The George Marshall Controversy

Elected to the U.S. Senate by the voters of Wisconsin in 1946, McCarthy was not well known outside his home state prior to 1950. The often-told story, perhaps more legend than fact, is that on January 7, 1950, Senator McCarthy had dinner at the Colony Restaurant in Washington, DC, with three friends, supporters, and fellow Catholics: Father Edmund Walsh, dean of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Relations, Charles Kraus, a professor of political science at Georgetown, and William Roberts, a Washington attorney. The objective that evening was to think of an issue that would give life to McCarthy’s reelection campaign. It was Father Walsh who suggested the idea of communists in government, an idea that McCarthy jumped at.⁹

Politicizing the subject of communists in government was not a new idea. Richard Nixon, for example, had invigorated his own career with his investigation of Alger Hiss while a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). But it would be McCarthy who gave his name to the anticommunist crusade of the 1950s. Just over a month after the dinner meeting, in a Lincoln Day speech to a women’s Republican club in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy said, “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party … I have here in my hand a list of 205 … that were known to the Secretary of State and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”¹⁰ This unfounded accusation, and those that followed, propelled McCarthy to national prominence and defined the remainder of his political career.

Eisenhower’s first encounter with McCarthy would not come until 1952. The roots of that encounter, however, go back to June 14, 1951. On that day, in a speech from the floor of the U.S. Senate, McCarthy charged that Secretary of Defense George Marshall was the key figure in “a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man.” This conspiracy was one “to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East and to impair our will to resist evil.” President Truman was not a “conscious party to the great conspiracy,” he said, because he “is only dimly aware of what is going on.” In his speech, McCarthy identified six policies supported by Marshall and pursued by the United States that he claimed were consistent with policies advocated by the Soviet Union.¹¹ Marshall had been army chief of staff during World War II; and later, as secretary of state, he had initiated the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. Such a charge against a man who had devoted his professional life to the security of the United States was truly shocking.

As the Republican nominee for president in the fall of 1952, Eisenhower was expected to support all Republican candidates for office. This included McCarthy, who was up for reelection. Despite this, Eisenhower later recalled, he was determined to give “no appearance of aligning my views with his” and told his campaign staff to make no plans to visit Wisconsin. When he later discovered that he had been booked on a whistle-stop tour of the state, it “occasioned the sharpest flareup I can recall between my staff and I during the entire campaign.”¹² On the morning that Eisenhower’s campaign train entered the state, Wisconsin governor Walter Kohler and Senator McCarthy came aboard. In a conversation witnessed by Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s campaign manager, Eisenhower said to McCarthy that at their first stop in Green Bay “I’m going to say that I disagree with you.” McCarthy replied, “If you say that, you’ll be booed.” Eisenhower shrugged his shoulders and said, “I’ve been booed before, and being booed doesn’t bother me.” In his brief remarks from the back of the train in Green Bay, with McCarthy and Kohler standing nearby, Eisenhower said that although he was concerned about domestic communism and would take appropriate action to eliminate it wherever it existed, he would not use methods that were un-American to do so. There were no boos from the sizable crowd that had greeted him.¹³

More important, however, was what Eisenhower said in his speech later that night in Milwaukee. Or, more precisely, what he did not say in his speech that night. Several weeks earlier, when it became clear that Eisenhower would have to visit Wisconsin, Emmet Hughes, one of his speech writers, suggested that the Milwaukee speech include a tribute to his friend and mentor George Marshall. Eisenhower liked the idea, and a paragraph was inserted that said:

The right to question a man’s judgement carries with it no automatic right to question his honor. With respect to one case I shall be quite specific. I know that charges of disloyalty have in the past been levelled against George Marshall… . I was privileged throughout the years of World War II to know General Marshall personally… . I know him as a man and a soldier, to be dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America.¹⁴

Before delivering the speech, however, Eisenhower approved the deletion of the specific reference to Marshall. Eisenhower later explained that in addition to Governor Kohler’s objections, his staff was nearly unanimous in their opposition to referencing Marshall. They believed that because Eisenhower had defended Marshall on previous occasions, the only reason to do so in Milwaukee would be to antagonize McCarthy in his home state, something they believed would do more harm than good.¹⁵ Unfortunately for Eisenhower, advance copies of the speech had been distributed to the press before his decision to delete the Marshall reference. This created the impression that Eisenhower had capitulated to McCarthy. The decision not to defend Marshall while on stage with McCarthy remains one of the most persistent criticisms of Eisenhower.

