Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (34 page)

T
HE WAR, FINALLY, LIFTED
the Red Scare to high tide. Truman was powerless to stop the wave of anti-Communist and xenophobic feeling that washed over the country during and after the conflict. Hoover redoubled his fight against Reds in American life. Schools embarked on drills that claimed to prepare children for the horrors of atomic attack. Sales of back-yard bomb shelters seemed to increase. States and towns passed legislation that banned Communists from teaching, civil service, or office-seeking and that made the taking of the Fifth Amendment grounds for dismissal from government service.
⁷³
Even the comic strips were affected: Buzz Sawyer went to work for the CIA; Terry now chased Communists, not pirates; Joe Palooka outwitted the Reds to rescue a scientist in Austria; Winnie Winkle was thrown into a Soviet jail; Daddy Warbucks and his friends blew up enemy planes carrying H-bombs toward America.

Fears unleashed by the Korean War helped to spread the Red Scare into intellectual circles. This was by no means an all-encompassing development, for American intellectual life remained vibrant. Many important books appeared during the war that were largely unaffected by concerns about Communism: J. D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951), Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man
(1952), Erik Erikson's
Childhood and Society
(1950), and David Riesman and Nathan Glazer's
The Lonely Crowd
(1950) are four of the most enduring. In the arts, architects and abstract expressionist painters made the United States—and New York City in particular—an international center of creative talent in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But the threat of Communism did alarm some intellectuals.
⁷⁴
Even before the war, in 1949, the British writer George Orwell had written 1984, a dystopian novel that was widely assumed to describe the future under Communism. It quickly became a classic. In 1951 Hannah Arendt, a highly regarded political thinker and philosopher known for her hostility to fascism, published
The Origins of Totalitarianism
. It tended to equate Communism and fascism by showing how both systems relied on terror and unlimited political power.

Conservative religious leaders more eagerly joined the wartime drive against Communism at home. During the winter of 1950–51 the evangelist Billy Graham spoke to enormous and enthusiastic crowds who heard him warn against "over 1,100 social-sounding organizations that are communist or communist-operated in this country. They control the minds of a great segment of our people. . . . educational [and] religious culture is almost beyond repair." In 1952 Fulton J. Sheen, the auxiliary Catholic bishop of New York, began attracting huge audiences to watch his new television show, "Life Is Worth Living." His book of the same title, published in 1953, reached number five on the best-seller list. Sheen wore a black cassock with red piping, a scarlet cape that flowed off his shoulders, and a large gold cross around his neck. Candles and a statue of the Virgin Mary loomed behind him. He had piercing eyes that glowed like coals and an apparently effortless eloquence that enabled him to speak without notes. Sheen kept his distance from the shabbier diatribes of McCarthyites. But many of his messages denounced Communism, the antithesis of Catholicism as he saw it.
⁷⁵
At his peak in 1954 he reached an estimated 25 million people a week.

In the Cold War climate of the early 1950s, it was hardly surprising that television, then spreading with incredible speed to American households, should have welcomed an anti-Communist like Sheen. Indeed, the TV networks, too, felt the rising power of the Red Scare. Three days before the North Korean invasion of 1950, three former FBI agents published
Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television
. Financed by a leading supporter of the China Lobby, it included an alphabetical list of 151 people in the radio and television business along with "citations" of their involvement in various suspect organizations. These were mostly liberal associations, but
Red Channels
made them seem subversive. Sponsors grew nervous, and radio and television stations felt their pressure. Blacklisting followed. Among the so-called subversives who found it hard to get time on the air in the early 1950s were Leonard Bernstein, Lee J. Cobb, Aaron Copland, Jose Ferrer, Gypsy Rose Lee, Edward G. Robinson, and Orson Welles.
⁷⁶
The left-wing singer Pete Seeger was banned from network TV until 1967. The black singer-activist Paul Robeson, an apologist for Stalinism, had his passport stripped for eight years beginning in 1950.
⁷⁷
In 1954 the
New York Times
estimated that right-wing agitation had cost 1,500 radio and television people their jobs.
⁷⁸

