A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Alleging that the U.S. Army itself had security issues, McCarthy challenged the integrity of General George Marshall, at which point Americans’ patience ran out. Many of his supporters turned against him; the Senate censured him in 1954; and his health deteriorated until his death three years later after long bouts with alcoholism.

  “McCarthyism” subsequently became a term synonymous with repression and terror—an amazing development considering that not one of the people subpoenaed by the senator to testify lacked legal counsel; none were arrested or detained without due process; and no one went to jail without a trial. “All through the ‘worst’ of the McCarthy period, the Communist Party itself was never outlawed, membership in the party was never declared a crime, and it continued to maintain public offices, publish books and the Daily Worker,” wrote McCarthy biographer Arthur Herman.40 If anything, McCarthy’s investigations underestimated the number of active Soviet agents in the country. At one time or another, the KGB regularly debriefed not only Harry Dexter White and Laurence Duggan, but also Michael Straight in the State Department; an agent known as Moris (thought to be John Abt in the Justice Department); Boris Morros, a Hollywood producer; and well-known columnist Walter Lippmann. Some, such as Duggan and White, deliberately and frequently shaped their internal policy memos to best benefit the USSR, not the United States, according to recently released KGB material from the Soviet Archives.41

  Even though the Eisenhower administration quietly abandoned the search for communists in the government, the assault on American communists became broader and, one could say, “more democratic,” as communists found themselves harassed, prosecuted, and hunted by the government with the enthusiastic support of large segments of the public. Unions, led by Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Philip Murray of the CIO, had kicked known communists out even before McCarthy started his famous hearings. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, turned anticommunism at the Bureau into a nearly personal vendetta: from its 1944 peak of eighty thousand members, the American Communist Party had shrunk to below twenty thousand in 1956 and fewer than three thousand in 1971.42 Hoover had considerable help, however. Public officials often ignored or violated the constitutional rights of Communist Party members, and more extreme groups encouraged vigilante activity against known communists. Harvard University stated in May 1953 that “membership in the Communist Party is beyond the scope of academic freedom,” and constituted “grave misconduct justifying dismissal.”43 That said, the fundamental fact was that overall the constitutional protections and the fair play and ethics of the majority of citizens restrained and limited anticommunist zeal.

  Without doubt, the public was hostile to communism and suspicious of fellow travelers (nonparty members who abetted communism). In its last burst of pro-America activism, Hollywood chipped in with movies such as I Married a Communist and The Red Menace, produced between 1947 and 1949. The blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten is well known. Hearings into the movie industry saw one resolute witness, a young Ronald Reagan, defend the industry and question the attacks on civil liberties. Public schools promoted prodemocracy programs, and tell-all books by former communists abounded.

  The bottom line, however, was that anticommunism was a serious response to genuine threats on many levels than it was a form of paranoia. And overall, the dislocations attributed to anticommunist movements were and are exaggerated. As historians of the American communist movement noted, “Even during the early 1950s, the high tide of McCarthyism, the Communist party functioned legally, its spokesmen publicly advocated its doctrines, its recruiters brought in new members, and its press published daily and weekly newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and books in the millions of copies.”44 University purges were rare. Of the 1,850 colleges and universities with nearly 300,000 faculty in the 1950s, there were 126 cases of professors (at 58 institutions) dismissed or threatened with dismissal for their communist affiliation.

  The bad news was that the spy scandals here and in Britain indicated that communist infiltration into national security and the State Department was worse than imagined. Spies Julius Rosenberg, Claus Fuchs, and others had given the Soviets the data they needed to make an atomic bomb. The spy revelations, along with the invasion of South Korea by communist North Korea and the fall of China to dictator Mao Tse-tung in 1949, led to sharp concern over Soviet espionage activities in the United States. Labeling this the Red scare, or hysteria, is a gross exaggeration. Hysteria is an ungrounded fear, as opposed to concern based on genuine threats. As newly released Soviet documents confirm without question, the USSR had penetrated virtually every important division of the U.S. government related to military, diplomatic, and security issues. Certainly the opposition to the cold war and agitation by so-called peace movements in America was manipulated by the Soviets. Ironically, evidence for this Soviet involvement in domestic peace organizations comes from a historian sympathetic to the Left, Robbie Lieberman, who admits that American Communists “saw peace as bound up with the fortunes of the Soviet Union.”45 As he noted, “Communist agitation for peace was bound up with defending the interests of the Soviet Union, especially guaranteeing its…power (nuclear and otherwise) vis-à-vis the United States.”46

