by Jim Newton
Oppenheimer had been, in some respects, the cause of his own undoing. Lesser men understood in the 1950s that those entrusted with secrets needed to watch their friends. Oppenheimer’s most sturdy connections to Communism were long behind him by 1954; his wife no longer was a party member, nor his brother. His mistress was dead. True, he had recently visited in Paris with a Communist who had once raised the idea of Oppenheimer divulging secrets from the Los Alamos project, but there was no evidence that Oppenheimer had done any such thing. Instead, his censure was the result of naïveté and unwillingness to accept what eventually became an American consensus: that the hydrogen bomb was an essential instrument of national security. Never again, after 1954, would Oppenheimer lift a hand to help the government to which he had once devoted his life. Reston would long wonder about his role in the tragedy, whether his report had antagonized the board and turned it against the scientist. Garrison assured him that it had not, that the board was set to vote against Oppenheimer from the beginning. Still, the episode echoed into history, leaving behind many troubled participants. As Reston wrote late in life, “Many … intelligent men, including Eisenhower, Strauss, and Oppenheimer himself, contributed to the tragedy.”
Meanwhile, McCarthy’s hearings approached their climax. By June, the senator’s desperation, fueled by his alcoholism and raw nerves, carried his intensity to new heights, with Welch acting as the principal adversary. As usual, McCarthy’s weapon of choice was the smear. This time, he turned on a young associate in Welch’s Boston law firm. Frederick G. Fisher had worked for the National Lawyers Guild and had briefly assisted Welch in preparing for the hearings. Once he disclosed his work with the lawyers’ guild, Welch recommended that he drop off the case, fearful that McCarthy would suggest something untoward about Fisher’s past association. (The guild, a progressive legal organization that still exists today, refused to administer loyalty oaths, and members of the organization had represented clients accused of Communist affiliations, including the Rosenbergs. To some fervid anti-Communists, including McCarthy, that made the guild a Communist or “communist-front” organization.)
On June 9, after Welch had questioned Cohn, McCarthy raised the issue of Fisher’s association and suggested that Welch had tried to “foist” Fisher on the committee and allow him access to its files. Because Welch anticipated that McCarthy might make an issue of Fisher, he was ready with a reply. At first Welch struggled to get the senator’s attention, as McCarthy commented that he could listen with “one ear” while summoning the attention of an aide.
“I want you to listen with both,” Welch demanded. Once McCarthy focused, Welch shook his head and spoke with deep resignation: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness.” Welch explained the circumstances of Fisher’s background and his work on the hearings, as well as Welch’s decision to drop him from the group in order to prevent him from being damaged in precisely the way McCarthy had just done.
“Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad,” Welch continued. “It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I’m a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.”
McCarthy, undeterred, retorted that he was only responding to Welch’s personal attacks on Cohn. Welch then looked at Cohn and asked whether his questioning had inflicted any such injury.
“No, sir,” Cohn replied.
“And if I did,” Welch added, “I beg your pardon. Let’s not assassinate this lad further, Senator.”
Still McCarthy persisted. “Let’s, let’s …” he began. But before he could complete his sentence, Welch interrupted cuttingly.
“You’ve done enough,” he said, staring directly at McCarthy. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
McCarthy attempted one last recovery. He argued he was merely laying “the truth on the table” and disparaged his adversary as “the completely phony Mr. Welch.” He tried once more to contend that Welch had foisted Fisher, with his suspicious background, into the work of the committee, but Welch was not about to yield. His air of sadness moved now to fury:
Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat within six feet of me and could ask—could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have seen fit to bring it out, and if there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further. I will not ask, Mr. Cohn, any more witnesses. You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness.
The audience sat silent for a moment. And then they began to clap. McCarthy seemed confused. He fingered his glasses, considered the applause, stared blankly.
The hearings continued, but from that moment on McCarthy’s arc was descendant. Americans, once transfixed by his charges, had now seen for themselves a triumph of public democracy. Millions were appalled and embarrassed. Within the year, the senator had ceased to play a meaningful role in American life.
For decades, historians have debated whether Eisenhower’s strategy was the right one, and opinion remains divided. Refusing to confront McCarthy openly was canny politics. Truman had openly opposed the senator and had only raised his profile. Moreover, the risks were greater for Eisenhower, whose party included conservatives who supported some of McCarthy’s goals, if not his methods. But Ike’s reticence came at a cost: it allowed the senator to grill, harass, and defame Americans guilty of no offense—even the Communists who appeared before his committee had a legal right to their membership in what was, after all, a legal political organization.
That analysis obscures the real choice that Eisenhower faced. His option was not to sanction McCarthy or to stop him. It was how best to silence an independently elected official over whom Eisenhower had no legal authority. Eisenhower refused to name him publicly but shared his disgust with captains of industry and newspaper publishers, members of his staff and Congress, academic leaders and foundation presidents. By spreading word among those influential leaders, Eisenhower made it widely known that he deplored McCarthy without ever granting McCarthy the satisfaction of a direct retort. And by neither confronting McCarthy nor allowing any doubt about his own abhorrence of the senator, Ike quietly cut off McCarthy from sources of support. He isolated McCarthy from his colleagues, the media, and the mainstream of the Republican Party, then exposed him to the American people. After slowly drawing the senator into a blind created by his own hubris, Eisenhower sprang the trap. It was almost military in nature and, like so many aspects of the Eisenhower administration, deceptively deliberate.
