The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  McCarthy next went after the Voice of America, the State Department’s Cold War propaganda arm, which Allen Dulles had helped create, absurdly declaring it another hotbed of Communist infestation. By April, 830 of the Voice of America’s 1,400 employees had been purged, including its chief.

  That same month, Cohn and Schine announced that they were setting off for Europe together to inspect the libraries maintained by U.S. embassies. These embassy libraries were supposed to be a “balanced collection of American thought”—showcases for U.S. tolerance and diversity. But Cohn and Schine were determined to cleanse the libraries of all books they suspected of a leftward tilt. The pair’s investigative junket, which one subpoenaed author labeled “a book burning,” turned into a public relations disaster for the United States, provoking widespread revulsion and ridicule in the European press.

  While visiting Frankfurt, Cohn and Schine found other ways to embarrass their country, according to a local newspaper, engaging in flirtatious antics in a hotel lobby and leaving their hotel room in a shambles after a vigorous round of horseplay that the reporter left up to the reader’s imagination. But instead of criticizing McCarthy’s rowdy henchmen, Foster Dulles dutifully culled the embassy libraries of all ideologically impure books, including works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Langston Hughes. Cohn even wanted to ban the soaringly American music of Aaron Copland from the libraries, which also loaned records, because the composer had made the mistake of signing petitions defending the civil rights of labor leader Harry Bridges and other beleaguered left-wing heroes.

  This was Washington at the dawn of the Eisenhower-Dulles era, when the most powerful men in the capital lived in fear of being served subpoenas by a drunken senator, when even John Foster Dulles trembled before McCarthy’s brute force. It would take Foster’s more iron-nerved brother to bring the beast to heel.

  In July 1953, after having his way with Foster Dulles’s State Department, McCarthy came after his brother’s CIA, announcing in his usual imprecise way that he possessed “tons” of evidence that revealed widespread Communist infiltration of the spy agency. McCarthy’s prime suspect was a bespectacled, Ivy League–educated CIA analyst named William Bundy, whose profile made him the perfect embodiment of the Dulles agency man. A member of Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society—breeding ground for future spooks—Bundy joined Army intelligence during the war, working at Bletchley Park in England as part of the Ultra operation that cracked Nazi codes. Dulles was close to Bundy’s father, Harvey, a top diplomat who had helped oversee the Marshall Plan, as well as his younger brother, McGeorge, another product of Skull and Bones and Army intelligence who had worked with Dulles at the Council on Foreign Relations and on the Dewey presidential campaign.

  McCarthy hoped to make Bill Bundy his Alger Hiss, and, in fact, one of the main pieces of incriminating evidence he waved against him was that Bundy had contributed $400 to the Alger Hiss defense fund. But the Bundys were solid members of Allen Dulles’s inner circle, and Dulles did not easily abandon men like Bundy. The spymaster finally decided to draw the line with McCarthy—and the ensuing, explosive confrontation led ultimately to the inquisitor’s downfall.

  Taking on McCarthy at the height of his power was a daunting task, even for the director of the CIA. Dulles knew that, despite J. Edgar Hoover’s growing doubts about McCarthy, the FBI still fed him a stream of damaging information about his Washington enemies. Hoover, a sworn rival ever since Dulles outmaneuvered him to create the CIA in 1947, had amassed a thick file on Dulles and his busy adulterous life. Hoover even suspected Dulles of “secret communist leanings,” a delusion as fantastic as any of McCarthy’s wild claims. At least one high-ranking CIA official—Robert Amory, the agency’s top intelligence analyst—was convinced that the FBI had tapped his office phone.

  But Dulles, too, was a master at this sort of game, and he made sure his agency kept its own files on Hoover. Jim Angleton liked to say that any intelligence service that didn’t keep a close eye on its own government wasn’t worth its salt. “Penetration begins at home,” he quipped. The CIA counterintelligence chief was rumored to occasionally show off photographic evidence of Hoover’s intimate relationship with FBI deputy Clyde Tolson, including a photo of Hoover orally pleasuring his longtime aide and companion. Dulles’s wisecracking mistress Mary Bancroft liked to call the FBI director “that Virgin Mary in pants,” but there was nothing virginal about Hoover.

