Against that backdrop, it was perhaps unsurprising that when pressures were exerted on Lawton to ease up on security removals at Monmouth, those pressures came via Adams. Indicative of the process, and sharp clash of views, was an Adams-Lawton phone call in October concerning employees scheduled for suspension. Lawton himself would record this exchange as follows: “Adams asked Lawton on the phone, ‘I hope you can see your way clear to withdraw certain cases which you have recommended for removal as bad security risks.’ Lawton: ‘I would not. Let the secretary take the responsibility.’”5 That put the conflict in a nutshell.
In substance this was confirmed by Adams, who said there were nine Monmouth suspensions Lawton’s bosses wanted him to reverse but that the general refused to do so. The critical nature of the episode was underscored as well by Stevens, who later discussed it with General Back, Chief Signal Officer of the Army. “I am a little concerned,” said Stevens, “over General Lawton’s continuing to suspend people at Monmouth…[He] is suspending people we haven’t got anything on and we will have to take them back…When he suspends a fellow because he lives next door to a person who thought he was a Communist, that just isn’t going to do us any good.”*279 6
Things would turn still worse for Lawton a few weeks later, after he gave a series of security briefings to Monmouth workers. Though these talks were supposedly off the record, the contents of one—or what were said to be such—were leaked to New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press. In this bootlegged account, Lawton once more allegedly sang the praises of McCarthy, commending him for helping get results at Monmouth and for the “fairness and courtesy” of the hearings. The general then added, according to the news report, that security problems at the post stemmed from graduates of certain universities—CCNY foremost among them (which was of course quite true).7
By this time the Monmouth dispute was not only changing direction but undergoing a complete inversion. Somewhere in the higher reaches, the perceived problem at the research complex wasn’t the presence of such as Aaron Coleman, Barry Bernstein, Samuel Snyder, Harry Hyman, or Ruth Levine, the hemorrhaging of secret papers, or the Rosenberg-Sobell contacts who had been hanging around the place for years. Instead the main problem to be dealt with was the budding McCarthyite, security hawk, and too-talkative witness—the commanding general of the installation.
Accordingly, in the manner of Colonel Allen and Captain Sheehan, Lawton would himself become a target of suspicion and a candidate for removal. In late November 1953, General Back obtained from Lawton and conveyed to Stevens a memo on the employee briefings—the predictable sense of which was that they had simply been attempts to make workers more security-conscious. Stevens was not impressed. A Senate memo capsuling Back’s tête-à-tête with Stevens says, “Secretary Stevens questioned whether General Lawton was fit to continue in command at Monmouth, or should be relieved.” Underscoring this all-but-explicit threat, the memo added that, on this same occasion, “General Lawton physically appeared outside Secretary Stevens’ office. Stevens did not care to see him.” For those who could read such obvious portents, Lawton’s Monmouth days were numbered.*280 8
Actually getting rid of Lawton, however, would prove to be a tricky business. Though his views and actions were now seen as unbeneficial to “the Army,” any move to oust him might trigger a reaction from McCarthy, and that wouldn’t be too beneficial, either. Adams tried to test the waters, asking Cohn what McCarthy’s reaction would be if Lawton were relieved at Monmouth. As might be guessed, the answer wasn’t enthusiastic, so Lawton’s job, for the time being, was officially safe. There would be no overt or immediate ouster.
Instead, something more circuitous was attempted: a subliminal effort to crack down on Lawton while he ostensibly remained in charge at Monmouth. He was told to stop attending hearings and otherwise pull back from collaboration with McCarthy. He would then be placed on “medical disability,” complaint unspecified, and sent to Walter Reed Hospital, though people who visited him there said he seemed in good health. Meanwhile, Stevens in his public statements continued to tell the world Lawton was still in charge at Monmouth. The evident purpose of all this was to keep McCarthy at bay and avoid a public blowup, while surreptitiously squelching Lawton.