When Eisenhower was elected, McCarthy was a formidable force in American politics. His influence was on the rise, and his opponents were terrified to challenge him. Conservatives, deprived of Taft by his sudden death, were hungry for a champion and might have dropped Eisenhower for a leader more faithful to their views and more willing to force military confrontation with China and even the Soviet Union. McCarthy could well have been that standard-bearer if Eisenhower had made McCarthy’s Republicanism an alternative to Ike’s. Within two years, McCarthy and his crusade already seemed a joke. History may continue to debate Ike’s strategy, but as the president boasted to his aides: “It’s no longer McCarthyism. It’s McCarthywasm.”
While the McCarthy and Oppenheimer hearings dominated the domestic Cold War, the international conflict posed far more worrisome threats to American security. In the spring of 1954, the United States set out to conduct what were, by then, routine nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific. But on March 1, events went frighteningly out of control. A hydrogen bomb that scientists had expected to produce a yield of roughly six megatons instead detonated at a staggering fifteen megatons. That made it the largest explosion in human history, and it vaporized the Bikini atoll where it was staged. The unexpe
cted yield of the weapon, combined with unfavorable weather conditions, spread fallout across hundreds of miles, with radioactive dust falling on nearby islands before residents could be evacuated and drifting onto the decks of U.S. ships as servicemen huddled below. A Japanese fishing boat, the inaptly named Lucky Dragon 5, unsuspectingly went about its work as ash from the explosion fell on the vessel. Twenty-three crew members continued fishing as the flakes drifted down and clung to their skin. Some soon felt nausea and many broke out in rashes, but it was not until they returned to port later that month that they connected their disorders with the explosion. Once a Japanese reporter pieced together the events, outrage ricocheted around the world—the spectacle of innocent Japanese suffering from American nuclear fallout being too redolent to escape international fury. Eventually, one crewman, a radio operator named Aikichi Kuboyama, died. The episode continued to roil relations between the United States and Japan for months.
As if that weren’t enough to suggest the fragility of the peace in that turbulent spring of 1954, violence was visited upon the U.S. leadership just hours after the bomb went off. Half a world away, Congress was meeting to debate an immigration bill. Some time after 2:00 p.m., four Puerto Rican nationalists took their seats in a visitors’ area then known as the Ladies’ Gallery. Lolita Lebrón gave the order, her colleagues muttered the Lord’s Prayer, then jumped to their feet and waved a Puerto Rican flag, struggling to unfurl it. Lebrón shouted “Viva Puerto Rico,” and she and her colleagues began to unload their automatic pistols into the well of the House, where 243 members were gathering to vote. The protesters emptied their guns, reloaded, and kept firing. “Hit the deck,” shouted Representative James E. Van Zandt of Pennsylvania, one of the first to realize what was happening. He dashed upstairs to help apprehend the shooters, jostling with police and spectators confused and then terrified by the violence. Five congressmen were hit, one through a lung, another in the back. Police captured the shooters quickly, while on the floor pages rushed to help the wounded. One congressman stripped off his tie and used it as a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding of a colleague. Another staggered into the cloakroom and collapsed.
Eisenhower heard of the shooting soon after it occurred. He called the rattled Speaker of the House, Joseph Martin, who was still dissecting rumors about what had prompted the attack. Martin was concerned that some of the assailants had escaped—none did—and told the president that the shooting might have been motivated by anger over the immigration bill, the wetback bill, as he indelicately described it.
“These people just shoot wildly, just shoot into a crowd,” Eisenhower grumbled. “Probably blindly insane.”
The Korean War had halted by 1954, but Korea remained a quarrelsome ally. Rhee would never be satisfied with the partition of his country, and he continued to harangue Eisenhower to support a war of reunification. In March, he delivered an impassioned appeal for help. His “hysterical” letter first was refused by Bedell Smith. Finally, Eisenhower replied: “I cannot comply with your request for support in military action to unify your country.”
China was finished probing in Korea, but it yearned for conflict elsewhere and aggressively challenged the core principle of Eisenhower’s New Look defense policy, the assumption that America’s dominance in nuclear weapons would deter Communist aggression. In Indochina and in the straits that separated mainland China from the redoubts occupied by Chiang Kai-shek, armies refused to submit to the nuclear threat. In addition to Taiwan itself, Nationalist China claimed three sets of islands, each a few miles off the mainland. The northernmost, which included the Tachen Islands, was protected by thirteen thousand Nationalist troops; a center group including Matsu by about five thousand; and a southern batch including Quemoy by another forty-three thousand soldiers. Eisenhower considered the islands remote and nearly indefensible, but Chiang, deprived of all but these scraps of land, insisted that they were essential to the protection of his people and government.