  Dulles compiled even more scandalous files on Joe McCarthy’s sex life. The senator who relentlessly hunted down homosexuals in government was widely rumored to haunt the “bird circuit” near Grand Central Station as well as gay hideaways in Milwaukee. Drew Pearson got wind of the stories but was never able to get enough proof to run with them. But the less discriminating Hank Greenspun, editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, who was locked in an ugly war of words with McCarthy, let the allegations fly. Greenspun had been given access to the Pearson files, and he had picked up his own McCarthy stories involving young hotel bellboys and elevator operators during the senator’s gambling trips to Vegas. “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years,” wrote Greenspun. “He seldom dates girls and if he does, he laughingly describes it as window dressing. . . . It is common talk among homosexuals who rendezvous at the White Horse Inn [in Milwaukee] that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities.”

  McCarthy’s wedding announcement triggered more wicked chatter in the capital, where many saw it as an obvious ploy to dispel the rumors. The senator was as surprised as many others to read the announcement of his pending nuptials—it was his mother-in-law-to-be who placed the notice in the newspapers. McCarthy’s young bride was described in one gossip magazine as “a bright, shrewd and very ambitious young lady. ‘Opportunist’ was the word many people used.”

  One Hoover aide later denied the gay reports about McCarthy, insisting that the allegations were blowback against the senator because he had dared to take on the Dulles brothers. But Hoover kept his own secret files on McCarthy, one of which was filled with disturbing stories about McCarthy’s habit of drunkenly groping young girls’ breasts and buttocks. The stories were so widespread that they became “common knowledge” in the capital, according to one FBI chronicler. Walter Trohan, Washington bureau chief of the conservative Chicago Tribune, who witnessed McCarthy’s molesting behavior, said, “He just couldn’t keep his hands off young girls. Why the Communist opposition didn’t plant a minor on him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don’t know.”

  “The Communist opposition” might have missed the opportunity, but the CIA was clearly prepared to leak stories about McCarthy’s behavior—stories so sordid, they would have destroyed his career. This gave Dulles leverage in his battle with McCarthy that none of the senator’s other political opponents enjoyed. There was an explosive sexual subtext to the CIA’s power struggle with McCarthy, one that was largely hidden from the public but would eventually erupt in the Senate hearings that brought him down.

  What the public witnessed was fascinating enough: a clash of titans that verged on a constitutional crisis. When McCarthy tried to subpoena Bill Bundy, Dulles simply stonewalled him. The agency had Bundy spirited away to an undisclosed location, and when Roy Cohn called to demand that he testify before the subcommittee—that very day—he was told that Bundy was on leave. Walter Pforzheimer, the CIA’s legislative liaison, later remembered the phone call. “Roy was furious. . . . What a fight! Later that day, my secretary tracked me down to tell me Cohn wanted to talk to me [again]. And he wanted me to testify about Bundy’s file.” But Dulles simply “wouldn’t allow it.” When a subpoena arrived for Pforzheimer, the CIA director was unfazed. “Allen Dulles just took it and gave it to somebody. I wanted it for posterity, but no one’s ever found it.”

  On July 9, 1953, an outraged McCarthy took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Dulles’s “blatant attempt to thwart the authority of the Senate” and demanded that Dulles himself appear before his subcommittee. Dul
les still refused to bend, but he did drop by McCarthy’s office to explain his position. Because of the highly sensitive nature of the CIA’s work, Dulles informed the senator, his agency must be granted immunity from congressional investigations. McCarthy just had to take his word that there were no Communists hidden in the agency. If he ever did find any Reds, Dulles later explained to the press, “I’d kick them out. I have the power to do it and don’t have to have proof they work for the Kremlin. The fact that a man is a Communist would be enough.”

  Dulles’s defiant position on congressional oversight astonished even the anti-McCarthy Democrats on the subcommittee, like Senator Stuart Symington. But the CIA director never wavered from his stand, and he soon won Eisenhower’s support. Nixon was again dispatched to meet with McCarthy, to work out a face-saving way for the senator to back down. Soon after, McCarthy announced that he and Dulles had come to a mutual agreement to suspend the probe of the CIA. Dulles drove home his victory by making sure that his friends in the Washington press corps reported McCarthy’s losing confrontation with the CIA as a major humiliation for the senator.

