Ike and McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

  However, when Adams took the stand to testify, the hearing was already in turmoil. That was because Eisenhower and Brownell had hatched a one-two punch designed to throw McCarthy off balance. That morning, Brownell had stated that criminal prosecution might be instituted against those involved in the “preparation and dissemination” of the fraudulent letter from J. Edgar Hoover. That was a shot across McCarthy’s bow, designed to intimidate him just before Adams presented the president’s executive privilege letter.24

  When the smoke cleared, Adams read the one-page letter aloud. Eisenhower bowed to congressional prerogatives whereby, if requested, departments or agencies must furnish relevant information to committees. The letter presented an elegant separation-of-powers argument: that “the persons entrusted with power in any one of the three great branches of Government shall not encroach upon the authority confident to the others. The ultimate responsibility for the conduct of the Executive Branch rests with the President.”

  “Throughout our history,” the letter continued, “the President has withheld information whenever he found that what was sought was confidential or its disclosure would be incompatible with the public interest or jeopardize the safety of the Nation.” Eisenhower stressed the necessity for executive-branch personnel “to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters” and said it was improper “that any of their conversations or communications, or any documents or reproductions, concerning such advice be disclosed.” Therefore, the secretary of defense was ordered, regarding the issues now before the subcommittee, to instruct those employees that “they are not to testify to any such conversations or communications or to produce any such documents or reproductions. This principle must be maintained regardless of who would be benefited by such disclosures.”

  The president concluded with a carefully parsed paragraph that exempted from his order communications directly between “any of the principals”—McCarthy, Cohn, Stevens, Adams, Hensel, and Carr—in the Army-McCarthy hearings. It clearly left out the participants in the January 21 meeting, including John Adams, who, on that particular date, had been acting in an advisory capacity. When he finished reading, Adams looked up and stated, “The letter is signed by Dwight D. Eisenhower.” A terrible silence ensued. The president’s bombshell had completely disrupted the hearings. The presidential hand was no longer “hidden.”25

  Karl Mundt was upset. Later, in his unpublished manuscript, the South Dakota senator complained that, as result of the president’s letter, “the lid was put on.” John Adams, he wrote, had been put “under wraps and the wheels of the investigation ground to a slow halt.” He recalled that he had “had a feeling we were shadow boxing, that the witnesses who should be testifying were not there, that the Secretary of the Army, Mr. Stevens, and John Adams were mere puppets and somewhere in the dim misty background were the real actors pulling the strings and whispering the cues.”26

  Years later, Roy Cohn, near death, contended that Eisenhower’s action had proved that the army had not acted independently: “The White House was quarterbacking this game to get Joe and had been all along.” He asserted, “Under the guise of protecting the separation of powers . . . President Eisenhower made the Mafia rule of omerta”—the gangster’s “code of silence”—into “a constitutional principle.” Eisenhower had decreed that “nobody in the executive branch was permitted to testify to Congress about anything he or she discussed within the executive branch.” Cohn’s verdict: “Nothing close to this had ever been done before by a President of the United States.” The president who had declared, “I won’t get into the gutter with that guy,” had “gutted the Constitution.”27

  In the face of the president’s action, both the Democrats and Republicans on the hearing committee floundered. Senator McClellan suggested that, as a result, “these hearings are terminated.” Dirksen could not see how the committee could reach a conclusion “with the proof incomplete.” McCarthy felt blindsided: “I must admit that I am somewhat at a loss to know what to do.” He railed against this “Iron Curtain.” “Who,” he demanded, “who is responsible for the issuance of the smear that has held this committee up for weeks and weeks and weeks and has allowed Communists to continue . . . with a razor poised over the jugular vein of the nation?” Then he stalked out of the hearing room.28

  When McCarthy returned, he demanded a week’s recess to figure out how to respond to this new development. A contentious subcommittee executive session lasted from 1:30 p.m. to 3:00, with Dirksen finally moving to recess the hearings until the following Monday, May 24, in the hope that the president’s order could be clarified or changed. Potter seconded, insisting that the vote did not mean “this would end the hearing.” The motion passed 4 to 3 on a party-line vote.29

  When Cohn later asked McCarthy why he thought Eisenhower would go so far, the senator replied, “Too much was coming out and he had to stop the show.” According to Cohn (and confirmed by Sherman Adams), Everett Dirksen had gone to the White House “to try to convince the President to change his mind.” Eisenhower, Cohn wrote, “refused to allow us to establish for the record the full truth about that fateful January 21 meeting when plans were drawn to destroy Joe McCarthy.” For all his biases, his analysis was largely accurate.30

  Also—no small matter to Dwight Eisenhower—May 17, 1954, was the day that the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional.

