The Truman administration grew increasingly disenchanted with the struggles of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to find its niche in the national security structure. In early 1948 the National Security Council (NSC) commissioned three intelligence veterans—Allen Dulles, William Jackson, and Matias Correa—and charged them with undertaking a thorough review and providing a blueprint for reform. The Dulles Report, submitted on 1 January 1949, criticized the CIA for becoming just another bureau “producing intelligence in competition with older established agencies” and called for the CIA’s evolution into “a semi-autonomous highly centralized agency with a broad variety of intelligence responsibilities.” The report pointed to the “inadequacies of direction” provided by the CIA’s current management.1 Truman knew just the man he wanted to drive the reorganization.
Twice Truman offered Smith the job, but without any luck. Still recuperating in the hospital, Smith realized that taking over the foundering intelligence agency would tax what little reserves he had left. But in light of the CIA’s failure to anticipate the North Korean invasion of the south, Smith told Eisenhower he “could not refuse for a third time.” To a friend he candidly wrote, “I expect the worst and I am sure I won’t be disappointed.”2
When Truman became president, as he noted in his memoirs, one of his strongest convictions “was that the antiquated defense setup of the United States had to be reorganized quickly.”3 Even before deciding to form a centralized intelligence agency, Truman named a director of central intelligence (DCI). The first appointee was fellow Missourian RADM Sidney Souers, a reserve officer keen on returning to civilian life. Souers, who recognized he was merely occupying a desk, served for only six months but succeeded in establishing the organizational groundwork. The dashing Hoyt Vandenberg, wartime air force commander in Europe and nephew of a powerful Republican senator from Michigan, replaced Souers but served less than a year. Vandenberg set the wheels in motion for legislation that led to the formation of a central intelligence agency. Vandenberg collected remnants of the Office of Strategic Services and other intelligence units and established the Office of Special Operations (OSO), an agency for conducting espionage, counterespionage, and clandestine foreign intelligence operations. During Vandenberg’s tenure, his office acquired responsibility for intelligence work in Latin America from the Federal Bureau of Intelligence. Vandenberg left to head the newly independent U.S. Air Force.
On 26 July 1947 Truman signed the National Security Act, establishing—along with the unified Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the NSC, and the U.S. Air Force—the CIA. The New York Times reported, “one of the final steps before adjournment, largely overlooked in the avalanche of last minute legislation, was the stamp of approval Congress placed on the creation, for the first time in American history, of an effective world-wide American intelligence service of its own.”4 The act charged the CIA with coordinating interagency intelligence activities, primarily with the Departments of Defense and State; collecting, correlating, and evaluating overt and covert intelligence; and producing national estimates for the guidance of the president and policy makers. In addition, the agency would perform other duties and functions related to intelligence, as directed by the NSC. The legislation made the DCI the principal adviser to the president and the NSC on all foreign intelligence matters related to national security, and the DCI was responsible for safeguarding intelligence sources and methods. The DCI also chaired the Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC), the coordinating body that established priorities among the Departments of Defense and State, the JCS, and the Atomic Energy Commission, whose representative sat on the committee.
