Watching the furor from New York, Henry Cabot Lodge was dismayed. He wrote a “Dear General” letter to Eisenhower, critical of the fact that Leonard Hall, the Republican National Committee chairman, had publicly stated that communist subversion would still be an issue in the 1954 election, “a virtual admission that we’ve accomplished nothing constructive of our own.” He was incensed that the RNC had provided “a publicity build-up for the Harry Dexter White Speech.” Lodge argued that Brownell should have turned the issue over to the courts instead of making a speech. A court decision would have produced “the maximum of political benefit, minimizing the complaints about ‘McCarthyism.’ ” He hoped the president would treat his observations as “suggestive for you to use in a press conference.”22
The morning of November 18, armed with Lodge’s sage advice, Ike set out at his news conference to put the White hullabaloo behind him. When Merriman Smith brought it up, the president responded, “I should like to make [cl]ear, ladies and gentlemen, that so far as this case itself is concerned, I haven’t another single word to say about it, certainly not at this time, and don’t intend to open my mouth about it.”
Another reporter brought up Len Hall’s assertion that communism in government would be the big issue in the 1954 elections. Eisenhower followed Lodge’s counsel to the letter. Thanks to his administration’s internal security program, he said that he believed that “this whole thing will be a matter of history and of memory by the time the next election comes around.” A reporter noted Truman’s charge “that your administration has now embraced McCarthyism. Do you have any comment on that?” Ike snapped, “I am ready to take the verdict of this body on that.”23
A PRIVILEGED PRIVATE
Robert Stevens was still trying to placate McCarthy. The day Brownell delivered his controversial speech, he invited McCarthy, Cohn, subcommittee director Frank Carr, and John Adams to lunch at the Pentagon. His purpose was to reassure the senator that the army was already rigorously investigating subversives. The discussion inevitably migrated back to Cohn’s relationship with David Schine. McCarthy pressed for a New York assignment for Private Schine, suggesting he be assigned to West Point to look for procommunist influences in textbooks.24
However, the next day, McCarthy shocked Stevens with a phone call asking, as a “personal favor,” that the secretary not assign Schine back to his committee. In that conversation, McCarthy called Schine “a good boy” but said there was “nothing indispensable about him.” The call reflected the strange hold Cohn had over the senator. Cohn was “on the verge of quitting the committee” because he was so angry over Schine’s treatment. Cohn, McCarthy said, “was completely unreasonable about the situation” and “thought Schine should be a general and work from the penthouse of the Waldorf.” Stevens informed McCarthy that he had agreed with Cohn to let Schine use the first two weeks after induction to complete his work in New York and then he could obtain passes on weekends or weeknights as needed. McCarthy endorsed that plan.25
Schine had been formally inducted into the army on November 3 and had been assigned to New York, as Stevens had agreed. Stevens had also agreed to approve passes for Schine the first four weekends he was at Fort Dix and frequent night passes—privileges rarely granted to new draftees. In addition, Schine obtained other privileges, thanks to Stevens. The secretary ordered the post commander to provide Schine with an office for committee work. However, Schine and Cohn decided that they could conduct “committee business” more effectively fifteen miles away at the Stacy Trent Hotel in Trenton.26
But Stevens’s hopes for peace with McCarthy were soon dashed. On November 13, Stevens announced that he had discovered “no evidence of espionage” at Fort Monmouth. In response, McCarthy angrily declared that Stevens’s failure to uncover espionage “makes it necessary to open public hearings almost immediately.” Hearings were set to begin on November 24. As John Adams put it, “The siege was on again.”27
Stevens decided to try again to placate McCarthy. On November 17, he entertained McCarthy, his aides, and George Sokolsky, a pro-McCarthy commentator, in high style at the Merchants Club in Lower Manhattan. McCarthy ordered a double Manhattan and the most expensive steak on the menu—as payback, he told Stevens, for “what you did to us.” He complained, as he ordered another double Manhattan, that Stevens had “called me a liar before the whole country.” After that two-hour lunch, as John Adams recalled, Stevens “walked into another trap.” McCarthy suddenly proclaimed that he wanted them all to fly to Fort Dix to “see Dave.”
