CHAPTER THREE

Getting Started

January 21–March 31, 1953

AFTER EISENHOWER had been in office for slightly more than a month, Robert Donovan of the Herald Tribune asked him at a news conference, “How do you like your new job?” Eisenhower replied that he had never said nor thought that “I would like it. It is not a job that I suppose it is intended one should like.”1

Eisenhower was being a bit coy. Despite his almost blasé remark in his diary at the end of his first day in the Oval Office, he was finding the job to be fascinating, absorbing, challenging, and fulfilling. He once—only once—admitted that he found the clash of wits with the German generals during the war to be “exhilarating.” In a different way, so was the Presidency. He was not engaged in a direct contest with Stalin and his generals as he had been with Hitler, Rommel, Rundstedt, and the others; the issues were never as clear-cut between right and wrong, good and evil; nor could he expect instant obedience, even from members of his own team, when he handed down his orders. But there were compensations. The range of problems was much greater; so were the possibilities of using his talents to bring about compromise and to find a modus vivendi among warring factions. Most of all, even for the former Supreme Commander it was a heady experience to feel that he was “at the center of the world.” The “excitement” of working daily on a wide variety of difficult problems of the greatest importance, he confessed, was “exhilarating.”²

On January 23, Eisenhower presided over his first Cabinet meeting. He began with his standard pitch for teamwork. He said he intended to meet on a weekly basis with the Cabinet, and with the Republican leaders in Congress, so that everyone would know what everyone else was thinking and doing, thereby avoiding “any appearance of disunity.” He urged “selflessness rather than empire building” on his department heads, and insisted that they cooperate fully with Congress, using Jerry Persons as their liaison. He told them that “there is no use to try to conceal an error,” so they should “advertise your blunders, then forget them.” Promising to back them up, he added, “I believe in decentralizing—that’s why I took so much care in picking this gang.”

Eisenhower said he was concerned about the State of the Union message he would have to deliver to Congress in a little more than a week. It was much too early, he thought, for him to be presenting a program, but the date was fixed and he would have to go through with it. He was concerned “about the lack of detailed substance in the message,” and said he did not “want to assemble Congress without having something to give them. I would like more from each member of the Cabinet in specific terms.”

Next Eisenhower turned to an issue that much concerned him and his colleagues—getting control of the bureaucracy. Eisenhower had not heard Truman’s warning—Poor Ike, Truman had said, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen.”—but he did not need to hear it to know it. The Democrats had complete control of the bureaucracy, and had managed to protect, through Civil Service, more than 95 percent of the officeholders. Eisenhower feared they would sabotage his programs. The Republicans, naturally enough, wanted their own people in those jobs and, of course, they had thousands of party faithful who expected rewards for their services.

Intertwined with the problem of getting Democrats out and Republicans in was the question of security. It was an article of faith among the Republicans that the Democrats had allowed thousands of Commies, pinks, queers, and other undesirables into the bureaucracy. To emphasize the Republican devotion to national security, Eisenhower had already announced that all new appointees—including Cabinet members—would have to undergo a security check by the FBI. Brownell now expounded on that theme. He said he did not like loyalty oaths, because they were inefficient and difficult to administer. He suggested that the basic criteria for appointment to office be changed from those of loyalty to those that put the emphasis on the security risk involved. A drunk or a homosexual could be as loyal as Uncle Sam himself, and still be a security risk because he could be blackmailed. Eisenhower seized on that idea and in his formal message announced that henceforth “security,” not “loyalty,” would be the test for appointments and retention.

Identifying the security risks, and removing them, was the next problem. Eisenhower said he intended to set up review boards in each department. He would encourage the bureaucrats to inform on each other; the review board would then hear the case; it would make a recommendation for retention or firing to the department head, who would have the final authority. Nixon pointed out that if the review-board members were picked from existing employees, all Democrats, they would protect each other. The boards, Nixon said, “should consist of people new to the department”—meaning Republicans—or nothing would happen.

Humphrey said he thought it important to get rid of the subversives “as quietly as possible.” He urged caution—“don’t start with wholesale firings”—and prudence. “Let’s make certain our cases are strong—we’ve got to win the first one.” Eisenhower, more aware than Humphrey of how badly the Republicans wanted dramatic action on the subversive front, disagreed. He wanted strong cases, but when undesirables were found and fired, he wanted maximum publicity. Dodge said there were already lists “of persons on whom disloyalty cannot be proved—but they are nevertheless poor security risks.” Eisenhower said he wanted to be fair and to protect the rights of the individuals involved, “but I want positive action taken when we are in the right.” And in the “hot” departments of Defense and State, “no doubt can be tolerated.”

Turning from security to other grounds for cleansing the stables, Eisenhower said he felt that “talkativeness is a good basis for firing a man.” He did not want to read any quotes from staff officers in the newspapers; he wanted them to know that leaking information to reporters was “tantamount to resignation.” Then he warned the Cabinet that “there is nothing so dangerous as the Washington cocktail party. As a young officer I was horrified by the arbitrary comments of upper-level officials. Those parties are an abomination of the devil.”3

The next week, Eisenhower read his latest draft of the State of the Union speech to the Cabinet, then asked for reactions. Nixon wished he had laid into the Democrats more; Eisenhower said he did not want to be critical of the past, but forward-looking and positive. He pointed out that he would need Democratic support to put his program through. Besides, he said, he had hammered the Democrats hard enough on Yalta with his promise to ask Congress at a later date for a resolution “making clear that this government recognizes no kind of commitment contained in secret understandings of the past with foreign governments which permit enslavement.” Further, his announcements on his Korean policy all implied severe criticism of Truman’s policy. Eisenhower intended to say that he was stepping up military assistance to the Koreans, so that the Republic of Korea (ROK) forces could do more of the fighting, allowing American troops to be pulled back into reserve. More dramatically, he would announce that Truman’s order to the U.S. Seventh Fleet to patrol the waters between Formosa and China in order to keep the two sides apart was being rescinded. “I am,” he read, “issuing instructions that the Seventh Fleet no longer be employed to shield Communist China.” In fact, under secret orders from Truman, the Seventh Fleet had long since encouraged Nationalist raids on a regular basis against the Chinese coast, but nevertheless all agreed that the Old Guard would be delighted at Eisenhower’s decision to “unleash” Chiang Kai-shek.

There were other items designed to delight the Old Guard, including Eisenhower’s decision to end price controls. This policy, he said, should have a “great effect on Taft,” who not only wanted a free economy but who would be delighted by the elimination of the twenty-five thousand federal employees who administered the program. Humphrey expressed his satisfaction with this, and was overjoyed to hear the President say that “the first order of business is the elimination of the annual deficit.”

Eisenhower wanted to give the Old Guard as much as he could, because on the most basic issues he was setting policies that ran directly counter to its wishes. Unleashing the Nationalist Chinese, for example, sounded good, but it merely disguised the more fundamental decision not to seek an all-out victory in Korea. So too with the balanced-budget pledge—Republicans wanted that, but they also wanted an immediate tax cut. Eisenhower was refusing to give it to them. Eisenhower knew too that the Old Guard would be unhappy with his strong support of foreign-aid programs, especially to the NATO countries, and with his determination to cut back on defense spending (the key line read, “To amass military power without regard to our economic capacity would be to defend ourselves against one kind of disaster by inviting another.”). Further, although the Old Guard would be pleased by Eisenhower’s firm commitment to find and fire the security risks within the bureaucracy, McCarthy and his friends expected the files of all government agencies to be thrown open to their investigations. Eisenhower could hardly expect them to give him their “understanding and cooperation,” as he put it, in leaving such investigations to him and his Cabinet.

On the tariff, too, Eisenhower anticipated trouble with the Old Guard. The last time the Republicans were in power, they had pushed through the highest tariff in American history (the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930); since then, the Democrats had cut the tariff in half, primarily through the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) of 1934, which gave the President the power to raise or lower tariffs by executive agreement. The act was due to expire in six months—and good riddance, most Republicans felt—but Eisenhower had a theoretical commitment to free trade and a practical need to encourage foreign trade, so he intended to announce that he wanted RTAA “studied and extended.” Weeks feared that any Republican-dominated commission set up to study RTAA would end up recommending its elimination. Eisenhower disagreed. “Put reasonably intelligent men in possession of all the facts,” he said, “and they will come to general agreement in support of extension.”