Another rear admiral, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, reluctantly succeeded Vandenberg in September 1947. Junior in rank to the brass in the JCS, and lacking self-confidence in his dealings with the State Department, Hillenkoetter proved to be a nonentity. As the Cold War deepened in 1948 (following the coup in Prague and the Berlin crisis), the State Department wanted political and psychological warfare operations initiated against the Soviet Union and its allies. Kennan, as head of policy planning at State, pushed for a covert operations bureau inside the CIA but under State Department control during peacetime. Hillenkoetter restricted CIA activities to information gathering and doubted that the agency possessed the legal right to engage in covert actions. Nevertheless, the White House established a bureau for covert operations in 1948 and placed it in the CIA under Frank Wisner, a well-connected Wall Street lawyer. With little control from above, Wisner rapidly expanded the size and scope of his operations.5
Two days after his fifty-fifth birthday, on 7 October 1950, Smith inherited an organization in tatters. The agency’s multiple failures, climaxing with the North Korean invasion, gave Smith the mandate to reform the intelligence agency.6 During their entire time together during the war, Eisenhower had stymied all Smith’s attempts at restructuring first AFHQ in the Mediterranean and then SHAEF in northwestern Europe. Although Eisenhower had granted Smith what amounted to sovereignty over the operations and staffing of Allied headquarters, until the very end of the war—and then only under duress—he had dithered and ducked and weaved against all efforts to streamline headquarters organization, even those directed by Marshall. For the first time in his career, Smith possessed the authority to build a structure in keeping with his own ideas on how a centralized bureaucracy should operate. His predecessors never overcame the inherent frictions the intelligence agency faced in dealing with the armed services, the FBI, and the State Department; as the CIA rapidly expanded, it became a bureaucratic morass of competing interests.7 The Washington bureaucratic turf battles—both outside the agency, with national security rivals, and inside, between operations and intelligence sections—deflected the CIA from performing its core tasks. Smith knew he faced formidable political and institutional roadblocks but reckoned that he possessed the prestige, the connections in the Defense and State Departments, and the persuasive powers necessary to effect the required restructuring; he also enjoyed the full support of the White House.
Smith’s wartime experience colored his entire approach to the job. As an American chief of staff, he had possessed no grant of executive authority on paper, yet Eisenhower had bestowed on Smith decisionmaking powers parallel, but always subsidiary, to the supreme commander’s. Smith avoided the advice of CIA legal counsel to pursue augmented statutory control as director. Although he preferred clearly defined command channels, Smith knew that pursuing this course would involve time-and energy-wasting wrangles with the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill and would open the CIA to press scrutiny—which he keenly sought to avoid. During the war he had solved problems through personal associations. Rather than worry about the niceties, he visited his friend Omar Bradley, chairman of the JCS, and Dean Acheson, now secretary of state, and hammered out informal arrangements for intelligence sharing.8 In November Smith met with J. Edgar Hoover with the view of forging better cooperation between the CIA and the FBI. Smith admitted “there had been misunderstandings in the past and thought that a large number of them were the result of personalities rather than any question in policy.” He stressed the need for closer collaboration between the FBI legal attachés operating abroad, especially in Latin America, and their CIA counterparts. The next day, 12 November, he issued a directive to overseas operatives instructing them to establish “close and friendly mutual contact” with the FBI. Disputes, he added, would be sorted out in Washington, not by third parties. “FBI and CIA will wash their linen in private at home,” he insisted.9
The structure he eventually put in place mirrored his wartime thinking. Smith moved to consolidate executive decision making in his own hands. In his first full-dress IAC meeting on 20 October 1950, Smith discreetly but pointedly clarified his intentions by simply reading the relevant portions of the 1947 legislation and NSC 50, which specified the authority incumbent on the DCI.10 He made it abundantly clear that he would operate independently when appropriate and tolerate no dissent. Smith always referred to the recommendations contained in NSC 50 as his marching orders from the president. In his opinion, Congress and the White House bestowed two principal functions on the CIA: conventional intelligence gathering and analysis, and political and psychological warfare operations. He likened the two to the intelligence (G-2) and operations (G-3) divisions in his wartime headquarters. As Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Smith had overseen intelligence and psychological warfare operations and harbored a dim view of covert operations. Smith firmly believed that the CIA’s first responsibility was to provide the president and the national security apparatus with the most current and hardest possible intelligence on the strengths, weaknesses, and intentions of potential adversaries. Conducting counterintelligence and aggressive covert operations behind the Iron Curtain and in nations suspected of falling into the Soviet orbit or being susceptible to subversion took a distant second place. He wanted a functionalized headquarters structure with an executive deputy director answering directly to him and supervising two subordinate divisions overseeing intelligence collection and correlation and foreign operations.