Eisenhower Develops a McCarthy Strategy

Eisenhower’s next encounter with McCarthy came less than two weeks after his inauguration. On February 5, Eisenhower nominated Charles “Chip” Bohlen to serve as ambassador to the Soviet Union. McCarthy was determined to prevent Senate confirmation of Bohlen because he had been an adviser to President Franklin Roosevelt during the 1945 Big Three conference at Yalta where Roosevelt had allegedly abandoned Eastern Europe to communism. Although the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had unanimously approved Bohlen’s nomination, McCarthy led a fight against him on the Senate floor. “We find that his entire history is one of complete, wholehearted, 100 percent cooperation with the Acheson-Hiss-Truman regime,” McCarthy said, referring to Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state, and Alger Hiss, subject of the 1948 HUAC investigation led by Richard Nixon.¹⁶

Eisenhower sent Vice President Nixon to talk to Senator McCarthy. Nixon had begun to serve as intermediary between the president and conservatives in Congress. Eisenhower’s moderate views and his desire to remain above the political fray, not to mention his inexperience in the world of politics, made such an intermediary necessary; and Nixon’s credentials with conservatives made him an excellent choice. Nixon, however, was unsuccessful in preventing a floor fight over Bohlen.¹⁷ Eisenhower stayed loyal to his nominee and Bohlen was ultimately confirmed, but Eisenhower was disturbed that eleven of the thirteen Senators who voted against Bohlen’s confirmation were Republicans. “There were only two or three that surprised me by their vote,” Eisenhower remarked; “the others are the most stubborn and essentially small-minded examples of the extreme isolationist group in the party.”¹⁸

Despite McCarthy’s reckless tactics, Eisenhower refused to denounce him publicly for several reasons. One was political. In the words of Vice President Richard Nixon, “Most Republicans in the House and Senate were then still strongly pro-McCarthy and wanted Eisenhower to embrace him, while the predominantly liberal White House staff members opposed McCarthy and wanted Eisenhower to repudiate him,” but the president “was reluctant to plunge into a bitter personal and partisan wrangle, aware that if he repudiated McCarthy or tried to discipline him, the Republican Party would split right down the middle in Congress and in the country.”¹⁹ The president’s assessment was more nuanced: “There is a certain reactionary fringe of the Republican Party that hates and despises everything for which I stand… . In many cases, you will find that McCarthy’s voting record does not align him very precisely with that group. However, the members of that gang are so anxious to seize on every possible embarrassment for the administration that they support him… . Old Guardism and McCarthyism become synonymous in the public mind—this is not necessarily the case at all.”²⁰

The second reason Eisenhower refused to denounce McCarthy was his belief that the best way to neutralize him was to ignore him. “I really believe that nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of troublemaking as to ignore him. This he cannot stand.”²¹ Eisenhower maintained that McCarthy fed off publicity. “Nothing would probably please him more than to get the publicity that would be generated by public repudiation by the President,” he wrote to General Mills chairman Harry Bullis.²² For this reason Eisenhower was angry at the attention given to McCarthy by the national news media. To Bill Robinson of the New York Herald Tribune he complained: “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.”²³

The last reason was of a more personal nature. In letters to friends who encouraged him to get tough with McCarthy, Eisenhower explained his guiding principles on matters of “personality.” To Kansas businessman Paul Helms he explained that from experience, “I developed a practice which, so far as I know, I have never violated. That practice is to avoid public mention of any name unless it can be done with favorable intent and connotation; reserve all criticism for private conference, speak only good in public.”²⁴ To Paul Reed, chairman of the board of General Electric, he stated his belief that “the only effective answer to unjust and unfair attack is a constant repetition of truth… . To attempt to answer in terms of personal criticism is to place yourself in the hands of the attacker.”²⁵ To his friend Swede Hazlett, he wrote, “I was interested in a statement of yours in which you express your satisfaction that ‘at last you are ready to crack down on McCarthy.’ … I disagree completely with the ‘crack down’ theory. I believe in the positive approach.”²⁶ For Eisenhower these were not mere tropes. The transcripts of his press conferences, particularly on days when reporters were asking him about McCarthy, demonstrate that he truly lived by these principles.

The next battle between McCarthy and the Eisenhower administration, in late 1953, might have been avoided if Attorney General Herbert Brownell had not been overeager to establish the administration’s own anticommunist credentials. In a speech on November 6, he made a startling allegation against former president Harry Truman. In early 1946, Truman had appointed Harry Dexter White to the position of executive director of the International Monetary Fund. Truman had done so, Brownell alleged, even though the FBI had provided him with evidence that White had transmitted classified information to agents of the Soviet Union.²⁷

Former president Truman defended himself from these accusations in a nationally televised speech on November 16. More memorable than the defense of his actions, however, was the counteraccusation he made:

It is now evident that the present administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism… . It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process of law. It is the use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of our society.²⁸

McCarthy demanded equal time from the networks to respond to President Truman. Much of his response was dedicated to condemning the Truman administration and its legacy, but he also issued a warning of sorts to the Eisenhower administration. The Republican Party, he said, had not created the situation, but it was now responsible for handling it. So far, McCarthy alleged, it was doing so no better than Truman had. With no irony intended, he concluded with a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “If this nation is to be destroyed, it will be destroyed from within.”²⁹ For McCarthy, this criticism was rather mild, but C. D. Jackson believed that a line had been crossed.³⁰ When James Reston of the New York Times reported that Jackson believed McCarthy had “declared war on Eisenhower,” it caused a stir in the White House. The resulting discussion provides a good example of Eisenhower’s approach to dealing with McCarthy.³¹

