The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  By early 1952, the Dulles brothers had come to agree that throwing their support behind the popular war hero was their best path to the White House. In May, Foster flew to France, meeting with the general twice at NATO headquarters in Fontainebleau and urging him to run. The two men did not immediately hit it off. Foster was uncharacteristically diffident and uncertain in the presence of the legendary warrior. Eisenhower, accustomed to crisp military briefings, found Foster’s discursive and lawyerly monologues boring. Foster quickly wore out the general’s patience, which he was in the habit of communicating by tapping out a restless drumbeat on his knee with a pencil and, when that failed to end the ordeal, by gazing blankly at the ceiling and “signaling the end of all mental contact,” in the words of one aide. Foster later brought out the wicked wit in Churchill, who proclaimed him “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”

  But the foreign policy paper that Foster presented to Eisenhower in France was far from dull. The memo, which Foster appropriately titled “A Policy of Boldness,” urged the next president to take a much sharper stand against the Soviet bloc than Truman, aiming to roll back Communism in Eastern Europe rather than simply containing it. Foster called for an escalation of the underground war against Moscow that his brother was already operating, including a redoubled commitment to psychological warfare. “We should be dynamic, we should use ideas as weapons, and these ideas should conform to moral principles. That we do this is right, for it is the inevitable expression of a faith—and I am confident that we still do have a faith.” Foster’s paper had the italicized cadences of a preacher’s sermon; it was filled with the missionary fervor that had run for generations through his family.

  Foster was at his most zealous in his discussion of nuclear arms policy. He proposed an unsettling shift in thinking about America’s fearsome nuclear arsenal, moving away from the concept of doomsday weapons as an instrument of last resort to one of first resort. The United States must reserve the right to massively retaliate against any Soviet aggression in the world, wherever and whenever it chose, he wrote. By making it clear to the world that Washington was not afraid to wield its nuclear arms as if they were conventional weapons of war, the United States would gain a commanding strategic advantage. It was the type of leverage enjoyed by a heavily armed madman in a crowded room. But Foster had a more diplomatic way of expressing it. Weapons of mass destruction “in the hands of statesmen . . . could serve as effective political weapons in defense of peace.”

  Foster further sweetened his argument by pointing out that a nuclear-based military strategy would help contain the growing costs of America’s “far-flung, extravagant” defense complex that was threatening to bankrupt the nation. Instead of maintaining an expensive troop presence at every global flashpoint, Foster wrote, all the United States had to do was keep a ready finger on its nuclear trigger.

  Even master of war Eisenhower was initially taken aback by Foster’s proposal for a “first-use” nuclear strategy. After making his presentation to the noncommittal general, Foster returned to his suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where he frantically paced the room, telling a confidant that Eisenhower somehow failed to grasp that the world was facing a dire Soviet threat. But Eisenhower did share Foster’s passionate anti-Communism. And the cost efficiencies of the massive retaliation strategy appealed to the budget-minded general, who was equally concerned about the growing burden of military spending on the economy. So began the reign of nuclear terror—or “brinksmanship”—that would hold the world in its grip for the next decade.

  Foster’s new “policy of boldness” became a centerpiece of Eisenhower’s presidential campaign, and the Wall Street lawyer was widely touted as the next secretary of state. Henry Luce helped enshrine Foster by running his foreign policy paper in Life magazine in May 1952. “No one has a broader bipartisan understanding of U.S. foreign policy than John Foster Dulles,” stated the respectful biography that accompanied the article.

  After Foster was duly confirmed as secretary of state in January 1953—a position he had long coveted and felt he was destined to hold—he addressed several hundred foreign service employees gathered in front of the State Department building in Foggy Bottom. The weather was uncomfortably cold, but the sixty-five-year-old Foster stood on the steps overlooking the crowd with a sturdy self-confidence—a “solid tree trunk of a man,” in the words of one biographer, “gnarled and weathered and durable.” He carried himself like someone who owned the place. “I don’t suppose there is any family in the United States,” he told his assembled workforce, “which has been for so long identified with the Foreign Service and the State Department as my own family.”