Another CIA failure dramatically hastened the process. On 1 November 1950, three weeks after Smith took over, Chinese troops crossed the Yalu in strength, falling on GEN Douglas MacArthur’s badly overextended forces. American intelligence—military, diplomatic, and the CIA—suffered its second debacle in six months.11 Nobody foresaw the size or effectiveness of China’s swift intervention. Disaster was narrowly averted, but not without serious losses in American lives and prestige. In January 1951 Smith flew to Tokyo for discussions with MacArthur. One of the factors behind intelligence failures in Korea stemmed from MacArthur’s blocking CIA operations in the theater of operations. Smith brought the general around to his view and, on his return to Washington, ordered the formation of a CIA station in the Japanese capital.12 The intelligence blunder accentuated the pressing urgency of Smith’s reforms.
Smith dug in and pushed for his reorganization. He demanded a clear division of functions. Smith recruited William Jackson as his deputy director of central intelligence, created a directory for administration, and placed Allen Dulles in charge of operations as deputy director of plans. Improving the intelligence analysis and dissemination side of his staff proved most pressing, so he tackled it first. Upon joining the CIA, and to his utter amazement, Smith discovered there was no current assessment of the threat in Korea.13 In October he dissected the Office of Reports and Estimates into three sections: the Board of National Estimates, coordinating intelligence retrieval and the production of national intelligence estimates; a “current intelligence” office, providing the president with daily bulletins; and an office for research. Instead of duplicating the efforts of other intelligence sources, Smith demanded that the CIA integrate and analyze intelligence from across the spectrum. When the armed services balked at surrendering their cryptologic programs, Smith pointed to the failures in signals intelligence in Korea. At his urging, the NSC formed the National Security Agency (NSA), unifying military and naval intelligence inside the Department of Defense. By producing daily bulletins and national intelligence assessments, the CIA evolved into the hub of the Washington intelligence establishment.
Reining in Wisner and his boys proved more difficult. Smith especially resented Wisner’s running his own covert operations through the innocuously named Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which received its direction from the Departments of State and Defense but remained administratively under the CIA. When Wisner asked Smith for a new table of organization and a legal directive, Smith snarled that he required no piece of paper: “Wisner, you work for me.” He brought in another hard-bitten general, Lucian Truscott, to conduct a study of Wisner’s programs in Europe. “I’m going to go out there,” Truscott told Smith, “and find out what those weirdoes are up to.” To soldiers like Smith and Truscott, the men who staffed and ran covert operations inhabited a different world—a world out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel peopled with privileged scions of wealthy families who attended the same prep schools and Ivy League institutions, joined the same clubs, and entered the same Wall Street legal and financial firms. They saw themselves as gifted amateurs and scorned their less well-born professional colleagues in the OSO, the foreign intelligence analysts. Smith immediately saw the difference between the two sides of his establishment: the operations types drove imported sports cars, while the analysts drove Fords and Chevrolets. The fraternity boy pranks that passed as political and psychological warfare operations astounded Smith, and in Europe these men had virtually unlimited funds, including Marshall Plan money, to underwrite their escapades. In Germany and Italy, operatives set off stink bombs at communist youth festivals. More ominously, they floated the idea of assassinating Stalin should he appear (he did not) in Paris for a four-power summit—a project Smith “rejected out of hand.” They thought up inventive uses for rubber products. Balloons dropped 300 million leaflets into eastern Europe. Suggestions surfaced for using balloons to distribute cheap American consumer products behind the Iron Curtain, illustrating the superiority of the capitalist mode of production. Inside the psychological warfare offices at headquarters, CIA officials sat around shooting balloons with BB guns. Famously, another suggestion involved dropping gigantic condoms labeled “medium” into Russia, giving the impression that all American males were supermen. Perhaps it was intended as a joke, but Smith exploded, “If you send me one more project with goddamned balloons, I’ll throw you out of here.” He organized a “Murder Board” and weeded out the dilettantes, firing fifty of Wisner’s people. “I don’t care whether they were blabbing secrets or not,” he flatly stated. “Just give me the names of the people at Georgetown cocktail parties.” Wisner’s wife maintained a salon for the Georgetown crowd. When one of the OPC cadre was confined in St. Elizabeth’s, a Washington mental hospital, for showing too much affection for barnyard animals, Smith wondered aloud, “Can’t I get people who don’t hire people who bugger cows?”14