Following the appearance of Reston’s article, White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams reminded the staff that they should not comment on McCarthy. White House legislative liaison Jerry Persons agreed, arguing that such talk would make it more difficult to get Eisenhower’s legislative program through the Senate, where he believed that McCarthy controlled the votes of six other senators. Admitting that the “declaration of war” quote had been his, Jackson argued that “appeasing McCarthy in order to save his seven votes for this year’s legislative program was poor tactics, poor strategy … and poor arithmetic, and that unless the president stepped up to bat on this one soon, the Republicans would have neither a program … nor [a] 1956.” Jackson believed that Eisenhower should issue a strongly worded response to “face up to this declaration of war.”³²

Jackson began working on just such a response but believed he was being shut out of the conversation by those who sought accommodation with McCarthy. In a remarkable meeting with Eisenhower, Jackson and the others worked out their differences. In his diary Jackson recalled: “I pitched in as strongly as I could by telling him [Eisenhower] that so long as Taft was alive he might have been able to get out of the responsibility of leading the party, but now he could no longer get out of it.” Eisenhower, he said, “twisted and squirmed” as he spoke. He “read my text with great irritation, slammed it back at me and said he would not refer to McCarthy personally—‘I will not get into the gutter with that guy.’ ”³³

According to Jackson, the meeting became more productive at that point with everyone, including the president, working on the statement. Later that day, at the president’s press conference, he made the following statement: “In all that we do to combat subversion, it is imperative that we protect the basic rights of loyal American citizens. I am determined to protect those rights to the limit of the powers of the office with which I have been entrusted by the American people.”³⁴ Compared to Jackson’s desire that the administration reciprocate McCarthy’s “declaration of war,” the president’s statement was relatively mild, but Jackson was satisfied.³⁵

The Peress Case

When Republicans took over control of the Senate in 1953, McCarthy was passed over for the chairmanship of the Internal Security Committee, which went to William Jenner of Indiana, one of his closest allies. Instead, McCarthy was given the chairmanship of the Committee on Government Operations. Although it was not considered a prestigious appointment, Government Operations had a Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy took the chair of this subcommittee for himself and turned it into the Senate’s chief communist-hunting committee. It became known as the “McCarthy Committee.”

Shortly after the blowup over the White case, McCarthy began an investigation into the case of Irving Peress, an army dentist at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. Peress was drafted in October 1952 and commissioned as a captain in the army reserves. When filling out a loyalty form, Peress refused to answer questions relating to membership in subversive organizations, claiming “federal constitutional privilege.” Army Intelligence ran a check on Peress and found “sufficient evidence of subversive and disloyal tendencies to warrant his removal.” In the meantime, Peress was called to active duty and assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington, in preparation for deployment to Korea. This overseas deployment was subsequently cancelled, however, and Peress returned to Camp Kilmer in March 1953. It took three months for the file recommending his removal to catch up with Peress and another two months for the army to take any action. Asked to reply to another, more detailed, loyalty form, Peress refused to answer all but the most basic questions about himself, again claiming federal constitutional privilege. Army Intelligence received the form in September 1953.³⁶

While Army Intelligence was analyzing his loyalty form, Peress applied for promotion. Active-duty medical professionals were eligible for promotion to a rank that would provide a salary roughly equivalent to what they had made as civilians. Although Peress’s request for promotion arrived at army headquarters with a cover letter from Camp Kilmer recommending that the request be denied, it was inexplicably approved. In July 1953, Camp Kilmer came under the command of Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker, a highly decorated veteran of World War II. Zwicker was briefed on the Peress case three months later, and on October 21 he wrote a memo to General Withers Burress, commanding officer of the First Army, requesting that Peress be immediately relieved of duty. Despite the plea for immediacy, another month went by before Burress was informed and the army took action. On November 18, the Army Personnel Board, believing that it did not have the grounds to court-martial Peress, decided to take the most expedient route of granting him an honorable discharge. Peress was notified on January 18, 1954, and his discharge was scheduled for March 31, 1954.³⁷

McCarthy learned of the Peress case in December 1953. On January 4, Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, called Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens to ask about it. Stevens called Cohn back a few days later and said that the army was aware of the situation and that Peress was being discharged. On January 27, despite the army’s assurances that the case had been dealt with, Peress was called to testify before McCarthy’s committee. Peress appeared before the committee on Saturday, January 30. McCarthy, assuming that Peress was a communist, asked him questions about his activities. Peress declined to answer, taking the Fifth Amendment. McCarthy was also very interested in why Peress’s deployment to Korea had been cancelled, how he had gotten promoted, and why he was being given an honorable discharge. A badly shaken Peress met with General Zwicker the following Monday morning and requested that his discharge from the army take place immediately. Zwicker was happy to accommodate his request, and Peress was given an honorable discharge the following afternoon.³⁸

On Thursday, February 18, both Peress and Zwicker were called to testify before McCarthy’s committee. Peress, now a civilian, refused to answer most questions, and it was Zwicker’s testimony that made the bigger impact. Zwicker appeared without counsel and without adequate preparation. An impasse was reached when McCarthy asked, “Do you think, general, that anyone who is responsible for giving an honorable discharge to a man who has been named under oath as a member of the Communist conspiracy should himself be removed from the military?” After an unsuccessful attempt to dismiss the question as hypothetical, Zwicker responded, “That is not a question for me to decide, Senator.” McCarthy ordered Zwicker to answer the question. “You will answer that question, unless you take the Fifth Amendment,” he said. “I do not care how long we stay here, you are going to answer it.” Zwicker then asked for a clarification of the question. “I mean exactly what I asked you, general, nothing else,” McCarthy responded, “and anyone with the brains of a five-year-old child can understand that question.” Zwicker finally responded that he did not believe that someone responsible for giving an alleged communist an honorable discharge should necessarily be removed from the military. McCarthy’s response was over the top, even for him: “Then, general, you should be removed from any command. Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says ‘I will protect another general who protects Communists’ is not fit to wear that uniform, general. I think it is a tremendous disgrace to the Army… . You will be back here, general.”³⁹

