by Jon Meacham
President Eisenhower, a Republican, continued the work of his two Democratic predecessors, spending billions on Cold War defense and on the interstate highway system. Criticized by conservatives for failing to dismantle the New Deal and the Fair Deal—a dream of the right during the two-decade-long reigns of Roosevelt and Truman—Eisenhower resisted reflexive partisanship. “Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions,” Eisenhower wrote one of his brothers in 1954. “I oppose this—in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it….Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”
Eisenhower’s essential acceptance of the existing political order was wise governance, but, as ever, fear could not be totally conquered. In the same years Truman and Eisenhower were using the presidency to improve the infrastructure of prosperity, anxieties about foreign influence and subversion were growing. “There was an atmosphere throughout the land [in the early 1950s] of suspicion, intolerance, and fear that puzzled me,” William L. Shirer, who had covered Nazi Germany, wrote on returning home. “I had seen these poisons grow into ugly witch hunting and worse in the totalitarian lands abroad, but I was not prepared to find them taking root in our own splendid democracy.” Yet here they were.
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In the closing weeks of 1954, during a long drive down the Hudson Valley to New York City, the conversation among the four passengers in the car—all friends—turned, as it usually did, to politics. One of their number: Robert Welch, a conservative candy manufacturer based in Massachusetts. (Two of his most popular products: the caramel “Sugar Daddy” and the chocolate “Tar Baby.”) Welch believed, and told his friends, that President Eisenhower was to blame for the Republicans’ loss of both the House and the Senate in the November 1954 midterm elections. The president, Welch said, had engaged in a “double-crossing” of his own party, refusing to campaign for candidates after promising to do so. The Congress had been “moved a few notches further left by the defeat of several conservatives,” he said, adding that “this effect was probably intentional” on Eisenhower’s part.
His friends expressed surprise, and Welch recalled that he then explained how Eisenhower—lifetime soldier, conqueror of Hitler, former supreme commander of NATO, and now president of the United States—was an “agent” of a “Communist conspiracy” to undermine and take over America. With a rising worry about domestic subversion in recent years, Welch said, there had been some hope that the country was coming to understand the threat from Moscow. “The American people,” Welch later wrote, “had begun to wake up to the extent of Communist infiltration into our government and into every segment of our public life.”
Eisenhower, Welch claimed, had changed all that. “The sad truth is that this tyranny was actually saved, in this period of great vulnerability, by just one thing: by the inauguration, on January 20, 1953, of Dwight David Eisenhower as President of the United States,” Welch wrote. “Subtly, cleverly, always proclaiming otherwise and finding specious excuses for what were really pro-Communist actions, these Communist influences made [Eisenhower] put the whole diplomatic power, economic power, and recognized leadership of this country to work, on the side of Russia and the Communists, in connection with every problem and trouble spot in their empire.”
Eisenhower—whom Welch asserted was guilty of “a very sinister and hated word”: treason—was not a lonely subversive or a solitary dupe. There were, Welch believed, plenty of others. One was Franklin Roosevelt, who, Welch wrote, had been “swept along and used by Communist forces…avid for the glory and the power of being a wartime president and of tossing around millions of men and billions of dollars with a nod of his head.” Another was the former army chief of staff and Truman secretary of defense and of state George Marshall, whom Welch said was “a conscious, deliberate, dedicated agent of the Soviet conspiracy.” To Welch, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, was yet another “Communist agent.”
There was no evidence for such fevered assertions. A classic conspiracy theorist, Welch fell back on a dictum of Daniel Webster’s: “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.” Where the naked eye and the rational brain saw Eisenhower as a patriot seeking to govern in a nuclear age, Welch, his vision and perception warped by a fear of Communism, detected treason.
Four years after his ride along the Hudson, at a meeting in Indianapolis, Welch founded the John Birch Society. Named in honor of a soldier killed by Chinese Communists, the society believed itself to be engaged in an end-times struggle between good and evil. Of Birch, Welch wrote: “With his death and in his death the battle lines were drawn in a struggle from which either communism or Christian-style civilization must emerge with one completely triumphant and the other completely destroyed.”
It was language made familiar in postwar America in part by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the hard-drinking provocateur from Wisconsin. “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity,” McCarthy told the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on Thursday, February 9, 1950. “The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they are truly down.”
Concern about subversion was hardly novel. The House of Representatives, for instance, had formed a Committee on Un-American Activities, under the chairmanship of Congressman Martin Dies, a Democrat from Texas, in 1938. In 1940 Congress passed the Smith Act, which made it a crime for anyone to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence.” The bill was wildly popular. “The mood of the House is such that if you brought in the Ten Commandments today and asked for their repeal and attached to that request an alien law,” a congressman said, “you could get it.”