  Once installed at Foggy Bottom, Foster quickly took command of Eisenhower’s foreign policy, elbowing aside other experts in international affairs who sought the president’s ear. Sherman Adams, President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, found the new secretary of state a “tough-fibered individual . . . an aristocrat in his own domain” who insisted on maintaining his own direct line to the president. Foster was “a rather secretive person,” Adams added, who assiduously deflected efforts by the White House staff to enter the tight loop he had built with the commander in chief. After their initial uneasiness with each other, Eisenhower ultimately decided that even though his secretary of state was “a bit sticky at first . . . he has a heart of gold when you know him.” Foster soon had Eisenhower “in his palm,” observed a State Department aide.

  Allen Dulles felt as firmly entitled to run the CIA under Eisenhower as his brother did the State Department. The junior Dulles had worked uncomplainingly for two years as Walter Bedell Smith’s deputy director at the agency, though he had considerably more intelligence experience than “Beetle.” Dulles good-naturedly put up with the crusty general’s foulmouthed explosions, with the expectation that Smith would anoint him his successor. “The general was in fine form this morning, wasn’t he? Ha, ha, ha!” Dulles would chuckle, after returning to his office from what his CIA colleagues called one of Smith’s “fanny-chewing sessions.”

  During the 1952 presidential race, Dulles proved his loyalty to the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign by channeling funds to the Republican ticket through CIA front groups and by leaking embarrassing intelligence reports to the media about the Truman administration’s handling of the Korean War—flagrant violations of the CIA charter that forbids agency involvement in domestic politics.

  But even though Smith recruited Dulles for the agency and made him his deputy, he never warmed up to his number two man. “Beetle”—who, as Eisenhower’s former wartime aide, enjoyed unique access to the president-elect—became an impediment to Dulles’s CIA ascension following the Republican victory. “After two years of close personal observation,” wrote a CIA historian, “Smith lacked confidence in Dulles’s self-restraint.” The general felt that Dulles was too enamored of the dark arts of the spy trade. Smith would tell friends that running the CIA sometimes made it necessary to leave his moral values outside the door. But, he quickly added, clinging to his soldierly code of conduct, “You’d damned well better remember exactly where you left them.”

  Dulles struck Smith as a man who was all too blithe about abandoning his scruples. The deputy CIA director had no qualms about advocating the assassination of foreign leaders, even presenting a plan to Smith in early 1952 to kill Stalin at a Paris summit meeting. Smith firmly rejected the plan. He shuddered at the thought of Dulles taking over the top spot at the agency.

  As Smith prepared to step down at the CIA, he lobbied against Dulles as his replacement, advising Eisenhower that it would be politically unwise to have the brother of the secretary of state serve as the administration’s intelligence chief. Instead, Smith urged Eisenhower to select another one of his agency deputies, Lyman Kirkpatrick. Like Dulles, Kirkpatrick was a product of Princeton and had an impressive espionage résumé dating back to the war—but, as his career at the CIA would prove, he also had a well-tuned sense of proper conduct. (Years later, Kirkpatrick would be call
ed upon to direct the internal investigation of the Bay of Pigs debacle that nearly ruined the agency, doing such an honest job that some CIA old boys, including Dulles himself, never forgave him.)

  Despite Beetle Smith’s close ties to Eisenhower, he found himself outmaneuvered by the Dulles brothers. Anticipating Smith’s objections, Foster got to Eisenhower first and convinced him that having his brother in charge of the CIA would actually be an asset, ensuring smooth cooperation in the running of foreign policy. When Smith began making his case against Dulles, Eisenhower cut him off, telling his old friend that he had already talked to Foster, who saw no problem at all with a fraternal reign of power.

  Smith had never really stood a chance of blocking Allen Dulles. Eisenhower was deeply beholden to the Wall Street Republican power brokers who had not only recruited him for the presidential race but had helped finance his electoral battle, loaned him one of their own—white-shoe lawyer Herbert Brownell Jr.—to run his campaign, and had even tapped Dick Nixon as his running mate. The Dewey-Dulles group was Ike’s brain trust and bank. When these men spoke, the general listened.