  SENDING THE SECRETARY INTO BATTLE

  There was no great outcry by the public or Congress against Eisenhower’s order. It had thrown the McCarthy forces into such disarray that they desperately needed the recess to regroup. Senator Symington called the postponement a “transparent device” to conclude the inquiry, but Chairman Mundt denied that the recess “even remotely implies a discontinuation of the hearings.” McCarthy complained, “We can’t possibly resume the hearings unless we are allowed to get all the facts.” On May 18, Jim Hagerty, when asked if the president might modify his order, replied tersely that “the President issued his letter yesterday—period.” Asked if the president’s letter had been intended to terminate the hearings, he snapped, “I can think of nothing that would be a more silly question.”31

  Senator McClellan denied that any failure to modify the president’s order would mean the hearings would be “terminated.” “My position is the same as always,” he stated. “The hearings should not end until all the principals have been heard.” A primary “principal,” Joe McCarthy, had not yet testified. McCarthy continued to maintain, “I think the President will rescind the order,” a prospect The Washington Post called “unlikely.”32

  Once again, Eisenhower did not intend to stay in town to answer questions. By midday on May 18, he was airborne for Charlotte, North Carolina, to participate in the ceremonies celebrating the 189th anniversary of the signing of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence—an oft-disputed precursor of the 1776 declaration—and to celebrate Armed Forces Week. On the way to the airport, he ordered Hagerty to manage the fallout from his order so it would appear constitutional, giving no hint of the real significance of the meeting in Brownell’s office. He “did not intend to modify in the slightest degree his order to the Defense Department” but wanted the January 21 meeting framed as strictly limited to discussion of subpoenas for loyalty board members, “not to take over from Stevens the conduct of the investigation.” Any implication that his order was intended to close down the hearings was “just stupid and silly,” but he would be firm that “confidential advice” from his advisers would not be provided to Congress.

  Eisenhower took a guest with him on the presidential plane that day: Robert Stevens. The president did not intend to give the unpredictable army secretary a chance to stay in Washington and talk to reporters. When it was announced that Stevens would accompany the president, Hagerty observed that the reporters “did not believe this was the only reason—and they were right.” Hagerty provided the press with a cosmet
ic reason for the secretary’s presence: that the president wanted to give “public support to him by having him as [a] guest on [the] plane and appearing with him on [the] platform.” However, Ike had a confidential plan that he, Hagerty, and Stevens would hammer out in the privacy of the presidential aircraft.

  Eisenhower deemed it politically imperative to distance himself from the January 21 meeting. He delegated Hagerty to negotiate with Stevens about “his willingness to issue a statement on his own behalf.” Eisenhower sealed the deal in person. “The President and I,” Hagerty chronicled, “talked to Stevens alone on the plane and outlined this plan and procedure.” Like the dispassionate commander in World War II who had sent men into battle to die, Eisenhower chose to deploy a bureaucratic foot soldier to take enemy fire.33

  Once in Charlotte, in return for that commitment, President Eisenhower gave Stevens the admiring public attention he craved. The secretary, Hagerty noted, got “a big hand” when the president introduced him. Ike “supported him to the hilt with photographs eating together” and by shaking hands with him at both the Charlotte and Washington airports. Upon Ike’s return to the White House, Sherman Adams and Hagerty met with Eisenhower to discuss whether to hold a press conference on May 19. They decided to go ahead; otherwise, in Hagerty’s words, it “would look as if the President were trying to run away from the situation.”34

  At 10:30 a.m. on May 19, Eisenhower strode purposefully into the news conference and went quickly to questions. Regarding the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the president said, “The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional processes in this country; and I will obey.” He intended that as a soldierly statement of duty, without elaboration. Eisenhower was not about to climb out on another major constitutional limb only forty-eight hours after invoking executive privilege in the Army-McCarthy hearings.

  Eisenhower was asked if his letter invoking executive privilege would make it “impossible to get at the whole truth in the controversy” and, if so, whether he would “rescind or at least relax that order.” He was prepared: “First I have no intention whatsoever of relaxing or rescinding the order, because it is a very moderate and proper statement of the division of powers between the Executive and the Legislative.” He was “astonished” that anyone would suggest that the order “be used as a reason or excuse for calling off hearings.” It was, in effect, Eisenhower’s fifth veto of any attempt to end the hearings.

  Therefore, as he had planned, Eisenhower resolutely asserted that the imminent subpoenas for loyalty board members were “the purpose of the January 21 meeting,” camouflaging his personal involvement. “They,” he began, distancing himself from the issue, “asked an advisor or two of mine to be there.” He noted that the meeting had been in the attorney general’s office, not the White House. Ike contended that his May 17 order had avoided sidetracking that meeting into “a relationship between the President and his advisors that had no possible connection with this investigation.” He asserted that he had simply been trying to keep the investigation “on the rails.”

  The president repeated the word he had carefully parsed at his May 5 news conference, hoping the investigation would be “concluded” soon but “conclusively so that the principals tell their stories openly and fully.” He declined to specify which “principals” he was citing—again avoiding McCarthy’s name—but noted that only “some of them have been questioned.”

  Then the president revealed the bargain he had negotiated on the plane to North Carolina: Secretary Robert Stevens would issue a statement “about the disassociation between his administration of the Army and this meeting of last January 21st.” When asked whether the authority for the army’s response to the investigation had “passed from Stevens to a higher level at the January 21st meeting,” Eisenhower stated that “at that meeting there was no attempt made, there was nothing brought up that could intimate such a thing.” For a reporter listening closely, that comment revealed that the president knew precisely what had transpired in the attorney general’s office on January 21.