McCarthy, though, was something new in modern political life: a freelance performer who grasped what many ordinary Americans feared and who had direct access to the media of the day. He exploited the privileges of power and prominence without regard to its responsibilities; to him politics was not about the substantive but the sensational. The country feared Communism, and McCarthy knew it, and he fed those fears with years of headlines and hearings. A master of false charges, of conspiracy-tinged rhetoric, and of calculated disrespect for conventional figures (from Truman and Eisenhower to Marshall), McCarthy could distract the public, play the press, and change the subject—all while keeping himself at center stage.
Showcasing largely unfounded accusations of Communist subversion, McCarthyism was about exaggerated threats at a time of real danger. Abroad, evidence of the Soviets’ post–World War II ambitions was genuine and growing. By 1949 Moscow had a successful atomic program. In response, the Manchester Union-Leader, a conservative New Hampshire newspaper edited by William Loeb, suggested a preemptive nuclear attack: “We cannot sit idle and wait for Armageddon and destruction. We must forestall such a catastrophe and the only way is to strike a proposed aggressor before he is ready to strike.”
The arrests of Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets—Fuchs in Great Britain, the Rosenbergs in the United States—terrified the West. China, meanwhile, fell into Communist hands, and the Korean War began. At home there was the celebrated case of Alger Hiss, the urbane New Deal lawyer and diplomat pursued by Congressman Richard Nixon—a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee—and convicted of perjury after denying knowing Whittaker Cha
mbers, a confessed former spy for the Russians who had become a fervent Cold Warrior. And politically, the Republican Party was eager to win seats in the House and Senate elections of 1950. Domestic fears of Communist influence were potent—and might just make a powerful midterm issue.
It was in this climate that McCarthy delivered what The Wheeling Intelligencer described as an “intimate” and “homey” address to the 275 guests gathered in the Colonnade Room of the McLure Hotel at the corner of Market and Twelfth streets in Wheeling. “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” McCarthy said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department.”
The number of McCarthy’s alleged Communists was a moving target; his charges were constantly shifting. (In the fullness of time, the 205 figure he offered at Wheeling wandered down to 57.) He thrived on a dangerous, but politically alluring, combination: hyperbole and imprecision. “Talking to Joe was like putting your hands in a bowl of mush,” recalled George Reedy, a wire-service reporter who became an aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
McCarthy was an opportunist, uncommitted to much beyond his own fame and influence. His own lawyer, the young New Yorker Roy M. Cohn, could not discern any great ideological conviction in the junior senator from Wisconsin. “Joe McCarthy bought Communism in much the same way as other people purchase a new automobile,” Cohn recalled. “The salesman showed him the model; he looked at it with interest, examined it more closely, kicked at the tires, sat at the wheel, squiggled in the seat, asked some questions, and bought. It was just as cold as that.”
As Cohn tells the story, in late 1949 McCarthy was given an FBI report detailing allegations of Communist infiltration within the federal government, particularly in the Department of State. It was not new information: A copy had been on file at State since at least 1947. In truth, the Soviets had made strides in penetrating Washington in the 1930s and early ’40s, but a loyalty program had rolled up many of the agents. Now, in the waning hours of the decade, Cold War ultra-hawks wanted to press the case, even though most observers believed the matter largely closed.
McCarthy was in; he said he was “buying the package.” Why? Roy Cohn offered two reasons. “The first was patriotic,” Cohn recalled. “He was worried about the threat to the country posed by the Communist conspiracy, and he decided to do what he could to expose it.” The second? McCarthy, Cohn said, “saw the dramatic political opportunities connected with a fight on Communism. McCarthy was gifted with a sense of political timing. Sometimes he misjudged, but on balance his sense of what made drama and headlines was uncommonly good….He had found, he thought, a politically attractive issue he could sink his teeth into.”
A few days after the Wheeling speech, a trio of Wisconsin journalists sat down with McCarthy at Moy Toy’s, a Chinese restaurant on Third Street in Milwaukee.
“Joe, I don’t believe you’ve got a goddamn thing to prove the things you’ve been saying,” one of the reporters recalled saying. “It’s all a lot of political hogwash.”
“Listen, you bastards,” McCarthy replied. “I’m not going to tell you anything. I just want you to know that I’ve got a pailful of shit and I’m going to use it where it does me the most good.”