Smith’s earlier surgery did not solve his health issues. His inability to regain weight—in fact, he continued to shed pounds—nearly led doctors to insist that he step down at the end of 1950. His chronic ill health contributed to his sour disposition, which somebody characterized as always the same—vile. Smith’s acerbic tongue and short fuse were already the stuff of legend. He had learned from his mentor Marshall how to put fire to the feet of prospective subordinates to see whether they measured up. Smith wanted there to be no doubt about who the boss was. Even Dulles came in for his share of abuse. “Dulles,” Smith routinely roared at his deputy, “Dulles, Goddamnit, get in here.” Sherman Kent, who came from Yale to join the Office of National Estimates, remembered Smith’s persuasive charms. Uncertain about taking the job, Kent appeared to be on the verge of heading back to New Haven, “whereupon, putting on that annoyed cobra look of his,” Smith tore into the young don. Kent stayed, remaining with the CIA until 1967.15 Douglas MacArthur II reminisced about receiving the Beetle treatment. One time the two men disagreed, and MacArthur stalked out of Smith’s office. “Doug, come back here for a minute,” Smith said. MacArthur sat down, and they cleared the air. “He liked to stick that shit in the beginning, and make sure you knew he was a force and you were going to play ball. It was a technique.”16
After contesting against the Abwehr during the war and knowing only too well the ruthless efficiency of the Soviet security apparatus, Smith suffered no illusions about the challenges confronting the CIA. The cold, hard professionals on the other side ran circles around the CIA’s not so gifted amateurs. From the beginning, the list of CIA failures lengthened. Foreign operatives in the CIA’s pay were betrayed—parachuted to waiting communist agents, interrogated and tortured, marched before people’s tribunals, then shot. Moscow radio broadcast the show trials of recruited agents unwittingly delivered up by their CIA handlers. The CIA’s track record under Smith showed no great improvement: there were failures in appraising the situation in Iran, anticipating the revolution in Egypt, predicting a series of coups in Latin America, and combating virulent anti-American sentiment in Europe and Latin America.
Korea also demanded an amplification of the CIA’s authority over covert operations. In 1948 the NSC authorized the CIA’s conduct of “covert action,” including the organization of indigenous irregular forces, but in “time of war or national emergency,” control reverted to the JCS and the local military command. In the wake of the Chinese intervention and UN retreat, the NSC suspended this provision, at Smith’s request, allowing the formation of CIA-organized stay-behind guerrilla bands operating in the enemy’s rear. Early in 1951 the NSC discussed options for relieving pressure on UN forces in Korea. The idea emerged of opening a second front by inserting a CIA-sponsored force of Nationalist Chinese into northern Burma, on the theory that Beijing would pull forces out of Korea to deal with the incursion. Smith knew a harebrained scheme when he heard one and angrily stated, “The Chinese Communists have so goddamn many troops, you can’t count ‘em all; they won’t pull anyone out of [Korea].” The secretaries of defense and state overruled Smith, a nonvoting member of the NSC, and pushed the recommendation up to Truman, who approved it. Smith delegated to Wisner the job of initiating the covert paramilitary operation. The Guomindang proved far more adept at trafficking drugs than fighting the Reds; their presence in Burma destabilized the Rangoon government, leading to a temporary breach in U.S.-Burma relations.17 This fiasco pretty much typified early CIA covert operations.
Smith’s blunt, no-nonsense communications style served its function in cowing subordinates but proved less efficacious in managing press relations. Unlike Eisenhower, with his highly developed skill of talking but saying nothing of substance, Smith was habitually straightforward. Although no McCarthyite, Smith was a dedicated cold warrior. When Nelson Rockefeller made a lukewarm speech in favor of labor unions, Smith branded him a “Red.”18 In September 1952, with the presidential campaigns at their zenith, Smith set off a furor when he testified at a pretrial hearing in a libel suit brought by McCarthy against Senator William Benton. Smith stated that the State Department had been infiltrated by communists as early as 1945 and that this was widely known in official circles. Under questioning, he acknowledged that communists had no doubt insinuated themselves into his organization; it would be foolish to think otherwise. Here again, he simply told the qualified truth when he said that the CIA “never has detected one spy ‘in our ranks.’”19 Spies outside CIA ranks proved a different matter.
