by Kai Bird
McCarthy’s attack on the CIA came to a head on July 9, 1953, when Roy Cohn called the Agency to demand that William Bundy testify on why he had contributed $400 to Alger Hiss’s defense fund. Bundy was then a special assistant to the deputy director of intelligence. To McCarthy’s surprise, Allen Dulles refused to allow Bundy to testify and rejected a subpoena demanding the testimony of the Agency’s legislative counsel. For the moment, McCarthy backed off, largely because Vice-President Richard Nixon advised him that he didn’t have the support in his own Senate committee, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, for a confrontation with the CIA. McCloy was greatly relieved.
By the late summer of 1953, the Eisenhower administration had made covert action a major pillar of its foreign policy. Eisenhower himself felt that covert operations were “just about the only way to win World War III without having to fight it.” He rejected the notion endorsed by the 1952 Republican convention of “rolling back” Soviet control of Eastern Europe. This was impractical and might lead to general warfare. But he, like McCloy, believed that there were many things that could be done on a covert level that might greatly diminish Soviet influence over the period of a decade or more. So, in the spring of 1953, he authorized a major review of the country’s Cold War strategy in a series of seminars code-named Project Solarium. The resulting study urged the president to prosecute an “intensified cold war covertly using a national program of deception and concealment from public disclosure and Soviet discernment.”35
Project Solarium set the tone for much of the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy over the next eight years. C. D. Jackson, forever an energetic proselytizer of covert action, wrote in his diary that year, “He [Eisenhower] is convinced that psychological warfare should not be the pet mystery of one or more Departments of the Government, but should be the entire posture of the entire Government to the entire world.”36 That August, the president approved a joint CIA-British operation in Iran to restore the shah to his throne. The coup succeeded on August 22,1953, supervised in Teheran by the Agency’s Kermit Roosevelt. The same week, Eisenhower wrote McCloy, inviting him to attend a special stag dinner to raise private funds for the CIA-sponsored National Committee for a Free Europe. “Quite frankly,” wrote Ike, “I believe you will be asked to take the leadership, within your industry, in support of their campaign.”37
McCloy was fishing in Arizona with Lew Douglas that month, but came back to the East Coast in plenty of time to attend the dinner on September 23. Henry Ford II, Bedell Smith, and the corporate executive officers of Standard Oil, Paramount Pictures, AT&T, General Motors, the U.S. Steel Corp., and other companies attended. McCloy sat across the table from Allen Dulles. (The press was not allowed to know the subject of the dinner or the fact that Dulles was attending on an off-the-record basis.) C. D. Jackson was there to give the pitch soliciting corporate contributions for the National Committee for a Free Europe. A representative of the Heritage Foundation agreed to coordinate a private fund-raising campaign. Some money was no doubt raised in this fashion, but over the years the Committee continued to draw the vast bulk of its budget from the CIA.38
While the Eisenhower administration continued to draw upon McCloy’s intelligence expertise, Germany remained his highest priority. More than a year after he resigned as high commissioner, it was clear to everyone in the State Department that, when it came to German policy, private citizen McCloy was still a major player. In part this was simply because Adenauer and other German officials chose to use McCloy as a back channel to Eisenhower.39 Throughout the Eisenhower presidency, Adenauer knew he could count on McCloy to make the German case in Washington. Indeed, it seemed sometimes as if the former high commissioner served as the chancellor’s own private envoy to Washington.