Other items sure to make members of the Old Guard wish they had Taft rather than Eisenhower for a President included his call for “some corrective action” on Taft-Hartley, and his reminder that “we are—one and all—immigrants or sons and daughters of immigrants,” which led him to demand new, nondiscriminatory immigration legislation. And although no one in the Cabinet disagreed with Eisenhower’s proposal not only to retain but actually to extend Social Security to “millions of citizens who have been left out,” the department heads were apprehensive about the effect of this decision on the Republicans in Congress.

Overall, the Cabinet liked Eisenhower’s address. The department heads were especially pleased by his concluding paragraph, for it expressed his philosophy clearly: “There is, in our affairs at home, a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare of the whole Nation. This way must avoid government by bureaucracy as carefully as it avoids neglect of the helpless.”4

On February 2, just before going to the joint session to make his speech, Eisenhower noted in his diary that it was much too soon to be announcing specific policies. “But,” he realized, “the Republicans have been so long out of power they want, and probably need, a pronouncement from their president . . .”—one that would convince them that real and drastic changes in policy were under way.5 He satisfied them by putting the repudiation of Yalta and the unleashing of Chiang at the beginning of the speech. These two items got by far the most attention. Democrats told reporters they had no intention of repudiating Yalta (and thus FDR); Europeans, led by the French, feared that the supposedly new Formosa Straits policy would lead to a wider war. The British were also upset; later that week Dulles had to reassure them privately that there would be no real change, and certainly no wider war.⁶ “I hope, and pray,” Eisenhower had written in his diary, “that [the speech] does not contain blunders that we will later regret.”⁷ After gauging the reaction, he decided that it had not, and that he had passed this first test successfully.

•  •

Now it was time to turn away from public relations to the serious problems of statecraft. One of Eisenhower’s major goals was the creation of a United States of Europe. During his year and a half as SACEUR, 1951–52, he had pushed that concept hard, in public and in private. In his State of the Union message, he called for a “more closely integrated economic and political system in Europe.”⁸ He sent Dulles and Stassen on a tour of the European NATO capitals, with instructions to pressure the Europeans toward a ratification of the European Defense Community (EDC), which was designed to create an all-European army. Eisenhower’s idea was that no political unity could be achieved in Europe without a spur, and that EDC was the best possible spur. A treaty had been signed creating EDC; the French were holding up ratification; Eisenhower wanted to force action.

Before leaving for Europe, Dulles had begun to apply the pressure by announcing, in a television speech, that “if it appeared there were no chance of getting effective unity . . . then certainly it would be necessary to give a little rethinking to America’s own foreign policy in relation to Western Europe.” The press described this speech as a “shock treatment,” and Eisenhower’s many friends in Europe protested privately to him at this implied threat by the Republicans to return to a policy of isolation.⁹

Eisenhower wrote a long letter to the SHAPE chief of staff, his old friend Alfred Gruenther, with instructions to Gruenther to pass the word at the various NATO capitals. He said he had sent Dulles and Stassen to Europe to remind the Europeans that American aid “was bound to be weakened unless they move definitely in the direction of greater unification.” Eisenhower said he was “amazed” that the NATO leaders could believe he intended to desert them.¹⁰

Eisenhower’s amazement at European nervousness about the direction of his policies was itself surprising. The all-out Republican assault during the campaign on the Truman-Acheson policies and Republican promises for major changes inevitably made Europeans sensitive and worried. The British, who liked to think they had a “special relationship” with the Americans, and especially with Eisenhower, were greatly concerned. They showed their sensitivity when Eisenhower appointed Winthrop Aldrich as his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s without first consulting with the Churchill government. In fact, Eisenhower had warned Dulles to inform Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, before making the announcement, but Dulles had failed to do so. In his diary, Eisenhower recorded his reaction: “I am going to advise Anthony . . . to lay the blame for this whole unfortunate occurrence squarely on me. He will have the logical explanation that my lack of formal experience in the political world was the reason for the blunder. Actually, I was the one who cautioned against anything like this happening, but manifestly I can take the blame without hurting anything or anybody; whereas if the secretary of state would have to shoulder it, his position would be badly damaged.”11

The Europeans, meanwhile, were telling Dulles—and Eisenhower’s special representative to NATO, William Draper—that they could not afford to spend any more on defense, and that their idea was that the United States ought to increase its nuclear arsenal in Europe (which currently stood at sixteen bombs of twenty kilotons each).¹² Eisenhower told Draper to remind the Europeans that “if, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, a backward civilization with a second-rate production plant can develop the power to frighten us all out of our wits, then we, with our potential power can, through work, intelligence and courage, build any countering force that may be necessary.”¹³

Thus early were patterns established. Eisenhower was determined to force the Europeans to spend more on defense, and to achieve political and military unity. Dulles, highly visible and quotable, flew around the world, apparently acting on his own but in fact operating under instructions from Eisenhower. So tightly did Eisenhower control Dulles that Dulles, each evening that he was on a trip, sent a cable reporting on what had transpired that day and what he intended to say the following day. Dulles carried messages; he did not make policy. And, frequently, Dulles had to be saved from his own mistakes, which Eisenhower was more than willing to do, even at his own expense.

•  •

NATO was a matter of great concern to Eisenhower, but the war in Korea was of more immediate importance. On February 11, Eisenhower met with the NSC to consider the situation and the options. Bradley gave a briefing in which he discussed recent reports, and a request, from General Clark. The reports concerned a Chinese buildup in the Kaesong sanctuary, a twenty-eight-square-mile area created through the armistice negotiations and which “was now chock-full of troops and material.” Clark believed the Chinese were preparing an offensive; he asked permission to attack Kaesong “as soon as he believes that the Communist attack is imminent.” Dulles agreed with Clark; he said the time had come to end the arrangements for immunity at Kaesong, which had been designed to facilitate armistice negotiations, which were now defunct. Eisenhower asked about the possibilities of using atomic weapons on Kaesong, as “it provides a good target for this type of weapon.” He did not like that option, but “we can not go on the way we are indefinitely.”

Bradley thought it unwise to consider using atomic weapons. Dulles mentioned the moral problem “and the inhibitions on the use of the A-bomb, and Soviet success to date in setting atomic weapons apart from all other weapons as being in a special category.” He said in his opinion “we should try to break down this false distinction.” Eisenhower knew that the U.N., and especially Britain and France, would object strongly to using atomic weapons; in that case, he added, “we might well ask them to supply the three or more divisions needed to drive the Communists back.” But, on reflection, he concluded that there should be no discussion “with our allies of military plans or weapons of attack.” As to Clark’s request to attack Kaesong, Eisenhower said he “doubted the validity” of any advance information Clark might obtain on Chinese intentions. He said that although “I have never been able to understand why the U.N. command had ever abandoned its rights of hot pursuit of enemy aircraft to the bases” in Manchuria, he nevertheless would not give Clark the authority to attack Kaesong. He also told Dulles not to broach the subject of ending Kaesong’s immunity with the NATO allies.14

The next day, February 12, at a Cabinet meeting, Korea came up again during a discussion of the timing of the removal of price and wage controls. Dulles had been in Europe when Eisenhower ordered the controls ended; he was back for the February 12 meeting and at it expressed his concern. He said he did not want to recommend reversing Eisenhower’s decision, but he did want to warn the President that “the situation has never been so grave as it looks today.” He said that the Russians were on the move in Berlin and in the Arab world, and that the Chinese were about to launch an offensive in Korea. Under the circumstances, he thought the President might have to “backtrack” on the removal of controls.

Eisenhower stared at his Secretary of State, then said slowly and deliberately, “We are living on a high plateau of tension and we cannot risk living all our lifetimes under emergency measures.” To do so would risk turning the United States into a police state.15

Instead, Eisenhower wanted to increase the psychological pressure on the Chinese. He intended to let them know, “discreetly,” that unless the armistice negotiations resumed and satisfactory progress was made, the United States would “move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons . . . We would not be limited by any world-wide gentleman’s agreement.”¹⁶ Unleashing Chiang was a part of the pressure; so was Eisenhower’s announcement that he was increasing military assistance to the ROK; so were his frequent statements that the situation in Korea was “intolerable.” But the greatest pressure, by far, was his own reputation. The Chinese were fully aware that in the war against Germany, Eisenhower had used every weapon at his disposal. They knew that he had atomic weapons available in the Far East, that he would not accept a stalemate, and that he was not demanding their unconditional surrender, but only that they agree to an armistice. The substance behind Eisenhower’s threats was Eisenhower’s reputation, backed by America’s atomic arsenal.