A further remarkable chapter in the Lawton story would be written in the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954. As these were intensely focused on Fort Monmouth, Lawton would have been an obvious person to hear from. Senators of both parties urged that he be called, and it was stated he would be. (As for Lawton’s own outlook, according to one press account, he was “hopping mad” and anxious to have his say in public.)9 But, in the fashion of Scott McLeod, Lawton would be strangely absent from the proceedings. Nor did Cohn and McCarthy, whose cause would have been helped by his testimony, insist that he be called. This was puzzling to John McClellan, who quizzed Cohn as to his seeming lack of interest in hearing Lawton.10 Only later would an answer be provided. The McCarthy forces had been told that, if the general did appear, he would be punished further—losing benefits he was to receive as a long-serving member of the Army.
For this insight we are once more indebted to John Adams, who would relate that Sen. Karl Mundt (R-S.D.), Cohn, and others wanted to call Lawton but were warned off by Army spokesmen playing big-league hardball. The general, said Adams, “could not very well claim [publicly] that Stevens had driven him out of the Army, lest he lose his medical benefits. On the day Lawton was to testify, John Pernice, the Signal Corps chief counsel, met Cohn in Mundt’s office and asked the two of them, ‘are you prepared to do this to General Lawton?’ Lawton was not called.”*281 11
Mundt and the McCarthy forces weren’t “prepared to do this” to Lawton, but his superiors were prepared to do things to him and would in short order prove it. Once the Army-McCarthy hearings were over and the public spotlight had gone elsewhere, the administration proceeded to finish breaking Lawton. Having already been passed over for promotion and sent to medical coventry at Walter Reed, Lawton would be removed from his command in the summer of 1954 and by the end of August retired from active duty. His premonition of the wrath to come had not been mistaken.
BY COOPERATING with McCarthy, praising the work of the committee, and speaking his mind on security matters, Lawton not only blighted his career but ended it entirely. A second general pulled into the security whirlwind would learn to read the warning signs, take the opposite fork in the road, and thus achieve official favor. This was Gen. Ralph W. Zwicker, a much-decorated veteran of World War II and now commander at Camp Kilmer, another Army post located in New Jersey, near New Brunswick.
In the course of the Monmouth probe, McCarthy and Co. received a tip about security goings-on at Kilmer that might be worth some digging. Following up on this, in late January 1954, committee staffer George Anastos placed a call to General Zwicker, saying he had heard of a security problem at the post involving someone in the medical corps but didn’t know much else about it. Zwicker, not sure who was on the line, said he would call back, and an hour later did so.
The resulting conversation was momentous, as it led to not one but two historic McCarthy cases. With the relevant file before him, the general gave Anastos the name of the security suspect, said he was in the dental corps, and provided other data capsuled by Anastos in a memo for committee records. The next morning, Zwicker would call Anastos again, confirming what he had previously suggested, that the suspect was now scheduled for an honorable discharge. The general had gone an extra furlong to help McCarthy’s staffer.
The suspect in question, as everyone would soon discover, was Dr. Irving Peress, a New York dentist drafted during the Korean War and given the entering rank of captain (as reflective of his professional civilian status).*282 He was also, according to sworn testimony and official records, a member of the Communist Party. This unlikely officer would soon become quite famous, subject of a pro-McCarthy rallying cry, “Who promoted Peress?” sounded often in the 1950s. And there were several other que
stions about the case that likewise needed answers.
At his induction, it developed, Peress had signed a statement—form 390—in effect foreswearing allegiance to the Communist Party or any other subversive group. But thereafter, in executing other, similar forms, he gave a different answer—equivalent to the Fifth Amendment—pleading “constitutional privilege.” This not only meant he was unwilling to say whether he was a CP member, but by obvious implication suggested he swore falsely in his prior statement.
The matter of the loyalty forms (backed by other Army data) should have been enough to have Peress discharged forthwith, on a less-than-honorable basis. Instead, he had led a seemingly charmed existence—moving blithely from post to post, always a step ahead of his security records (once forwarded to the wrong command), so that nine months elapsed before the brass would focus clearly on the problem. Along the way, he received favored “compassionate” treatment in terms of posting, plus automatic promotion to the rank of major. Now there was to be an honorable discharge in the bargain.