The year before, the CIA had uncovered the activities of the most famous double agent in history, H. A. R. “Kim” Philby. For some time the CIA suspected that a mole had penetrated the highest circles of the agency. In fact, three of the infamous Cambridge Five—Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess—operated out of the British embassy in Washington. In his role as British intelligence liaison, Philby enjoyed access to intelligence on a whole range of CIA operations. Virtually all of the CIA’s covert operations behind the Iron Curtain—in Poland, Ukraine, and especially Albania—miscarried. Worse, Philby passed on intelligence about the limited American nuclear stockpiles, which undermined the deterrence threat and contributed to Stalin’s pursuit of more provocative policies in Europe—the Prague putsch and the Berlin blockade—and in the rapidly decolonizing Third World. MacArthur’s command in Korea also suspected that the other side received operational intelligence. Philby encouraged the CIA’s chief mole hunter, James Jesus Angleton, in his belief that the CIA had been penetrated. Angleton turned the agency upside down in his search, disrupting operations, creating a climate of suspicion, and deflecting attention from Philby.
Suspecting one of their own, the CIA allowed Philby, Maclean, and Burgess to continue their activities. When attention finally fixed on Philby, Smith ordered William Harvey to conduct a separate investigation. A gumshoe, not part of the old school-tie set, Harvey never shared the Anglophilia that marked the upper echelons of the CIA. Long before James Bond, British secret service agents enjoyed a global éclat for their subtleness, effectiveness, and aristocratic élan. Before and during the war, the coldly professional British intelligence community made the first American attempts at spying and counterespionage appear clumsy and inept. The U.S. Army in particular suffered under the handicap of an insufficiency of trained intelligence officers; in AFHQ and SHAEF, the British ran the show. Class prejudice blinded the Americans as much as or more than it did the British. Certainly, high-born British gentlemen operatives in His Majesty’s secret service—products of the public schools, elite universities, and exclusive clubs that the Grotons, Yales, and Skull and Crossbones modeled themselves after—could never betray their side. Harvey thought otherwise, but Angleton concluded that Philby had been “honestly duped” and advised Smith not to pursue the matter.
Smith and Philby possessed a mutual regard for each other. A curious thing about Smith was that he never developed any deep and lasting friendships with his American colleagues. “Although hundreds of officers call him Beetle,” observed a reporter, “only a handful really knows him.”20 He and Eisenhower were friends, but their relationship always remained guarded. Smith worked at being enigmatic because a large part of his effectiveness rested in the unpredictability of his response to problems. He could be subtle, even charming, when the situation demanded; more often, he displayed his explosive irritability. His assignment was to get results, not to make friends. Smith’s churlish approach to people and issues won him many enemies and few real friends, and it goes a long way in explaining why he never secured the posts he most desired. With the British it was entirely different; with them, he let his hair down. ACM William Elliott said of Smith, “Bedell was fastidious in his choice of friends but to those he liked he revealed a surprising flame of affection as warm as was, by contrast, the chilling reception which he reserved for those he loved less.”21 His other British friends spoke of his open heart, generosity, and extraordinary loyalty. Except for the last trait, no American saw much evidence of any “flame of affection.” The Janus-faced Philby—with his intellect, undeniable charm, disarming upper-class lisp, and brilliant war record—was a master of deception and beguiled a large circle of powerful people. Philby spent a lifetime around intellectually gifted people and respected Smith’s “precision-tool brain.” “Many times,” Philby affirmed, “I saw him read a long memorandum, toss it aside and, without a pause for thought, paragraph by numbered paragraph, rip its guts out—real virtuoso stuff.”22
With Maclean’s cover blown in April 1951, he and Burgess defected. Attention zeroed in on Philby as the “third man” who had tipped off his two comrades. Smith declared Philby persona non grata and dispatched an ultimatum to Stuart Menzies, longtime head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, threatening that if the British did not fire Philby, the CIA would dissolve the Anglo-American intelligence partnership. Menzies sacked Philby but, still not convinced of his guilt, surreptitiously employed him in Beirut until his defection to Moscow in 1963. In the aftermath of the Philby affair, Smith headed a badly shaken organization on the verge of civil war; morale sank as recriminations flowed all around. Smith responded by wrapping a cloak of secrecy around the CIA. He also restructured the flow of intelligence, giving only the uppermost officials a comprehensive picture of the agency’s action.