Zwicker’s report of the incident quickly went up the chain of command to Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens. Stevens called Senator McCarthy to inform him that he would not allow Zwicker to testify again. After contacting other members of the committee, he released a statement to the press stating that “the prestige and morale of our Armed Forces are too important to the security of the nation to have them weakened by unfair attacks on our officer corps.” Therefore, he had ordered Zwicker not to appear before McCarthy’s committee again. He did, however, express his willingness to testify himself if asked to do so.⁴⁰

By the time Stevens released his statement to the press, the White House had already begun its behind-the-scenes activities that would lead to McCarthy’s downfall. On January 21, Attorney General Herbert Brownell hosted a meeting in his office. Among those present were Brownell, Sherman Adams, Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, who had arranged the meeting, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge, and Army Counsel John Adams. Except for John Adams, these men were among President Eisenhower’s closest advisers.⁴¹ The purpose of the meeting was to discuss McCarthy’s threat to subpoena members of the army’s Loyalty and Security Appeals Board as part of his ongoing investigation of Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. An executive order issued by President Truman in 1948 preventing such testimony was still in force, but Brownell and Rogers were doing the groundwork for Eisenhower to issue a more robust assertion of executive privilege if it became necessary.

After discussing this threat, the meeting turned to a different topic. John Adams described how Roy Cohn was putting intense pressure on the army to obtain special treatment for his friend and former member of the subcommittee staff, David Schine, who had been drafted. Cohn’s campaign was taking place even as the subcommittee was investigating Fort Monmouth. Those present immediately saw how potentially damaging this information was to McCarthy, and Sherman Adams encouraged John Adams to compile a detailed chronological narrative of what had taken place.⁴²

On Tuesday, February 23, Secretary Stevens and John Adams attended a meeting with Vice President Nixon and Senate Republicans to plan for Stevens’s appearance before the McCarthy subcommittee. Seeing how unprepared Stevens was for a confrontation with McCarthy, Nixon recommended an informal meeting between the two men. Nixon and the others present recommended that Stevens promise to cooperate with McCarthy if McCarthy promised to treat army witnesses with respect. The meeting was held at lunchtime the following day in the office of Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL). Besides McCarthy, Stevens, and Dirksen, Senator Karl Mundt (R-SD), a member of the subcommittee, would also be present. Because of the menu, the meeting became known as the “Chicken Luncheon.”⁴³ From the point of view of Stevens, it was more of an ambush. When he arrived at what was supposed to be a secret meeting, he found the hallway crowded with reporters. The senators proceeded to gang up on Stevens, and after a two-hour meeting the reporters were presented with a “Memorandum of Understanding” that stated that Stevens would “give the subcommittee the names of everyone involved in the promotion and honorable discharge of Peress, and such individuals will be available to appear before the subcommittee.” No mention was made of army personnel being treated with respect.⁴⁴

Eisenhower had been away from Washington and heard about the Chicken Luncheon after it had taken place. He was upset with the result of the meeting, and although he still refused to confront McCarthy directly, he initiated his own behind-the-scenes activities that would eventually contribute to the senator’s demise. Eisenhower summoned Dirksen to his office and told him that the White House was drafting a new memorandum of understanding to be issued that day and requested his help getting the committee Republicans on board. Dirksen took the new agreement, drafted by Hagerty, to the Capitol, but McCarthy refused to sign. Undeterred, Eisenhower told Hagerty to prepare a statement for Stevens to read that evening at the White House.⁴⁵ At 6:15, in Hagerty’s office, Stevens read the statement. “I shall never accede to the abuse of Army personnel under any circumstances, including committee hearings,” he said. “I shall never accede to them being browbeaten or humiliated. I do not intend them to be deprived of counsel when the matter under consideration is one of essential interest to me as Secretary, as was the case with General Zwicker.”⁴⁶

On March 3, Eisenhower held his first press conference since Zwicker’s appearance before McCarthy’s committee. An expectant press turned out in larger than usual numbers. After a few opening remarks, the president said, “I want to make a few comments about the Peress case” and began reading from a prepared statement. He admitted that the army had made “serious errors” in the Peress case, but said he was confident that it was “correcting its procedures” and would “avoid such mistakes in the future.” With that out of the way, he went on to say that no member of the executive branch was expected to “submit to any kind of personal humiliation when testifying” before a congressional committee. “In opposing communism,” he continued, “we are defeating ourselves if either by design or through carelessness we use methods that do not conform to the American sense of justice and fair play.” As he went on with his statement it became clear that the president was taking McCarthy’s assault on the army personally. “I spent many years in the Army,” he said, a fact known to everyone in the room. “In all that time, I never saw any individual of the Army fail to render due and complete respect to every member of Congress with whom duty brought him in contact. In all that time, I never saw any member of the Congress guilty of disrespect toward the public servants who were appearing before him.” He made clear that he expected this tradition to continue:

Except where the interests of the Nation demand otherwise, every governmental employee in the executive branch, whether civilian or in the Armed Forces, is expected to respond cheerfully and completely to the requests of the Congress and its several committees. In doing so it is, of course, assumed that they will be accorded the same respect and courtesy that I require that they show to the members of the legislative body… . I expect the Republican membership of the Congress to assume the primary responsibility in this respect.