  Gould Lincoln of The Washington Star asked the big question: “Mr. President, would it be correct to say that the White House OK’d the preparation and submission of the Army report on Senator McCarthy and Mr. Cohn?” Eisenhower’s blunt response: “It would not.” Since the “preparation and submission” of that report had taken place in the Pentagon, the president’s statement, however misleading, sounded superficially credible.

  After discussion of the Supreme Court decision in Brown, David Sentner of Hearst Newspapers peeled one last layer off the January 21 question: “Mr. President, did you say whether you were aware in advance of the calling of the so-called conference on January 21st?” Eisenhower stalled: “The what?” Sentner repeated the question. Suddenly Ike’s memory failed him—although Herbert Brownell revealed in his memoirs that he had discussed the January 21 meeting with the president both in advance and afterward. “Well,” said the president evasively, “I wouldn’t answer it in any event because, after all, we do come to a place here where you can’t go into detail; but my memory wouldn’t serve me anyway. I couldn’t remember such a thing.” Whatever his flaws, Eisenhower did not have a bad memory.

  Asked for his judgment of the impact if the hearings were called off at this time, Ike reinforced veto number five: “Well, I don’t think the facts have been brought out.” He repeated his earlier statement, word for word, that he still wanted to hear “all of the principals telling their story.” Though he wanted “to see this thing settled conclusively,” it needed to be done in a manner “so that we do know the facts” and “let the chips fall where they may.”35

  ORCHESTRATING A COVER-UP

  Jim Hagerty called this press conference “one of the best” the president had held, “forceful and to the point.” He called Herbert Brownell immediately to report on what their boss had said. “That makes my job a lot easier,” the attorney general responded. Brownell was expecting Senator Mundt and Ray Jenkins shortly for lunch, a meeting undoubtedly arranged as part of the Eisenhower strategy. Hagerty’s diary reveals that he had already phoned a recording of the president’s remarks to Fred Seaton “so he could get up Stevens’ statement saying [the] Army had sole responsibility.”36

  The operation was typical of General Ike—carefully timed, with near-military precision. A half hour after the president’s press conference had begun, Stevens had been scheduled to deliver his statement. Mundt and Jenkins would lunch with the attorney general soon thereafter, allowing sufficient time for them to hear about the president’s and the secretary’s statements.

  At 11:30, Robert Stevens released his carefully composed statement, drafted by Fred Seaton and designed to get his commander in chief off the hook. The secretary began, “I wish to make it perfectly plain that the decision and the acts on the part of the Army concerning the controversy presently being heard by the Senate Subcommittee were the decisions and acts of the Department of the Army alone. At no time did the Army or I as its Secretary receive any orders from anyone in respect to the preparation or presentation of the Army’s case. Specifically, the conference of January 21 was only for the purpose of obtaining an interpretation of existing directives.”37

  Later, Brownell called Hagerty to report that Mundt and Jenkins “had dropped their request for modification of [the] Executive Order” upon hearing of the president’s remarks and Stevens’ statement that “the Army had sole responsibility” and that no “higher ups” had been in charge. The two men had left “in good spirits,” and, Brownell informed Hagerty, “they were in favor of the Administration, at least when they walked out of my door.”38

  Did the president lie to the press on May 19, 1954? Yes, he did. The best that can be said is that it was a strategic deceit. He was determined not to give McCarthy grounds for making the president, not himself, the issue. Otherwise, the resulting scandal could have threatened Eisenhower’s presidency and provoked a constitutional crisis. Any
attempt by a president to destroy the prestige of a prominent US senator risked violation of the separation of powers—the very constitutional doctrine Eisenhower had invoked in his May 17 executive order. The newspapers the next day quoted Eisenhower’s saying “Let the chips fall where they may.” Clearly, he did not want them falling anywhere near the Oval Office.

  Stevens’s statement defused the efforts to pin responsibility for the Schine report on the White House or prematurely end the hearings. Karl Mundt’s public response was that the hearings “will resume Monday—period.” He appeared to accept the premise that the army alone had been responsible for the charges made against McCarthy and his aides.39

  JOE MCCARTHY IN TROUBLE

  That McCarthy was in trouble was undeniable; he had been tumbling toward political purgatory since March 11, when the Schine report had been released. By May 24, his “unfavorable” rating in the Gallup Poll had risen to 49 percent, with 35 percent favorable. At that point, his narrow path to redemption rested on his own testimony. During the one-week recess, McCarthy searched almost desperately for an issue that would have traction. He claimed that he had attempted to see the president on his issues with the army between January 22 and February 24; Jim Hagerty checked and told reporters, “I know of no request by the Senator at that time for an appointment with the President.” When the senator criticized the administration’s foreign policy in a speech, Eisenhower ranted angrily about Republican senators who lacked “the guts to defend the Administration—Boy! We really need a few good hatchet men on our side up there!”40