Tensions in Hollywood also demonstrated the special anxiety that American institutions felt about Communism during the Korean War years. Thanks in part to HUAC's assaults in 1947, accommodating studios had already brought out a few films that featured explicitly anti-Communist themes. These included
The Iron Curtain
(1948) and
The Red Menace
(1949). With the coming of war, anti-Communism did a brisker business on the sets: one historian has counted around 200 such movies produced between 1948 and 1953, most of them after 1950.
⁷⁹
Among them were
I Married a Communist
(1950),
I Was a Communist for the FBI
(1951),
The Whip Hand
(1951),
Red Snow
(1952), and
My Son John
(1952). Many of the Communists portrayed in these films (few of which did well at the box office) were scruffy, humorless, effeminate, and sinister. They did a good deal of spying and recruiting for the party, and when necessary they murdered patriotic citizens who got in their way.
⁸⁰

Another growing genre of film, science fiction, also tried to play on anti-Communist emotions during and after the war. Following such films as
When Worlds Collide
(1951) and
War of the Worlds
(1953), "sci-fi flicks" became increasingly popular in the 1950s. Many of these movies need no deep analysis. Others, such as
Them
(1953) and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956), were truly scary, arousing fears of monsters—perhaps mutations from atomic testing. Common themes in the sci-fi movies featured "good" scientists and public officials contending with dangerous conspirators, aliens, or monsters from the "other." What one got from such themes surely varied; if we know anything from the explosion of cultural analysis in our own times it is that many individuals reach their own conclusions about what they see and read and hear. Still, some of these movies carried conservative subtexts: watch out for people who are different; things (and people) may not be what they seem; trust in authority; be careful in all that you say and do; guard against enemies and conspirators.
⁸¹

Liberals and leftists in Hollywood had to be especially careful following the outbreak of war in Korea. Some actors, directors, and technicians lost their jobs in the war years; one estimate places the number at 350 by the mid-1950s.
⁸²
Blacklisted screenwriters resorted to the use of pseudonyms. A particular target of Red-hunters was the British-born Charlie Chaplin, who angered conservatives both because he had been involved in a paternity suit and because he had supported a range of left-wing causes. One of his films,
Monsieur Verdoux
(1947), was withdrawn from circulation after the American Legion led protests against its pacifist message. A new film in 1952,
Limelight
, ran in only a few American cities. When Chaplin took a trip out of the United States in September 1952, the government arbitrarily rescinded his re-entry permit until he agreed to submit to rigorous examination of his political beliefs and moral behavior. Refusing to do so, Chaplin remained in exile until returning in 1972 to receive a special Oscar. He died in Switzerland in 1977.
⁸³

The Justice Department's intervention in the case of Chaplin underlined the continuing importance of governmental action in feeding the flames of anti-Communism. As before, zealots on Capitol Hill proved ready with the matches. With Korea as Case Number One of Communist conspiracy, McCarthy and others spearheaded thirty-four separate probes into domestic Communist influence during the 1951–52 Congress and fifty-one in 1953–54. So politically popular was the issue of anti-Communism that 185 of the 221 GOP representatives elected in 1952 asked Republican House leaders to give them an assignment on HUAC in the new Congress.
⁸⁴

One of the most effective anti-Communists in Congress was Patrick McCarran, a conservative Democratic senator from Nevada. McCarran meant business and, as a member of the majority party before 1953, got results. In 1950 he led to passage an Internal Security Act (also called the McCarran Act) that required Communists and other "subversive" groups to register with the Attorney General. A Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) was given broad authority to identify the groups. The law further barred individuals in such groups from holding government or defense jobs or from getting passports; it denied entrance to the United States of aliens who had ever belonged to the Communist party or other totalitarian parties or had advocated violent revolution; and it authorized detention of accused spies and saboteurs during any national emergency declared by the President. Truman vigorously opposed the legislation, calling it the "greatest danger to freedom of press, speech, and assembly since the Sedition Act of 1798."
⁸⁵
Civil libertarians also denounced the act, mainly because of the sweeping authority it gave to the SACB. Still, the Democratic Congress not only approved the legislation but overrode Truman, when he vetoed it in September 1950, by votes of 286 to 48 in the House and 57 to 10 in the Senate.
⁸⁶
Thanks to litigation by the Communist party, the act was not enforced, but it placed left and liberal groups on the defensive and remained on the books for years. It exposed with special clarity the bipartisan political appeal of anti-Communism in the Korean War election year of 1950.

