Finally, McCarthy stood the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees protection against self-incrimination, on its head. In McCarthy’s world, anyone who “took the Fifth” to avoid testimony about communist associations was obviously a communist. When Albert Einstein, a refugee from Nazi Germany, openly urged his colleagues to refuse to speak in McCarthy’s hearings, even if it meant “jail or economic ruin,” McCarthy countered that anyone handing out such counsel “is himself an enemy of America.”2
“I HATE CENSORSHIP!”
The last week in June, McCarthy continued his demagoguery over allegedly communist books in the overseas libraries, announcing new hearings and subpoenas for twenty-three authors. The New York Times reported that several hundred books by more than forty authors had been removed from IIA library shelves. Democrats in Congress complained that Eisenhower had retreated from his condemnation of “book burning” at Dartmouth College.3
On June 26, Eisenhower dispatched a letter to Robert Bingham Downs, the president of the American Library Association, to be read at the organization’s annual meeting in Los Angeles. Emmet Hughes, who had drafted the message, recalled that Ike intended it to be “another blunt warning on the ugliness of McCarthyism.” Eisenhower christened the country’s librarians the protectors of “the precious liberties of our nation: freedom of inquiry, freedom of the spoken and the written word, freedom of exchange of ideas.” “A democracy chronically fearful of new ideas,” he asserted, “would be a dying democracy.” Eisenhower took direct aim at McCarthy—as always, without mentioning his name. “There are some zealots,” he wrote, “who—with more wrath than wisdom” would censor what people are free to read. “Freedom cannot be served by the devices of the tyrant,” he warned, and “freedom cannot be censored into existence.”4
Eisenhower was fed up with the book controversy and how the State Department had handled it. At his cabinet meeting that same day, he ordered Secretary Dulles to provide a statement at the next meeting “on our book policy abroad.” Americans could not fight communism, he said, “by ducking our heads in sand.” Though he deplored “propagandizing for the Commies,” the department should be able “to lay down a general rule of reason.” Dulles responded that the hundreds of books removed from the shelves “were not because of any directive” from the State Department; rather, librarians had acted out of “fear of or hatred for McCarthy.” Besides, the law authorizing the libraries required that books “be descriptive of the U.S. or U.S. foreign policy”; strictly enforced, that requirement would exclude Shakespeare and the Bible. The president countered that such “arguments can be carried to extremes.” He sighed. “I hate censorship.”5
At the president’s July 1 news conference, Raymond Brandt, a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, prodded the president about “some confusion between your Dartmouth speech and your press conference speech in which you said it was perfectly all right for the State Department to burn books or to do as they pleased with them.” Eisenhower bristled, “I said ‘burned books’?” He said he had simply stated that the government could not legally promote the reading of books that advocated the overthrow of the US government. Brandt shot back, “I think there was a phrase there.” Eisenhower barked, “What was that phrase?” “That they could do as they pleased about it,” the reporter responded. Eisenhower countered, “I don’t think I said they could do as they pleased.” Brandt pointed out that mystery writer Dashiell Hammett’s books had been “thrown out of the libraries.” Ike snapped, “Who were they thrown out by?” Brandt suggested that a list had been provided to the librarians. “Here? In Washington?” the president shot back. Brandt provided the answer Ike wanted: “Oh, no; by the libraries overseas.” “I think someone got frightened,” Eisenhower said. “I don’t know why they should. I wouldn’t; I will tell you that, I wouldn’t.”6
That was not strictly accurate; Eisenhower, if not frightened, was clearly concerned that McCarthy might resurrect Ike’s friendly postwar associations with communists and Soviet leaders in Germany. At a June stag dinner in the White House, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, The New York Times’ publisher, perhaps at Ike’s behest, proposed “political amnesty” for those who had ended questionable associations prior to the Berlin Airlift in 1948; such an amnesty would prevent their “automatically having a black mark.” The day after his July 1 news conference, Eisenhower asked Herbert Brownell to involve J. Edgar Hoover in a review of that proposal. However, Ike eventually wrote Sulzberger that “the experts in the field”—meaning Brownell and Hoover—had declared the proposal “impractical.” That was because communists, employing “lies, treachery, and deceit,” often planted “sleepers” in important positions and such persons might “have merely cloaked their true feelings.” Eisenhower understood that McCarthy would probably denounce such a proposal as “amnesty for traitors”—and include the president of the United States.7
MCCARTHY IN TROUBLE
Then McCarthy made a mistake that allowed Eisenhower to embarrass him. On June 18, he appointed a veteran Red hunter, Dr. J. B. Matthews, as executive director of his investigation subcommittee. Mathews had been chief of research for the House Committee on Un-American Activities from 1938 to 1945. Unknown to his new employer, Matthews had written an article entitled “Reds and Our Churches” for the July 1953 issue of American Mercury. Its opening line stirred up a hornet’s nest: “The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen.”