•  •

On Tuesday, February 17, Eisenhower held his first presidential news conference. He had already announced, through Hagerty, that he intended to meet with the press on a regular basis, weekly if possible, and that he was considering allowing TV cameras into the Executive Office Building for the conferences. Eight years later, he had met with the press on 193 occasions, and starting in 1955 with the cameras present. He thus subjected himself to the questions of the press far more often than any other President in American history. He did so despite the jeers of his critics, who had great fun with his jumbled syntax, his confessions that he “did not know” about this or that issue, and his often inappropriate or impossibly confusing answers.

Eisenhower was proud of his command of the English language, as he had a right to be—he had written MacArthur’s speeches in the thirties, and in 1945, at Guildhall, he had delivered a speech (which he wrote by hand) that the London Times ranked with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Churchill’s “blood, sweat and tears” speech. But showing that he could get his verbs and nouns to agree, that he knew better than to end a sentence with a preposition, or that he could turn a phrase, was not part of his purpose in the news conferences. Rather, he used the reporters, and later the TV cameras, to reach out to the nation. One of his basic principles of leadership was that a man cannot lead without communicating with the people. Through the conferences, he could educate and inform, or confuse if that suited his purpose. The conferences helped him stay in control; through his answers, he could command the headlines and the national discussion of issues. The Tuesday-morning meetings allowed him to set the national agenda for that week. By downplaying an issue, he could get it off the front pages; by highlighting an issue, he could make it the prime item of national interest. He could, in short, decide when there was a crisis, and when there was not. He could also obfuscate an issue when he was not yet sure how he would deal with it.

As he had done during the war, and in the period 1945–1952, he cultivated the press corps, especially the senior members. Reporters who covered his vacations would find themselves invited to a feast of fresh-caught trout, cooked by the man who had caught them, the President himself. Sometimes he played golf with reporters. And although he could not, and did not, expect the kind of loyal cooperation he had gotten from the press during the war, when he considered the reporters to be quasi members of his staff, he never allowed his relationship with them to degenerate into one of antagonism. In his opening remarks at his first news conference, he praised the American press corps, saying that in the eleven years he had been a world figure, “I have found nothing but a desire to dig at the truth . . . and be open-handed and forthright about it.” And he was aware of, and thanked the reporters for, the sympathetic treatment he had received: “I feel that no individual has been treated more fairly and squarely over the past many years . . . than I have by the press.”

There was an obvious major difference between being Supreme Commander and being President. In the first instance, Eisenhower was executing policies made by Roosevelt, and in his press conferences he could concentrate on how he was carrying out his responsibilities. Reporters did not ask him about, much less criticize, his plans and intentions. As President, he was making policy, which meant that his conferences concentrated on what he was going to do, and why. Further, all reporters were on his side as a general, but as President he faced a press corps of which at least half the working members were Democrats. Despite the differences, it was as true of President Eisenhower as it was of General Eisenhower that he established and maintained an excellent rapport with the press.

In this first presidential news conference, Andrew Tully of Scripps-Howard Newspapers wanted to know if he had “discovered any other secret agreements besides the one signed at Yalta?” No, Eisenhower responded, he had not. What about the repudiation of Yalta? Eisenhower had promised to send an appropriate resolution to Congress on that subject; he now explained, “I am merely talking about those parts of agreements that appeared to help the enslavement of peoples, or, you might say, have been twisted by implication to mean that.” In so saying, he made a major concession to the Democrats. The Republican position was that Roosevelt had handed over East Europe to Stalin; the Democrats maintained that Roosevelt had entered into the best possible agreement, one which should have guaranteed freedom to the Poles, but that Stalin had violated his pledged word.

May Craig of the Portland Press Herald then asked if he was aware that “many members of Congress feel that the agreements were never binding, anyway, because they were not presented to the Senate” for ratification. Of course he was aware, but he confused the issue: “Well, I think there are, in our practice, certain things that are of course binding when the people are acting as proper representatives of the United States—say, in war, as in establishing staffs and that sort of thing. That extends out into some fields that are almost politico-military in nature.”

Unsatisfied, Craig pressed on. “Are you aware that many members of Congress also feel that the President had no right to take us into Korea without consulting Congress, also that he had no right to send troops to Europe?” Eisenhower cut her off: “That all took place long before I came to this office. I have a hard time trying to determine my own path and solve my own problems. I am not going back and try to solve those that someone else had.” (Two weeks later, Craig pressed again; Eisenhower then told her, sharply, “I have no interest in going back and raking up the ashes of the dead past.”)

Eisenhower also used his news conferences to send messages to Congress. When a reporter wanted to know if he intended to sponsor a bill to retain the excess-profits tax, which was due to expire on June 30, he replied, “I would say this—I can’t answer that in exact terms—I shall never agree to the elimination of any tax where reduction in revenue goes along with it.” Then, giving the reporters a wave and a big grin, he left the room, leaving them to figure out what he had said and what he meant, but with the distinct impression that everything was under control.17

•  •

Like most Presidents, Eisenhower had difficulty distinguishing between attacks on his policies and attacks on himself. When Ken Crawford of Newsweek wrote a critical piece, Eisenhower told an aide, “I don’t understand how he could write a piece like that because I’ve always regarded him as a friend of mine.” The aide replied, “Well, he admires you and he is a friend of yours. His trouble is that he hates Republicans.” Eisenhower rubbed his chin, grinned, and replied, “He may have something there.”¹⁸

Indeed, in his first months in office, Eisenhower had far greater difficulty with his own party than with the Democrats. On February 7, Eisenhower had noted in his diary, “Republican senators are having a hard time getting through their heads that they now belong to a team that includes rather than opposes the White House.”¹⁹ He had in mind the Old Guard, and most especially Senator McCarthy.

A fight between Eisenhower and McCarthy was inevitable. The senator was not about to give over to the Administration the issue that had catapulted him to international prominence, Communism in government. And he was hardly alone. With control of the congressional committees in hand, the Republicans were determined to use their investigative powers to expose the undesirables who, in their view, had taken over the federal bureaucracy. By the time Eisenhower made his diary entry, congressional committees had already launched eleven different investigations of just the State Department. Nearly every Republican wanted to participate; of the 221 Republican representatives, 185 had requested assignment to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).²⁰ But, as had been true since February 1950, McCarthy stood preeminent in the anti-Communist crusade.

During the 1952 campaign, Hughes, Shanley, and others on Eisenhower’s staff had urged him to denounce McCarthy. He refused to do so because, he said, he could not repudiate a fellow Republican. Now, as President, he needed the support of the Republican senators, and according to popular belief (shared by Eisenhower), McCarthy controlled seven or eight votes in the Senate. These included Herman Welker, Pat McCarran, and George Malone, who were relatively inconsequential, and Styles Bridges, William Jenner, Everett Dirksen, and William Knowland, who were of consequence, as they each headed a Senate committee and thus were the party’s leaders in the Senate. In addition, Taft frequently sided with McCarthy (a friend of Taft’s explained, “McCarthyism is a kind of liquor for Taft. He knows it’s bad stuff, and he keeps taking the pledge, but every so often he falls off the wagon.”21).

Eisenhower had said repeatedly that he intended to cooperate with Congress. This fit exactly the Republican mood. All the Republican complaints about FDR and Truman could be summed up in one phrase—usurpation of executive power. In every way possible, the Republicans wanted to cut back on the size and scope of the President’s activities, while enhancing the powers of Congress. This was the prime motivation for the demand for a repudiation of Yalta, for the Bricker Amendment, for the two-term amendment, and other attempts to substitute a de facto parliamentary system for the United States. As Eisenhower fully agreed with the basic criticism of FDR’s and Truman’s activism, he was willing to cooperate in this endeavor—to some extent. He drew the line at such fundamental points as the Executive’s right to conduct foreign policy or to provide for security in government. It was at precisely these points, however, that the Republicans, and especially McCarthy, were most determined to exercise control.

Their first opportunity came when Eisenhower sent to the Senate his appointees for State Department and foreign posts. With a Republican majority, albeit of only one vote, Eisenhower expected a pro forma confirmation. He was therefore astonished and furious when he learned, on January 22, his second full day in office, that McCarthy was holding up his first nominee’s confirmation. That nominee was Walter B. Smith, a man whom Eisenhower trusted and admired without stint. Smith had conservative views, to say the least—he once told Eisenhower that he thought Nelson Rockefeller was a Communist—and he had served the Truman Administration as head of the CIA, as well as ambassador to Russia. Eisenhower could not conceive of any possible objection to Smith, but his morning Times informed him that McCarthy was taking “an interest” in the case, because Smith had defended John Paton Davies, who was on Smith’s staff in Moscow. Smith had characterized Davies as “a very loyal and capable officer.” Insofar as Davies was one of McCarthy’s favorite targets, high up on the senator’s famous list of known Communists in the State Department and a prime example of bumbling State Department China hands, Smith’s praise for Davies made Smith, in McCarthy’s view, a possible fellow traveler.