  The nation was quite rational in exhibiting serious concerns about such developments and, at the same time, was fortunate to have a war hero and levelheaded Kansan as its new president—a man who could stand up to the excesses of McCarthy without in any way backing down from the commitment to containment abroad. What is less clear is how seriously Eisenhower took the threat of communist infiltration into the Roosevelt and Truman administrations: he appeared more embarrassed by McCarthy than concerned with the likes of Owen Lattimore and Alger Hiss. Some of Eisenhower’s approach must in part be attributed to strategy, not wishing to expend little of his administration’s energy pounding on the errors of his predecessor. Some of it must be chalked up to a certain (and in this case, wrong) American presumption that large numbers of fellow citizens would not be traitors. Whatever the reason, Ike’s unwillingness to be even slightly associated with McCarthy’s cause led the new president to miss a golden opportunity to clean house of Soviet agents and, in the process, reinvigorate the conservative movement without the taint of extremism associated with the John Birch Society (a far-right anticommunist group) or McCarthy.47

  The Eisenhower Smile

  It was natural that Americans considered military service a training ground for the presidency—most presidents had served in the armed forces, many as successful generals—and both Eisenhower and MacArthur entertained thoughts of a political career. For Dwight Eisenhower, one potential roadblock was that he had not been particularly political in his life, nor did the public even know what party he favored, although he had voted Republican those times that he did vote.

  Ike encouraged the impression among the media elites that he was somehow detached from the partisan wrangling of the day. Supporters lobbied him to run for office the minute he came home from Europe, but he demurred. He even indicated that he would have been happy supporting the party favorite, Robert Taft of Ohio (1889–1953) if “Mr. Republican” had endorsed NATO. Yet in a meeting with Eisenhower, Taft rejected American involvement in collective security for Europe, sealing Ike’s decision to run. Like Truman, Ike did not mind being underestimated. Elites rallied to the Democratic candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois (1900–65), but Eisenhower appealed to the common man.

  Seeking to blunt attacks from the McCarthy wing of the GOP, Ike named Congressman Richard Nixon of California as his running mate. In the campaign, Democrats charged Nixon with financial irregularities and corruption. The resilient Nixon, in one of the most famous political television addresses ever, carefully reviewed his finances, noting that he and his family had few luxuries, that his wife Pat did not have fur coats but a “good Republican cloth coat.” They had accepted one gift—a cocker spaniel named Checkers, and with a tear in his eye Nixon stated he would not give up the family dog.
Unswayed, Ike certainly stood ready to dump Nixon if popular support didn’t materialize, but the speech grabbed the nation’s heartstrings, and he stayed on the ticket. Eisenhower buried Stevenson in the popular vote, garnering nearly 10 percent more votes and overwhelming him in the electoral college, 457 to 73.

  Liberal journalists and academics have attempted to portray the election as one in which the lesser man won—that “smart” people voted for Stevenson, but were swamped by the rubes. In fact, Stevenson was an avid nonreader, and the only book at his nightstand when he died was The Social Register.48 Voter statistics revealed that the more education someone had, the more likely the person was to vote for Eisenhower. Oddly, Ike irked the press by smiling a lot. But he also worked hard and long, and despite his demeanor, in some ways he lived hard too. No soldier could achieve what Ike had without some rough edges. During the war he drank twenty cups of coffee a day, smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, and lived with myriad constant health problems.49 Ike played politics with the best, often opting for the indirect route that kept his friends and foes alike baffled and, like Ronald Reagan after him, he delegated duties effectively.

  Unlike his successors Kennedy and Nixon, Eisenhower had no love for the power or status of the office itself. Being president provided the means to improve the nation, and more broadly, the world. Adviser George Kennan found that in small meetings, especially on foreign affairs, Ike was “a man of keen political intelligence and penetration [who] spoke of matters seriously…insights of a high order flashed out time after time.”50 When he wished to avoid a direct answer, Eisenhower employed military jargon to obfuscate, and even pretended not to understand his own translator to deflect foreign queries. Most of all, Ike’s animated face fit the times, like Lincoln’s solemn demeanor fit his own.

  The Eisenhower smile “was a political statement: America was good; unlike Hitler or Stalin, America was offering to the world a good man…. Understandably, it drove fanatics and the alienated up the wall.”51 He responded with straightforward and simple answers:

  Q. Can you bring taxes down?

  A. Yes. We will work to cut billions…and bring your taxes down.52

  A low inflation rate (just over 1 percent) and virtual full employment (3 percent unemployment) contributed to Eisenhower’s popularity. He balanced his budget three of eight times, and the other years had only minor deficits. Long before Ronald Reagan established the Eleventh Commandment—Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican—Ike had absorbed that principle. If he needed to bash a particular GOP opponent, he did so through references to general characteristics, not by name. When it came to the Democrats, however, Ike could be brutal. And when it came to foreign enemies, Eisenhower took another tack, speaking in paradoxes and inscrutable philosophizing.

