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Ike, Milton, and the McCarthy Battle

President Eisenhower and his brother Milton agreed about almost everything.  Indeed, Milton, who became a university president rather than a soldier, could subscribe just as vigorously as his older brother did to the West Point motto:  Duty, Honor, Country.  Both men believed America should exercise strong leadership in international affairs, should restrain the growth of the federal government as far as possible, and should do everything possible to support and improve democracy at home and abroad.  In their own lives and careers, they attempted always to treat their political friends and foes with respect.

That proved exceptionally difficult when Ike had to deal with Joseph McCarthy, a Republican Senator from Wisconsin.  McCarthy came to fame by condemning individual Americans of disloyalty – repeatedly, publicly, and recklessly.  To this day, the term “McCarthyism” is used to describe the acts of a prominent public person who brutally attacks people inside or outside of government through unproven allegations of subversion or treason. 

To quote historian Stephen Ambrose, “A fight between Eisenhower and McCarthy was inevitable.”  But how to fight?  When to fight?  Ike and Milton agreed that McCarthy was an abomination, but they disagreed over the manner in which the President should deal with this “evil man.”  You might want to decide which man you think was right.
           
McCarthy was catapulted to Cold War fame as Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations through his charges that Hollywood, America’s academic communities, and the United States government were riddled with communists and their sympathizers.  These charges resonated with many Americans who were fearful of the steady advance of communism in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa.  It was all too reasonable for them to assume that any domestic communist, and maybe even any left-leaning citizen, was a Soviet spy.  Joe McCarthy took advantage of this national sentiment by launching attacks on citizens who he claimed were or had been members of the Communist Party, communist sympathizers, or, as he put it, “fellow travelers.” 

His methods were intimidation through accusation without proof of guilt.  Many motion picture people and college professors lost their jobs and were publicly blacklisted for future employment after having appeared before McCarthy’s subcommittee.  In congressional hearings, unlike the courts, they lacked the legal defenses that our system of government provides through the Constitution.  McCarthy took advantage of that.  He labeled anyone as a “Fifth Amendment Communist” who exercised his or her constitutional right to refuse to testify.

Eisenhower’s first direct encounter with McCarthy came during the political campaign of 1952, when Ike decided to remain aloof and not to defend his friend and mentor General Marshall from McCarthy’s attacks (see “The Wisconsin Paragraph” story on this website).  For Ike, however, it became increasingly difficult to remain aloof from the Senator’s rampages.  One of those wild attacks followed Eisenhower’s nomination of Charles E. (“Chip”) Bohlen to the Senate for confirmation as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R.  Bohlen, a distinguished Soviet specialist, had served both Roosevelt and Truman in various State Department capacities, and Eisenhower had come to know him during his stint as NATO commander when Bohlen was assigned to the American embassy in France.  Ike liked and admired Bohlen and knew him to be a deeply dedicated American patriot.  In the Senate, however, McCarthy denounced Bohlen as an “architect of disaster,” a public servant who had advanced Soviet power.  The Senator ended his tirade by stating that Bohlen was a security risk.    
           
That’s when the President and his brother disagreed.  Milton urged Ike to lash out publicly and rebuke McCarthy.  But Ike refused this advice.  He told Milton that to battle openly with McCarthy would mean getting down in the gutter with him.  All it would do is increase the headlines with McCarthy’s name in them.  It would demean the Office of the President, he said, to deal with “that skunk” and, since the Republican majority in the Senate was slim, he might actually need McCarthy’s vote some time in the future.  Deciding to go at the problem indirectly, Eisenhower quietly asked two nationally respected senators, Republican Robert Taft and Democrat John Sparkman, to review Bohlen’s security file and present their conclusions to the Senate.  After their study of the file both senators announced that Chip Bohlen’s allegiance to the Unites States was beyond question.  The Senate quickly confirmed the nomination 74 to 13. 

Round one went to Eisenhower who had not spoken McCarthy’s name in public.  Ike won, but Milton wanted the President to play a different and somewhat broader role as leader of the American people.  He wanted a clear line drawn between political behavior that was acceptable and unacceptable in America, but Ike held on course and avoided a public confrontation. 

Several more clashes could have gone public had Eisenhower been willing to openly censure the Senator from Wisconsin.  For instance, the State Department’s International Information Agency operated several overseas libraries that were freely available to citizens of the host countries.  McCarthy declared them to be Soviet tools because there were books in those libraries authored by communists and their “fellow travelers.”   He harassed the libraries so fiercely as communist propagating tools that some of the libraries actually burned the books written by authors McCarthy deemed to be subversive. 

Shortly afterwards, during a commencement address at Dartmouth College, Eisenhower said, “Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”  He never mentioned McCarthy’s name, but the press picked up on the statement and wrote their stories as an Eisenhower rebuke of the senator.

The provocations continued, and McCarthy didn’t limit his character assignations to government employees.  In the summer of 1953, he had one of his staff members announce that, “the largest single group supporting the communist apparatus today is Protestant clergymen.”  President Eisenhower, through his Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, induced the National Conference of Christians and Jews to send the White House a condemnation of the McCarthy statement.  Ike then made public his reply letter in which fully endorsed their statement.  But he did not mention McCarthy by name.  Again, the press reported it as if Ike had soundly rebuked the Senator from Wisconsin.

The two top staffers for McCarthy’s subcommittee, Roy Cohn and David Schine, were young men who adopted the same arrogance and employed the same kind of slander as their mentor.  When the Selective Service notified David Schine that he had been drafted to serve in the Army, Cohn, with the endorsement of his boss, tried to get a deferment for his partner.  When that failed, they pressured the Army to assign Schine to the subcommittee.  The Army did not make the assignment.  Cohn continued his demands for two months through 65 phone calls and 19 meetings during which he sought to have Schine directly commissioned as an officer, with relief from chores such as KP duty, extra off base passes, and special visitor privileges.  Except for issuing some extra passes, the Army insisted on treating Schine no differently than any other soldier.

This infuriated Cohn and McCarthy, and no surprise:  the next organization the Senator attacked was the Unites States Army.  He declared before the subcommittee and the press that the Army’s loyalty investigations and procedures were hopelessly deficient and permitted large numbers of communist subversives to hold sensitive national security positions.  A rational person might have been cautious about defaming an institution such as the Army at the same time as a five-star Army general was also President of the United States.  But McCarthy severely underestimated Ike. He forged ahead with subcommittee hearings on Army subversive practices.  

Ike responded by putting together a task force headed by Herbert Brownell, Sherman Adams, and Henry Cabot Lodge to oversee the defense of the Army.  They learned through the Army’s legal counsel, John Adams, that at the same time McCarthy was publicly defaming the Army he was privately demanding favors for his protégé David Schine.  This disclosure led to a dramatic confrontation at the hearings and started the unwinding of McCarthy’s power and position, a process that eventually led the Senate to censure him.

What then should we conclude?  Was Ike right to play behind the scenes and win a relatively cost-free victory?  Or was Milton right to insist that the President provide the nation with a forceful statement of how American politics should be conducted and how our constitutional rights need to be protected?  You can decide – and perhaps even apply your conclusion to contemporary events in the drama of American politics.