Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  At his news conference the next day, Eisenhower went directly to questions. The inevitable McCarthy question was asked: “A certain senator” had charged that “there had been a delay of 18 months in the production of the hydrogen bomb” and that it was “due to subversion in the Government.” Ike brushed off the question, saying “No, I know nothing about it. I never heard of any delay on my part, never heard of it.” When pressed again on McCarthy’s charge, he insisted, “I don’t know of any speech; I get from here the first knowledge that there was a speech.” That was another dig at McCarthy, conveying to the senator that the president deemed his address unimportant.

  In reference to McCarthy’s See It Now broadcast, Eisenhower was asked, “Mr. President, would you care to say anything to us about the loyalty and patriotism of Edward R. Murrow?” By reflex, Eisenhower sought to avoid saying anything about McCarthy and Murrow’s broadcast: “I am going to say nothing at all about that. First of all, I don’t comment about people, I don’t comment about things of which I know nothing.”

  Then Ike realized what he had done: if he left it there, the headlines the next day would say he had doubts about Murrow’s loyalty. He owed too much to the journalist for his eloquent denunciation of McCarthy on March 9. “I will say this,” he amended. “I have known this man for many years; he has been one of the men I consider my friend among your profession.” The president’s refuge when in a tight spot was often to invoke World War II. He recalled that when Murrow had been reporting on the war from London, “I always thought of him as a friend.” It was an extraordinary moment for Eisenhower to call any journalist “my friend.”15

  Once Samuel Sears resigned, the hearing subcommittee moved quickly to replace him. On April 7, Ray H. Jenkins of Knoxville, Tennessee, was announced as the subcommittee’s unanimous choice. Everett Dirksen called him “the best trial lawyer in East Tennessee.” Subcommittee members were relieved to find no record of public statements by Jenkins about McCarthy. “We asked,” Dirksen said, “in effect, whether he had ever stolen a horse or burned down a barn” or done anything else “that might rise later to haunt this committee,” but “we were satisfied there was not.” The committee set a target date of April 21 to begin hearings.16

  Meanwhile, Herbert Brownell was busy preparing his remarks designed to follow up on the president’s televised address. His task was to report on what the administration was actually doing to combat communism. The president micromanaged the drafting of Brownell’s speech, much as he had Nixon’s March 13 address. After reviewing a draft, he called Hagerty into his office. Perhaps recalling the mistake he and Brownell had made with the Harry Dexter White speech in November, Eisenhower emphasized, “Tell Herb that he must remain above partisanship. He has a good speech. He’d spoil it if the people listening think it is political.”17

  Brownell did his duty. Focusing on the threat of “Communist infiltration here at home,” he extolled the FBI’s “quiet, painstaking work” in penetrating communist groups. As a result, “36 active Communist leaders have been convicted and sentenced to jail for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of our Government by force and violence.” He warned that communists could exploit people outside the party, and “for that reason, we have adopted the Employee Security Program and under it have removed hundreds of such employees who were security risks.”

  As Ike wished, Brownell’s presentation was rigorously factual, almost to the point of tedium. Once again, the Eisenhower team had stolen the spotlight from McCarthy without mentioning his name, while invoking the glamor of the FBI. The president’s editing had toned down what Hagerty called a “deliberate crack at McCarthy” to a patriotic commitment to be “basically fair in accordance with the traditional American concepts of due process of law” and “a careful regard for individual dignity and freedom and the preservation of personal liberty.” The next day, the New York Times editors praised the attorney general’s speech and were impressed that the FBI had so effectively infiltrated subversive organizations that “the Communist Party in this country doesn’t know which of its Communist members to trust.”18

  THE OPPENHEIMER LAND MINE

  Another threat to Eisenhower’s anti-McCarthy operation had surfaced on April 8, the day prior to Brownell’s broadcast: the Atomic Energy Commission had stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer, frequently called “the father of the atom bomb,” of his security clearance. Oppenheimer had headed the Manhattan Project, developing the first nuclear device; following the war, he had become an adviser to the AEC.