It was one of those wild Joe McCarthy afternoons; the senator pressured Schine’s chauffeur into letting him drive the specially equipped Cadillac limousine to the airport. To the group’s discomfort, he swept through the Holland Tunnel, siren howling and red lights flashing, giggling all the way. Later, when the secretary’s DC-3 landed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, all, including Schine, posed for pictures in front of the plane.28
“A DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST THE PRESIDENT”
Meanwhile, McCarthy demanded equal time to respond to Harry Truman’s attack on “McCarthyism.” The networks capitulated and scheduled McCarthy’s address for the evening of November 24.
The night prior to McCarthy’s speech, Eisenhower accepted the America’s Democratic Legacy Award at a B’nai B’rith dinner in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish organization famed for combating anti-Semitism. Chastened by how badly the Harry Dexter White affair had gone, Ike returned to core principles. He invoked the frontier values of his hometown, Abilene, where justice was defined “by the right to meet your accuser face to face . . . by your right to go to the church or the synagogue or even the mosque of your own choosing; by your right to speak your mind and be protected in it.” His invocation of “the right to meet your accuser face to face” was widely perceived as an anti-McCarthy statement. In the Harry Dexter White episode, perhaps Eisenhower had relearned a lesson from his war experiences: If you imitate your enemy, you risk becoming like him. And if that is not who you really are, you will be supremely incompetent in carrying it out.29
McCarthy presented a stark contrast to those values in his televised address the evening of November 24. He asserted that Truman had “made a completely untruthful attack upon me.” Instead of “McCarthyism,” he offered “Trumanism,” “the placing of your political party above the interest of the country.” Truman, the senator declared, had made five false statements about the Harry Dexter White case. The sixth, he said—the “granddaddy of them all”—was “Oh, it’s all McCarthy’s fault” and “Isn’t that nasty McCarthy an awful man.”
Then McCarthy turned his guns on Eisenhower. “A few days ago,” he said, “I read that President Eisenhower expressed the hope that by election time in 1954 the subject of communism would be a dead and forgotten issue. The raw, harsh, unpleasant fact is that communism is an issue and will be an issue in 1954.” He patronized the president, citing “those very well-meaning people who speak about communism not being an issue” when, to the senator, communism was paramount among “the other great evils which beset us today.” To prove his point, McCarthy cited the case of Harry Dexter White and asserted that the Republican Party’s “batting average has not been too good.”
McCarthy waded into foreign policy, lamenting that American prisoners of war were still being held and “brainwashed” by the Chinese. The government run by his party was guilty of “whining, whimpering appeasement.” He attacked the policy of providing “billions of dollars each year to help our allies build up their military strength”—funds that then “pay for the shipment of the sinews of war to Red China.” In protest, the administration had sent only “perfumed notes.” The United States could end this pernicious trade, McCarthy asserted, “without firing a shot” by blockading the coast of China and telling the allies: “If you continue to ship to Red China while they are imprisoning and torturing American men, you will not get one cent of American money. If we
do that, my good friends, this trading in blood-money will cease.”30
Neither Eisenhower nor Truman listened to the speech. Special Assistant to the President C. D. Jackson, Ike’s easily agitated adviser on psychological warfare, did—and was appalled. He wrote Sherman Adams the next morning that listening to McCarthy had been “an exceptionally horrible experience.” Jackson called McCarthy’s speech “an open declaration of war on the Republican President of the United States by a Republican senator.” Two days later, he was still fuming and shared his unvarnished opinion with James Reston. Reston reported that White House staff members were “hopping mad” about the speech and one had described the address as “a declaration of war against the President.” Stewart Alsop called McCarthy’s speech “a blunt warning to President Eisenhower” to “play the game my way—or else.” Roscoe Drummond, a favorite columnist of Eisenhower’s, asserted, “Senator McCarthy, in effect, launched his campaign for the 1956 Republican presidential nomination.”31