Washington covered up the Philby business, but Smith’s admission that communists had infiltrated the CIA—whether true or not—set off a press firestorm and placed the CIA in the middle of a seething campaign issue. The headline in the New York Times read, “Gen. Smith Thinks Reds Have Entered All Security Units.”23 Smith flew into damagecontrol mode, imploring Republican nominee Eisenhower and Democratic candidate Governor Adlai Stevenson to refrain from throwing any accelerant onto the fire of McCarthy’s Red Scare. Stevenson immediately responded positively, telling the press that the nonpolitical CIA “must never become a political football.” The Eisenhower camp recognized in Smith’s remarks a brilliant opportunity to ramp up its attack on the Truman administration as “soft on Communism” and remained noncommittal. Smith informed Truman on 2 September that he had made a second personal appeal to Eisenhower, but the issue did not go away.24 On 13 October Smith gave more circumspect testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and later that evening the apolitical Smith told a Philadelphia audience that the country would “have little to worry about” in fighting communist infiltration if the next president cooperated with security agencies “as well as President Truman.”25 As is usually the case, the notoriously short-memoried American public soon focused its attention on other campaign issues. To Smith’s relief, the CIA confronted no real press inquiry or congressional investigating groups.
Truman placed a high priority on receiving current threat assessments and marveled at Smith’s facility in providing them. When Truman entered the White House in 1945, the War Department withheld certain strategic and national security information from him. He was president for twelve days before Stimson gave him his first briefing on the Manhattan Project, of which Truman had heard only rumors while vice president. Every Friday, Smith entered the Oval Office and presented a distilled intelligence briefing; he left a boiled-down summary of the Current Intelligence Weekly Review in a tidy notebook for the president’s perusal. Later Souers, the president’s special consultant for national security affairs, joined them for a postmortem over coffee.
In August 1952, after the nominating conventions, Truman and Smith discussed “the propriety of keeping the presidential candidates informed on the situation around the world.” Both men decided that Eisenhower and Stevenson should receive their first briefing together; thereafter the CIA would provide updates at regular intervals.26 Truman invited Eisenhower and Stevenson for lunch with the cabinet and asked Smith to come by and deliver one of his crisp briefings “on the foreign situation.” He told Eisenhower, “I’ve made arrangements with the Central Intelligence Agency to furnish you once a week with the world situation as I also have for Governor Stevenson.” Stevenson happily accepted the invitation to lunch; Eisenhower declined, stating, “The problems which you suggest for discussion are those with which I have lived for many years” as Allied supreme commander, chief of staff, and head of NATO.27
Eisenhower’s curt dismissal greatly angered Truman. Stevenson attended the lunch briefing, and the Eisenhower camp issued what one journalist called “rather a harsh statement” critical of the president for playing partisan politics. Enraged by that charge, Truman held a news conference. When asked about Eisenhower’s accusations, Truman replied, “Well, now, let’s let that rest for a while, and when the campaign gets to rolling pretty good, I think your question will be answered without much trouble.”28 Truman engaged in some plain speaking in a handwritten letter to Eisenhower. Truman derisively apologized for any embarrassment the invitation had caused Eisenhower and explained his motives for the briefing. In his view, it was vitally important for both candidates to receive current intelligence so that no disruptions occurred in American foreign policy despite the change in administrations. “Partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the United States,” Truman frankly stated. “I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us.” He concluded by telling Eisenhower he had “made a bad mistake, and I’m hoping it won’t injure this great Republic. There has never been one like it and I want to see it continues regardless of the man who occupies the most important position in the history of the world. May God guide you and give you the light.”29