For some time, he had delayed a long-planned visit back to Germany, and finally, on October 17, 1953, he set sail aboard the Queen Elizabeth. Accompanying him was Shep Stone, now an official of the Ford Foundation. Five days later, he was having lunch in Bonn with Adenauer and the entire German Cabinet.40 He tried to reassure Adenauer on the one issue that troubled all Europeans about the Eisenhower administration: McCarthyism. As the widely read Hamburg newspaper, Die Welt, suggested, many Europeans worried that, in dealing with McCarthy, Eisenhower would ultimately bow to the views of the “conservative majority of Republican Congressmen who look to East Asia” rather than Europe as the focal point of U.S. strategic interests. The revival of America’s latent isolationism—directed at Europe, but not Asia—was a scenario that gave Adenauer’s conservative constituency nightmares. This was particularly true at a time when the Soviets had launched another “peace offensive” calling for a neutral, unified, but demilitarized Germany. Die Welt went so far as to question whether Foster Dulles or Joseph McCarthy was running American foreign policy.41 Though McCloy, of course, had his doubts about Dulles, he tried to persuade Adenauer that Eisenhower himself was ultimately in charge and would not turn his back on the West Germans.
Adenauer must have wondered, however, how much stock to place in such assurances when the very next week McCloy himself was personally assaulted by McCarthy. In a Chicago speech attacking the “bleeding hearts” who opposed his investigative methods, McCarthy singled out McCloy for criticism. He said the former high commissioner “had been considered for Secretary of State, but fortunately President Eisenhower was too smart.” Linking McCloy with those opposed to his investigations, McCarthy told his audience, “We can’t treat these people with a lace handkerchief. You can’t go on a skunk hunting expedition with a top hat and silk handkerchief.. . . The closer we get to the nerve center, the louder and louder will be the screams.”42
McCarthy’s attacks were now escalating. While McCloy was in Germany, the senator was holding a series of hearings to investigate new charges developed by Roy Cohn that the U.S. Army had been infiltrated by communists. By this time, Cohn had no doubt become aware of the controversy surrounding McCloy’s 1945 testimony to Congress on the army’s policy toward leftists. McCarthy chose not to use this information just yet, and instead had Cohn elicit testimony in closed-door hearings on charges that a communist spy ring had established itself inside the army’s Signal Corps Center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
Far from standing up to McCarthy, as McCloy had suggested to Adenauer it would, the Eisenhower administration now attempted to appease the senator. In late October, the administration announced that 1,456 federal employees had been fired. And on November 6, Attorney General Herbert Brownell gave a speech charging that President Truman had nominated Harry Dexter White to be director of the International Monetary Fund in 1946 despite his knowledge of FBI reports that McCarthy said proved him to be a Soviet agent. On national television Truman angrily denied this and charged that the Eisenhower administration “has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism.” To this, the Wisconsin senator demanded equal time, and in a network speech on November 24 he shocked the administration by characterizing Eisenhower’s foreign policy as the same kind of “whining, whimpering appeasement” displayed by Truman. He specifically criticized the administration for not having fired John Paton Davies, McCloy’s former political counselor.43 (Davies was then serving at the U.S. Embassy in Peru.)
McCarthy’s attack precipitated a sharp debate within the White House on how to respond. C. D. Jackson told The New York Times’ James Reston that he thought the senator had “declared war on Eisenhower.” Privately, Jackson thought McCarthy was attempting “to establish McCarthyism as Republicanism.” He wrote in his diary, “Wonderful syllogism—I [McCarthy] am the only effective rooter-outer of Communists; there are still Communists in Government (Davies). . . . Therefore unless Eisenhower roots them out my way, he is a harborer of Communists.” But other White House aides disagreed, and feared the president would lose votes on the Hill for his domestic program if he were to condemn McCarthy. Eisenhower, in the meantime, told Foster Dulles that he hadn’t even bothered to read McCarthy’s speech. A sho
cked Jackson complained, “This place is really falling apart.” But Jackson didn’t give up, and bluntly argued in a White House staff meeting, “. . . this Three Little Monkeys act was not working and would not work, and that appeasing McCarthy” was poor tactics. A few days later, however, the president was still adamant and blustered, “I will not get in the gutter with that guy.” Even after a great deal of Jackson’s “needling,” the most Ike would do was to tell a press conference on December 2 that he would “protect the rights of loyal Americans.”44