A WHITE HOUSE IN TURMOIL
Jackson believed that Eisenhower had been consistently wrong in his approach to McCarthy. Ike’s “disastrous appeasement” had begun in 1952, when the general had deleted words of praise for General Marshall from his Milwaukee campaign speech. “I am very frightened,” he wrote in his diary three days after the McCarthy speech. Jackson lobbied John Foster Dulles to intercede with the president. On November 27, Eisenhower—in Augusta, Georgia, for the Thanksgiving break—learned from Dulles that Jackson wanted a high-level discussion on Monday to deal with McCarthy’s diatribe; Ike, irritated, responded that “their only answer would be to do nothing,” but Dulles suggested that the president read McCarthy’s speech. “Why?” Ike asked. The secretary replied that the senator had called for a blockade of trade with China. Eisenhower grumbled that McCarthy “was never interested in facts, just something to shoot at.” Ann Whitman recorded Ike’s exasperated question: “Does he want to declare war today?”32
In Eisenhower’s absence, Jackson continued to stew. He confessed to Jim Hagerty that he had leaked his “declaration of war” assessment of the McCarthy speech to the newspapers and extracted a pledge from the press secretary to discuss the speech at Monday’s staff meeting. On Sunday, Jackson saw Dulles, who shared “two terrifying facts”: that “the President had not read the McCarthy speech or been briefed on it” and that, as of Sunday afternoon, Brownell had not read it either. Jackson despaired, “This place is really falling apart.”33
At Monday’s staff meeting—“Black Monday,” Jackson called it—Hagerty discussed the problem of leaks to reporters. “After [a] moment of dead silence,” Jackson confessed to telling James Reston that McCarthy had “declared war on the President” and lectured the staff on the evils of appeasement; he warned that that the “three Little Monkeys act” would not work.
The discussion degenerated into what Jackson called a “big rhubarb” between two factions. The legislative liaison staffers opposed taking on McCarthy, while the Jackson group argued for responding in order to retain Democratic support of the president’s legislative program. Bryce Harlow eventually convinced the group that a carefully crafted statement at the president’s press conference would give the matter “just the right amount of importance.” However, another round of squabbling erupted over the content of the statement. Finally, they agreed to take drafts to a meeting with the president.34
Unknown to the staff, Eisenhower and Dulles had been meeting on the same issue: how to respond to McCarthy. By then Ike had apparently read the speech. They decided that Dulles should hold a news conference focused on the issue of support for allies. The next morning, he would return for Eisenhower’s final approval of his statement before facing reporters.35
CROSSING THE RUBICON
At 8:30 a.m. on December 1, Dulles met with reporters to respond to McCarthy’s criticisms of Eisenhower’s foreign policy. Reporters were informed that his statement had been approved by Eisenhower and would be publicly supported by the president at his news conference the following day. As Ike preferred, Dulles never mentioned McCarthy’s name. He addressed “a widely publicized criticism of this Administration’s foreign policy” that the United States had sent its allies “perfumed notes” rather than use “threats and intimidation to compel them to do our bidding.” The secretary labeled that charge an attack on “the very heart of United States foreign policy.” It was, he asserted, in American interests “to assist certain countries but that does not give us the right to try to take them over, to dictate their trade policies and to make them our satellites.” Dulles extolled the foundations of Allied assistance by means of “well-located bases,” participation in the “early warning system,” and reliance on their “large industrial strength to keep the balance of world power” in favor of the West. “We do not,” he stressed, “propose to throw away those precious assets by blustering and domineering methods.” His final words left no doubt of the president’s support: “These fundamentals of our foreign policy were agreed on by President Eisenhower and me before I took my present office. These principles still stand.”36
C. D. Jackson called Dulles to praise his statement and inform him that there had been “quite a flap” over the president’s upcoming press conference. Dulles concurred that “if the President starts to twist and turn tomorrow, it will be pretty bad.” Jackson pleaded with him to “have a word” with Eisenhower to ensure that he took a strong stance. Dulles responded that “if he doesn’t I am finished, I might as well quit.”37