In 1951 McCarran struck again, this time directing his Internal Security Subcommittee to investigate "China hands" in the State Department who had "lost" China. Truman, feeling the pressure, tightened his loyalty/security procedures in April 1951 to place a greater burden of proof on government employees. John Stewart Service, an expert on China, underwent eight separate investigations before being labeled a risk and fired by Acheson in December. Another China hand, John Carter Vincent, was accused of being a loyalty risk in 1951 and quit the State Department. By 1954 most of the leading men on the China desk had been purged from government service, thereby depriving the United States government of the expertise it had previously been able to muster about the People's Republic of China.
⁸⁷

McCarran's next success, in 1952, was the McCarran-Walter Act. The law was liberal in one respect: it repealed thirty-year-old legislation that had excluded Asian immigrants from the United States, substituting instead small quotas, and it removed racial qualifications for citizenship that had also been used to discriminate against Asians. Otherwise, the McCarran-Walter Act was offensive to liberals and to Truman, who vetoed it. It maintained the existing "national origins" system of immigration by which certain groups—mainly southeastern Europeans and Jews—had been discriminated against. It also strengthened the Attorney General's authority to deport aliens who were thought to be subversive. Congress again overruled Truman's veto.
⁸⁸

The Red Scare on Capitol Hill—and elsewhere in the United States during the Korean War—exposed a final legacy of the war: it deeply damaged the Truman administration. This damage was cumulative rather than dramatic, for the Korean conflict, unlike the later quagmire that was Vietnam, was not a "living room war." People could not turn on their television sets and witness the savagery of combat. There was little in the way of organized anti-war protest: Americans either wanted to win or get out. Some 5.7 million men served in the military during the war—about one-third the number in World War II—without much being said against the draft. But the frustrations of stalemate—and the continuing casualties—heightened the Red Scare and rendered Truman virtually powerless to control Congress or effectively to lead the country. Well before the 1952 elections it was clear that the Korean War had divided the nation and that the majority of the American people were ready for a change in leadership.

9
Ike

A poll of historians conducted by Arthur Schlesinger in 1962 ranked President Dwight D. Eisenhower as number twenty-one among the thirty-four Presidents in American history before that time. He stood near the bottom of "average" presidents, tied with Chester Arthur and just ahead of Andrew Johnson. That changed. A poll twenty years later placed Eisenhower ninth among the ten best, between Truman and James K. Polk.
¹

Polls such as these are silly exercises that reveal more about the biases of historians (most of whom are liberals) and about the times than they do about the ability of individual Presidents. Eisenhower ranked higher in 1982 in part because some of his successors in the White House, especially Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, had pursued outrageously devious and dishonest policies. By contrast Eisenhower (and Truman, too) seemed by then to be sensible and honorable. His reputation since 1982 has if anything grown more lustrous. An accomplished biographer, Stephen Ambrose, started his book in 1990 by stating that "Dwight David Eisenhower was a great and good man. . . . one of the outstanding leaders of the western world of this century."
²

Those who have a low opinion of Ike, as he was called, tend to regard him as a career military officer with a narrow range of interests and a limited intellect. Many professors at Columbia University considered him to be wholly out of his depth in the academic world, whereupon he offered his own definition of an intellectual: "a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows,"
³
Schlesinger, a liberal Democrat, later said that Eisenhower's mind "functioned at two levels: a level of banal generality, so hortatory as to be meaningless; and a level of
ad hoc
reaction to specific events, often calm, intelligent, and decisive, but not always internally coherent. It may indeed seem in the end as it did at the time that, while Eisenhower often knew what he wanted to do at any particular moment, his larger sense of affairs was confused and contradictory."
⁴

When Eisenhower became President in 1953, his detractors regularly made fun of his habits. Deploring his time-consuming passion for golf, they also criticized him for his taste in books—mainly western novels—and for his love of poker and bridge. This passion was indeed deep: flying back from the GOP national convention in San Francisco in 1956, Eisenhower spent eight straight hours on the plane playing bridge with his friends.
⁵
His critics further complained that he surrounded himself mainly with big businessmen and other rich people, sometimes at stag dinners in the White House, and cut himself off from "ordinary" folk.

