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The Wisconsin Paragraph

All of us make mistakes and Dwight Eisenhower was no exception. This is a story about a wrong choice Ike made and regretted.

During the long years of his military service two officers profoundly influenced Eisenhower’s intellectual growth and made possible his eventual success. The first was Brigadier General Fox Connor, who took an interest in the young and discouraged junior officer in 1922 and spent three years mentoring Ike; tutoring him in military history, strategy, leadership, and world affairs. Conner literally taught the young Captain how to read the truly important books, how to judge events, and to discuss intelligently the lessons learned. The second officer who shaped his life was George Catlett Marshall.

General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1939 to 1946, was one of the nation’s finest military leaders. Historians today regard George Marshall and George Washington as two of the best soldiers our country has ever produced. In Marshall’s lifetime, presidents, statesmen, and military leaders held him in highest regard, as an American of unimpeachable character and patriotism. A few days after the Pearl Harbor tragedy, Marshall promoted Eisenhower and brought him into the General Headquarters Staff in Washington. Through Marshall’s influence Ike was promoted throughout World War II, all the way to Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe. General Marshall unswervingly supported Ike throughout the war, even when the public media castigated Eisenhower for his alleged mistakes. Marshall was the one officer Eisenhower came to respect above all others.

A few years later, when Eisenhower was running for the presidency in 1952, his loyalty to George Marshall was called into question. This happened when Ike was dealing not only with his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, but also the isolationist wing of the Republican Party. The GOP was divided into two camps. The moderate faction was led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who supported continued engagement with the United Nations and with foreign military alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Senator Robert Taft, a highly respected senator with an enormous following, led a deeply conservative faction that believed after World War II America should withdraw from the UN and NATO and not participate in armed defense beyond the nation’s borders. Eisenhower had bested Taft in the primary elections and became the GOP candidate, but he realized that he couldn’t win without the backing of his entire party. He reached out to the conservatives and accepted a party platform that in many aspects he disliked.

One of the best known and most notorious members of the conservative faction within the Republican Party was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Through his position as a member of the Senate Un-American Activities Committee, he had become nationally famous by publicly denouncing various people as “communist sympathizers” or “downright traitors.” Eisenhower was repulsed by McCarthy’s reckless claims. Ike lamented the Senator’s abusive treatment of witnesses before the Committee. But Eisenhower also believed he needed the electoral votes of Wisconsin to win the presidency, and he did not speak publicly about McCarthy’s activities.

Silence worked for a time, but Eisenhower was trapped by circumstances he should have avoided. Early in the presidential campaign Senator McCarthy issued a scathing condemnation of George Marshall, who had served as President Truman’s Secretary of State after retiring from the Army. The Senator said the former Chief of Staff was, “part of a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man.” This was absurd, but in 1952 it was dangerous to point out how absurd McCarthy’s charges were, especially if you were the Republican candidate for president.

Working in his campaign train in Illinois, on his way to make a September 2nd speech in Milwaukee, Eisenhower amended his campaign speech to include a paragraph soundly denouncing the junior Senator from Wisconsin for having bizarrely defamed George Marshall. One of the campaign staffers notified McCarthy of Ike’s intentions. The Governor of Wisconsin, Walter Kohler, and Senator McCarthy flew to Peoria, Illinois, to confront Eisenhower before he got to Wisconsin. Ike met privately with McCarthy and the General told his staff that he had made no commitment to delete the paragraph condemning the attack on George Marshall.

The next day Eisenhower’s future Chief of Staff, Sherman Adams, met with Eisenhower after Governor Kohler told him that including the paragraph in the speech would cause serious problems for the Republicans in Wisconsin. When he sat down with Eisenhower, Adams urged him to take out the paragraph rebuking McCarthy. Adams, whom Ike respected for his political acumen, managed to convince Ike to make his statement on behalf of Marshall later in the campaign -- in a state other than Wisconsin.

But the trap had already closed. Unbeknownst to Eisenhower or Sherman Adams the original text of the speech had already been given to reporters. They waited in Milwaukee, eagerly composing headlines to use about Eisenhower’s stinging condemnation of McCarthy. With Kohler and McCarthy on the platform behind him, Eisenhower delivered his usual campaign speech without the paragraph he had written or any words about either Marshall or McCarthy. His single reference to the matter was a lame and oblique sentence, “The right to question a man’s judgment carries with it no automatic right to question his honor.” When the speech was over, McCarthy was photographed shaking hands with Eisenhower.

With Wisconsin Governor Kohler looking on, 1952 presidential candidate Eisenhower and Senator McCarthy shake hands in Milwaukee

The next day newspapers around the nation condemned Eisenhower for failing to deliver his ringing support for his mentor, the renowned George Catlett Marshall. Herblock published a cartoon showing McCarthy standing in a dirty pool holding up a sign reading, “ANYTHING TO WIN.” President Truman, who regarded George Marshall as one of the truly great Americans, was furious over Eisenhower’s ingratitude. Truman fiercely attacked Eisenhower and the public disputes between the two men now took on a bitter, personal quality. From that day on, the staffers on the campaign train called September 2, 1952, “That terrible day.”

True to form, George Marshall never uttered a public reference or wrote a word on the subject. If Eisenhower ever apologized to his mentor, it is unknown. Over thirty years later Marshall’s wife, who had been terribly hurt at the time, said to Marshall’s biographer, Forrest Pogue, “Don’t attack President Eisenhower about the McCarthy thing; he did everything in the world to make it up to George and me.” But, of course, there was in fact no way to “make it up.”