He concluded with a reminder to Congress. “There are problems facing this nation of vital importance… . I regard it as unfortunate when we are diverted from these grave problems—one of which is vigilance against any kind of internal subversion—through disregard of the standards of fair play recognized by the American people.” After finishing his prepared statement, Eisenhower indulged in what can only be considered wishful thinking: “And that is my last word on any subject … related to that particular matter.”⁴⁷

By Eisenhower’s standards, it was a strongly worded statement, but many of the 256 reporters who attended the press conference felt let down. They had anticipated—even hoped—that the president would condemn McCarthy and his actions, engaging him by name for the first time. A disappointed William Lawrence of the New York Times reported that the president had opened his press conference with a “moderately critical statement about the ‘disregard for standards of fair play.’ ”⁴⁸

McCarthy was among those expecting a tougher response from Eisenhower. He had prepared a statement and scheduled his own press conference immediately following the president’s. By the time he read Eisenhower’s remarks he had little time to soften his statement. “If a stupid, arrogant, or witless man in a position of power appears before our committee and is found aiding the Communist Party, he will be exposed,” McCarthy said, apparently referring to Zwicker. He claimed he was being attacked because he had brought to light “the cold unpleasant facts about a Fifth Amendment Communist Army officer who was promoted, given special immunity from duty outside the United States and finally given an honorable discharge with the full knowledge of all concerned that he was a member of the Communist party… . It now appears that he was a sacred cow of certain Army brass.”⁴⁹

Taking note of President Eisenhower’s moderate statement and McCarthy’s harsh reply was 1952 Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Referring to McCarthy during a televised speech in Miami, Florida, on March 6, Stevenson asked his Democratic audience, “Why … have the demagogues triumphed so often?” The answer, he said, was “inescapable.” A small group within the party had “persuaded the president that McCarthyism is the best Republican formula for political success.” Invoking Abraham Lincoln, he warned that “a political party divided against itself, half McCarthy and half Eisenhower, cannot produce national unity; cannot govern with confidence and purpose.”⁵⁰

McCarthy quickly asked the television networks for airtime to respond to Stevenson’s “personal attack” on him, but Eisenhower took steps to prevent that from happening. Eisenhower asked Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to make a request for time to respond to Stevenson’s speech, saying that the party would choose a spokesperson. The question of who should reply to Stevenson, according to Vice President Richard Nixon, was discussed at length during a legislative leaders meeting. Nixon was Eisenhower’s choice. Looking straight at Nixon, he said, “I think we probably ought to use Dick more than we have been. He can sometimes take positions which are more political than it would be expected I take. The difficulty with the McCarthy problem is that anybody who takes it on runs the risk of being called a pink. Dick has experience in the field, and therefore he would not be subject to criticism.”⁵¹

Although Nixon’s speech was intended as a response to Adlai Stevenson, at Eisenhower’s urging, he took a few shots at McCarthy as well. The most quoted line was vintage Nixon: “I have heard people say, ‘Afterall, we are dealing with a bunch of rats. What we ought to do is go out and shoot them.’ Well, I agree they are a bunch of rats. But remember this. When you go out to shoot rats, you have to shoot straight, because when you shoot wildly, it not only means that the rats may get away more easily … but you might hit someone else who is trying to shoot rats, too.”⁵²

It had been a tough week for McCarthy. Earlier in the week Senator Ralph Flanders (R-VT) had verbally attacked him on the floor of the Senate. “To what party does he belong?” Flanders asked of McCarthy. “It does not seem that his Republican label can be stuck on very tightly, when by intention or through ignorance he is doing his best to shatter that party whose label he wears… . What is his party affiliation? One must conclude that his is a one-man party, and that its name is McCarthyism, a title which he has proudly accepted.” He went on to mock McCarthy’s pursuit of Irving Peress. “He dons his warpaint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist.”⁵³

On Thursday, March 11, John Adams distributed his narrative on the Schine case to members of McCarthy’s subcommittee. From there it found its way to the press. It detailed the pressure applied by McCarthy, Cohn, and the subcommittee staff to obtain special treatment for Schine. It included attempts to secure a commission for Schine, attempts to get him assigned to New York so that he could continue his work on the committee staff, suggestions that his period of basic training be shortened, and numerous demands for special privileges such as weeknight and weekend passes and relief from unpleasant duties.⁵⁴ As the McCarthy Committee was in the midst of investigating Fort Monmouth, these efforts created the impression that the committee might ease up on its investigation in return for special treatment of Schine.