  On July 17, syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop—a journalist so deeply entwined with the CIA that he once declared it was his patriotic duty to carry the agency’s water—announced that “Senator Joseph R. McCarthy has just suffered his first total, unmitigated, unqualified defeat. . . . [Administration strategists] have allowed McCarthy to conceal his defeat behind a typical smoke screen of misleading statements. But the background story proves that the junior Senator from Wisconsin went down for the count of ten, all the same.”

  Dulles proudly collected newspaper coverage of his battle with McCarthy. He was no doubt particularly pleased by one of the clippings he gathered, an article by The Buffalo Evening News’s Washington correspondent, which reported that the CIA director is “known here as ‘John Foster Dulles’s tougher, younger brother.’”

  Not all of the press reaction to Dulles’s display of defiance was so enthusiastic. Two journalistic pillars whom the CIA director considered old friends—syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann and New York Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin—took strong issue with the way Dulles had flouted Senate authority. “The argument that the CIA is something apart, that it is so secret that it differs in kind from the State Department or, for that matter, the Department of Agriculture, in untenable,” Lippmann opined. Baldwin struck an even more critical note, warning of “a philosophy of secrecy and power” taking hold in Washington under the banner of national security.

  But Dulles’s firm stand against McCarthy—a man Richard Helms compared to Goebbels—proved enormously popular within the CIA, particularly among the ranks of the liberal, intellectual types whom Dulles had recruited. While Dulles and his family were stalwart Republicans, he recognized that many of the most passionate Cold Warriors were ex-Communists and liberals who not only had firsthand knowledge of bare-knuckled Communist Party practices but were eager to prove their patriotism and join the American celebration. Dulles further cemented his position with this liberal crowd when he stood by CIA recruit Cord Meyer, another bright young product of Yale, who came under FBI suspicion in August 1953 for his postwar peace activities.

  After enduring years of relentless harassment from Red hunters, many Washington liberals cheered Dulles as a savior. His CIA became known as a haven for the intelligentsia and for others looked on with suspicion by McCarthyites. “I emerged from [my FBI] ordeal with increased respect for Allen Dulles,” Meyer later wrote. “Dulles proved to be a pillar of courageous strength inside the Eisenhower administration during the McCarthy era. Once he had determined the facts and satisfied himself as to the loyalty of a CIA official, he was prepared to defend him and he refused to give in to the pressures that McCarthy was able to bring to bear. As a result, morale within the agency was high during this period, in contrast to morale in the State Department where John Foster Dulles was less willing to defend the innocent victims of McCarthy’s campaign.”

  Dulles’s defiance of McCarthy won the widespread devotion of liberals, but it established a dangerous precedent. In his very first year as director, Dulles began molding an image of the CIA as a super agency, operating high above mere senators. The CIA would grow more powerful and less accountable with each passing year of Dulles’s reign.

  McCarthy never got over his rough treatment at the hands of the CIA, and he would threaten on more than one occasion to reopen his investigation of the agency. But if he had, he might have encountered an even more severe response. In March 1954, McCarthy’s subcommittee convened a hearing on “alleged threats against the chairman.” One witness—a military intelligence officer named William Morgan who had worked for C. D. Jackson in the White House—stunned the subcommittee by recounting a conversation that he had the previous year with a CIA employee named Horace Craig. As the two men were discussing how to solve the McCarthy problem, Craig flatly stated, “It may be necessary to liquidate Senator McCarthy as was [assassinated Louisiana senator] Huey Long. There is always some madman who will do it for a price.”

  The Dulles slapdown of McCarthy proved to be a fateful turning point for the senator, inspiring a new boldness within the Eisenhower administration that would lead to his collapse. A month later, in August 1953, when McCarthy took aim at Reds in the Agriculture Department, of all places, Nixon advised Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson to “take a firm stand, like Allen Dulles, if McCarthy gets out of line.” In September, after returning from his honeymoon, McCarthy made his final—and fatal—mistake, by taking on another central institution of U.S. national security, the Army.

  Like Foster Dulles, the spineless Army Secretary, a former textile executive named Robert Ten Broeck Stevens, had done everything he could to appease McCarthy, but the senator had only grown more frothing in his attacks, accusing the Army of sloppy security measures that had led to the hiring of subversive civilians. At one point, McCarthy dragged a decorated D-day hero, General Ralph W. Zwicker, before his panel and dressed him down like he was a bumbling Beetle Bailey, barking at the dignified, ramrod-stiff officer that he was “not fit to wear that uniform.”