Learning some of this, an incredulous Joe McCarthy called Peress before him at a hearing on January 30. At this session, Peress would be identified in sworn testimony by undercover police agent Ruth Eagle as a member of the Communist Party in New York and an alumnus of a Red leadership school in Queens. When Peress took the stand, rather than denying the identification, he proceeded to cite the Fifth Amendment across the board. Some of the exchanges went as follows:
COHN: When you went down to Camp Kilmer…did you attempt to recruit any of the military personnel there into the Communist Party?
PERESS: I again claim the [Fifth Amendment] privilege.
COHN: When stationed at Camp Kilmer, did you have Communist Party meetings in your home, attended by one or more military personnel from Camp Kilmer?
PERESS: I again claim the privilege.
McCARTHY: Is there a Communist cell at Camp Kilmer of which you are a member?
PERESS: I again claim the privilege.
McCARTHY: Did you not organize a Communist cell at Camp Kilmer?
PERESS: I again claim the privilege.12
Amazed to have before him an Army officer named as a Communist, who took the Fifth Amendment about it, had recently been promoted, and was now scheduled for an honorable discharge, McCarthy immediately fired off a letter to the Army, hand-delivered to the Pentagon. This urged that Peress’s honorable discharge be canceled, thus keeping him within the jurisdiction of the Army, and that he be held over for court-martial. Since Stevens was at this point on a trip to Asia, the letter was instead received, at a fateful moment, by Army counselor Adams.
Adams could at this point have held up the honorable discharge but, by his own account, in a sudden vindictive mood decided not to. (“…I found myself deciding not to do what McCarthy demanded, and instead, to let the dentist go. In short, to hell with McCarthy.”)13 Thus, on February 2, the day after McCarthy’s letter was received, Irving Peress ended his magical mystery tour in the Army with an honorable exit. The Pentagon, in the person of John Adams, had done the exact reverse of what McCarthy suggested.
Now thoroughly outraged, McCarthy redoubled his efforts to find out how such a thing could happen, a quest leading back to base commander Zwicker. On February 13, McCarthy staffer James Juliana went up to Kilmer to interview the general and came back with further background on Peress and the impression, reinforcing the Anastos contacts, that Zwicker would be an informative and friendly witness. Specifically, as Juliana would testify, Zwicker said he was opposed to the honorable discharge of Peress. (“In fact,” as Juliana later put it, “if Zwicker had testified on the stand to what he told me at Camp Kilmer, there is no question that it would have confirmed McCarthy’s point about laxness in the Army’s handling of security suspects.”)14
Zwicker was thus scheduled to come before McCarthy, at an executive hearing, on the afternoon of February 18. It proved to be a stormy session. Zwicker would later say he was edgy and apprehensive, and that this affected his performance. McCarthy for his part had been sleepless the night before, as his wife had been injured in an auto accident, and he had been with her at the hospital until the small hours of the morning and again at noon the day of Zwicker’s appearance. McCarthy rushed into the hearing room so frazzled his staffers wanted to postpone the session.
It would have been far better for all concerned if they had. What happened that afternoon shed no glory on McCarthy, but also none on Zwicker. Expected to be a knowledgeable and forthcoming witness, the general was neither. Instead, he bobbed and weaved, fenced verbally with McCarthy, and refused to answer many questions about the weird career and honorable discharge of Peress. As this cat-and-mouse game went on, McCarthy became increasingly angry and peremptory in his questions.
Particularly infuriating to McCarthy were pleas of ignorance with which Zwicker peppered his responses, ignorance McCarthy had reason to know was feigned. When asked why he hadn’t himself held up the honorable discharge, Zwicker claimed he didn’t know about Peress’s Red connections. (“I was never officially informed by anyone that he was part of the Communist conspiracy.”)15 The general further implausibly said he was unaware of the well-publicized fact that Peress had taken the Fifth Amendment about his Red affiliations.