As a result, the islands weighed heavily on Communists and Nationalists alike: Communist China saw Nationalist occupation as provocation, a garrison of tens of thousands of hostile soldiers less than ten miles from the Chinese mainland; Chiang Kai-shek imagined them as stepping-stones to his reconquest of mainland China, a mission to which his life was dedicated. An American observer of Chiang remarked in early 1958 that it was “his destiny, his responsibility, to liberate his shackled people and to rehabilitate his own prestige and reputation before he dies.”
In the spring of 1954, China began massing forces on the mainland near the islands, escalating that provocation just as the McCarthy hearings were reaching their feverish peak. Eisenhower calculated the American response: Would an attack on the islands constitute an act of international aggression or a battle in the continuing Chinese civil war; more important, would it be of sufficient gravity that it warranted a nuclear response? It seemed frightfully provocative to meet the shelling of lightly defended islands of questionable strategic value with a nuclear attack on China, but the theory of American deterrence rested on the idea that the U.S. nuclear arsenal existed precisely to discourage aggression by threatening devastation in reply. Eisenhower took counsel of the military and diplomatic stakes and ordered the U.S. Seventh Fleet to pay “friendly visits” to the embattled islands, initially with instructions not to fire even if fired upon. For weeks, that uneasy stability held, thanks to the restraint of disciplined men on both sides of a perilous divide.
Meanwhile, the French in Indochina were confronting the liberation campaign of Ho Chi Minh. After years of frittering away their strength in Indochina, the French determined in 1953 and 1954 to build their forces to 250,000 and train another 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers, with the idea that the combined presence would be enough to defeat the North Vietnamese by the end of 1955. The United States supplied aid but not troops, and in the fall of 1953 the French occupied an outpost near the Laotian border, a strategically located stretch of plain known as Dien Bien Phu. At the time, holding Dien Bien Phu seemed to the French to offer a chance to contain guerrilla access to the Red River delta; in retrospect, the occupation of an isolated post, accessible only by air and surrounded by wooded hills, would reveal itself as military folly. Ike spied the danger early and asked State and Defense to relay his concerns to the French, but they ignored him.
The French were confident that their enemy neither possessed nor would acquire artillery to mount in the surrounding hills. They also imagined themselves superior fighters with superior numbers. All those assumptions toppled in the spring of 1954. On March 13, North Vietnamese troops attacked the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, firing down on the isolated fortress from the hills with artillery supplied by the Soviet Union (and ferried through China). The immediate assault was repulsed, but, again with Chinese help, though not Chinese ground troops, the North Vietnamese regrouped and resupplied. Two weeks later, they attacked again, shelling the airstrip where French forces were resupplied. Dulles told the cabinet that American support for the French was vital. If not, he warned, “Reds would win that part of world and ‘cut our defense line in half,’ ” Hagerty recalled. For Eisenhower, the moment of decision was at hand. The French begged for air support and more, while Ike weighed the merits of attaching American prestige to a European effort to maintain a colonial empire. “Air power might be temporarily beneficial to French morale,” he reflected in his memoirs. But, he recorded fatefully, “I had no intention of using United States forces in any limited action when the force employed would probably not be decisively effective.” Privately, Ike, who got his fill of French military misdirection during the North Africa campaign, was maddened by the position they placed him in now. For years, he complained, he had been urging France to internationalize the conflict in Indochina. Now the “frantic desire of the French to remain a world power” was undercut by that nation’s “deep divisions and consequent indecisiveness.” Strong action and clear purpose were required, but France resorted to “weasel words” a
nd consequently “suffered reverses that have been really inexcusable.”
Ike surveyed the military balance, braced for the political backlash, and withheld the support the French desired. On May 7, Dien Bien Phu fell.
American leaders feared for the wholesale collapse of the region and again contemplated nuclear war. Just before lunch on June 2, Eisenhower’s top military and diplomatic advisers came to him to discuss American action should China advance on Vietnam or the rest of Indochina. Even read a half century later, their contingency plan trembles: “Congress would be asked immediately to declare that a state of war existed with Communist China, and the U.S. should then launch large-scale air and naval attacks on ports, airfields, and other military targets in mainland China, using as militarily appropriate ‘new weapons.’ ”
The French and the North Vietnamese signed a partition pact later that summer, and the Republican right wing again rebelled, with Bill Knowland decrying it as “the greatest victory the Communists have won in 20 years.” Ike was incensed at the recurring broadsides from the Republican Senate leader. He grumbled to Hagerty, “The more I see of Knowland, the more I wonder whether he is a Republican leader or not.” Eisenhower and Hagerty assigned a more sympathetic senator to challenge any colleagues who criticized the settlement to ask whether they were prepared to send “American boys to fight in Indochina.” The silence spoke loudly. Despite the pleadings of his own party and the desperation of an ally, Eisenhower refused to budge. He would not wage war in Vietnam.