  The action against Oppenheimer had not yet been announced. Jim Hagerty and Robert Cutler discussed their fear that McCarthy “would be able to make a lot of hay on it.” Hagerty fretted, “It’s just a question of time before someone cracks it wide open and everything hits the fan.” Oppenheimer had a huge reputation in the scientific world; suspension of his security clearance would touch off a “chain reaction” at a moment when, Hagerty believed, McCarthy had his “back to [the] wall” and “could easily get out from under by splashing this one.”19

  How to get out ahead of McCarthy on the Oppenheimer issue? In near desperation, Hagerty enlisted AEC chairman Lewis Strauss to persuade The New York Times to delay announcing Oppenheimer’s suspension in return for detailed information that would assist the paper in writing an in-depth story. On April 10, Hagerty noted that the “Oppenheimer business” was “all the work” that got done that day. He and Sherman Adams briefed the president, who “listened gravely,” then asked if “the record will be spelled out?” The staff worked furiously on a draft of an AEC statement, which they presented to Eisenhower at 11:30 a.m. “He looked serious,” Hagerty noted, removed his glasses, “and chewed them” while reading. Hagerty also showed Eisenhower an Associated Press story about McCarthy saying he would “soon” discuss “publicly” the causes of the eighteen-month delay in the development of the hydrogen bomb. Eisenhower instructed the staff to “stick carefully to the facts” and follow “orderly procedure.” He was concerned that they “handle this so that all our scientists are not made out to be Reds. That god-damn McCarthy is just likely to try such a thing.”20

  The Oppenheimer case preoccupied the president’s team throughout the weekend. After Brownell and Hagerty debriefed Strauss on the reasons for the AEC’s action, Brownell expressed skepticism, saying that he “would have to see the President on this one.” He thought that the only possible criminal action against Oppenheimer would be for perjury. “No one has proved any espionage,” he said, “just bad associations.” That conclusion haunted the White House; “guilt by association” was a staple of McCarthyism. Eisenhower had lectured the public on television about the destructiveness of fear. Now people in his administration had turned the fear of communist subversion into an action damaging the reputation of a man who had served his country with distinction.21

  The sleep-deprived Hagerty characterized April 13 as “a rough day.” The word on Oppenheimer had gone out on the wire services the previous night, and Hagerty’s phone had rung constantly from 10:30 p.m. until 6:30 a.m. Hagerty called Strauss, and they agreed to hold any formal AEC statement until later in the day. The news about Oppenheimer’s suspension was already in The New York Times, making use of the details generated by Hagerty’s efforts. The article chronicled Oppenheimer’s questionable associations, his hiring of alleged communists or former communists, his contradictory testimony to the FBI about attending communist meetings, his failure to report in timely fashion on an attempt by the Soviet Union to secure scientific information from him, and his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer, who had had not denied his communist associations in the 1930s and ’40s, provided a forty-three-page response to the allegations.22

  The press would soon be clamoring for a statement from the White House. At 9:00 a.m., Strauss, Brownell, Assistant Press Secretary Murray Snyder, Hagerty, and Persons met with Sherman Adams to argue about its content. Strauss and Hagerty warned that any delay in revealing the
steps taken resulting in suspension “would start us off on the wrong foot and we would have to admit it later anyway.” Hagerty informed the president that the AEC statement was ready for release, and Eisenhower said, “Get it out as soon as possible.” By 12:30, Strauss had cleared the release with his other commission members, and it was released at 1:30 p.m.23

  It was Oppenheimer’s opposition to the H-bomb that the White House feared McCarthy would exploit. Later that day in Arizona, McCarthy called the Oppenheimer suspension “long overdue” and commended Strauss and the AEC for their action. The senator stated that the previous spring, he had conducted his own investigation about the delay in developing the H-bomb. He claimed that two White House aides had convinced him that “it would not be wise to hold public hearings at that time because of the security measures involved.”24