Truman’s “give ‘em hell” letter illustrated the outgoing president’s mounting antagonism toward Eisenhower. Aside from the party divide, Truman was from Missouri and Eisenhower from Kansas. There was no love lost between the two border states, and Truman never forgot that his family farm had been despoiled by marauding Kansas Jayhawkers during the Civil War. Beyond that, Truman questioned Eisenhower’s character. Truman had made Eisenhower chief of staff and supreme commander and had even offered him, albeit indirectly, support if he led the Democratic ticket. Truman could forgive him the last—Dickinson County, Kansas, had never elected a Democrat to anything—and he could even forgive the blistering attacks on his policies, but he could never condone as “politics as usual” Eisenhower’s failure, in an appearance in Wisconsin, to defend Marshall’s reputation. Truman considered Eisenhower’s Milwaukee speech “the low point in this [Red Scare] hysteria.” In Milwaukee, instead of condemning the slander against Marshall, “one of the finest, most honorable, and most patriotic soldiers and public servants we have ever had,” Eisenhower endorsed Joe McCarthy for reelection as senator from Wisconsin. Eisenhower may not have been beholden to Truman, but according to the president, he owed “more to General Marshall than he does to any other living man.” Worse than engaging in partisan politics and honest disagreement over the direction of foreign policy, Eisenhower stood guilty of the unpardonable sin of disloyalty.30
Smith sent Eisenhower a wire congratulating him on the nomination, but he must have had mixed feelings. As DCI, Smith came in for his share of abuse at the hands of the McCarthyites and found himself dragged in front of the Committee on Un-American Activities. He and Truman got on very well; both were self-made straight-shooting midwesterners. Stevenson immediately defended the CIA during the Red infiltration flap and impressed Smith with his command of foreign affairs. Although he never said as much, Smith’s reaction to Eisenhower’s tacit acquiescence in the personal attacks on Marshall must have mirrored Truman’s, and he fumed when the Republicans issued a press release condemning his briefing of Stevenson. Still, with Ike in the White House, Beetle might get that coveted chief of staff’s chair.
On 14 August Eisenhower finally acknowledged Smith’s note of congratulation but took the opportunity to scold him. “The past two days my whole headquarters has been in a bit of a steaming stew over an incident in which, according to the papers, you were at least briefly involved. It was the meeting that Governor Stevenson had with the President and the Cabinet.” It appeared to Eisenhower “like the outgoing Administration was canvassing all its resources in order to support Stevenson’s election.”31
Eisenhower’s letter “upset the hell out of Beetle.” Two days after Eisenhower received Truman’s letter, another one arrived from Smith. Sounding more like a lawyer than a friend, Smith proposed that the CIA provide Eisenhower and Stevenson briefings containing the same information he delivered to the president each Friday morning.32 Eisenhower was reluctant at first—he told Truman the weekly CIA reports would suffice—but he later changed his mind and accepted Smith’s idea. After the last preelection briefing, Eisenhower told the CIA official who conducted the session that he appreciated the agency’s efforts but “missed the G-3 information” he had received as a military commander. On parting he said, “When you get back to Bedell Smith, tell him if I get elected I’ve got a job for him.”33
On 1 November, just days before the election, Smith tendered his resignation. Eisenhower’s promise of a job had nothing to do with his decision. Smith had made no secret of his unhappiness with the DCI job and decided to exit with the outgoing administration. As Truman wrote in his last days in the White House, “As Director of Central Intelligence since 1950, following your superior service as Ambassador to Moscow, you have successfully and faithfully accomplished your mission of developing the Central Intelligence Agency into an efficient and permanent arm of the Government’s national security structure.” Truman felt “sure that future Presidents will benefit substantially from the outstanding work which you have done in developing the Central Intelligence Agency.”34 Smith had taken the faltering agency, applied his typically strong grip, and pounded the disparate intelligence agencies into something resembling an “intelligence community”—a term that had come into usage by the end of his tenure. Although the structure still contained many flaws—the question of which department controlled covert operations in an active theater was never resolved—the CIA organization Smith fashioned survived in many of its parts into the twenty-first century.35