The Democratic members of McCarthy’s subcommittee denounced the essay as “a shocking and unwarranted attack against the American clergy.” Charles Potter, McCarthy’s Republican subcommittee colleague from Michigan, called for Matthews’s dismissal and condemned his charge that seven thousand Protestant clergy were providing “the party’s subversive apparatus with its agents, stooges, dupes, front men and fellow travelers.” The National Council of Churches declared that the piece reflected “a degree of stupidity and misrepresentation which can be reached only in an atmosphere of suspicion, distrust and fear.” On Sunday, July 5, prestigious pulpits across the country reverberated with denunciations of Matthews.8
McCarthy resisted the protests. He refused to accept Matthews’s resignation, insisting he had the authority to individually hire or dismiss subcommittee staff members. At a heated two-hour closed session on July 7, the subcommittee was unable to reach an agreement. However, by the next day, Republican leaders in the Senate were predicting that McCarthy would be forced to accept Matthews’s resignation.9
The Matthews uproar was, as Bernard Shanley put it, “an opportunity which we couldn’t miss.” William Rogers urged a rapid response. “The reason Joe gets away with so damn much,” he told Emmet Hughes, “is that he always has the other guy on the defensive before the slugging starts—and here’s our chance to get Joe on the defensive.” Shanley, with Eisenhower’s approval, called Dr. Everett Clinchy, the Episcopal priest who headed the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Shanley urged Clinchy to send the president a telegram protesting Matthews’s article and signed by the three prelates—Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant—on the NCCJ governing board. The telegram arrived at midday, calling “the sweeping attack” on the patriotism of Protestant clergymen “unjustified and deplorable.”10
“I want you to know at once that I fully share the convictions you state,” Eisenhower wrote the NCCJ leaders. He denounced “irresponsible attacks that sweepingly condemn the whole of any group of citizens,” asserting that such assaults “betray contempt for the principles of freedom and decency,” when directed at “such a vast portion of the churches or clergy.” Once again, he preserved his “principles, not personalities” strategy, avoiding mention of either McCarthy or Matthews.11
The challenge was to deliver Eisenhower’s letter to the press before McCarthy could announce his dismissal of Matthews. Richard Nixon and William Rogers waylaid the senator, allowing time for release of the president’s statement;
that left the impression that Eisenhower had forced McCarthy to accept Matthews’s resignation. Emmet Hughes told Shanley that, after playing that trick on the senator, he “didn’t see how Bill Rogers could ever look Joe McCarthy in the eye again.”12
The operation had the desired effect. The Washington Post declared that Eisenhower’s charge that such attacks on the clergy were “alien to America” was effectively saying that “McCarthyism is alien to America.” The New York Times called the president’s message “a direct shot by President Eisenhower at Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” Eisenhower had “struck, and struck hard, at the peculiar form of un-Americanism which has come to be known as McCarthyism.” He had, the paper declared, “slapped Mr. McCarthy down.”13
Shanley recorded in his diary that the Matthews episode was “the first real nail in the McCarthy coffin.” Eisenhower expressed pleasure to Emmet Hughes because “that guy”—McCarthy—in defense of Matthews had talked “about not censoring anybody, when all he’s been doing is trying to act like a goddam censor himself.”14
A STRESSED PRESIDENT
Six months in the presidency had taken a toll on Eisenhower. On July 10, the day after the Matthews uproar, the president informed Nixon that as soon as Congress adjourned, he intended to vacation for five or six weeks. That very day, he hoped to skip the cabinet meeting and get out of town. However, aides persuaded their grumpy boss that they had business to bring up that would require his presence.15