Despite McCarthy’s direct involvement in the campaign on behalf of Schine, the primary focus was on Cohn, whose profanitylaced phone calls accounted for most of the forty-four items in Adams’s narrative.⁵⁵ McCarthy might have been able to avoid further scrutiny by firing Cohn, but he refused to do so. “There is only one man the communists hate more than Roy Cohn,” McCarthy said. “That’s [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover.” Instead, McCarthy counterattacked. He claimed that it was the army, not his committee staff, that was guilty of “blackmail.” The army was holding Schine “hostage” in an attempt to prevent his committee from exposing communists in their ranks. To support his claim, McCarthy produced eleven documents that no other members of the subcommittee had seen before. One of the documents was allegedly a report on a meeting attended by Stevens, McCarthy, and Cohn, among others. It claimed that Stevens had said that if McCarthy brought out everything it had on the army he would be forced to resign. “Mr. Stevens asked that we hold up our public hearings on the Army,” it said. “He suggested that we go after the Navy, Air Force and Defense Department instead.”⁵⁶

The charges and countercharges between the army and McCarthy made clear that a congressional investigation would have to take place. Less clear was how the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations could proceed against its own chairman. When asked about the possibility of McCarthy presiding over the investigation, Eisenhower weighed in: “If a man is a party to a dispute, directly or indirectly, he does not sit in judgement on his own case.”⁵⁷ After some talk of turning the investigation over to the Armed Services Committee, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations ultimately decided to handle it. McCarthy would step down as chair during the hearings but would retain the right to cross-examine witnesses and vote on matters of procedure. Karl Mundt assumed the chair, and Ray Jenkins, an attorney from Tennessee, replaced Cohn as special counsel for the subcommittee. Joseph Welch, a trial lawyer from Boston, replaced John Adams as special counsel for the army.⁵⁸

According to historian David Oshinsky, the Army-McCarthy hearings were supposed to focus on two distinct questions: Did McCarthy, Cohn, and members of the subcommittee staff exert improper pressure on the army to get preferential treatment for Schine; or did Stevens, Adams, and the army use blackmail and bribery to stop the subcommittee’s investigation of the army? The issues, however, were more complex than that. They included the integrity of the Armed Forces, the constitutional separation of powers, the moral responsibilities of federal workers, and the future of McCarthy. In addition, “They pitted Republican against Republican, the President against Congress, and the subcommittee against their chairman.”⁵⁹

The Army-McCarthy Hearings

The Army-McCarthy hearings began on April 22, 1954, nearly six weeks after the account of the pressure campaign by McCarthy and Cohn on behalf of Schine became public. Chairman Mundt predicted that they would last a week. Americans had never seen McCarthy in action before his subcommittee, and it did not take long for the network television broadcasts of the hearings to become a national obsession. Many Republicans began to fear that McCarthy’s behavior was doing a disservice to the party. On May 11, Dirksen presented a plan that would shorten the hearings and get them off television by taking them into executive session.⁶⁰ The other Republicans on the committee were enthusiastic, but Mundt needed consent from all the principals, and Stevens objected. On the day the subcommittee voted on Dirksen’s plan, Eisenhower called Secretary Wilson and told him not to put any pressure on Stevens to go along.⁶¹ Without Stevens’s consent, the televised hearings, and the damage they were doing to McCarthy, would continue.

During his testimony on May 12, John Adams made a crucial mistake. He volunteered information about the meeting on January 21 during which Sherman Adams had suggested he prepare a written record of all the McCarthy committee’s requests related to Schine.⁶² Jenkins did not realize the importance of this testimony at the time but later recalled John Adams to question him further about the meeting. Welch objected, citing an order that had been issued by President Truman prohibiting officials from testifying about high-level discussions in the executive branch. The committee members were not satisfied with this claim of executive privilege as it had come from a previous administration. Welch knew that if John Adams testified about the meeting it would not be long before Sherman Adams, Brownell, Rogers, and Lodge, who were also present, would all be called to testify. He therefore asked to delay Adams’s appearance, giving him time to investigate the matter.⁶³

The White House was already prepared for the likelihood that executive branch officials would be called to testify about meetings at the White House.⁶⁴ Earlier in the year, Eisenhower had asked the Justice Department to prepare a memorandum on executive privilege.⁶⁵ He told Republican legislative leaders he would not allow his advisers, many of whom had been at the January 21 meeting, to testify: “Any man who testifies as to the advice he gave me won’t be working for me that night.”⁶⁶ By that time, Eisenhower had already sent the Justice Department memo to Wilson along with a letter directing him not to allow his employees to testify. At the hearing John Adams read the letter to the committee from the witness chair.