  The “Fair Deal” Becomes “Dynamic Conservatism”

  A central, lingering domestic question that both Truman and Eisenhower had to deal with involved the continuation of the New Deal—or rolling it back, as some hoped. Welfare-state liberalism had become entrenched by 1946, and despite his triumph over Wallace, Truman did little to slow the extension of federal programs. Truman raised the minimum wage, made an additional 10 million people eligible for new Social Security benefits, embarked on federal slum clearance, and proposed a large farm-income program. Truman’s domestic program—dubbed the Fair Deal in honor of his Progressive forebears—also included 810,000 federally subsidized housing units. At almost every point Truman allied with the big-government forces.

  In 1953, therefore, Eisenhower had a remarkable opportunity. As the first GOP president since Hoover, he was in a position to limit or end some of the New Deal policies, especially with the House and Senate under Republican control for a brief time. Nevertheless, Ike recognized that part of his appeal rested on his bipartisan image. He had not run as anti-Roosevelt, and was indeed far too progressive for some in the Republican Party, including “Mr. Republican,” Senator Taft of Ohio. Many voters thought Taft and other conservatives overemphasized anticommunism to the exclusion of other issues (although Taft is perhaps best known for his sponsorship of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1946, prohibiting closed-shop, union-only, workplaces). Taft’s insurgency failed, and the senator died in 1953, removing the most significant Republican opposing voice to Ike’s policies, although remaining GOP insurgents forced the president to moderate the rate of growth of New Deal programs. Where Ike did reverse New Deal policies was in his cabinet selections, who were mostly businessmen. Among the group was the devout Mormon, Ezra Taft Benson, who cut back federal ownership of hydroelectric power businesses and limited regulation of offshore oil leases. But Eisenhower did not hesitate to spend: the National Highway Act of 1956 used federal money to link the nation’s cities, thus lowering (private) transportation costs. Blasted as “corporate socialism” for Detroit, the act reflected Ike’s World War II experience, which impressed on him the need for a highway system for defense.

  His domestic strategy, called dynamic conservatism, was a policy that shed the criticism that conservatives were only against something and offered nothing positive. The minimum wage rose to a dollar an hour under Eisenhower and federal aid to education increased through the National Defense Education Act. Social Security benefits likewise rose, and Ike created a new superagency—the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—to continue to administer the New Deal welfare-state programs. Eisenhower did not end the New Deal, but he slowed its growth.

  The Atomic Genie

  Both Truman and Eisenhower maintained a consistency in dealing with atomic energy and atomic weapons. Realizing that atomic power provided not only new terrors, but also new sources of relatively clean energy for civilian use, Congress authorized the Atomic Energy Commission under civilian control to examine peaceful uses of nuclear power. Bernard Baruch, head of the War Industries Board in World War I, became the American delegate to the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. To control the spread of nuclear weapons—which could easily grow out of the unchecked expansion of peaceful nuclear power—the UN proposed an international agency to supervise all atomic development. Baruch even submitted a plan to have the United States hand over atomic secrets to the UN, on the condition that the United States, the USSR, and other nations likely to develop nuclear power would agree to allow international inspections at atomic installations. The United States, under those conditions, would agree to destroy its nuclear stockpile. The Soviets had already secretly started construction of their own atomic bombs, and they had no intention of allowing free access by international inspectors to anything.

  H-bomb testing produced fallout of a different sort when a national meeting of church leaders, scientists, authors, and other notables in June 1957 led to the formation of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). Emphasizing the “human community,” SANE placed ads in major papers protesting the H-bomb tests, but soon its agenda included international control over all U.S. weapons.

  By 1948, even before the USSR had detonated its own atomic bomb, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Truman’s security advisers understood that temporarily the only way to protect Europe from further Soviet expansion was the threat, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, of the use of nuclear weapons by the United States in the event of aggression against any of the NATO allies. In a document called NSC-30, “the first formal expression of American atomic policy,” the United States deliberately left its options open regarding the use of nuclear weapons.53 After NSC-30, which effectively established the principle of linkage, America’s enemies knew that the atomic weapons in the arsenals of democracy would not just sit by while Europe or Asia was being overrun.

  At about the same time, an independent group of civilians established the Research and Development Corporation (RAND) as a think tank to study problems associated with nuclear warfare. RAND employees John D. Williams, mathematician John von Neumann, and others concluded that nuclear war was not “unthinkable”; quite the contrary, to prevent it, s
omeone should think about it. RAND developed studies that crystallized the armed forces’ concepts of how to use, and how to prevent the use of, nuclear weapons, essentially forming the theoretical basis for mutual assured destruction, or MAD.54

  Eisenhower, along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, further delineated America’s strategy in 1954 by making it clear the United States would, if necessary, use nuclear weapons even on nonnuclear countries that threatened American national interests. To the Soviets—who by then had their own nuclear arsenal—this sent a clear message that the United States would not be bullied. Wishing to keep the nuclear genie in his bottle, however, Eisenhower introduced a flexible response that allowed for a wide range of military options when confronted with local or regional threats.55 In short, Ike kept America’s enemies guessing and off balance, never sure if aggression might invoke a nuclear response. This tended to keep rogue nations cautious and, for the most part, peaceful.