By this time, McCloy was back in America, and, like Eisenhower, he chose not to respond to McCarthy’s attack upon him. Instead, he decided it would be prudent to distance himself from McCarthy’s critics. In a speech at the Waldorf-Astoria calling for acceptance of West Germany by the European economic community, he took the trouble to reiterate his own anticommunist credentials. He acknowledged that there had been an “astounding” number of dupes and traitors in the United States. He even criticized the “casualness” with which previous administrations had treated the problem of communist infiltration of government agencies.45
But even such accommodating words did not keep McCarthy from launching another personal attack. Two weeks later, the senator claimed that Telford Taylor and McCloy had plotted to protect 125 German communists allegedly employed in the offices of HICOG 46 McCloy was unbelieving. He couldn’t countenance that he, of all people, was becoming one of McCarthy’s most prominent targets. That November, he had been elected chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a trustee of the Ford Foundation, a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, and one of the president’s most valued private advisers. And yet none of these prestigious positions counted for much in the mind of Joe McCarthy. On the contrary, given the isolationist context of McCarthy’s charges, McCloy’s internationalist résumé made him a natural target of the senator’s loyalty investigations. Worse, the White House was still trying to placate McCarthy. Only a week after his most recent attack on McCloy, the senator was invited to have lunch with the president. There Attorney General Brownell graciously outlined for the senator a “new offensive” against subversion. The administration, he said, would consider introducing legislation barring the Communist Party and legalizing wiretap evidence in spy cases. McCarthy walked out of the luncheon and told his friends, “Ike’s really learning. Now he’s asking my advice.”47 It was true.
By the end of 1953, caution and appeasement characterized Eisenhower’s strategy in handling the volatile senator. Above all, individual victims of the witch-hunt could expect to receive no support from the White House. Early in December, the FBI had received an allegation that J. Robert Oppenheimer was a communist spy; Eisenhower immediately ordered Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, to place a “blank wall” between Oppenheimer and any classified information.48 A full-scale investigation was launched against the physicist, whom McCloy regarded as a trusted colleague. In a few short months, McCloy would be called upon to testify in his behalf. But before that happened, he would first have to defend himself.
On February 7, 1954, in a speech before a dinner crowd of a thousand at an Eagles’ Club in Madison, Wisconsin, McCarthy associated the Democratic administrations of the past twenty years with an “unbelievable, inconceivable unexplainable record of the deliberate, secret betrayal of a nation to its mortal enemy, the Communist conspiracy.” He then singled McCloy out by name, charging that the former assistant secretary of war had issued an order for the destruction of all U.S. Army intelligence files on communists. “Clearly, thus the record shows,” McCarthy said, “that not only were Communists assigned to key jobs but an attempt also was made to keep any succeeding Administrations from knowing where and who the traitors were.” Reached at his home in Manhattan that evening by wire-service reporters, McCloy branded the charges as “absolutely, utterly and completely untrue.” He said he had never had any records destroyed at any time, adding, in a jab at McCarthy, “I’ve been a Republican longer than he has.”49
Three days later, in Los Angeles, McCarthy told reporters, “I was in error on that.” It was one of the rare occasions during his Senate career when McCarthy actually retracted an allegation.50 Evidently, he had not carefully read the information dug up by Roy Cohn on McCloy, and had gotten the story wrong. McCloy, he conceded, had not ordered the destruction of any files on communists; but, he announced, McCloy had signed orders, when he was assistant secretary of war, to commission known communists as army officers. This allegation, of course, was quite true; McCloy had signed numerous memos during the war, largely at the urging of his friend Harold Ickes, ordering the army not to discriminate against leftists, veterans of the Lincoln Brigade and even admitted former communists who claimed their party membership had lapsed.