On his way to the meeting, Shanley encountered the president “in a complete foul mood”; Ike did not even say “Good morning.” He was visibly exasperated during Nixon’s opening remarks. Suddenly, the vice president declared that they were all there “to congratulate the President on his leadership on the great anniversary of his nomination.” The president, Nixon said, was a dedicated fisherman who had become a “fisher of votes” in the Congress. In honor of this anniversary, the staff had draped two dozen large fishing lures on a three-foot-square plaque. As Press Secretary Jim Hagerty and another staffer attempted to turn the plaque for viewing, one of the lures hooked Hagerty’s pants “in an embarrassing location.” The more the press secretary tried to extricate himself, the worse it got. The room shook with laughter, led by Ike, whose “tears were just streaming down his face.” Finally, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson produced a penknife and cut Hagerty out of his problem, ruining his best blue suit. Shanley quipped to the president that this “was one fly he hadn’t expected.”16
After the cabinet meeting, the president hosted a gathering to sign a bill creating a commission on intergovernmental relations. A staffer described McCarthy as “lost in the crowd.” Shanley observed that he looked “awfully queer, as though he wasn’t sure he should have come.” Eisenhower looked out at the group, spotted McCarthy in the back row, waved and boomed, “Hello there!” McCarthy waved back and smiled. Once again, even to his face, Ike had not used the senator’s name.17
Despite the Matthews affair, McCarthy’s subcommittee voted 4 to 3 along party lines to affirm the senator’s authority to employ or discharge staff members without a vote; in response, the three Democratic members walked out. A week later, the Democrats rejected a two thousand-word letter from McCarthy urging their return. By mid-July, The New York Times found the senator “in the middle of a widening storm,” the result of “sharp attacks on both the Senate and White House fronts.” “For the first time in his career here,” wrote William S. White, McCarthy “has been thrown upon the defensive and, indeed, compelled to retreat.” Arthur Krock headed his July 12 column “President Gets Tough and Finds It Pays Off.” He equated the president’s strategy with Colonel William Prescott’s order to the Minutemen in 1775: “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”18
In response to such reports, Edward “Swede” Hazlett, a boyhood friend of Ike, congratulated the president that “at last you are ready to crack down on McCarthy.” Eisenhower responded, “I disagree completely with the ‘crack down’ theory.” To attack out of “anger or irritation,” he said, would “do far more to destroy the position and authority of the attacker than it would do to damage the attacked.”19
On July 22, the weary President Eisenhower faced the press. Richard Wilson of Cowles Publications noted that many people were urging the president to “bring some discipline into the Republican Party by cracking down on McCarthy.” Ike tersely reminded the reporter that he never dealt “in terms of personalities, and I don’t now.” Nevertheless, he took a shot at McCarthy’s methods: “You cannot get ahead merely by indulging extremist views and listening to them. What do they bring? They don’t bring majority action.”20
PEACE IN KOREA
On the Fourth of July weekend, Eisenhower received a letter from Robert Johnson, the IIA director, saying his doctors “have given me final orders to leave my present post within thirty days.” Whatever his health issues, Eisenhower was probably glad to see Johnson go. Once Johnson indicated his intention to resign, Eisenhower moved quickly to resolve the remaining issues with the IIA. On July 7, Johnson, almost certainly on Eisenhower’s orders, announced that officials in the overseas libraries had been instructed to restore numerous books to their shelves. The new criteria reflected Eisenhower’s view that combating communism mandated knowing what it was. While “these libraries are in business to advance American democracy, not Communist conspiracy,” Johnson asserted, “it would be unwise to foreclose the opportunity of using, to serve affirmatively the ends of democracy, something that a Communist has written for an entirely different purpose.” Predictably, McCarthy termed the new directive “completely ridiculous”; he argued that the sole purpose of any communist author was to bring about “the end of democracy,” not its idealistic “ends,” as Johnson had stated.21
