Fifties (41 page)

In the postwar years, the Army shrank to its prewar norms; in July 1920, Ike was made captain and three years later he became a major, a rank he held for sixteen years. Promotion in the Army between wars was excruciatingly slow. Still, he was known as a talented young comer; he became friendly with George Patton, Jr., at the Infantry Tank School at Camp Meade, and also Fox Conner, possibly the most talented and cerebral officer in the Army at the time. Both Eisenhower and Patton felt the Army was underestimating the future importance of tanks. Ike eventually served as Conner’s executive officer in Panama; there, Conner taught Ike to take his career more seriously. From then on, Eisenhower was never the same officer. He entered the command and general-staff school at Fort Leavenworth, the Army’s most important school for mid-level officers, and finished first in his class.

But for all of that, life in the peacetime Army was hard, particularly on Mamie. For her, Panama was a world of bugs, tropical storms, and brutal heat. She was never quite able to enforce her rule that the chicken for dinner be killed out of her earshot. Their housing was dreadful. “Roofed-over camping out,” was the way she described it. There were certain hardy, adventurous women who were ideal for the role of Army wife; Mamie was not one of them. “She was,” wrote Stephen Ambrose, “an authentic American and like many native Iowans she considered the world a wonderful place, especially when she was living neatly between New York and San Francisco.” To make things even more painful, they lost their first son, Dwight David Junior (Icky), to scarlet fever. But Mamie endured those years. As he was frugal from the legacy of his father’s failure, so she became frugal as well. She was furious when they bought furniture for their post housing at Fort Sam and did not get reimbursed.

If the younger officers, like Eisenhower and Patton, were already thinking in terms of the next war, many old-fashioned Army rituals were still emphasized. Ike disliked such ceremonies as the Sunday morning protocol visits to superiors in which he had to dress in striped pants and derby hat. The modern Army was about tanks and airplanes and he knew it. Yet he served and waited, never in a rush. Patience and hard work would be rewarded; his biographer Stephen Ambrose shrewdly noted that Ike was different in this respect
from his younger brother Milton. Milton had worked in Washington for years and thought in terms of what government should do for the citizens. Dwight Eisenhower, whose life was spent mostly in the Army, was wary of politicians and believed in what the citizen should do for the country. Those years of sacrifice made him a somewhat hard and unsentimental man. At the start of World War Two, when he had finally begun to rise above men who had long been his superiors, George Marshall suggested making Troy Middleton a two-star general. Middleton was an old friend of Ike’s who had left the Army just before World War Two to become comptroller of Louisiana State University. Ike said no. “He left us when the going was tough,” Eisenhower said.

For McCarthy, Eisenhower’s election was the beginning of the end. On election night, as the returns came in, Phil Graham, the publisher of
The Washington Post,
turned to Murrey Marder, the
Post
reporter who had distinguished himself with his intelligent and thorough coverage of the senator, and told him he was going to lose his beat. Graham was sure that Ike’s presidency would eventually mean McCarthy’s isolation; now that the Republicans had the White House, they would not need McCarthy any longer. But Marder knew McCarthy’s recklessness and his hatred of authority. Party loyalty was not even an issue with him—it would not matter who was in the White House. No, Marder speculated, his beat was not finished; instead they would now need two people to cover the senator. They were both right.

What would take place, of course, was the denouement. McCarthy did not understand, of course, that his real value was not in uncovering spy rings (which he had most certainly not been doing) but as a partisan ploy, allowing worthier men to keep their hands clean. “Joe, you’re a real SOB,” Senator John Bricker of Ohio once said, “but sometimes it’s useful to have SOBs around to do the dirty work.” The McCarthy show had been playing for too long. By the time Eisenhower was inaugurated, three years of endless charges with little proof were wearing thin. McCarthy was losing the center, as represented by Dwight Eisenhower, who hated him. “A pimple on the path of progress,” Eisenhower called him, and there were epithets far harsher as well. McCarthy’s virulent attacks on George Marshall, Ike’s great benefactor, had prompted Eisenhower to attempt to square the record at a campaign stop in Wisconsin. Eisenhower had already been appalled at a campaign stop in Indiana,
where he had been embraced on the platform by William Jenner. It had caused Eisenhower to recoil physically and leave as quickly as possible. The attempt to defend George Marshall, whom McCarthy had accused of treason, was for Eisenhower the saddest day of his campaign. He directed his speechwriters to craft a ringing defense of General Marshall and his patriotism: “I know that charges of disloyalty have, in the past, been leveled against General George C. Marshall. I have been privileged for thirty-five years to know General Marshall personally. I know him, as a man and as a soldier, to be dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America. And this episode is a sobering lesson in the way freedom must
not
defend itself.” Ringing words that never rang. Ike’s advisers, fearing McCarthy’s retaliation against their candidate, talked him into dropping the remarks. Ike cut them out, but he was furious—at his advisers, at McCarthy, above all at himself.