  Much of the anti-Army spleen in the McCarthy office was inspired by the adolescent frustrations of the senator’s twenty-six-year-old chief counsel, Roy Cohn. When Cohn’s boyfriend, David Schine, was drafted into the Army in October 1953, McCarthy’s point man began frantically pulling strings on his behalf. Assigned to Fort Dix in New Jersey for basic training, Schine was showered with special privileges, including frequent exemptions from KP duty and weekend passes so he could be chauffeured to New York City for R&R with Cohn. (Their chauffeur would later testify that the two men also used his vehicle’s backseat for their passionate reunions.) Schine, who found his Army issue boots uncomfortable, was even allowed to wear custom-made boots. When Cohn was told that his boyfriend might be transferred overseas, he flew into a rage. “We’ll wreck the Army,” he spluttered at the Army’s liaison to the subcommittee. “The Army will be ruined . . . if you pull a dirty, lousy, stinking, filthy, shitty double cross like that.”

  After months of trying to manage McCarthy, Eisenhower finally reached his breaking point. In February 1954, Massachusetts Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a close ally of the president, privately warned that the Army investigation was “an attempt to destroy the president politically. There is no doubt about it. He is picking on the Army because Eisenhower was in the Army.” The following month, the president authorized Lodge to ask for the publication of a damning report that the Army had been secretly compiling on the numerous ways that McCarthy and Cohn had bullied and blackmailed military authorities on Schine’s behalf. In response to the scorching Schine report, McCarthy’s subcommittee removed him as chairman and called for hearings on the Army’s allegations. The stage was set for the Army-McCarthy hearings, a televised spectacle that turned the inquisitional tables on the senator and finally ended his infamous reign.

  McCarthy—who was allowed to pa
rticipate in the proceedings—gave his usual crude performance, badgering witnesses and shouting “point of order” whenever he felt the urge to disrupt the drama. But captured in the glare of the TV lights, his coarse act had a repellent effect on the viewing public. By the time the Army’s distinguished Boston attorney, Joseph Nye Welch, uttered his devastating and instantly memorable line—“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”—the American people knew the answer.

  In December 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, and he continued his slide toward oblivion, drinking more and more heavily until he was polishing off a bottle of the hard stuff a day. By 1956, those who knew the senator were describing him as a “sick pigeon” suffering from a host of physical ailments and shuttling in and out of detox. During a visit home to Wisconsin in September, he was seized by delirium tremens and saw snakes flying at him. In May 1957, he was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he died of acute liver failure at age forty-eight. Joe McCarthy had drunk himself to death.

  McCarthy’s confrontation with the Army would become famous for his undoing, but it was his earlier battle with Allen Dulles that had drawn first blood and made him vulnerable. As McCarthy’s stature in Washington shrank, Dulles’s grew. No politician during the Eisenhower era would ever again seriously challenge the CIA director’s rule. With his Washington power base secure, Dulles was ready to take on the world.

  10

  The Dulles Imperium

  On the afternoon of August 18, 1953, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the thirty-three-year-old shah of Iran, and his glamorous twenty-one-year-old wife, Queen Soraya, swept into the gilded lobby of the Hotel Excelsior on Rome’s fashionable Via Veneto. The young royal couple cut a striking image, with the slim shah wearing a trimly tailored, light gray, double-breasted suit and dark glasses, and his petite, voluptuous queen calling to mind the exotic beauty of Sophia Loren. Soraya was half Persian and half German and had almond-shaped, green-blue eyes described as the most beautiful in the world by an Italian director who years later cast her as the leading lady in one of his movies. But on this day, the Iranian royals looked “worn, gloomy and anxious” in the words of a Times of London reporter—one of a flock of scribblers and paparazzi who had swarmed the couple when they disembarked from their BOAC plane at Ciampino Airport and pursued them to their hotel. Back home in Tehran, violent mobs controlled the streets of the capital, and after twenty-eight years on the Peacock Throne, the Pahlavi dynasty seemed on the verge of collapse. Fearing for their lives, the shah and his wife had fled his homeland carrying only a couple of suitcases, taking off in his private Beechcraft jet for Baghdad—the first leg of their journey—with such haste that they forgot to take the queen’s beloved dog.