To make Smith into a suspect was, in Eisenhower’s view, preposterous, degrading, embarrassing. It gave Eisenhower an intimate sense of the true meaning of McCarthyism. Eisenhower came to loathe McCarthy, almost as much as he hated Hitler. He was determined to destroy McCarthy, as he had destroyed Hitler, but his campaign against the first was much different from his campaign against the second. The direct assault against Hitler was replaced by an indirect assault against McCarthy, one so indirect as to be scarcely discernible, and one which contributed only indirectly—at best—to McCarthy’s downfall. Eisenhower went after Hitler with everything he had; with McCarthy, he kept all his ammunition in reserve. During the war, he had insisted on keeping Hitler at the center of everyone’s attention; in his first years as President, he did his best to get people to ignore Joe McCarthy.

Why the difference? Beyond such obvious factors as nationality and party affiliation, Eisenhower cited two basic reasons for his non-approach to McCarthy. The first was personal. “I just won’t get into a pissing contest with that skunk,” he said to his friends, many of whom—including Milton—were encouraging him to do just that.22 But Eisenhower never adversely mentioned McCarthy by name. Not once.²³ He explained his position to Bill Robinson: “No one has been more insistent and vociferous in urging me to challenge McCarthy than have the people who built him up, namely, writers, editors, and publishers.” He thought they should have a touch of guilty conscience, protested that McCarthyism existed “a long time before I came to Washington,” and complained that as McCarthy grew in headline value, “the headline writers screamed ever more loudly for me to enter the list against him. As you and I well know—and have often agreed—such an attempt would have made the Presidency ridiculous.”²⁴

Aside from the dignity of the Presidency, Eisenhower refused to speak against McCarthy because he convinced himself that ignoring McCarthy was the way to defeat McCarthy. He explained his reasoning in his diary: “Senator McCarthy is, of course, 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.” Eisenhower, with Smith in mind, knew what he was talking about. Thus his conclusion: “I really believe that nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of troublemaking as to ignore him. This he cannot stand.”²⁵

Eisenhower’s second reason for attempting to ignore McCarthy, and indeed to appease him whenever possible, was his need for McCarthy’s support in the Senate. Some of his advisers strongly disagreed. C. D. Jackson argued that to cooperate with McCarthy would only embolden him further, while costing the President independent and moderate support.26 But Eisenhower insisted that if anyone should censure McCarthy, it should be the Senate itself, not the President, and that anyway if given enough rope, McCarthy would hang himself. Jackson retorted that appeasing McCarthy was poor arithmetic (referring to the Senate votes) and worse politics. But Nixon and Jerry Persons urged Eisenhower in the direction his feelings were already taking him. They said that an attack on McCarthy would only divide the party and publicize the senator even more. “The best way to reduce his influence to the proper proportion,” Nixon said, “is to take him on as part of the team.”²⁷

That was no part of Eisenhower’s view. He never saw McCarthy as a possible member of his team. But McCarthyism, broadly considered, was the most divisive issue of the day. Eisenhower wanted to bring the nation together, through cooperation, not tear it further apart through confrontation. Behind McCarthy stood millions of Americans; they were an important part of the electorate that had put him in office; to attack and alienate McCarthy would be to alienate the senator’s millions of supporters, driving them farther away from the middle road in American politics.

Further, Eisenhower was more on McCarthy’s side than not on the issue of Communism in government. It was McCarthy’s methods he disapproved of, not his goals or his analysis. At a February 25 news conference, Eisenhower said he had no doubt at all that “almost one hundred percent of Americans would like to stamp out all traces of Communism in our country,” and added that if there had been a known Communist on his faculty at Columbia, he would have had the man fired, or resign himself.²⁸

But he was no McCarthyite. The senator’s methods, the way in which his charges and investigations set American against American, leaving innocent victims in the wreckage, were themselves evil. Eisenhower knew this, he felt it in his bones, but he was faced with the fact that McCarthy was an enemy of his enemies, and a friend of a good many of his friends. So while McCarthy had to be destroyed, his followers had to be educated and brought into the mainstream, not alienated. The best way to do that, Eisenhower thought, was to destroy McCarthy by ignoring him, or by letting him destroy himself. He believed this so strongly that he even ignored McCarthy when the senator called into question the good name of his old friend Beetle.

Instead, Eisenhower worked behind the scenes, as he would do countless times in the future, for he was not adverse to hastening the process of McCarthy’s withering away.29 In this instance, he called Taft and told him to put an immediate stop to this nonsense about Beetle. Taft did as told, it worked, and Eisenhower began to have a better impression of Taft.³⁰ Smith was confirmed, McCarthy got no headlines out of the case, battle had been avoided.

Then came the case of Dr. James B. Conant. Eisenhower had nominated Conant, Harvard’s president whom Eisenhower had known for years, as U.S. High Commissioner to Germany. McCarthy told Eisenhower that he would oppose the nomination in the Senate, primarily because Conant had once said there were no Communists on the Harvard faculty—a statement that ran so counter to McCarthy’s world view that he could only conclude that the man who made it must be a pink or worse. Eisenhower had Nixon talk to McCarthy—the first of many trips, as Nixon became Eisenhower’s ambassador to the senator—and himself called McCarthy on the phone. Eisenhower later told his Cabinet that he had “conclusive evidence” that the Republican senators “are trying to cooperate.” His evidence was a letter from McCarthy with regard to Conant; McCarthy wrote that although he was “much opposed” to Conant he would not make a floor fight against his nomination because “he doesn’t want to make a row.”³¹

Two days later, on February 5, Eisenhower put forward the name of Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen for the post of ambassador to the Soviet Union. McCarthy had had enough. Or rather, he now had something more substantial to fight with than questioning men like Smith and Conant about their supposed Communist tendencies. Bohlen made a much better target, because he was a career Foreign Service officer, by itself suspect, and had been at Yalta. Worse, he refused to reject Yalta. In confirmation hearings he upheld the agreements as the best possible and said he would have no part in repudiating them. McCarthy then obtained FBI reports that carried various damaging rumors about Bohlen’s family life. A furor erupted when McCarthy demanded that the FBI reports be made available to the Senate before it confirmed Bohlen. Eisenhower refused to make them available. Instead, he again sent Nixon to talk to McCarthy. Nixon was unable to keep McCarthy from opposing Bohlen on the floor of the Senate, but he did win a minor victory. As Persons later explained, “McCarthy had two speeches ready to use in fighting us. Both were pretty rough, but one was real dirty. So he [asked Nixon] which he ought to give. So Dick told him—and he didn’t use the real dirty one.”³²

The Senate debate over Bohlen lasted from March 23 to 27, and was bitter and heated. Before it began, Eisenhower discussed it with his staff. Shanley recorded in his diary that Eisenhower “said, ‘McCarthy has the bug to run for the Presidency in 1956.’ He slapped his knee and shouted, ‘The only reason I would consider running again would be to run against him.’ ”33 In public, however, Eisenhower refused to say the man’s name. He did come forthrightly to the defense of the much maligned Bohlen. At a March 25 news conference, he declared, “I have known Mr. Bohlen for some years. I was once, at least, a guest in his home, and with his very charming family. I have played golf with him, I have listened to his philosophy. So far as I can see, he is the best-qualified man for that post that I could find.”³⁴

Eisenhower also backed Bohlen privately. Dulles was wavering badly on the case, ready to cut and run because, as he told Eisenhower over the telephone, of the rumors of embarrassing incidents in Bohlen’s “family life” (a standard euphemism in the early fifties for homosexual tendencies). Eisenhower assured Dulles that he had already checked with an old Foreign Service man who had known Bohlen “intimately for many years and feels confident that Bohlen has a normal family life.” Thus reassured, not incidentally being informed sternly by Eisenhower that there would be no cutting and running on Bohlen, Dulles stayed behind the nominee.³⁵

McCarthy continued to demand the FBI files on Bohlen. Attorney General Brownell was adamantly opposed, on the grounds of establishing a bad precedent for executive privilege, and because no one was allowed to see raw FBI files. Dulles suggested a compromise—have two senators look at the files and report to the Senate. Eisenhower thought that reasonable. Brownell thought it dangerous. Eisenhower nevertheless ordered it done.³⁶ After much wrangling, the Senate agreed to have Taft and John Sparkman examine the files. They did so, reported to the Senate that there was nothing in them, and Bohlen was confirmed, 74 to 13, with Republicans dividing 37 to 11 in Bohlen’s favor. McCarthy, Bricker, Dirksen, and Hickenlooper were among those voting against Bohlen. When Taft was asked immediately afterward by reporters if there now was an “open break” between the Old Guard and Eisenhower, Taft responded, “No, no, no, no.”³⁷ But Taft also sent a clear message to Eisenhower: “No more Bohlens.”