  Under Allen Dulles, the CIA would become a vast kingdom, the most powerful and least supervised agency in government. Dulles built his towering citadel with the strong support of President Eisenhower, who, despite occasional misgivings about the spymaster’s unrestrained ways, consistently protected him from his Washington enemies. As America extended its postwar reach around the world, with hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries and U.S. oil, mining, agribusiness, and manufacturing corporations operating on every continent, Eisenhower saw the CIA (along with the Pentagon’s nuclear firepower) as the most cost-effective way to enforce American interests overseas. Presidential historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of The Declassified Eisenhower, initially regarded Ike as “a presidential pacifist.” But after examining the administration’s documentary evidence for her 1981 book, Cook arrived at the conclusion that “America’s most popular hero was America’s most covert president. Eisenhower participated in his own cover-up. His presidency involved a thorough and ambitious crusade marked by covert operations that depended on secrecy for their success.”

  The rise of Dulles’s spy complex in the 1950s would further undermine a U.S. democracy that, as Mills observed, was already seriously compromised by growing corporate power. The mechanisms of surveillance and control that Dulles put in motion were more in keeping with an expanding empire than they were with a vibrant democracy. As journalist David Halberstam later observed, “The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington—the transition from an isolationist America to imperial colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did. . . . What was evolving was a closed state within an open state.”

  On a bright afternoon in September 1953, forty-three-year-old Senator Joseph McCarthy married his office aide, a twenty-nine-year-old former college beauty queen named Jean Kerr, with great pomp and ceremony at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. Pope Pius XII bestowed his apostolic blessing on the couple, and twelve hundred guests—including Vice President Nixon, CIA director Allen Dulles, and young senator John F. Kennedy, whose father was a strong McCarthy supporter—crowded into the cathedral for the nuptials. Afterward, McCarthy and his new wife were whisked away by limousine to a celebrity-studded party held amid the Beaux-Arts splendor of the Patterson Mansion on Dupont Circle, where the couple cut their towering wedding cake and prizefighter Jack Dempsey kissed the bride. Feted by the capital’s political luminaries and Hollywood royalty, McCarthy stood at the pinnacle of his power on his wedding day. Packed into his monkey suit and slugging champagne, the thick-built Washington heavyweight with the dark-stubbled jaw had the champion swagger of Dempsey himself.

  The Republican senator had come a long way from the Wisconsin dairy farm where he had grown up. He had financed his political rise by taking payoffs from Pepsi-Cola bottlers and prefab construction moguls. In truth, he never lost his taste for the glitzy swag of politics. One of his wedding gifts, it was reported, was a pink Cadillac Coupe de Ville presented to him by a Houston businessman who shared his militant anti-Communism.

  By 1953, McCarthy’s anti-Red witch hunt was in full blaze, torching the careers of distinguished senators and statesmen and even beginning to flicker ominously outside the White House itself. The FBI’s Hoover, long a powerful supporter, was growing increasingly anxious about McCarthy’s inflamed ambitions. That summer Hoover warned the new administration that he had learned there was a “conspiracy” to sabotage Eisenhower’s presidency and replace Ike with the hard-charging Wisconsin senator.

  The carnival of shame and humiliation that McCarthy brought to Washington held the capital in its grip from February 1950—when he delivered the infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that kicked off his inquisition (“I have in my hand a list of names . . .”)—to December 1954, when the Senate finally voted to censure him, triggering his rapid political and physical collapse. No one—from the loftiest general or cabinet member to the lowliest government clerk—was immune from Joe McCarthy’s suspicious gaze. When he ran out of alleged Communist sympathizers to drag before his Kafkaesque-sounding Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he began prowling the halls of Washington in search of closeted homosexuals—or “powder puffs,” as he liked to call them.