Thoughtful people correctly gauged the McCarthy threat. “McCarthy’s methods, to me, look like Hitler’s,” Eleanor Roosevelt remarked. In a private letter, President Truman agreed with a correspondent who posited that “there is no difference in kind between Hitlerism and McCarthyism, both being the same form of bacteriological warfare against the minds and souls of men.” Winston Churchill, in office for a second term as prime minister, added a paragraph to Elizabeth II’s Coronation Address, delivered from Buckingham Palace on the evening of the June 1953 ceremony at Westminster Abbey, implicitly defending the Anglo-American tradition of fair play from McCarthyite incursions. “Parliamentary institutions,” the queen said, “with their free speech and respect for the rights of minorities, and the inspiration of a broad tolerance in thought and expression—all this we conceive to be a precious part of our way of life and outlook.”
“I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy,” President Truman told a press conference in Key West, Florida, in March 1950.
On Thursday, March 30, 1950, at a press conference at his Florida retreat in Key West—where Truman could indulge his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, bourbon, and poker—the president told the assembled journalists exactly what he believed. “I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy,” Truman said. (The reporters knew they had news. “Brother,” one exclaimed, “will that hit page one tomorrow!”) Truman reminded them that he had instituted a loyalty program as the Cold War took shape in 1947 to identify potential subversives. The administration had found the ranks of the disloyal to be “an infinitesimal part of 1 percent.”
The GOP, Truman said, was more interested in partisan advantage than in national security. “For political background, the Republicans have been trying vainly to find an issue on which to make a bid for the control of the Congress for next year,” the president told reporters. “They tried ‘statism.’ They tried ‘welfare state.’ They tried ‘socialism.’ And there are a certain number of members of the Republican Party who are trying to dig up that old malodorous dead horse called ‘isolationism.’ And in order to do that, they are perfectly willing to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States.”
The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket was successful in 1952, but the new president, who governed from the center, alienated many on the right who’d hoped for a wholesale repeal of FDR-Truman programs.
In his commonsense vernacular, Truman added: “Now, if anybody really felt that there were disloyal people in the employ of the Government, the proper and the honorable way to handle the situation would be to come to the President of the United States and say, ‘This man is a disloyal person. He is in such and such a department.’ We will investigate him immediately, and if he were a disloyal person he would be immediately fired. That is not what they want. They are trying to create an issue.” The net effect of the McCarthyite campaign, Truman said, was to undermine confidence in the country in a time of cold war. “To try to sabotage the foreign policy of the United States,” he said, “is just as bad in this cold war as it would be to shoot our soldiers in the back in a hot war.”
Not every Republican signed on for McCarthy’s machinations. On Thursday, June 1, 1950—fewer than four months after Wheeling—Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, issued what she called a “Declaration of Conscience” against McCarthy’s methods. “Joe began to get publicity-crazy,” Smith recalled in an interview with the historian David M. Oshinsky. “And the other senators were now afraid to speak their minds, to take issue with him. It got to the point where some of us refused to be seen with people he disapproved of. A wave of fear had struck Washington.”
As Smith recalled it, she ran into McCarthy, who had flattered her in the past with the suggestion that she would be a fine vice presidential nominee for the Republicans in 1952, on her way to the floor.
“Margaret,” McCarthy said, “you look very serious. Are you going to make a speech?”
“Yes,” Smith replied, “and you will not like it.”
“Is it about me?”
“Yes,” Smith said, “but I am not going to mention your name.”
A frowning McCarthy, Smith recalled, then said: “Remember, Margaret, I control Wisconsin’s twenty-seven convention votes.”
“For what?” Smith said, pushing on.
She rose a few moments later on the Senate floor. “I would like to speak briefly and simply about
a serious national condition,” Smith said. “It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.” She continued:
I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American….
I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution. I think that it is high time that we remembered that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation….
Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism:
The right to criticize;
The right to hold unpopular beliefs;
The right to protest;
The right of independent thought.
Too few heeded Smith’s warning; she was about four years ahead of most of her colleagues. While she did convince six other senators to join her “Declaration”—a defiant McCarthy dismissed them as “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs”—the Republicans were open to seeing where McCarthy’s act might lead. “Joe, you’re a real SOB,” Senator John Bricker, a Republican from Ohio, told McCarthy, “but sometimes it’s useful to have SOBs around to do the dirty work.”
McCarthy’s popular appeal was clear. “He’s unbeatable now,” Milwaukee mayor Frank Zeidler said in the spring of 1950. “He’s a Northern Huey Long.”
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