Authors: Jim Newton
History has tended to judge Eisenhower harshly in this area—perhaps too harshly. Ike’s life before the presidency gave him no history of regarding blacks as equals: he did not go to school with black classmates; his peers in the military were white; he never reported to a black man or woman. As Brownell recognized from their first conversation on the topic, Ike was uncomfortable leading in this area. He was a man at ease with force, subtle in its use, conscious of its power to deter. He was less sure-footed in matters of moral suasion. John Eisenhower, so often the shrewdest analyst of his father, said it best: “My dad was not a social reformer. He was a commander in chief.”
Eisenhower’s achievement in civil rights, then, is not that he was moved by its morality but that he overcame his own limitations. He gave Brownell wide latitude to press civil rights from the Justice Department and to pick judges and justices who would advance the movement and protect its advocates. And when, in the end, force was required, Ike used it. It is no accident that his greatest personal contribution to the movement came in response to defiance. Then, his options exhausted, Eisenhower became the first president since Lincoln to dispatch American troops to quell rebellion in the South.
Some of the same—and some of the opposite—could be said for Eisenhower’s role in toppling Mossadegh. There, Ike moved boldly. But, as with his nomination of Warren, the consequences of American action in Iran were only vaguely imaginable in 1953. In one sense, the coup was alarmingly easy to execute, despite a fundamental error in the intelligence that produced it. One common thread throughout the CIA report, Roosevelt’s firsthand account, the original documents of the era, and Eisenhower’s later reflection is the unswerving conviction that Mossadegh was moving the nation into the Communist orbit and that he would have delivered it to the Soviet Union—either by design or by inadvertence—had the United States not intervened. The evidence for that premise remains shaky at best.
Moreover, success in Iran sweetened Eisenhower’s taste for covert action, with complex consequences. In Iran—and later, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Congo, among other places—covert action offered a way to check Communism while avoiding a frontal confrontation with the Soviets or Chinese. In Cold War terms, that could seem prudent as it checked a menace without resort to ultimate force. But it substituted one version of colonialism with another, more subtle variant, relying as it did on the notion the U.S. reserved the right to chart the courses of smaller nations. The resulting resentments haunt international relations even today.
What was true and apparent at the time, however, was that Mossadegh was careering toward a calamity with no sure sense of direction or purpose. It was the United States—at Eisenhower’s specific instruction—that pushed him over the precipice, but his escalating conflict with the Shah could just as easily have presented the Soviet Union with its pretext for invasion or coup. The long-view consequences of the CIA’s work in Iran have been profound and unsettling: in the crowds that swirled through Tehran that summer was a cleric by the name of Ruhollah Khomeini, then fifty years old, whose enmity toward the United States ripened during the Shah’s long reign. Viewed through our contemporary prism, then, the insult to the Iranian people and their faith inflicted by American intelligence agents in 1953 seems a deep and costly one. But so, too, could the alternatives have shadowed the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, if the Soviet Union controlled Iran and the Persian Gulf through the heart of the Cold War. Instead, Iran lay safely nestled within the American orbit for the balance of Eisenhower’s tenure, indeed, for the rest of his life. When Ike finished
Mandate for Change
in 1963, he was able to write, with evident satisfaction, of Mossadegh’s surrender—“in pajamas,” Eisenhower added, vindictively—and to conclude that the coup’s success was self-evident: “For the first time in three years, Iran was quiet—and still free.”
7
Security
F
ew events in politics are genuinely inevitable. Too much rides on the decisions of calculating men and women. Sloppy thinking and writers postulating the inevitable in retrospect merely prove the power of cliché rather than destiny. Certainly, the break between President Eisenhower and Senator McCarthy was hardly inevitable; to the contrary, it was eminently avoidable. They shared, after all, two common foes: President Truman and the threat of domestic subversion. Eisenhower was disgusted by McCarthy’s methods, but he never doubted that there were Communists working in the United States and that party members and their allies were actively trying to undermine American security.
Joe McCarthy could have given Ike a wide berth, could have cooled his zeal once Truman left office. But he so enjoyed the limelight that he was unwilling to drop the one cause that had brought him national attention. And Ike found McCarthy, in the end, impossible to ignore. So they collided, and the ramifications of that collision reverberated long and loud.
