Authors: Jim Newton
Ike was used to his brother lecturing him, but his patience with the issue—and with Edgar’s presumptuousness—wore thin. “You seem to fear that I am just a poor little soul here who is being confused and misled by a lot of vicious advisers,” Ike sarcastically replied, adding that while Bricker might marshal some legal support for his arguments, the counterarguments were stronger. Moreover, he pointedly reminded his big brother that neither Bricker nor Edgar “has had any experience in conducting difficult negotiations looking toward the necessary and essential Executive agreements.” That still didn’t silence Edgar. As they continued to spar, they also argued over Earl Warren’s appointment to the Court and Edgar’s general concern that his brother was leading the nation toward socialism.
With the Bricker Amendment still on the table in early 1954, Edgar warned that he was hearing more and more reports that Ike had become enamored of the New Deal policies he had once deplored—Social Security, farm subsidies, and an internationalist foreign policy—and that he had fallen into the company of old Dewey supporters, the last a snarling accusation from a conservative Republican. Ike responded sternly, saying that normally he would shrug off “a communication which contains all the hackneyed criticisms and accusations palpably based on misinformation and deliberate distortion.” He was replying only, he said, because he was annoyed to have “one brother that seems always ready to believe that I am a … helpless, ignorant, uninformed individual, thrust to dizzy heights of governmental responsibility and authority, who has been captured by a band of conniving ‘internationalists.’ ” Even that didn’t shut Edgar up, but it did make the point.
If anything, Edgar’s lobbying seemed to harden Ike’s opposition to the amendment, which he became increasingly convinced would handcuff the president and undermine America’s ability to enter into alliances and treaties—a threat to Ike’s existential internationalism. It was tiresome, he acknowledged. “Never have I in my life been so weary of any one subject or proposition,” he told Edgar in February. The amendment itself wound its way through a complicated series of votes and amendments. One was intended to soften the language to make clear that it would only bar treaties that conflicted with the Constitution. For a time, it seemed that might resolve the matter, as supporters had argued that such a clarification was all they sought. When Bricker refused to back that change, however, the lines were drawn. The Bricker Amendment failed a series of close votes in early 1954. Finally, on February 25, it was defeated. A proposal that Ike warned “would have spelled tragedy for the future of America” never again resurfaced as a serious notion. What’s more, Ike won his argument with his brother. When Edgar wrote after the vote to complain that someone in the White House had tried to suggest a break between them on the issue, Ike refused to give in. He had never made a secret of their difference on the amendment, Ike explained, and had said so publicly. “I’m sorry you are upset about it,” Eisenhower wrote, “but the explanation is as simple as that.”
The Bricker Amendment was only one bit of carryover business from 1953. There were others, none more closely watched than Ike’s duel with McCarthy. In June, the two had almost reached a breaking point, when Eisenhower responded to McCarthy’s campaign to rid American libraries abroad of suspicious books by urging Dartmouth students not to join the book burners. Eisenhower’s subsequent silence made it seem as though he had returned to ignoring McCarthy; in fact, he was quietly but methodically isolating the senator.
In early 1954, McCarthy appeared to be gaining, not losing, steam. He had ended 1953 with his renewed attack on the State Department and Davies, hardly new terrain but worrisome in that it was now Eisenhower’s leadership, not Truman’s record, that captured the senator’s attention. Moreover, the still-secret investigation of Oppenheimer hovered over the administration, threatening to become public at any moment and offering McCarthy a chillingly rich target. Eisenhower publicly expressed the hope that Communists in government would not dominate the 1954 campaign, but taking that issue out of the debate would deprive McCarthy of his reason for being; neither he nor his allies could tolerate that. The
Wall Street Journal
captured the issue’s threat to Eisenhower with the headline of its lead editorial on November 23: “Accessory After the Fact.” The paper’s editorial board warned Eisenhower not to minimize the serious and continuing issue of subversion. “The answer,” the
Journal
editorialized, “is not to hush the whole matter up and forget it.” Two days later, McCarthy pointedly rejected Eisenhower’s attempt to talk down the threat of subversion and its relevance to the campaign. “The raw, harsh, unpleasant fact is that Communism is an issue and will be an issue in 1954,” McCarthy said.