For his part, Eisenhower was pleased with the result. He appreciated Taft’s support (“I think it is scarcely too much to say that Senator Taft and I are becoming right good friends,” he wrote in his diary), but he was worried about the eleven Republican votes against Bohlen. He thought the eleven “the most stubborn and essentially small-minded examples of the extreme isolationist group in the party.” Barry Goldwater’s vote against Bohlen, he confessed, surprised him, because he thought Goldwater “a little bit more intelligent than the others.”38

•  •

Irritating and embarrassing as McCarthy’s attacks on Smith, Conant, and Bohlen were to Eisenhower, far more ominous was McCarthy’s assumption of the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. McCarthy named himself the head of that committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Originally, the Administration thought that by getting McCarthy to take those posts, it had outmaneuvered the senator. Jenner replaced McCarran as chairman of the Internal Security Subcommittee, the traditional Communist-hunting unit of the Senate, and Jenner was thought to be a team player. As Robert Griffith remarks, “[Jenner] could be trusted to pummel the Democrats without embarrassing the Republicans.”³⁹ McCarthy would be out of the anti-Communist business, and thus rendered impotent. Taft bragged, “We’ve got McCarthy where he can’t do any harm.” But in fact the opposite was true. The subcommittee he headed had a very broad hunting license: to carry out “the investigation of the operation of all government departments at all levels, with a view of determining their economy and efficiency.”⁴⁰

Initially, in January, McCarthy promised to behave. He said he would investigate “graft and corruption” in government, and leave the job of finding and firing Communists to Eisenhower. But in mid-February, McCarthy launched an investigation into subversion in the Voice of America, a propaganda agency that had assumed huge proportions (it had a staff of ten thousand, comprising 40 percent of the total personnel of the State Department, and spent some $100 million a year; it transmitted fifty hours of programming daily in as many languages). Republicans were convinced that the Voice was filled with “Communists, left-wingers, New Dealers, radicals and pinkos,” and it was thus a target that McCarthy could not leave alone.⁴¹

McCarthy’s investigation consisted primarily of wild and unsubstantiated charges made by disgruntled lower-level employees. These “tips” fed McCarthy’s closed-door hearings, and led to enough rumors to force the resignation—brusquely accepted by Dulles—of the chairman of the Voice. McCarthy then turned to material used in Voice broadcasts and included in the libraries of State Department Information Centers in sixty-three countries. McCarthy said that the presence in the broadcasts or in the libraries of the works of such fellow travelers as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Dewey, Robert M. Hutchins, and Edna Ferber proved infiltration of the Voice. Eisenhower and Dulles tried to appease McCarthy—on February 19 the State Department issued a directive that forbade the Voice to quote from the works of “any Communist, fellow travelers, etc.” When High Commissioner Conant embarrassed State by cabling from Germany to ask for a clarification of “etc.,” State modified the directive to urge “great care” when using Communist sources, and to quote them solely to “expose Communist propaganda or refute Communist lies.”42 In the madness that followed, nervous librarians discarded and even burned books.⁴³

When Robert Spivack asked Eisenhower at a February 25 news conference whether “McCarthy’s investigation of the Voice of America is helping the fight against Communists,” Eisenhower responded with typical vagueness: “Well, I don’t know exactly what he is aiming to do, . . . because I just haven’t thought about his particular function—what he can do and what would happen if he didn’t do it.”⁴⁴ Ten days later he promised that “if the Senate investigation into the Voice . . . reached a point of inviting international misunderstanding and difficulties, I might intervene.”⁴⁵ But his much more consistent position was that “it would be extremely dangerous to try to limit the power of Congress to investigate,” and he added in response to a question about McCarthy’s methods, “I think it would be completely inappropriate for me to comment specifically on individuals in Congress and their methods, because presumably the Congress approves these, or they wouldn’t go on.”⁴⁶ Dulles, meanwhile, made it clear that he would cooperate with McCarthy’s investigation, and the general impression was that the Eisenhower Administration had surrendered to McCarthy.

•  •

That impression was strengthened by the Greek shipowners’ case, which McCarthy broke on March 28, when he announced that he had arranged an “agreement” with the Greek owners of 242 merchant ships to break off all trade with Communist China. McCarthy said he had negotiated the agreements “secretly” because of their “extremely delicate” nature. In fact, the American and Greek governments had just finished an eighteen-month-long negotiation process, finally agreeing to “prohibit the shipment of strategic materials by Greek ships to the Peiping regime.” This was a favorite issue of the Old Guard (and some who were not; McCarthy’s chief assistant on the Greek deal was Robert F. Kennedy), which had long since been demanding a complete embargo of China. The British, however, had refused to stop trading with China. One Eisenhower aide called McCarthy’s claims as “phony” as his procedures were “irregular.”47

Stassen, the head of the MSA and thus the man in charge of coordination of trade agreements, testified on March 30 before McCarthy’s subcommittee. Stassen told McCarthy, “You are in effect undermining and are harmful to our objective.” Stassen added the elemental point that such agreements could only be made between governments.⁴⁸ At an April 2 news conference, James Reston asked Eisenhower for a clarification about McCarthy’s “negotiations.” Eisenhower replied with a rhetorical question, “How do you negotiate when there is nothing to commit?” He then gave the reporters a simple civics lesson: Congressional investigators had no power to negotiate and moreover they “cannot possibly have the facts that would make such negotiations really profitable.” As to Stassen’s use of the word “undermining,” Eisenhower said that Stassen probably meant “infringement,” but added that he was not “the slightest bit unhappy” about what Stassen had said. To further confuse everyone, he added, “I am not going to say there never could be any good come out of such [negotiations].” Indeed, he thought that so long as McCarthy was discussing, suggesting, or advising, “he is probably in his proper function.” When Robert Spivack suggested that Eisenhower had to be angry at one or the other man, Stassen or McCarthy, Eisenhower snapped back, “The mere fact that some little incident arises is not going to disturb me. I have been scared by experts, in war and in peace, and I am not frightened about this.”⁴⁹ After Stassen said, the next day, that he indeed meant to say “infringement” rather than “undermining,” and after Dulles, Nixon, and McCarthy got together to negotiate what amounted to their own internal treaty, the issue gradually died away.⁵⁰

Eisenhower’s policy of denial—denial that McCarthy had any right to negotiate with foreign governments, denial that he had done so, denial that Stassen had said what he said, denial that there was any difference on basic issues between himself and McCarthy—plus the inner complexities of the case (British goods on Greek-owned ships flying foreign flags destined for Hong Kong to be sold to China), defused McCarthy’s attack and avoided a crisis. Many of Eisenhower’s aides were unhappy with Eisenhower for not standing up to the senator, especially in a case where McCarthy had so clearly exceeded his authority, and prophesied that no amount of appeasement of the junior senator from Wisconsin would ever make him behave.⁵¹

For all that Eisenhower shuddered at McCarthy’s methods, the President himself, at his first Cabinet meeting, urged aggressive action against Communists in government. He especially urged Dulles to crack down on the State Department. Dulles hardly needed the encouragement, as he had reasons of his own to conduct a purge. Virtually every senior official in the Foreign Service was a Democrat, most of them were guilty of personal devotion to Acheson and had a strong dislike for Dulles. Further, Dulles wanted to avoid the antagonistic relationship that had plagued Acheson in his dealings with Congress. Nothing, Dulles knew, would please the Old Guard more than his firing men whom Acheson had defended from McCarthy and his friends. In addition, Dulles had to prove his own anti-Communist zeal. The skeleton in his own closet, of which he was embarrassingly aware, was his endorsement of Alger Hiss as director of the Carnegie Endowment and his offer of a deposition in Hiss’s behalf during Hiss’s subsequent trial. So Dulles, acting under Eisenhower’s direction, made a purge his first priority.