Placed in the uncomfortable position of having to defend himself politically against facts he knew to be more or less correct, McCloy subjected himself to a rare interview with Drew Pearson. The widely read liberal columnist was startled by McCloy’s vehemence. “He is always eloquent, but not usually impassioned,” wrote Pearson that night in his diary. “This time he was passionate on the question of McCarthy.” McCloy told him, “McCarthy talks about twenty years of treason. I was part of that administration and I served with Republicans and Democrats, men like Henry Stimson, Bob Patterson, Bob Lovett. . . . We won a war that extended all over the world and touched every shore and after the war we managed to keep the economy of the world prosperous. That was a great achievement and I’m proud of it. And it was not accomplished by traitors.”51 McCloy then gave Pearson all the details behind Eisenhower’s well-known “book-burning” speech, including his own role in encouraging the president to condemn McCarthy. This was a good news story, and Pearson was delighted to have it.
Two days after seeing Pearson, and less than a week after McCarthy’s latest broadside, McCloy gave a speech in Philadelphia before an audience of a thousand business and civic leaders. Once again without mentioning McCarthy by name, he tried to place the issue of subversion in some kind of reasonable perspective. “We will make a great and fatal mistake,” he said, “if we believe that the main issue lies in determining how many Communists there were or now are in our Government. When the smoke clears away it will be found that, serious as the infiltration may have been, our own fundamental strength has not been impaired. And if there were 10 times as many as we thought, it would still be a problem which we can deal with. It is simple compared to the main issue.” He then tried to convince his audience that the battlefield lay not at home but abroad, “along the streets of Berlin, in the villages of India and Burma,” and the success or failure of this war against international communism depended on the “character of the political leadership we give to the world.”52 This was a psychological brand of warfare, and though McCloy did not speak of McCarthy, he did not have to; clearly, the senator from Wisconsin was not the kind of man to win the hearts and minds of German Social Democrats, not to mention the neutralist-minded Nehrus of the developing world.
McCloy also reiterated the argument he had made a year ago, that the excesses of McCarthyism had been induced by the New Deal’s investigations of Wall Street. This was a line of argument that Felix Frankfurter found bothersome. The justice gently admonished McCloy that he rather wished he “would risk plainer talk even to the gentry whom you addressed.” He then made an analogy between present-day conservatives who rather relished the spectacle of McCarthy’s attacks on liberals, and those German conservative leaders who believed Hitler could be controlled. McCloy quickly wrote back, saying he understood “the implied rebuke.” In his defense, he wrote, “The best way that I have found to get a response to the excesses of the present situation from conservative groups is to point to their own interests. They can recall how they were harassed and their motives maligned by a lot of zealots in the Roosevelt days.. . . So when McCarthy’s bully boys go to work, these people sit back with a certain sense of satisfaction. The minute, however, that
they see their position is related, they come to their senses.”53
Frankfurter did not let the argument rest there. A week later, he protested, “But surely you are not equating [previous liberal congressional abuses] with the pervasive evil and the deep gashes cut into our national life by the McCarthy performances and the tolerance of them. Nobody knows better than you the differences of degree are so enormous as to be almost differences in kind. . . . Really Jack, do not equate things that are of very different orders.”54 To this firm rebuke, McCloy had no reply.
While Frankfurter thought his former law student’s public stance against McCarthyism was not aggressive enough, McCloy and many other like-minded Republicans thought much the same of Eisenhower’s handling of the senator. That spring, McCarthy repeatedly humiliated the president, making it clear that his next target of investigation was the U.S. Army.
Finally, one day Lucius Clay told Ike over the phone, “This fellow got too powerful—people [are] scared to do anything about him. I’m willing to bet he has information on honorable discharges [of communists] while you were Chief of Staff.”55 Eisenhower vigorously protested that McCarthy could never prove such a thing, but he had good reason to fear otherwise. After all, if McCloy could be implicated, why not Eisenhower himself? It was in such an atmosphere that administration officials like C. D. Jackson and Henry Cabot Lodge now pleaded with the president to step in behind the scenes and undercut McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee’s powers of investigation. Tactically, they thought the first step was to get rid of Roy Cohn. From his post in New York as United Nations ambassador, Lodge wrote to advise that this was the time to use “the documentation on Private S. [David Schine].”