Then he pivoted ominously on the institution closest to Eisenhower, the U.S. Army. McCarthy’s inquiries had revealed that an Army dentist, Irving Peress, had refused to sign a loyalty oath and yet been promoted during his time at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. In high dudgeon, McCarthy summoned Peress, who refused to answer questions and was then honorably discharged from the service. McCarthy moved up the chain of command and hauled into the hearings General Ralph Zwicker, a former colleague of Eisenhower’s from the war years and currently the commander at Camp Kilmer. In one ill-tempered hearing after another, McCarthy bludgeoned Zwicker with the repeated question: “Who promoted Peress?” When Zwicker tried to deflect the inquiry, McCarthy sneered: “Anyone with the brains of a five-year-old child can understand the question.” Still, Zwicker refused to hand over names to the senator, prompting the furious McCarthy to exclaim: “Then, General, you should be removed from any command.” Fed up with McCarthy’s mistreatment of his subordinate, Robert T. Stevens, the secretary of the Army, ordered Zwicker to cease cooperation with the committee and said he would testify instead.
With that, the political leanings of a now-discharged Army dentist vaulted to the top of the nation’s agenda and threatened a full-blown test of the separation of powers. Stevens, in good faith, accepted an invitation from McCarthy to head off that confrontation. They talked over lunch in the Capitol on February 24 and cut a deal: McCarthy would stop badgering witnesses, and Stevens would permit Zwicker to return to the stand and provide the committee with the names of those involved in Peress’s promotion. Although McCarthy feigned friendship with Stevens—he once told the secretary that it would be easier to investigate the Army if he weren’t so fond of Stevens—the senator promptly double-crossed him. They emerged from the allegedly private lunch to a klatch of alerted reporters, and McCarthy announced that Stevens had relented and allowed Zwicker to return. He never mentioned that he, too, had made concessions.
“Stevens Bows to McCarthy at Administration Behest,” the
New York Times
trumpeted the next day: “What Secretary Stevens agreed to was precisely what Senator McCarthy had demanded.” “My own reaction,” Ike wrote years later, “was not pleasant.” At the time, he described himself as “astonished.” Stevens, meanwhile, was apoplectic, “in a state of shock and near hysteria,” as Eisenhower put it to Lucius Clay. It was, Adams recalled, the moment that “blew the lid off the teakettle.” Distraught, the secretary called Jim Hagerty and said he wanted to release a statement and then resign (a fact that also made its way into the
Times
). Ike’s long simmer now heated to a boil as he contemplated his obligation to Stevens and Zwicker and those upon whom he relied for counsel. Eisenhower released a statement backing Stevens, and congressional leaders supported the secretary’s version of events. Still, Clay advised caution in tangling directly with McCarthy. “Don’t think you can lock horns on this one,” notes of his February 25 conversation with Eisenhower record. “He has made fight impossible.”
Eisenhower was in fact prepared to fight, but on ground of his choosing. On March 2, he called Herb Brownell for some legal advice. What authority did the president have, Ike asked, to protect his own people? “Suppose I made up my mind that McCarthy is abusing someone,” he asked, hardly a vague hypothetical. “What is constitutional for me to do in this regard?”
While Brownell studied that question, Eisenhower laid the groundwork with important congressional leaders, asking their help to “get a better handling of things” and specifically urging Bill Knowland to keep a lid on McCarthy. He received their assurances and quietly telegraphed his mounting impatience to other key opinion leaders. “A lot of people are genuinely alarmed by what they consider to be his potential capacity for harm,” Ike said of McCarthy in a note to the chairman of the board of General Electric. To Bill Robinson, then settling into his new job as chief executive officer of Coca-Cola (succeeding another member of Ike’s Gang, Bob Woodruff), Eisenhower complained that the same media that had built McCarthy up now clamored for Ike to take him down, but he steadfastly refused to make the presidency “ridiculous” by tangling with him publicly. Worried that McCarthy was gaming for the presidency, Eisenhower vowed to deny him the chance: “He’s the last guy in the world who’ll ever get there, if I have anything to say.”