General Eisenhower and Tail-Gunner Joe had sparred during the 1952 campaign, when McCarthy’s supporters baited Ike into his worst blunder of that season, his refusal to give Marshall the full support he deserved. Eisenhower later insisted that he had not “capitulated” to McCarthy, but he knew he had let his mentor down. “If I could have foreseen this distortion of the facts, a distortion that even led some to question my loyalty to General Marshall, I would never have acceded to the staff’s arguments, logical as they sounded at the time,” he wrote. That was defensive. The error was his, and he knew it.
By the time of Ike’s election, McCarthy was well along on his rampage. After his broad assertions of Soviet spies at work in the U.S. government, he needed to produce names. First, he coyly announced that he had the identity of the “top Russian espionage agent in the United States” but declined to reveal it. Then he disclosed it to senators in a closed meeting and held an off-the-record meeting with reporters where he also divulged it, but since he refused to be quoted, the alleged agent’s identity became the source of fiery rumor. McCarthy’s unlikely target, as it was eventually revealed, was Owen Lattimore, a mild Asia specialist traveling in Afghanistan. Told of the accusations against him, Lattimore cabled back that the senator’s “rantings [were] pure moonshine.” He finished up his UN work in Kabul and headed home.
McCarthy had opened with explosive charges, delivered behind the safe veil of leaked remarks or congressional immunity. Now confronted with Lattimore himself, McCarthy retreated to safer ground, downgrading his attack to suggest that Lattimore was merely a “bad policy risk.” He pooh-poohed his own earlier assessment by saying he had perhaps “placed too much stress on the question of whether or not he has been an espionage agent.” Lattimore thus confronted shifting allegations, and unlike those who would follow him, he had no example of how to respond. With the help of his brilliant counsel, Abe Fortas, Lattimore elected to take on McCarthy directly. He testified in an open Senate session and blisteringly condemned the campaign against him. He even wrote a book about the experience while it was still under way.
Ordeal by Slander
was a thorough, steadfast, and principled defense of an individual against an unprincipled government adversary.
“We are in one of those national crises in which the fundamental cause of liberty will either be seriously impaired or renewed and strengthened, depending on what we do,” Lattimore argued and warned. “To break the grip of fear we must revive both the letter and the spirit of the Bill of Rights.”
McCarthy was unmoved. The FBI had compiled a flimsy collection of innuendo and suspicion. Lattimore was said to have denigrated Chiang Kai-shek in 1948, to have employed a Chinese economist who was “without a doubt a member of the Communist Party,” and to have spoken to groups of a “questionable nature.” The bureau’s files did include one more troubling, if uncorroborated, allegation: a confidential informant told agents on December 14, 1948, that the head of Soviet military intelligence named Lattimore as a Soviet operative, one of two working in Asia. Other informants questioned that information, but it supplied grist for McCarthy.
The senator cherry-picked the FBI report and pressed forward, punishing Lattimore for his defiance. Lattimore fought off one inquiry after another and was charged with perjury. Ultimately, he was exonerated, but only after many years and much pillory. In the meantime, McCarthy was emboldened. Having tasted fame, he was unwilling to cease, notwithstanding the election of a Republican president.
His first overtures were tentative, as Eisenhower and McCarthy measured each other. Ike congratulated McCarthy on his Senate victory and referred cautiously to the nation’s vote of confidence in “our crusade.” Before Inauguration Day, McCarthy warned John Foster Dulles that his committee intended to investigate the State Department’s filing system. Dulles welcomed the notice and the investigation, saying he “wanted all the help he could get.”
Encouraged, McCarthy ventured a bit further. He conveyed through a close friend, the crusading journalist George Sokolsky, that he intended to press the case against the Voice of America, supposedly a safe haven for Communist infiltrators. Again, the message was delivered gently: Sokolsky was an old friend of Dulles’s, having counseled him during Dulles’s brief Senate tenure. Moreover, the new secretary of state was an icon of American anti-Communism, convinced that Communist infiltration in government posed a genuine threat to national security. Though he declined, for instance, to cast aspersions on the loyalty of American socialists, he refused to employ them in State Department policy-making positions.
