New York Times trumpeted the next day: “What Secretary Stevens agreed to was precisely what Senator McCarthy had demanded.” “My own reaction,” Ike wrote years later, “was not pleasant.” At the time, he described himself as “astonished.” Stevens, meanwhile, was apoplectic, “in a state of shock and near hysteria,” as Eisenhower put it to Lucius Clay. It was, Adams recalled, the moment that “blew the lid off the teakettle.” Distraught, the secretary called Jim Hagerty and said he wanted to release a statement and then resign (a fact that also made its way into the Times). Ike’s long simmer now heated to a boil as he contemplated his obligation to Stevens and Zwicker and those upon whom he relied for counsel. Eisenhower released a statement backing Stevens, and congressional leaders supported the secretary’s version of events. Still, Clay advised caution in tangling directly with McCarthy. “Don’t think you can lock horns on this one,” notes of his February 25 conversation with Eisenhower record. “He has made fight impossible.”