  The florid McCarthy pageant is a fascinating case study in the dynamics of Washington power. The senator was a glaring outsider in the capital’s elite salons—a crude, hard-drinking ex-marine. He seemed to defy the neat power categories of C. Wright Mills, fueled more by the sort of ideological fervor, demagoguery, and murky sponsorship that would characterize the later Tea Party era of American politics.

  McCarthy was not educated at Ivy League schools, and he was never courted by Wall Street firms. He had worked his way through law school at Marquette University in Milwaukee by pumping gas and going door-to-door selling caulking compound for doors and windows. He liked to drink bourbon, and in 1952, when an operation for a herniated diaphragm cut him open from gut to shoulder and left him in chronic pain, he drank harder still. Even after he was elected to the august U.S. Senate, he carried around a barroom bully’s sense of grievance. He once assaulted Drew Pearson in the cloakroom of the exclusive Sulgrave Club, pinning the muckraker’s arms behind him and kneeing him in the balls—vicious payback for all the columns Pearson had written about McCarthy’s career. And yet, backed in the beginning by Hoover’s investigative apparatus, as well as by the Catholic Church and the right-wing Hearst and McCormick press, the thuggish senator was able to turn his chairmanship of the previously obscure subcommittee into one of the capital’s most powerful perches. Washington’s VIPs hated and feared him, but most paid homage to him.

  McCarthy was a monster of the Republican leadership’s own creation. By the time he claimed the national spotlight in 1950, the GOP had long been using the dark incantations of “treason” and “un-Americanism” for political advantage against the Democrats. It was only a matter of time before a specter like McCarthy began to rise up in this toxic atmosphere. Nixon had exploited these themes to great effect in his congressional and Senate races, as did Tom Dewey—though with less success—in his 1948 presidential campaign. Despite Truman’s victory, he was constantly on the defensive against Republican charges that Communists were honeycombed throughout the federal bureaucracy. In response, Truman imposed a loyalty test on federal employees and created an extensive surveillance apparatus to go with it, which turned up few real security threats. He also shredded the Bill of Rights by unleashing a wave of prosecutions against Communist Party officials, thereby effectively outlawing the party and demolishing much of the organized left. Realizing that he had crossed a constitutional Rubicon, a troubled Truman wrote to Eleanor Roo
sevelt—the New Deal’s aging but unbending icon—and insisted that he was not trying to set off a witch hunt. But that’s indeed what he did.

  As Eisenhower took over the White House in 1953, it was uncertain whether the most dynamic force in Washington would be the new president or the senator from Wisconsin. Eisenhower confided that he reviled McCarthy nearly as much as he had Hitler—but he kept pulling back from confronting him. When Ike had ventured into McCarthy’s home state during the 1952 campaign, making a whistle stop in Green Bay, the senator shared the platform with him. Before speaking to the crowd, Eisenhower leaned over to McCarthy and told him, “I’m going to say that I disagree with you.” McCarthy looked the general squarely in the face: “If you say that, you’ll be booed.” Eisenhower stood his ground. “I’ve been booed before.” But when it came time to speak, Eisenhower buckled, carefully smoothing over their differences.

  The GOP campaign in 1952 thoroughly embraced McCarthyism. Nixon took the leading Republican role as hatchet man so that Eisenhower could assume a more dignified posture; in September Nixon vowed to make the “Communist conspiracy” the “theme of every speech from now until election.” McCarthy, in turn, performed loyally for the party, putting his gutter techniques to use at the service of the campaign. Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, he declared in a widely broadcast speech in October, “would continue the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation.” At one point McCarthy pretended to confuse Stevenson with the accused traitor Hiss, calling him “Alger—I mean Adlai.”

  But after Eisenhower’s victory, McCarthy quickly made clear that he considered the new Republican administration fair game. The monster was loose and nobody in Washington was safe. Before the Dulles-dominated Eisenhower administration could get on with its ambitious plans for running the world, it first had to secure the capital, where the dangerous senator continued to make strong men cower. During the first year of Eisenhower’s presidency, McCarthy would boldly target the three institutions at the very center of Washington’s global power: the State Department, the CIA, and finally the Army.