Because it is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the executive branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters, and because it is not in the public interest that any of their conversations or communications, or any documents or reproductions, concerning such advice be disclosed, you will instruct employees of your department that in all of their appearances before the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Operations regarding the inquiry now before it, they are not to testify to any such conversations or communications or to produce any such documents or reproductions.⁶⁷

In response to questions from the press Eisenhower held firm, saying he had “no intention whatsoever of relaxing or rescinding the order.” He said that he had issued the order “because I saw an investigation going where it appeared that there was going to be a long side track established and go into a relationship between the president and his advisers that had no possible connection with this investigation.”⁶⁸ McCarthy’s passive-aggressive response reflected a desire to avoid a head-to-head confrontation with the president: “I don’t believe that this is the result of President Eisenhower’s own personal thinking. I am sure that if he knew what this was all about, he would not sign [such] an order.”⁶⁹ He also seemed genuinely nonplussed. “For the first time since I got into this fight to expose communists, I’m sort of at a loss to know what course to take. I think the White House made a great mistake. What we’ll do I don’t know.”⁷⁰

McCarthy was right to be concerned. His method of investigating communists in government required a steady flow of documents and information from those throughout the executive branch who were sympathetic to his cause. Democratic members of the subcommittee raised the question of whether McCarthy himself could be indicted for possessing documents that had been turned over to him in violation of the president’s order. “If any Administration wants to indict me for receiving and giving the American people information about communism, they can just go right ahead,” McCarthy responded. His informants had taken oaths “to defend their country against enemies—and certainly communists are enemies.” These oaths were “over and above any presidential directive.” McCarthy had already said enough to invoke a presidential response, but he continued: “As far as I am concerned, I would like to notify those 2,000,000 federal employees that I feel it is their duty to give us any information which they have about … communism … there is no loyalty to a superior officer which can tower above and beyond their loyalty to their country.”⁷¹

Eisenhower was enraged by McCarthy’s assertion that federal employees should defy his order. He called it “the most disloyal act we have ever had by anyone in the government of the United States.” McCarthy, he said, “is trying deliberately to subvert the people we have in government, people who are sworn to obey the law, the constitution and their superior officers.” McCarthy, he said, was making “exactly the same plea of loyalty to him that Hitler made to the German people. Both tried to set up personal loyalty within the government while both were using the pretense of fighting communism.”⁷²

It was just a few days later that Eisenhower made his speech at the Columbia University bicentennial dinner. Eisenhower’s assertion of executive privilege was a significant barrier to McCarthy’s case against the army, and the senator’s attempts to get around it further exposed his reckless and boorish behavior to a television audience. The low point for McCarthy came when he publicly smeared the reputation of Fred Fisher, a young lawyer at Welch’s law firm, revealing that he had once belonged to the Lawyers Guild, which HUAC had accused of being the “legal bulwark of the Communist Party.”⁷³ As a preface to Welch’s defense of Fisher he said, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy continued his attack, Welch famously interrupted: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”⁷⁴ This is, perhaps, the best remembered criticism of McCarthy.

The McCarthy-Welch exchange took place on June 9. One week later, on June 17, the Army-McCarthy hearings ended inconclusively. What Mundt had hoped could be accomplished in one week had taken nearly two months. Before returning to Boston, Welch visited Eisenhower in the Oval Office. According to Hagerty, “The President congratulated Welch for a very fine job. Welch told the President that he thought that if the hearings had accomplished nothing else, the army had been able to keep McCarthy in front of the television sets for quite a while, long enough to permit the public to see how disgracefully he acted. He said he was sure this would be helpful in the long run. The President agreed with him on this.”⁷⁵

McCarthy’s Censure

The following month, Senator Flanders submitted a resolution to censure Joseph McCarthy: “Resolved, that the conduct of the junior senator from Wisconsin is unbecoming a member of the United States Senate, is contrary to senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned.”⁷⁶ The resolution was referred to a special committee selected by Vice President Nixon. It consisted of three Republicans and three Democrats and was chaired by Arthur Watkins (R-UT).

The committee began its meetings on August 31. Watkins was determined not to lose control the way that Mundt had done during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Television cameras were banned, and McCarthy himself would be kept in line. The committee considered five charges against McCarthy: contempt of the Senate or a senatorial committee; encouraging federal government employees to violate the law by providing him with classified materials; receipt or use of a confidential or classified document; abuse of Senate colleagues; and abuse of General Zwicker. On September 27, the committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on counts one and five. It dismissed the other three charges.⁷⁷

Although McCarthy’s popularity had dropped considerably, his censure was a topic that the Senate had no desire to take up just six weeks before the election. Instead, a special session was called for November 8, six days after the election. On day two of the session, Watkins introduced the committee’s resolution recommending that McCarthy be censured on two counts. McCarthy’s response was defiant:

I would have the American people recognize, and contemplate in dread, the fact that the Communist party—a relatively small group of deadly conspirators—has now extended its tentacles to that most respected of American bodies, the United States Senate; that it has made a committee of the Senate its unwitting handmaiden… . I am not saying … that the Watkins Committee knowingly did the work of the Communist party. I am saying it was the victim of a Communist campaign; and having been victimized; it became the Communist party’s involuntary agent.⁷⁸

The censure vote took place on December 2. The charge of abuse of Zwicker was dropped from the resolution, not because senators approved of the way he had been treated, but because some feared that censure on such a charge would limit the Senate’s power to conduct investigations. The final version of the censure resolution, therefore, condemned Senator McCarthy only for showing contempt to the Senate and its committees.⁷⁹ The final vote was 67–22. All forty-four Democrats and one Independent voted in favor of censure; the Republicans split evenly, twenty-two for and twenty-two against. Many of the Republicans who voted against censure were strong McCarthy supporters while others feared a weakening of Senate investigatory powers. Among those voting against censure were most of the Republican Senate leadership.⁸⁰