The next morning, the White House staff staged a bureaucratic soap opera. Jackson, frozen out of the staff meeting, finally located the group in Assistant Press Secretary Murray Snyder’s office, and, as he put it, “we went at it again.” Speechwriter Robert Kieve, like Jackson, was worried; he called a draft statement “a truly sad document: a defensive, cringing, cowardly page-and-a half of purely negative prose.”38
Finally, at 9:00 a.m.—with the president’s press conference scheduled for 10:30—the key advocates were ushered into the Oval Office to present the president two versions of a statement supporting Dulles’s remarks. One was C. D. Jackson’s, the other apparently Bryce Harlow’s. What followed was what Jackson called a “battle royal.”39
The president first read Harlow’s draft, Jackson noted, “with visible irritation.” Then he started to read Jackson’s version—and exhibited “great irritation.” He choked on the words in the opening sentence: “I do not consider that the President of the United States should indulge in name calling, even the name of the junior Senator from Wisconsin.” The second sentence specified “the senator in his television appearance last week.” Those statements violated Ike’s cardinal rule of refusing to mention McCarthy. Eisenhower, Jackson recalled, “slammed it back at me and said he would not refer to McCarthy personally.” Jackson’s account in his diary repeated Ike’s favorite declaration about McCarthy: “I will not get down in the gutter with that guy.”
However, once the issue of personalizing the statement was settled, Eisenhower, the master editor, went into action. Jackson was amazed as Ike “himself began very ably to firm up the text as he re-read it again, this time very carefully.” The mood shifted from “divided snarling into united helping him along” until the president “dictated the last paragraph exactly as it finally appeared.” “The group almost cheered,” Jackson recalled, and “what started as a ghastly mess turned out fine.” Jackson exaggerated; Eisenhower had used almost nothing from Jackson’s draft.40
At the news conference, Eisenhower turned to the subject that had been “getting a lot of headlines” and launched into his prepared statement. He was now resolute; he was not going to abandon Dulles as he had Brownell. “I am in full accord with the statements made yesterday by Secretary Dulles in his press conference,” he said. “The easiest thing to do with great power,” he continued, “is to abuse it—to use it to excess.” The United States, he said, must not “grow weary of the processes of negotiation and adjus
tment that are fundamental to freedom” and slide into “coercion of other free nations.” To do so “would be a mark of the imperialist rather than of the leader.”
Eisenhower repeated his previous assertion “that fear of Communists actively undermining our government will not be an issue in the 1954 elections.” He further challenged McCarthy, saying, “It is imperative that we protect the basic rights of loyal American citizens. I am determined to protect those rights to the limit of the powers of the office with which I have been entrusted by the American people.” He pivoted toward the strategy Bryce Harlow had recommended in October in response to the letter from Nicholas Roosevelt, calling for “a progressive, dynamic program enhancing the welfare of the American people. . . . In any event, unless the Republican Party can develop and enact such a program for the American people, it does not deserve to remain in power.”
He ended his formal statement with “Now, that is what I am going to say about these late headlines, and on that and any closely related subjects, there is not another word to say. With that one proviso, I will mount the usual weekly cross and let you drive the nails.”
It had been a bravura performance; Eisenhower’s flawlessly modulated statement, though not mentioning the senator, had come off as confident, principled, and fully in charge. The statement was so effective that no reporter asked a question about McCarthy or his speech.41
James Reston opined that “President Eisenhower today took personal charge of his Administration’s counter-attack on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.” William Lawrence quoted close associates of the president as saying that Ike “had crossed a political Rubicon.” The turning point in the Eisenhower-McCarthy conflict had arrived.42
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