Eisenhower had already submitted a plan to Congress to establish the United States Information Agency (USIA) outside the State Department. This time Eisenhower, rather than Dulles, selected the new director. He chose Theodore Streibert, the former head of the Mutual Broadcasting System, who was working with High Commissioner James Conant in Germany. The new agency was scheduled to come into being on August 1.22
Suddenly, events in Korea seized center stage; Eisenhower’s great mission since taking office had been to end that war, eclipsing all concerns with Joe McCarthy. On Friday afternoon, July 25, the president huddled with Secretary Dulles to review the status of the armistice talks. He stayed up until nearly 1:30 a.m., reminiscing with aides about the end of the war in Europe. Assistant Staff Secretary Arthur Minnich noted that, on Saturday, Eisenhower “was under considerable strain” and “stayed up long beyond his customary bedtime on Saturday night, again talking almost incessantly to his close friends.” The White House expected the truce to be signed on Sunday morning; if that happened, the president wanted cabinet members to attend church with him. However, the signing ceremony was delayed until Sunday evening.
Finally, the word came. On Sunday, July 26, at 10:00 p.m. Eastern Time, the president spoke to the nation: “Tonight we greet, with prayers of thanksgiving, the official news that an armistice was signed almost an hour ago in Korea.” He reminded the American people that “we have won an armistice on a single battleground—not peace in the world. We may not now relax our guard nor cease our quest.” The President closed with the words from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”23
McCarthy recognized that the political winds were not blowing in his direction. Eisenhower’s success at peacemaking could derail his own embryonic presidential ambitions. The night the armistice was announced, McCarthy, at Nixon’s urging, announced that his now all-Republican investigative subcommittee would shift its emphasis from communism to corruption. The Democrats still refused to return to McCarthy’s
subcommittee. William S. White described the decline in McCarthy’s fortunes; for the first time, he wrote, Senate Democrats were “in almost unbroken array against Senator McCarthy,” and key Republicans were demonstrably less supportive.24
McCarthy’s commitment to a change of direction lasted less than a week. During August 1953, he sniped at several prospective investigative targets, again denouncing aid to allies shipping strategic goods to China, accusing Allen Dulles of “covering up” subversive activity in the CIA, and alleging that secret documents processed in the Government Printing Office might be accessible to communist spies.25
In spite of the apparent decline in McCarthy’s fortunes at home, Eisenhower was plagued with the impact of the senator’s investigations on US prestige abroad. At the July 9 National Security Council meeting, he expressed himself “much disturbed and concerned that so many of our allies seem frightened of what they imagine the United States Government is up to.” “The name of McCarthy,” he noted, “was on everyone’s lips and he was constantly compared to Adolf Hitler.” John Foster Dulles confirmed that some European leaders believed they were witnessing the rise of “an American fascism.”26
McCarthy’s negative impact was not confined to Europe. Francis O. Wilcox, chief of staff for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recalled a trip to Asia with Republican Senator Alexander Smith of New Jersey. Wherever they went, Asian leaders had made “strong representations” about McCarthy, wondering “when somebody was going to do something about it.” Upon their return, the men visited with Eisenhower. For what must have felt like the hundredth time, Eisenhower said, “Gentlemen, I refuse to get down in the gutter and fight with Senator McCarthy. . . . It would only be degrading to the office of the President of the United States for me to engage in combat with a person like Senator McCarthy.”27
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