In the interval between submitting his resignation and its effective date of 24 January 1953, Smith shouldered a new task: he assumed personal responsibility for the president-elect’s national security briefings. In a campaign speech in Detroit on 24 October, Eisenhower pledged he would go to Korea. Now, at the end of November, he prepared to fulfill the promise. On 28 November Smith, accompanied by his assistant Meredith Davidson, took the train to New York, where Eisenhower maintained a residence. Met at Union Station by army security officers, they proceeded on a meandering trip through Manhattan until the car stopped in front of a drugstore. Hustled through the store and out the back door, the little group went up an alley and through another back entrance, arriving in the Commodore Hotel. By this time, Smith was furious with this cloak-and-dagger routine. Then they sat in an outer room while Eisenhower finished lunch. Finally ushered in, Smith gave Eisenhower his frank and pithy personal assessment of the situation in Korea, especially with regard to the stalled peace talks. After the meeting concluded, Smith and Davidson went to the Waldorf Astoria and ran into John Foster Dulles. Dulles knew about Smith’s conference with Eisenhower and asked what had transpired. “That’s between him and me,” Smith snapped, and walked away.
Smith concluded that infrequent briefings would not work and established a CIA facility in New York to provide Eisenhower with information on a daily basis or as desired. Eisenhower’s newly appointed chief of staff, Sherman Adams, felt threatened by Smith and limited CIA contact with Eisenhower. Making his point, Adams installed the CIA office in “a broom closet some distance from the President’s office.”
Truman asked Smith to chair a new NSC appraisal of the global situation as part of a wholesale foreign policy review for the incoming administration. Other than the situation in Europe and Korea, the chief focus of the study was Iran and French Indochina. On 19 December Smith returned to New York and presented the findings of the NSC review. At some point, Eisenhower took Smith aside and revealed what job he had in mind for him. The news floored Smith: Eisenhower wanted him as the number-two man in the State Department under John Foster Dulles. Smith sat silent during the whole train ride back to Washington. He finally said in little more than a whisper, “And I thought that it was going to be great.”36
Other than his sideways remark to the CIA officer, Eisenhower gave no indication he ever intended to make Smith chief of staff. When Eisenhower was serving as president of Columbia University, he had received a telephone call that interrupted his afternoon game of bridge. The call was from President Truman, informing Eisenhower of his appointment as head of NATO. After he returned to the game, someone asked who he would take as his deputy. Eisenhower replied, “Well, I ought to take Bedell Smith, but I think I’ll take [LTG Alfred] Gruenther because he’s a better bridge player.”37 Eisenhower’s half-joking remark indicated how much he prized the intimacy of his circle of close friends, something he never enjoyed with Smith. Although he often spoke of the great debt he owed Smith, Eisenhower never felt obliged to repay it in kind. The key to Eisenhower’s leadership style was his ability to exploit the talents of subordinates; after they had served his purposes, he felt no special compulsion to push too hard for their elevation if it might compromise his own position. Putting aside Smith’s other baggage, his precarious health made his appointment as army chief of staff problematic. Whether the bitterness engendered during the 1952 campaign influenced Eisenhower’s decision remains unknown. Eisenhower certainly intended to continue to take advantage of Beetle’s talents—but in what Smith saw as a blind-alley job.
Whether he would have been a good choice as chief of staff is moot. Smith believed he had earned the appointment and felt betrayed. He had already received his fourth star in summer 1951 while DCI, but the award appeared to be an afterthought. Now with his dreams of holding Marshall’s old chair shattered, Smith submitted his paperwork for separation from the U.S. Army. His resignation became effective on 31 January 1954.38