Nothing gave his detractors more amusement (or concern) than Eisenhower's apparent inarticulateness. At press conferences he often seemed to stumble or to go off in all directions at once, thereby obscuring his meaning and confounding his audience. If Ike were giving the Gettysburg Address, Dwight Macdonald once quipped, he would phrase it like this:

I haven't checked these figures, but eighty-seven years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental setup here in this country, I believe it covered eastern areas, with this idea that they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual.
⁶

Critics of Eisenhower's presidency complain above all that he did not work hard at the job and that he failed to take charge. A good President, they thought, had to be strong and activist—like FDR. The liberal journalist I. F. Stone put this view well as early as January 1953 when he wrote, "Eisenhower is no fire-eater, but seems to be a rather simple man who enjoys his bridge and his golf and doesn't like to be too much bothered. He promises . . . to be a kind of president
in absentia
, a sort of political vacuum in the White House which other men will struggle among themselves to fill."
⁷
Objections to Eisenhower's love of golf especially punctuated his presidency. A bumper sticker read,
BEN HOGAN
[the best golfer of the era]
FOR PRESIDENT, IF WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A GOLFER FOR PRESIDENT, LET'S HAVE A GOOD ONE
. A contemporary joke had Ike asking golfers ahead of him, "Do you mind if we play through? New York has just been bombed."
⁸
Liberals then and later described Eisenhower as at best an appropriate President for the conservative 1950s: "the bland leading the bland." John F. Kennedy was but one of many contemporaries who, partisanship aside, believed that Eisenhower was a "non-President," with little understanding of the powers available to him.
⁹

Eisenhower's defenders reply correctly that he deserves a more rounded appraisal. Ike, they emphasize, had a remarkably engaging personality and dominating presence. Although he was only five feet, ten inches tall, he carried himself with an erect military bearing and exuded physical strength and vitality. At sixty-two when he entered the White House, he was one of the oldest chief executives in American history, but even after 1955, when he had a heart attack, he remained tanned and vigorous in appearance. Although he had a hot temper, most people who came in contact with him remembered instead his bright blue, often flashing eyes and his wide, warm, and infectious smile. He radiated sincerity and openness. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who clashed often with Ike during World War II, admitted, "He has this power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts the bits of metal. He has merely to smile at you, and you trust him at once."
¹⁰

Friendly writers also emphasize Eisenhower's native abilities and pre-presidential accomplishments. These had not been easy to foresee early in his life. Born in 1890 in Texas, he was raised by God-fearing pacifist parents in Abilene, Kansas, but nonetheless went to West Point, graduating in 1915. He was better known there as a football player (until sidelined by injury) than as a scholar, finishing sixty-first in a class of 164. Unlike MacArthur, he did not see action in World War I, and as a result he moved ahead only slowly in the resource-starved interwar army. In the 1920s, however, he served in Panama under General Fox Conner, a literate man who encouraged Eisenhower to read more widely in military history and the classics. Eisenhower later considered this stint as a kind of graduate education. Conner recommended him for the army's elite Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Ike excelled, graduating first in a class of 275.

Eisenhower was thereafter marked as one of the ablest young officers in the army. After a tour of duty in the office of the Assistant Secretary of War, he served under MacArthur both in Washington—while MacArthur was chief of staff between 1930 and 1935—and in the Philippines from 1936 to 1939. He then returned to the United States before being called after the attack on Pearl Harbor to work in Washington in the Planning Division of the War Department, where he much impressed army chief of staff Marshall. Marshall later tapped him to be supreme allied commander in Europe. Eisenhower's successful handling of D-Day, his open, democratic manner, and his ability to maintain harmony among often egotistical military and political figures made him an exceptional leader of coalition forces. He received a hero's welcome when he returned to the United States in 1945. He then became army chief of staff before leaving for Columbia in 1948 and the command of NATO forces in 1951.

By the end of World War II, when Eisenhower had become a closely watched figure, some disinterested observers appreciated his intelligence and articulateness. Steve Early, FDR's press secretary, went to one of Ike's press conferences and emerged as a strong admirer. "It was the most magnificent performance of any man at a press conference that I have ever seen," Early said. "He knows his facts, he speaks freely and frankly, and he has a sense of humor, he has poise, and he has command."
¹¹
Another experienced journalist, Theodore White, was equally impressed while Ike was commander of NATO in 1951 and 1952: "I had made the mistake so many observers did of considering Ike a simple man, a good straightforward soldier. Yet Ike's mind was not flaccid; and gradually, reporting him as he performed, I found that his mind was tough, his manner deceptive; that the rosy public smile could give way, in private, to furious outbursts of temper; that the tangled, rambling rhetoric of his off-the-record remarks could, when he wished, be disciplined by his own pencil into clean, hard prose."
¹²