  Traveling in the West, McCarthy continued to command headlines; reporters pressed the senator about whether he was trying to capture control of the Republican Party and run for president. The senator’s answer to both questions was “No.” When asked if he was “deliberately provoking a fight with the President,” he denied it. “I may say the President has never indicated to me that he was unhappy about digging Communists out.”25

  Meanwhile, McCarthy won a twenty-four-hour delay in starting the hearings so he could deliver a speech in Houston on Texas Independence Day. That moved the hearings to April 22. Karl Mundt announced procedures that would “limit the range of the investigation,” a proposal to which Senator John McClellan had agreed. Mundt confidently predicted that “the public hearings probably would run about ten days.”26

  THE INDICTMENT OF MCCARTHY

  April 13 was also the day the papers reported that Senator Karl Mundt had requested both sides to file in writing “the precise charges and the proof they intend to offer through documents and witnesses.” Mundt observed that the enterprise had increasingly assumed the character of a trial, not just a congressional hearing. The two brilliant trial lawyers, Jenkins and Welch, would feel right at home in such proceedings.27

  On April 13, the Eisenhowers left for Augusta, Georgia. Ike intended to go where reporters would be less able to ask him questions about the Army-McCarthy hearings or the Oppenheimer case. When Congress was in session, he normally scheduled a weekly news conference, but there would be none this week.

  On April 14, in response to Karl Mundt’s requirement, the army released twenty-nine formal charges against Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Joe Welch understood the importance of beating the McCarthy forces to the punch with the accusations; it also took attention away from the Oppenheimer story. His well-written document went well beyond the comparatively antiseptic, chronological report issued on March 11, portraying McCarthy as the principal protagonist in the dispute. He had designed the document to repudiate McCarthy’s protestation that the dispute was a conflict between only Roy Cohn and John Adams. Based on this new document, the editors at The New York Times confirmed that what “everybody knows to be the fact, is that Mr. McCarthy is up to his neck in this battle.” Now, with this bill of particulars, there was no longer much doubt about the army’s—and indirectly Eisenhower’s—intent: to place the junior senator from Wisconsin on trial for his political life.

  The army’s indictment was devastating; repeatedly, it hung the scandal of the Cohn-Schine relationship around Joe McCarthy’s neck. “The Department of the Army,” it read, “alleges that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy as Chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations,” along with his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had “sought by improper means to obtain preferential treatment for one Pvt. G. David Schine, United States Army, formerly chief consultant of this subcommittee.” McCarthy’s name was invoked again in item one, which said that “on or about July 8, 1953 Senator McCarthy sought to obtain a direct commission in the United States Army for Mr. Schine.” In the remaining twenty-eight charges, the dates and specifics tumbled, one after the other, in a chillingly precise recitation of the repetitive wielding of improper influence. McCarthy’s name was cited more than a dozen times, the indictment contending that Cohn had, at all times, been acting under the senator’s authority. No allegation was more damaging than number 24, stating that Cohn, “upon learning that Private Schine might be assigned to overseas duty, threatened to get the Secretary of the Army fired and cause the subcommittee to ‘wreck the Army.’ ”28

  The army’s “bill of particulars” was supposed to be withheld from the press until McCarthy and his associates released their own, but it quickly leaked; the entire text appeared in the papers on Friday, April 16. McCarthy refused to file his countercharges until the subcommittee took action on the “news leak.” It turned out that Democratic Senator Symington was the source, and McCarthy accused Symington of violating a Senate rule.