On January 23, Dulles sent a letter to 16,500 State Department personnel demanding “positive loyalty” to the new Administration. That same day, the first Eisenhower bill to pass the initial legislative stage emerged from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; it provided for an Under Secretary of State for Administration and Operations, with the specific task of housecleaning in the State Department. Dulles appointed Donald B. Lourie, president of the Quaker Oats Company, to the new post. For his chief security officer, Lourie chose Scott McLeod, a former FBI agent and assistant to Styles Bridges, who was one of McCarthy’s closest supporters in the Senate. McLeod, turned loose on the internal State Department files, hired two dozen ex-FBI agents and went to work immediately. Within three weeks, he fired twenty-one employees for alleged homosexuality. Later, he proudly announced that he had removed 306 civilian employees and 178 aliens without a single hearing. He also began feeding information to McCarthy, including the tips about Bohlen’s supposed immorality.52

Dulles, meanwhile, was actively appeasing McCarthy on other fronts. He dismissed from the service John Carter Vincent, one of the State Department’s most respected China experts, despite admitting that there could be “no reasonable doubt” about Vincent’s loyalty. Even this did not satisfy McCarthy, who criticized Dulles for allowing Vincent to keep his pension.⁵³

Eisenhower played no public role in the purges, but behind the scenes he was pushing Dulles hard. On March 18, he sent Dulles a memo saying that the senior posts in State were all held by people “who believe in the philosophy of the preceding Administration.” These men had risen to the top, Eisenhower said, “through a process of selection based upon their devotion to the socialistic doctrine and bureaucratic controls practiced over the past two decades.” Eisenhower feared that if “any sizable reductions” in State were made “before these top individuals are removed . . . the result will be that down through the organization there will be a studied effort to hang on to those believing in the New Deal philosophy and to eliminate those who show any respect for ideals of self-dependence and self-reliance.”54 Dulles gladly complied with Eisenhower’s orders to get rid of the top people first. As a result of this, and of McLeod’s activities, and of the Vincent case, morale in the State Department sank. Many spoke of a police-state atmosphere.

•  •

Eisenhower was no Hitler, and he did not preside over a police state. But he was deeply concerned with the Communist menace, and he knew the value of military secrets, which made him fearful of spies within the government. As the Rosenberg case showed, he was ready to deal with them without mercy. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been convicted of giving atomic secrets to the Soviets and had been sentenced to death. They had appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Supreme Court. By January of 1953, the Rosenbergs only hope was executive clemency. There was an immense international campaign, by no means exclusively Communist, to convince Eisenhower to stay the execution. The grounds were that the Rosenbergs had been framed, that their death sentence was the result of anti-Semitism and runaway McCarthyism. But on February 11, Eisenhower issued a public statement rejecting clemency, because “the nature of the crime for which they have been found guilty and sentenced far exceeds that of the taking of the life of another citizen; it involves the deliberate betrayal of the entire nation and could very well result in the death of many, many thousands of innocent citizens.” He insisted that the Rosenbergs had had a fair trial and received “their full measure of justice.”⁵⁵ Execution was scheduled for mid-June.

•  •

What McCarthy and his friends really wanted from Eisenhower and Dulles was much bigger than just firing a few queers and Communists, or the execution of the Rosenbergs. The senator wanted major policy and structural changes. In policy, the Old Guard wanted a flat repudiation of the Yalta agreements, to be followed by action—the form of which was unspecified—to free the East European satellites. In structure, the Old Guard wanted to amend the Constitution so that neither Eisenhower nor any future President could enter into such agreements. For the nation and the world, these were matters of transcendent importance, beside which the fate of State Department employees paled into insignificance. Eisenhower and Dulles were well aware of this, but so was McCarthy, who would not be bought off or diverted by Dulles’ petty purge. The Yalta resolution would give Eisenhower some of his most difficult moments in his first months in office; the Bricker Amendment, named after Senator John Bricker of Ohio, plagued him for the next two years.

As a candidate, Eisenhower had felt free to denounce Yalta. As President, his freedom of action was much more limited. When he turned to serious consideration of the effect of a repudiation of the agreements, he realized that such an action would have negative effects on American foreign policy and would needlessly alienate the Democrats. Further, having assumed power, he did not want to waste his assets by scavenger hunting into the past. Yalta had given the Americans their occupation rights in West Berlin and in Vienna; how could such guarantees be continued if they had been granted by an invalid agreement? The British, among others, warned that if the Americans could repudiate their pledged word, so could the Russians. Eden said bluntly that the U.K. would never participate in a repudiation. And of course the Democrats would resist with all their power any implied or real repudiation of FDR. Any resolution that passed Congress by a slim, partisan majority would have little if any effect. Eisenhower told the Republican leaders that “solidarity is the important thing.” He wanted politics to stop at the water’s edge.

So, on February 20, when Eisenhower presented to Congress his proposed resolution on Yalta, it did not repudiate the agreements, but instead merely criticized the Soviet Union for violating the “clear intent” of Yalta and thereby “subjugating” whole nations. The United States, Eisenhower’s resolution declared, rejected “interpretations” of Yalta that “have been perverted to bring about the subjugation of free peoples.” It “hoped” that these peoples would “again enjoy the right of self-determination.”56

The Old Guard denounced Eisenhower for this betrayal of basic Republican principle. Taft, under pressure from Eisenhower to go along, tried to bridge the gap by proposing a reservation to Eisenhower’s resolution: “The adoption of this resolution does not constitute any determination by the Congress as to the validity or invalidity of any of the provisions of the said agreements.” The Democrats, meanwhile, led by Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, hailed Eisenhower’s original resolution and opposed any change in it. This put the Old Guard in a dilemma. If it allowed Eisenhower’s resolution to pass unamended, it would imply acceptance of Yalta; if it amended the resolution, it would be guilty of partisanship and of splitting with a Republican President. But the Old Guard could not simply drop Yalta. Senator Hickenlooper wanted a clear and strong repudiation, and he had a number of allies on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which held hearings on the subject.

Then Stalin, of all people, came to Eisenhower’s aid. On March 4, word came from Moscow that the Soviet dictator was near death. Under the circumstances, passing a repudiation resolution would be regarded as particularly callous; further, the imminent change in Soviet leadership made it inopportune to reopen old wounds. Nevertheless, Eisenhower was ready to go ahead with his own resolution. On March 5 he told a news conference that “what I really want to do is to put ourselves on record . . . that we never agreed to the enslavement of peoples that has occurred.” When he was asked to comment on suggestions that the Taft amendment represented “a break between you and Senator Taft,” Eisenhower replied, “So far as I know, there is not the slightest sign of a rift or break between Senator Taft and me. And if anyone knows of any, I don’t.” Four days later, Eisenhower met with Taft and other Republican leaders to discuss the issue. Taft admitted that it was probably better “to forget the whole thing.” Eisenhower’s “powder-puff resolution” was not worth fighting for, while opposing it or amending it would be too costly.57 Stalin’s death, on March 5, allowed everyone to escape the dilemma by shelving permanently any resolution on Yalta.

•  •

The death of the man who had single-handedly led the world’s second most powerful nation, and America’s principal enemy, was an event of momentous importance. The trouble was that no one in the United States knew what to do about it, how to take advantage of it, or what was going to happen next. Eisenhower, relieved to have escaped the need to denounce FDR in public for Yalta, privately told his Cabinet that American unpreparedness was a “striking example of what has not been done” by the Democrats while they held power. Since 1946, he said, there had been much talk about what would happen when Stalin died, but the net result of seven years’ talk “is zero. There is no plan, there is no agreed-upon position.” He added that was why he had brought Robert Cutler down from Boston to give some form, direction, and organization to the work of the NSC. SHAEF had always had contingency plans ready in the event of Hitler’s death, and he wanted the NSC to be equally prepared in the future.58

•  •

The Constitution of the United States, in Article VI, makes treaties the “supreme law of the land.” Conservative Republicans, and many others, were unhappy with this provision and wanted an amendment to modify it. There were many motives. Back in 1920 the state of Missouri, for example, had challenged the federal government’s right to enter into a treaty with Canada to prevent the extermination of migrating ducks; Missouri took the position that no one could take away the rights of its citizens to shoot ducks within the state. The Supreme Court ruled against Missouri. The issue lay dormant for some decades, but Yalta revived it. So did American entry into the United Nations. Southern leaders feared that the U.N. commitment to human rights would imperil segregation; the American Medical Association feared it would bring about socialized medicine. In addition, there was widespread, and strong, support for limiting the powers of the President to enter into binding agreements with foreign nations.