More than anything, his handling of McCarthy during the campaign marked Dwight Eisenhower’s loss of innocence, his decision, for reasons of political expediency, to be less of a man than he really was. Not just his Democratic opponents, but some of his oldest and closest friends, such as General Omar Bradley, were appalled by his failure to defend Marshall, whose relationship to Eisenhower was described by Ike’s close aide Harry Butcher as “that of father and son.” “It turned my stomach,” Bradley wrote years later of Ike’s failure to speak up for the man he had once revered now that he was a political candidate. “No man was more beholden to Marshall than Ike.” Moreover, Bradley noted that Ike as a candidate in 1952 seemed again and again to be “hypocritically calling into question policies that he himself had helped formulate or approved or had carried out.” The one person who did not seem particularly bothered by the fuss was Marshall, a stoic man with an overwhelming sense of personal duty and marginal expectations of the political process. He told his goddaughter at the time, quoting Will Rogers, that there was no more independence in politics than there was in jail.

But Eisenhower’s hatred of McCarthy was virulent. At one point during the Army-McCarthy hearings, he remarked that the Kremlin ought to put McCarthy on its payroll. “He don’t take shovin’!” Jerry Persons, Ike’s longtime aide, once said of his boss. Eisenhower viewed McCarthy as someone who always shoved, and in private, embittered tirades he raged against him to his closest associates—how McCarthy was kept going by Texas oil money, how McCarthy wanted to be President. At one cabinet meeting in which
Arthur Larsen was describing a new kind of life insurance, a sudden-death policy you could take out on someone else, Eisenhower observed grimly, “I know one fellow I’d like to take that policy out for.” But when aides suggested that he personally take on McCarthy, he would always say, “I will not get in the gutter with that guy.”

McCarthy had not only alienated Eisenhower; his power was waning in the Senate as well. Taft, with little time left to live, began to distance himself. He gave the Internal Security subcommittee to William Jenner as a means of heading McCarthy off; McCarthy countered simply by using the Committee on Government Operations as his forum. Taft demanded that all investigations be cleared with him, but of course McCarthy had no intention of clearing anything with anybody. The first major break came in early March 1953, when Eisenhower nominated Chip Bohlen to be ambassador to Moscow. Though clearly the most competent man available for the job, Bohlen had been a minor official at Yalta. John Foster Dulles, the new secretary of state, was not enthusiastic about the nomination. Couldn’t you tell them that you were only an interpreter at Yalta? Dulles asked the nominee. On the morning of their appearance before Congress, Dulles suggested to Bohlen that they travel in separate cars so there could not be photographs of them together.

McCarthy, of course, went after the Bohlen nomination from the day Ike announced it, which meant that in the end he was forced to go after Dulles, whose duty it was to vouch for Bohlen. McCarthy demanded that Dulles testify under oath. It was the first time McCarthy had turned on his own party. Taft was furious. “So far as I am concerned Mr. Dulles’s statement not under oath is just as good as Mr. Dulles’s statement under oath,” he said. Afterward, reporters asked Taft if this represented a break with McCarthy. “No, no, no, no,” he quickly said. But, of course, it did.

The end came sooner than anyone expected. McCarthy went after the United States Army, and the resulting confrontation was carried live on ABC television; the nation watched and when it was over, McCarthy had done himself in with his ugliness. Somehow the Army-McCarthy hearings managed to show that he was in decline. And this to no less an authority on winners and losers than the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, an important ally in the past, always backed winners; during the hearings he unceremoniously dumped McCarthy. McCarthy overplayed his hand and became an embarrassment. He began to drink more heavily than ever. “You’re killing yourself, goddamnit,” his old friend Urban Van Susteren would tell him, and he would answer, “Kiss my ass, Van.” In 1954
the Senate censured him. But worse for him than the censure was what the press did: it began to ignore him. He could not understand what had happened. Why, he kept asking Dion Henderson, an outdoors writer for the AP in Milwaukee and a close friend, was a statement that had been news in 1950 not news in 1955? Finally, in 1955, he decided to make an about-face and give a pro-civil-liberties speech in which he would say that his entire career as a red-baiter had been a mistake. He had been reading Thomas Jefferson, McCarthy told Henderson, and had been influenced by him; but above all, he was anxious to make headlines, especially in
The Milwaukee Journal,
his most relentless journalistic opponent. McCarthy bet Henderson that the
Journal
would not use the story. Both Henderson and Ed Bayley of the
Journal
filed it, and Henderson’s story was used in a few papers, but Bayley’s story died on the copy desk. It had been McCarthy’s last chance to grab headlines: Joe McCarthy the born-again civil libertarian. Three years after being censured by the Senate and some seven years after his first speech, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was only forty-eight. If nothing else, he had illuminated the timidity of his fellow man.