Eisenhower's years in the military in fact had helped him to think and write clearly. Much of his career had involved preparing position papers and speeches, including many of MacArthur's. When speechwriters began composing for him, he proved to be a painstaking and often stern editor, seeking to rid prepared remarks of high-flown rhetoric. Although he was indeed convoluted in many presidential press conferences, he usually knew what he was doing, and he rarely said anything very damaging. Eisenhower was in fact considerably more ambitious, crafty, and egotistical than most people recognized, and he took pains to protect his image. When he decided to run for the presidency in 1952, he surrounded himself with more professional advertising and public relations experts than had any presidential candidate in American history, and by 1955 he used TV as much as he could to promote himself and his policies.
¹³
Samuel Lubell, a sophisticated journalist, laughed at the notion that Ike was a "five-star babe in the political woods." On the contrary, he was "as complete a political angler as ever filled the White House."
¹⁴
Ike was especially adept at a key to presidential survival: letting associates take the blame for controversial statements while appearing to remain above politics. The liberal reporter Murray Kempton later highlighted this talent in an influential article, "The Underestimation of Dwight Eisenhower," which is widely cited by pro-Eisenhower revisionists. Ike, Kempton concluded, was far shrewder than people realized. "He was the great tortoise upon whose back the world sat for eight years. We laughed at him; we talked wistfully about moving; and all the while we never knew the cunning beneath the shell."
¹⁵

Revisionists such as Kempton understood that Eisenhower was more than simply cunning. Many politicians—Nixon quickly comes to mind—were as good as or better than Eisenhower at that. Ike had three other characteristics that stood him in good stead as a President and that account for the huge affection that most Americans held for him in his own time. The first was his normally prudent way of reaching decisions. When he became President, he brought with him a military way of doing things: finding loyal staff, establishing a hierarchical system of organizing it, meeting regularly with immediate subordinates, and allowing time (where possible) for contemplation before rushing into things. As critics were quick to point out, this style of decision-making tended to deprive him of the free-wheeling and sometimes innovative ideas that energized the administrations of Presidents like FDR and JFK. Over time it often insulated him from urgent public passions, such as the emerging civil rights movement. But it was orderly, and it kept him focused, his mind uncluttered, on issues he considered important. As exploited by his cautious intelligence, this administrative style encouraged prudent judgments on most (not all) matters of high public policy.

Second, Eisenhower had great self-confidence in his knowledge of foreign and defense policies. Compared to Truman, who had to learn on the job, or Kennedy, who felt he had to prove himself, Ike came to the White House with the serene self-assurance—it bordered on arrogance at times—of someone who had wide experience in these areas. He was personally acquainted with many of the world's leading statesmen and military leaders and was for the most part a wise judge of character. More important, he understood military matters and kept abreast of technological changes in weaponry. For many Americans it was comforting, amid the otherwise harrowing nuclear build-ups of the Cold War, to know that Eisenhower was in charge.

Third, Eisenhower had a sincere commitment to public service.
¹⁶
This came from a combination of forces: his upbringing in a righteous, hardworking family; his education; above all, perhaps, his career as an army officer. While he was hardly "above politics" as President, he impressed associates with his seriousness and concern for the dignity of the office. More than most world statesmen of his time, he seemed solid and sensible—at least in foreign and military affairs.

As archival materials became available to historians and political scientists in the 1970s and 1980s, these, too, seemed to confirm that Eisenhower, while ill informed on many domestic issues, was normally shrewd and prudent otherwise. They make it clear that he, not strong-willed subordinates, was the one in control. Let Schlesinger, a critic, have last words that describe Ike as at once self-promoting and politically astute. Revelations from Eisenhower's papers, Schlesinger wrote in 1983,

unquestionably alter the old picture. We may stipulate at once that Eisenhower showed much more energy, interest, self-confidence, purpose, cunning, and command than many of us supposed in the 1950s; that he was the dominant figure in his administration whenever he wanted to be (and he wanted to be more often than it seemed at the time); and that the very genius for self-protection that led him to exploit his reputation for vagueness and muddle and to shove associates into the line of fire obscured his considerable capacity for decision and control.
¹⁷