Those initial parries, however, were followed by something far more ominous. McCarthy wheeled against Charles E. Bohlen, the administration’s nominee to serve as American ambassador to the Soviet Union. There were warning signs from the beginning that his nomination would run into trouble. Bohlen had served as a translator at Yalta, long a bane of anti-Communist conservatives who accused FDR of betraying Western interests to Stalin in the 1945 talks. Though Bohlen was a peripheral actor in those negotiations, his mere presence made him vulnerable, as Lattimore’s experience demonstrated. Eisenhower recognized that Bohlen’s Yalta connection could create controversy, but he worked to head it off, securing Senator Robert Taft’s promise to support the nomination by insisting that if Republicans defied their party’s leader on a matter this public and this early, “it would be a serious blow to the President’s prestige,” as Adams put it. The warning deterred Taft, but not McCarthy.
Ike submitted the nomination and soon realized there would be trouble. On March 13, Sherman Adams warned John Foster Dulles that “perhaps we are on very shaky grounds.” Publicly, the debate swirled around Bohlen’s unwillingness to denounce Yalta as a failure. Privately, however, the controversy centered on other matters. Adams warned Dulles that “moral charges” had been brought against the would-be ambassador. Although Adams dismissed those as “unsubstantiated and speculative,” they were rattling for the new administration. If anything, however, they steeled Eisenhower’s resolve. Discussing Bohlen with Dulles a few days later, Eisenhower described the allegations as “incredible” and observed that Bohlen “has a normal family life.” Ike insisted he had “not the slightest intention of withdrawing” his candidate’s name.
As the matter came to a head, it was jolted by a careless remark from one of the administration’s most conservative operatives. Scott McLeod, hired as the State Department’s security officer to appease McCarthy, told McCarthy, through an intermediary, that he had not cleared Bohlen’s nomination because of information contained in the FBI’s background check. That implied that Bohlen’s loyalty was under examination when, as McCarthy and McLeod both well knew, it was not. As Ike contemplated firing McLeod, Dulles publicly vouched for Bohlen, and McCarthy demanded that Dulles testify under oath while insisting that Bohlen was “part of the Acheson betrayal team … a very willing and enthusiastic part and parcel of the Acheson-Vincent-Lattimore-Service clique.” Eisenhower fumed right through the final vote, in which Bohlen was confirmed despite the defections of eleven Republican senators. He went on to serve with distinction.
The incident highlighted the full danger of McCarthy and his methods. Innuendo offered under the protection of congressional immunity delivered McCarthy headlines and political opportunity while insulating him from either legal or political retaliation. Since attention was what McCarthy most craved, Ike decided to deny the senator that which he wanted. Eisenhower’s approach, then, would be to shun McCarthy. On March 27, Eisenhower told his cabinet that he would refuse to “attack an individual.” A few days later, he confided to his diary: “Senator McCarthy is … so anxious for the headlines that he is prepared to go to any extremes in order to secure some mention of his name in the public press … I really believe that nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of troublemaking as to ignore him. This he cannot stand.” Ike complained to Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, that McCarthy was “a pimple on the path of progress.” The following day, Eisenhower said of McCarthy’s methods: “I despise them.” Still, he added, “I am quite sure that the people who want me to stand up and publicly label McCarthy with derogatory titles are the most mistaken people that are dealing with this whole problem.” To a sympathetic newspaper editor, he confidentially described McCarthy as a source of “embarrassment for the administration.” Through much of 1953 and 1954, Eisenhower was counseled to take on McCarthy directly. He steadfastly refused.
There was one moment in 1953 when it appeared that Eisenhower might be preparing to change his approach. That spring, two of McCarthy’s aides, Roy Cohn (one of the Rosenberg prosecutors) and David Schine, made a highly publicized tour of European embassy libraries, ferreting out works by Communists, fellow travelers, or otherwise suspect liberals. They returned with a list of 418 such disreputable scholars as John Dewey and Foster Rhea Dulles (John Foster Dulles’s cousin), whose books shamed the shelves of American institutions abroad. Some of them were burned. Works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Langston Hughes, among many others, were stripped from the shelves of American libraries abroad. Amid international uproar, Eisenhower’s friends again demanded that he intercede and confront McCarthy.