NINETEEN

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1951 Marlon Brando opened in his first big film, the cinematic version of Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire.
There was never any doubt he would get the part after his Broadway performance; he exuded a raw sexual power onstage that could only translate into box-office power. Brando was paid $75,000, reasonably good money at that time for a first starring role.

It would be hard to imagine an actor more wary of going from the legitimate stage to Hollywood than Brando. When he was a young, struggling actor in New York, he liked to boast that the theater was his real love and he would never sell out to become a movie star, something he viewed as a less exalted calling. After finishing
Streetcar
on Broadway, he received a letter from Stanley Kramer, who asked him to star in a movie called
The Men,
about a
group of paraplegic veterans. Kramer was the rare producer whom Brando respected, and the theme intrigued him. Somewhat reluctantly, he accepted. He installed himself in a ward at a real veterans’ hospital for six weeks, to get some firsthand experience of these men’s lives. He was on his best behavior, and the movie was excellent, but he did manage to offend the Hollywood press, particularly the two powerful gossip columnists of that era, both of them right-wingers, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Hopper, he liked to say, was the one in the hat, and Parsons was the fat one. They reciprocated his contempt.

If he found Hollywood an alien place, he was reassured by the fact that Elia Kazan, who had directed
Streetcar
on Broadway, was going to direct the movie. Vivien Leigh would play Blanche. When Miss Leigh, then married to Lord Laurence Olivier, arrived, the local journalists kept referring to her as Lady Olivier. “Her ladyship,” she noted at an early press conference, “is fucking bored with such formality and prefers to be known as Miss Vivien Leigh!” That should have augured well for her relations with Brando. But from the start he was suspicious of her, as much as anything else put off by her good manners; she
was
British and she
was
polite to everyone. That irritated him. His manners were at best flexible and at worst appalling; in the decade ahead, he would frequently exercise his inalienable right to be rude, especially to powerful people. “Why are you so fucking polite? Why do you have to say fucking good morning to everyone?” he asked Ms. Leigh early on. There were other problems on the set—the struggle between Olivier and Kazan over Ms. Leigh’s reading, for instance. Kazan would prepare her one way, and she would be his Blanche, then she would go home, work with Olivier, and return as
his
Blanche. But perhaps the more serious problem was getting certain aspects of Williams’s play past the Hollywood censors. On Broadway the elite audience was ever more willing to break new ground with sexual subjects in this new and more open postwar era. But Hollywood was a different story. Kazan and Williams, who wrote the screenplay, had to contend with the Breen office, the guardians of public morals, whose standards had been set in another time. Kazan had to negotiate each cut reluctantly and painfully with Joseph Breen. All references to homosexuality would have to be cut; Blanche was no longer to be interested in young boys. Then Breen demanded the rape scene be cut. On this Kazan stood his ground. He would not do the film unless the rape scene, in some form, was left in. The Breen office relented, but only if Stanley was punished by losing his wife’s love at the end. It was an appalling process, repugnant
to Kazan and to Williams. As for Brando, it merely confirmed his worst fears about Hollywood. What kept Kazan going was the knowledge of how much he was saving—the play was so strong, the performances so powerful, that Kazan was certain the movie was going to be an immense success. But when it was finished Kazan was stunned to find that Warner Bros., in order to win approval from the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, had made additional, serious cuts without telling him. It was a done deal and he had not even been consulted. Kazan was enraged. He was also powerless. He told Jack Warner he would never make a picture for him again. He wrote a bitter piece for the Sunday
New York Times,
but it was over. But Kazan’s instincts about making the film in the first place, and the compromises that it entailed, still proved to be true: The raw power of Williams’s play and the performances were beyond the reach of the censor. The film became a classic, but one cannot help but wonder what it might have been if the censors had not had their way.