On Saturday, December 4, at an informal meeting in the Oval Office, Eisenhower congratulated Watkins. Afterward, Hagerty walked Watkins out and told the press the president had congratulated the senator “for a fine job in handling his committee with dignity and respect.”⁸¹ This was widely reported in the next day’s newspapers. The result of Eisenhower’s brief meeting with Watkins was McCarthy’s long-awaited break with the president. On December 7, McCarthy read a statement before a meeting of his subcommittee. In it he said that he believed he should “apologize to the American people” for an “unintentional deception.” In 1952 he had campaigned for the president, promising that Eisenhower would “fight against communists in government.” Unfortunately, he said, “in this I was mistaken.”⁸² When Hagerty informed Eisenhower of McCarthy’s statement, he was unphased. “That’s all right with me,” he said. “I never had any use for him.”⁸³

The Senate resolution censuring McCarthy was, for the most part, symbolic. It did not unseat him. It did not even remove him as chair of the Government Operations Committee or its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, something seniority-conscious senators opposed. It merely condemned him for those actions found to be in contempt of the Senate and its committees. Coming when it did, however, just after the Republican Party had lost control of the Senate in the 1954 midterm elections, it did coincide with McCarthy’s loss of his chairmanships. McCarthy wielded much less power and influence in the years after his censure, but he continued to serve in the Senate until his death in 1957 at the age of forty-eight.

Eisenhower sought balance in his approach to McCarthy. He refused to engage McCarthy in the kind of head-to-head confrontation many of his supporters desired; but doing nothing or embracing the senator, as many Republican legislative leaders would have preferred, was never an option. Instead, Eisenhower worked indirectly to help bring about McCarthy’s demise. This approach satisfied no one at the time. He did enough to anger McCarthy and his supporters, but not enough to satisfy the senator’s critics. Brownell, writing after much time for reflection, summed it up well: “I think he [Eisenhower] understood better than all of us what made McCarthy so powerful and threatening and how he could be cut down to size and eventually defeated. A direct and forceful response of the sort President Truman had attempted would be futile. It would only elevate McCarthy to the president’s stature if not require the president to stoop to McCarthy’s level. It would further give McCarthy the kind of forum and public attention necessary for his attacks. It would demean the presidency. And it would divide the nation.”⁸⁴

On June 21, 1955, Eisenhower met with his White House legislative team. Toward the end of the meeting, a Senate resolution sponsored by McCarthy came up. After a brief discussion of the resolution, Eisenhower closed the meeting by asking if the others had heard a gibe that was going around Washington: “It’s no longer McCarthyism, it’s McCarthywasm!”⁸⁵ One can easily forgive Eisenhower this uncharacteristic indulgence. By this time, McCarthy was no longer a problem requiring his daily attention. Eisenhower’s indirect approach, particularly his assertion of executive privilege at a key moment in the Army-McCarthy hearings, had contributed to the senator’s demise, but it was not primarily responsible for it. That is exactly how Eisenhower wanted it. He believed that McCarthy was the Senate’s problem to deal with, and with some help from him, they had eventually done so. Ultimately, though, McCarthy was responsible for his own demise.

Eisenhower and Truman both referred to McCarthy as a demagogue. In the United States, this term had been most recently applied to Governor Huey Long who had become the virtual dictator of Louisiana in the 1930s. Demagogues are not defined by a particular ideology—McCarthy was a conservative Republican while Long was a liberal Democrat. What defines them are their methods. They position themselves as outsiders, fighting for the interests of common people against those of entrenched elites. Demagogues arouse passions by appealing to the fears and prejudices of their followers, exaggerating threats, disparaging their political enemies, and rejecting the established norms of political conduct. In his Columbia University bicentennial address, Eisenhower argued that truth is the best weapon with which to fight demagogues. Demagogues and their followers, however, are unconcerned with the veracity of their claims and are not persuaded by reason. Eisenhower avoided a direct confrontation with McCarthy, believing that it would demean him and the presidency while fueling the senator’s popularity. He also feared that it would derail his legislative agenda. But demagogues must be stood up to. Truman stood up to McCarthy, but the senator easily dismissed him as an enabler of the communist conspiracy he claimed to be fighting. He could not have dismissed Eisenhower so easily. If Eisenhower believed that democracy was in danger, as he suggested in his Columbia University address, then an earlier and more direct approach was called for.

Donald Trump’s presidency provides a contemporary example of the danger that demagogues pose to American democracy. During the 2016 presidential primaries, other Republican candidates were critical of Trump, but after his surprising victory, criticism from within the party fell mostly silent. As had been the case with McCarthy, some hoped that supporting him would advance their careers or their political agendas. Others feared opposing him would invite his fury and that of his followers. Although Democrats continued to criticize Trump, this only fueled his popularity. Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, his associates’ efforts to aid him in overturning the results of that election, and his supporters’ attempt to disrupt the recording of the electoral college vote threatened the transfer of presidential power. The events of January 6, 2021, led some who had previously supported Trump’s claims to stand up to him. Fortunately, their actions came in time to prevent a constitutional crisis. As with McCarthy, however, those who had the ability to eliminate the threat he posed should have done so sooner, more directly, and without regard to their political future.