  At the Pentagon, Joe Welch and his team could take satisfaction in their work to that point. They had put McCarthy and Cohn on the defensive. It was no accident that the leaked information had gone to Jim Hagerty’s favorite White House reporters. Nor had Symington’s action in releasing the document been thoughtless. With McCarthy in the eye of the storm, Welch chose that moment to quietly release the news that Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his law firm had been withdrawn from the case due to his previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild. That news was buried, almost unnoticed, at the end of The New York Times story about the army’s new document.29

  While McCarthy railed against Symington’s disclosure, he was out of state, unavailable to Roy Cohn. Therefore, Cohn leaked his own telegram to Senator Mundt, complaining that the army’s twenty-nine allegations “contain many false, misleading and distorted statements, as well as the outright omission of highly relevant events.” He blamed the accusations on the army’s “long-standing attempt to stop our investigation of instances of Communist infiltration in the Army.”30

  Karl Mundt knew he had the proverbial tiger by the tail. Understanding that his friend and political ally Joe McCarthy was facing a trial of dimensions he had not anticipated, he called a news conference and suggested that the senator “remove himself entirely from the investigation.” Mundt suggested that McCarthy “submit in writing any questions he might have for witnesses.”31

  MCCARTHY GETS HIS WAY

  Mundt was down to the wire in defining McCarthy’s role in the hearings. McCarthy had returned from Texas, and, on Sunday, April 18, Mundt announced that subcommittee investigators would meet with the Wisconsin senator on Monday to set “ground rules.” McCarthy was still adamant about his right to cross-examine witnesses; he threatened to appeal on the Senate floor if the subcommittee asked him to withdraw as a member.

  As usual, he got his way; agreement was finally achieved in a three-hour closed-door session. McCarthy accepted some limits on his questioning rights, provided they were “equal to those accorded the other side.” He also promised to file a detailed response to the army’s twenty-nine-point set of charges. Mundt still hoped to complete the hearings in ten days to two weeks.32

  G. David Schine showed up that day on Capitol Hill, fresh from Georgia, looking “trim and tan”; he spent some hours in the offices of the McCarthy subcommittee, presumably being questioned by Ray Jenkins, the subcommittee counsel. When pursued by reporters afterward, he bounded up a Senate Office Building stairway three steps at a time, literally running to jump into a waiting limousine with his father, J. Myer Schine.

  McCarthy, scrambling to regain his footing, played the Struve Hensel card. The senator apparently believed that Hensel, more than anyone else, had been responsible for issuing the March 11 report on privileges sought for Private Schine. He told reporters that Hensel would be a principal target of his questioning. On Tuesday, April 20, he issued a set of forty-six charges; one highlight was the allegation that John Adams had impeded the investigations into communists in the army, acting “with the influence and guidance of H. Struve Hensel.” While masterminding the preparation of the March 11 report, Hensel “was himself under investigat
ion by the subcommittee for misconduct and possible law violation” when he had held “a top procurement post” in the navy, illegally profiting to the tune of $56,526.34. Therefore, Hensel’s effort to block investigation of those charges was the real reason behind the army’s attacks on McCarthy and Cohn.33

  McCarthy had finally attacked someone who would not be intimidated. A few minutes after he aired those charges, Hensel responded with headline-grabbing rhetoric, calling the allegations “barefaced lies.” He threatened McCarthy with a lawsuit “if the Senator makes those charges without the protection of senatorial immunity.” He charged that McCarthy had “reached a high mark of scandalous malice and the low mark of cowardly irresponsibility.” Hensel immediately asked the Pentagon’s security officer to request J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to review all of his records and background. That day, Gould called the District of Columbia police, asking them to “pay close attention to Mr. Hensel’s house at night.” At the bottom of the memorandum recording Gould’s call was a single handwritten word: “McCarthy.”34

  Wednesday, the day before the hearings were to begin, was a tense day at the White House. Bernard Shanley tried to see Sherman Adams at 8:00 a.m., but, he recorded, Adams “wouldn’t open his mouth.” Shanley already knew the chief of staff was on edge because “he had been a little rough with me the day before.” Key personnel were just as jittery at the Pentagon, where Hensel was consulting with Joe Welch, undoubtedly regarding McCarthy’s allegations. One good sign for the Eisenhower forces: the Gallup Poll reported that 46 percent of the respondents tended to agree with Robert Stevens on the charges, 23 percent with McCarthy.35