So strong, in fact, that when Bricker introduced Senate Joint Resolution 1, on January 7, 1953, he had the cosponsorship of sixty-two other senators, including forty-four of the forty-seven other Republicans. The president of the American Bar Association was a supporter; so were the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the AMA, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and many other national organizations. The proposed amendment carried a much-celebrated “which” clause. It declared that “a treaty shall become effective as internal law in the United States only through legislation which would be valid in the absence of a treaty.” No one really knew what this meant. Some feared that future treaties would have to be ratified by all forty-eight states. Eisenhower thought that “the logic of the case is all against Senator Bricker,” but noted ruefully that “he has gotten almost psychopathic on the subject.” Eisenhower realized that a great many lawyers, including his own brother Edgar, were supporting Bricker, but “this fact does not impress me very much. Lawyers are trained to take either side of any case . . . [which] tends to create a practice of submerging conviction in favor of plausible argument.”⁵⁹

Eisenhower once characterized the proposed amendment as “an addition to the Constitution that said you could not violate the Constitution. How silly.”60 It was, nevertheless, an issue of fundamental significance. Peter Lyon is surely correct in stating that without Eisenhower’s opposition, the Bricker Amendment would have been adopted. With what results, no one knows. Bricker and his supporters gave the impression that the amendment would have prevented any future Yaltas, which was nonsense, as nothing in Yalta had any effect within the United States. More generally, the amendment was designed to take power in foreign relations from the President, although even here it was hardly precise on how that would be accomplished.

“I’m so sick of the Bricker Amendment,” Eisenhower told his Cabinet.⁶¹ His preference was to drop it and forget it, but that was hardly possible with an amendment that had two-thirds of the Senate as sponsors, and which had the near-unanimous support of the Republican Party. He therefore tried to talk Bricker into dropping the “which” clause and accepting an amendment that merely said no treaty could violate the Constitution—something Eisenhower regarded as meaningless enough that he could support it. He met with Bricker privately; he met with Bricker and Dulles (who was opposed); he met with Bricker and Brownell (who thought that the whole thing was ridiculous). Bricker could not be moved. Eisenhower thought the senator merely wanted something with his name on it “as a permanent monument.” Unable to change Bricker’s mind, Eisenhower appealed to Dulles to “write anything which will provide the monument” without detracting from the President’s power to enter into treaties and agreements. He informed the Cabinet that he had a copy of the Federalist Papers on his desk, and was reading them “in every spare minute” on the subject of the balance of powers between the President and Congress. The Founding Fathers, Eisenhower said, “had so distinctly in mind the separation of powers.” But he could not convince even his own Cabinet. Wilson thought the Bricker Amendment would “strengthen the Constitution”; Weeks also supported Bricker; Nixon urged caution; Humphrey wanted to avoid a “head-on fight” with Bricker.⁶²

Eisenhower continued to work on Bricker, to no avail. Dulles wanted the President to join the issue more directly. “I haven’t been fuzzy about this,” Eisenhower protested. “There was nothing fuzzy in what I told Bricker. I said we’d go just so far and no further.” Dulles replied, “I know, sir, but you haven’t told anybody else.”

Dulles himself was a problem. He sent Eisenhower a copy of a speech he intended to make on the amendment; in it, Dulles said that such an amendment might be necessary under different leadership, but that it was not required so long as Eisenhower was in charge. Eisenhower told Dulles that if the Secretary really believed that, then he should withdraw his opposition to Bricker.

Eisenhower tried to make the amendment ridiculous (“Bricker seems determined to save the United States from Eleanor Roosevelt,” he told one Cabinet meeting; on another occasion he passed along a joke he had heard, that the Constitution was being demolished “brick by brick by Bricker”). Nothing worked. Bricker could not get the amendment on the Senate floor, because of the parliamentary maneuvering of Eisenhower’s supporters, but Eisenhower could not kill it. Still, through the year 1953 Eisenhower managed to keep the amendment in hearings, avoiding a vote.63 But the issue droned on.

•  •

Eisenhower was not the only man to oppose Bricker, but he was obviously the most important member of the minority that did so. He was in a similar position with regard to the defense budget. Eisenhower ordered Wilson to cut back sharply. Except for Humphrey, only a handful of Republicans supported Eisenhower on these cuts, although few went public with the opposition. The Democrats felt no such constraints. After Wilson announced his program of major reductions, Senator Symington launched an attack—one that the Democrats would continue and intensify over the next eight years—charging that Eisenhower’s determination to balance the budget through defense cuts was leaving the United States vulnerable to Soviet aggression.

When Eisenhower was asked about Symington’s charges, at a March 19 news conference, he used the occasion to attempt to educate the American people. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there is no amount of military force that can possibly give you real security, because you wouldn’t have that amount unless you felt that there was almost a similar amount that could threaten you somewhere in the world.”⁶⁴

At a Cabinet meeting the following day, the President was even blunter. Dulles was opposed to making a balanced budget top priority. He warned Eisenhower that if the United States cut back on defense spending, it would have the effect of saying the crisis was over. The Europeans would then feel that in that case, they too could cut back on military expenditures. This, he gravely warned, “would take the heart out of NATO.” Eisenhower immediately disagreed. There could be no security, he told Dulles, without a sound economy, which was dependent upon a balanced budget. Dulles charged that the decision to balance the budget was made in a vacuum. He then tried to pose a dilemma for Eisenhower: What were they going to do about Korea? Continue the stalemate? If so, they would lose congressional support. Try to win? If so, they needed more money for defense. Eisenhower held his position. “There is a limited kind of striving for a victory,” he said, “but we simply cannot have these succeeding deficits.” Dulles tried another approach. The French were coming to Washington to ask for more help in Vietnam. Dulles thought that “we can clean up Indochina by an eighteen-month all-out effort” of military aid to France. It made good sense to Dulles to spend the money now, in order to effect greater savings later. So too in Korea—victory there now, whatever the cost, would mean savings later.

Eisenhower admitted that there was some truth in what Dulles said, but not enough. He pointed out that just getting sufficient force in Korea to drive the Communists back a few miles, so that the front lines would run across the narrow waist of the peninsula, would cost $3 or $4 billion. “How much better off are we at the waist,” he wondered, “and how much do we want to pay to get there?” Dulles said driving forward to the waist would improve Korean morale. Eisenhower replied that was “an imponderable.”

Turning to a broader theme, Eisenhower flatly declared that “the defense of this country is not a military matter. The military has a very limited sector.” If military spending continued at present levels, “then we’ve got to call for drastic reductions in other things,” such as veterans’ benefits, Social Security, farm programs. Eisenhower also warned his Cabinet that “any notion that ‘the bomb’ is a cheap way to solve things is awfully wrong. It ignores . . . the basic realities for our allies. It is cold comfort for any citizen of Western Europe to be assured that—after his country is overrun and he is pushing up daisies—someone still alive will drop a bomb on the Kremlin.”65

•  •

Shortly after taking office, Eisenhower had a telephone conversation with Omar Bradley about the situation in Korea. Hanging up the phone, he turned to Ann Whitman and said, “I’ve just learned a lesson.” Bradley had called him “Mr. President,” after a lifetime of calling him “Ike.” Eisenhower told Ann that it was a shock to hear it, and made him realize that as long as he was in the White House he would “be separated from all others, including my oldest and best friends. I would be far more alone now than [during the war].”⁶⁶

To overcome those feelings of loneliness, Eisenhower turned first of all to his wife. They almost always ate their evening meal together, in the West Sitting Hall, usually with Mamie’s mother, Mrs. Doud, who lived in the White House with them. Later in the evening, when Eisenhower painted, Mamie would sit with him, reading or answering correspondence. They took their vacations together, whether to Augusta in the winter or Colorado in the summer. In the late winter of 1953, following Mamie’s first visit to the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, named Shangri-La by FDR, Mamie announced that she would not go back to the rustic, rather shabby place unless it was modernized. But there was no money in the White House budget to do so. A member of the staff suggested to Mamie that since the place was operated by the Navy, the Navy might pay for remodeling. Mamie said, “I think I’ll just pass a hint along to the Commander-in-Chief.” The work was done; Eisenhower renamed the retreat Camp David after his grandson; thereafter, until the Gettysburg farm was remodeled, the President and Mamie spent numerous weekends together in the mountains.67

Eisenhower’s son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren also helped him preserve some modicum of a normal family life. John and Barbara stayed in the White House until after the inaugural; Eisenhower liked having them around, and they liked being there. The morning of January 22, Mamie had discovered Barbara sitting in a big four-poster in the Royal Suite, having her breakfast served to her. Mamie had laughed at the sight; Barbara had said that she would “never be nearer heaven than right then.”⁶⁸ In the months and years that followed, Barbara was often back, with her children, which added immeasurably to Eisenhower’s pleasure, and to his sense that the White House was a real home, not an institution.