All this was dicey, but would get more so when McCarthy analogized the case to that of a GI accused of stealing $50. In that instance, he asked, would Zwicker have blocked an honorable discharge until the matter was settled? The general said he would. Then why, asked McCarthy, didn’t you block an honorable discharge for someone accused of something a good deal worse? To this Zwicker didn’t have much of an answer, except that he was following orders.*283
McCarthy then posed a hypothetical case in which an officer okayed an honorable discharge for an identified Red who took the Fifth Amendment—all based on the facts about Peress. In this instance, McCarthy asked, should the general who signed the order for the honorable discharge be kept on in the military? After several evasive comments, Zwicker finally answered, “I do not think he should be removed from the military.” Whereupon McCarthy blew up and uttered the words that would thereafter plague him:
“Then, General, you should be removed from any command. Any general who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says ‘I will protect another general who protected Communists’ is not fit to wear that uniform, General. I think it is a tremendous disgrace to the Army to have this sort of thing given to the public.”16
With this outburst McCarthy added another blotted page to the catalog of his famed abuses. It was indeed a grievous error thus to address a decorated combat hero, however evasive or false his statements—so much so it would eventually become one of the two counts officially voted by a Senate panel weighing McCarthy’s projected censure. In the end, however, McCarthy’s fellow senators refused to follow through on Zwicker. There was a widespread perception that the general had provoked the tirade, as in fact he did, and the votes couldn’t be found to censure McCarthy for it. (See Chapter 44.)
And, as things turned out, that was not the half of it. Ultimately, the case would be reviewed by three committees of Congress—including an exhaustive inquiry chaired by John McClellan—whose findings would cast an entirely different light on Zwicker’s conduct. Chief among these was that, far from being ignorant of the data on Peress, the general knew most of what was to be known about him. In fact, Zwicker himself had protested the lenient treatment of Peress in terms not too different from McCarthy’s. On October 21, 1953, Zwicker had written the commanding general of the First Army: “This officer [Peress] refused to sign a loyalty certificate, and refused to answer an interrogatory concerning his affiliation with subversive organizations, claiming constitutional privilege…” The presence of Peress in the U.S. Army, said Zwicker, “is clearly not consistent with the interest of national security.”17
Thereafter, on November 3, 1953, when Zwicker learned about the Peress promotion, he sent still another
letter to First Army, repeating the point about the loyalty forms and adding: “Investigation completed April 15, 1953, determined that this officer was a known and active Communist in Queens N.Y.”18 (Emphasis added.) This was some three months before Zwicker swore on the witness stand that he hadn’t been told about the Red activities and background of Peress.
On top of these disclosures, evidence would emerge from the Anastos phone logs that Zwicker had given the Peress info to the committee in the first place. Zwicker admitted that, in these talks, he named Peress, said the suspect was a dentist, and that he was scheduled for an honorable discharge. But, according to Anastos, the news from Zwicker went beyond this, including the fact that Peress had been identified as a CP member. Backing this testimony was committee staffer Mary Morrill, who had listened in on the Anastos-Zwicker conversation.19
Small wonder, then, that the McCarthy forces believed Zwicker would be a helpful witness, or that McCarthy was dumbfounded when he wasn’t. It was this 180-degree U-turn that most inflamed McCarthy. Nor was the reversal lost on other members of the Senate. Georgia Democrat Richard Russell, in later questioning of Zwicker, would say: “…at this hearing, it appears that your earlier attitude of, I might say, friendly helpfulness, changed to one of hostility. What caused your attitude to change?”20
That was of course the $64,000 question, to which Zwicker addressed some sketchy answers, only one of which proved salient: that, on February 17, the day before his set-to with McCarthy, he received a flying visit from Army counsel Adams. And though Zwicker was vague about what happened at this meeting, it was apparent to members of the Senate that this changed everything, turning a potentially friendly witness into one hostile and evasive.*284 The point would be confirmed, again, by the forthright-in-hindsight Adams.
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