Publicly, Eisenhower continued to avoid using McCarthy’s name but signaled his displeasure with veiled—and well-received—swipes at the proceedings. His denunciation of book burning still heartened McCarthy’s critics, and he telegraphed his sympathies in other ways, too. In September 1953, investigators for the House Un-American Activities Committee uncovered a 1936 voter registration card bearing the name Lucille Ball and claiming Communist affiliation. Ball was questioned about the card in a private session and admitted that it was hers but noted that she was young at the time and had registered as a Communist to gratify her grandfather Fred Hunt, who helped to raise her. “We just did something to please him,” she insisted. The committee was satisfied with Ball’s responses, but Walter Winchell, the radio commentator, later that week broadcast the news that “the top television comedienne has been confronted with her membership in the Communist Party.”
Winchell’s accusation was false and reckless. Other than to fill out that registration card, Ball had done nothing to cement a relationship with the party and certainly was not a member in 1953. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, vigorously and persuasively rebutted Winchell’s implications; Arnaz got off the best line of the affair, introducing Lucy as “my favorite redhead, in fact, that’s the only thing Red about her, and even that’s not legitimate.” The matter blew over quickly, aided by America’s affection for Ball. More people watched the episode of Lucy delivering her baby than tuned in for Ike’s inaugural.
Still, in those days, even the taint of Communism was enough to cast a shadow across those touched by it. Friends of Ball and Arnaz mysteriously canceled social engagements, and Lucy and Desi worried that her career would suffer. To that, Ike and Mamie supplied a welcome antidote: the couple was invited to a White House dinner to celebrate Ike’s birthday. They entertained the audience and then were asked to sit next to Ike and Mamie. Desi Arnaz well understood the blessing he and Lucy were being offered. “God Bless America!” he exclaimed.
Having worked to cut McCarthy off with colleagues and opinion leaders—and having signaled his distaste for the whole ugly business—Ike now analyzed his options under the Constitution. The key question was whether the president could refuse to make his aides available to Congress if they were subpoenaed to appear. The short answer, as Brownell soon reported, was that there was no legal precedent for such an action. But there was not necessarily a bar, either, and Ike’s friends now pressed him to take the action he was contemplating. “Sooner or later—and probably sooner—Senator McCarthy will again summon … some member of the Executive Branch of the Government who should not be summoned,” wrote Paul Hoffman. “Then and there, I suggest that you issue instructions to this person to refuse the summons from Senator McCarthy and give the reasons for so doing.”
Easily said, not so easily done. Although defying McCarthy on this ground appealed to Eisenhower, it also was sure to provoke a political and constitutional confrontation with an uncertain outcome. It threatened Republican unity on the eve of the midterm elections, and it risked providing McCarthy with the stage that Eisenhower had worked so steadfastly to deny him. Eisenhower considered options: perhaps, one aide suggested, the Justice Department could supply government witnesses with lawyers to accompany them; perhaps there were other protections to give subordinates. Ike bided his time.
The Army positioned, too. Rather than defensively debate their handling of Peress, Army officials prepared a counterattack. They accused McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn of attempting to use his influence to secure favorable treatment for his friend David Schine, who had recently been drafted (it was widely assumed that Cohn and Schine were homosexual, so that inquiry posed a special threat to McCarthy and his aide). They would still have to answer for Peress, but now the Army leadership had McCarthy on the defensive. There was yet another piece of deft footwork as the committee prepared to reconvene. With Ike’s encouragement, the Senate decided to televise the hearings. McCarthy readily agreed, imagining that television would deliver a national platform to him and fantasizing that he was about to vastly expand his reach and power. Eisenhower better understood the implications of that openness. Now the country would see McCarthy as he really was.
First, however, it received the stunning news that America’s preeminent nuclear scientist, surpassed only by Einstein himself, was under suspicion. While McCarthy preened before the public, serious forces had quietly gathered to deliberate the fate of Robert Oppenheimer. The hearing began on April 12, the public still unaware that anything was afoot. The cards were decidedly stacked against the scientist: Strauss had handpicked the three-man committee to hear the charges and had picked the prosecutor to bring them. He had bugged Oppenheimer’s home, his phone, and his lawyers’ offices to keep abreast of their strategy. The prosecutor was permitted to meet with the panel to review the FBI’s extensive file on Oppenheimer, while Oppenheimer’s lawyers were excluded from those sessions. When the hearing began, the members of the board had before them large briefing books, all prepared by Oppenheimer’s pursuers, none available for the defense to review.