But neither Mamie nor the family could fully satisfy Eisenhower’s need for friendship and companions. Mamie seldom woke before 10 A.M., and did not get out of bed before twelve. “I believe that every woman over fifty should stay in bed until noon,” she said, quite seriously.⁶⁹ She would study the papers, looking for bargains, whether in food, clothes, or gifts, which she would then order over the telephone. She closely supervised the White House staff and took charge of the social functions, deciding on the menu, flowers, and seating arrangements. “I have only one career, and his name is Ike,” she frequently declared, but in fact she was so busy—not to mention his schedule—that they seldom saw each other in daylight. John had his own career to pursue—he returned to Korea and the front lines shortly after the inaugural—and Barbara and the grandchildren lived in New York State. Further, Mamie never played golf, and she refused to play bridge with her husband, for the good reason that he yelled at her every time she misplayed.

Fortunately, he had friends who shared his love of golf and played bridge to his satisfaction. Even better, they were devoted to him. Following his elections, his gang got together and agreed that they would always be available to the President whenever he had a free moment for golf or bridge. They were men of large affairs with crowded schedules of their own, but they felt they had played a major role in convincing their friend to take on the Presidency, and they now felt they owed him whatever they could give him—which was primarily their time and their friendship. Over the next eight years, they were always available. Ann could telephone them in the morning, tell them that the boss wanted to play, and they would immediately get on a plane to Washington. Or, on a few occasions, to England or the Continent.70

Eisenhower told Slater he was especially delighted at the gang’s willingness to come to Washington at a moment’s notice, because most of his favorite partners and opponents in Washington were Democrats. He enjoyed playing with Chief Justice Fred Vinson, Senator Symington, and others he had known for years in the capital, but he feared that if he continued to play with them “some Republicans might not understand.”⁷¹ Another criterion his bridge partners had to meet was getting along with Mamie. As one of the gang told an interviewer, “Mamie wants her soldier boy around, and Ike likes to be around her. So when you play bridge, you play at Ike’s place. He doesn’t go out with the boys at night.”⁷²

In his memoirs, Eisenhower paid a handsome tribute to his gang. “These were men of discretion,” he wrote, “men, who, already successful, made no attempt to profit by our association. It is almost impossible for me to describe how valuable their friendship was to me. Any person enjoys his or her friends; a President needs them, perhaps more intensely at times than anything else.”⁷³

In the middle of February, Robinson, Roberts, and Slater came down from New York to spend the weekend at the White House. After golf in the afternoon and dinner on Saturday night, the party went to the movie theater in the White House to see Peter Pan. The next morning, Eisenhower and his gang marched into Mamie’s bedroom about 10:30 A.M. Mamie refused to go to church with them, saying that she planned to stay in bed all day; nevertheless, Robinson noted in his diary, “she hoped we wouldn’t completely neglect or forget her.” Slater asked Eisenhower how the Presidency was going to work out for him financially. “Hell,” Eisenhower replied, “this job is no easy touch. Truman says I’ll be lucky if I don’t use $25,000 a year of my own money.” Mamie added that the government only allowed her $3,000 for redecoration, and complained about “the stingy, small bath towels.”74

Later in the afternoon, Robinson accompanied Eisenhower to the study in which he did his painting. As Eisenhower worked on a self-portrait Milton had requested, he talked to Robinson about various political problems. “Ike always likes to be in motion of some kind when he is talking and thinking,” Robinson noted. “He seldom sits in the same chair for very long during a discussion and abhors sitting behind a desk in any extended conference. During our two- or three-hour talk he was all over the room and he continued to talk animatedly while he worked on the painting.”⁷⁵

The previous day, Adlai Stevenson had charged that the “Big Deal” was succeeding the New Deal. Eisenhower told Robinson he thought Stevenson was “very clever” in making the charge, and said he wished he had someone “who could turn the Stevenson kind of satire into a boomerang with cleverly turned phrases and labels.” Eisenhower stressed the value of “catch phrases” and pointed to FDR’s “nothing to fear but fear itself” line as an example. “Ike pointed out that this was the least important thing that Roosevelt had said in that speech but because of the catchy phrase it was the one thing that people remembered.”⁷⁶

Eisenhower consistently used his gang and his friends to try out ideas. On one occasion, he startled Slater by remarking that “I think I’m going to get along well with Taft, and if things work out the way I hope, Taft might be available to us as candidate for the top job in 1956.”⁷⁷ He had found Taft to be “solid” on domestic affairs and thought he could be educated about foreign affairs. What Eisenhower liked best about being able to think out loud with his companions was that none of them was ever guilty of a leak, or even an indiscretion; as Eisenhower put it in his memoirs, “not one of [my] friends . . . has ever . . . written a sentence or uttered a word that could have been embarrassing to me.”⁷⁸

•  •

When Robert Donovan asked Eisenhower on February 25 how he liked his job, Eisenhower mentioned “the confinement, and all the rest—those things are what you pay.” Wanting always to be in motion, he hated having to spend hours, days, or weeks on end in his office, without a break from the routine, and he got away as often as possible. Dr. Snyder always encouraged him to do so, even if only for half a day. On February 7, Ann noted in her diary that “today the President wanted to play golf, very, very badly. He awoke to a cold and drizzly rain. He peered at the sky frequently during the morning, and finally, after another excursion out to the porch, announced, ‘Sometimes I feel so sorry for myself I could cry.’ ”79

Later that month, Eisenhower was delighted when the American Public Golf Association offered to build a putting green on the south lawn. Eisenhower accepted, and had it placed just outside his office window. He practiced his approach shots and putts on his way to and from the office. He was furious with the squirrels, which were almost tame because Truman liked to feed them, and who buried acorns and walnuts in the green. Eisenhower told Moaney, “The next time you see one of those squirrels go near my putting green, take a gun and shoot it!” The Secret Service talked him out of that idea, substituting traps instead; soon most of the squirrels had been transported to Rock Creek Park.⁸⁰

Eisenhower’s favorite place to play golf was not on the White House lawn, or at the Burning Tree golf club outside Washington, but at Augusta National. There he and Mamie could entertain their friends, relax, and play cards. On February 27, he made his first trip there for a weekend; the gang flew down from New York in a Chase National Bank plane; everyone had a great time; Eisenhower played golf with the world’s most famous golfer, Bobby Jones; he vowed to return often.⁸¹

•  •

By the end of March, Eisenhower was satisfied with what he had accomplished to date. Defense spending was coming down. There was some movement in Korea toward an armistice. He had managed to put off any immediate tax cut. Price controls had been lifted without any major swing in prices up or down. The Cabinet and the NSC were both functioning the way he wanted them to, showing “a spirit of teamwork and of friendship that augurs well for the future.”⁸² He had managed to avoid a repudiation of Yalta and the passage of the Bricker Amendment. Congress was acting on his requests for reorganization, the most important of which was the creation of a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.⁸³ He had set various long-range studies in motion, most of all by Cutler and the NSC staff on the subject of the strategic options in the Cold War. He had put his economics adviser, Dr. Hauge, to work on a study for building “high-speed highways traversing” the country, cautioning Hauge that “the timing of construction should be such as to have some effect in leveling out peaks and valleys in our economic life.”84 Stalin’s death gave some hope of a new beginning in Soviet-American relations.

His chief worry was the Old Guard. Not Taft, whom he was beginning to admire, but McCarthy, Hickenlooper, Bricker, Bridges, Goldwater, and the others. The apparent hopelessness of working effectively with such men led Eisenhower to muse about the possibility that “I should set quietly about the formation of a new party.” He was considering making a “personal appeal” to every congressman and governor “whose general political philosophy [is] ‘the middle way.’ ” He feared that such a drastic step might “be forced upon us,” but hoped that he could avoid it by educating the Old Guard about “teamwork and party responsibility.” He thought “this will be much the better way.”⁸⁵