Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (37 page)

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FTER WINNING THE ELECTION
Eisenhower went as promised to Korea, where he spent three days on the front. He returned convinced that the war had to be brought to a close, and he concentrated on that goal during the first six months of his administration in 1953. A combination of circumstances, including the fatigue of the enemy, led to signing of a cease-fire that took effect on July 27. This was thirty-seven anguished months after the start of the war in 1950.
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In securing the cease-fire Eisenhower did not win major concessions from the enemy: had the Truman administration tried to sell a similar result, it would have been attacked by the Right. Nor did the agreement end all bloodshed: border incidents killed many people over the subsequent decades that American troops remained there. But Eisenhower, a general and a Republican, escaped popular vilification. The cease-fire agreement, indeed, was probably the most important single accomplishment of his eight-year presidency, and the one he most cherished later. Giving a big boost to Eisenhower's prestige early in his presidency, it also eliminated the most acrimonious political issue of the era. A year and more of peace by late 1954 even calmed some of the passions of the Red Scare. By 1955 Americans were already trying to put the war out of mind and to concentrate on the enjoyment of the good life at home.

The ebbing of acrimony, however, took time. Especially in 1953 and 1954, Cold War passions and partisan battling continued to rend American society and culture. No President could easily have managed these controversies, and Eisenhower, who tried to avoid most of them, was no exception. A persistent political reality intensified these controversies in 1953–54: the aggressiveness and fury of the anti-Communist Right.
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In the aftermath of the heady GOP triumph of 1952 these emotions may have been stronger—and the Left weaker—than at any time in the modern history of the United States. One scholarly overview of these years concludes: "On the coldest, darkest, and most reactionary days of the [Ronald] Reagan ascendancy [in the 1980s] there was more radical belief and activity to be seen in the United States than was present anytime in the 1950s."
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Historians, to be sure, have subsequently dug about in the byways of American culture and exposed signs of rebellion and dissatisfation with the conservative values of the early Eisenhower years. Some young people, mostly in university circles, identified with Holden Caulfield, the restless anti-hero of J. D. Salinger's novel
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951).
Mad
magazine, a zany and highly irreverent publication, began its commercially very successful career (it was number two in circulation behind
Life
by the early 1960s) in 1952.
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I. F. Stone established his iconoclastic and liberal
Weekly
in 1953; Irving Howe started
Dissent
, an organ of left-of-center opinion, in 1954; Marlon Brando and (by 1954) James Dean stood forth as models of anti-Establishment behavior in film. But these scattered manifestations of unease and discontent did not matter much in political circles. Readers of
Dissent
, for instance, admitted that they remained a "tiny band of exiles" throughout the 1950s: circulation for the magazine approximated 4,000 at the time.
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Writers interviewed by
Partisan Review
, another left-of-center magazine, agreed in a symposium in 1952 that they did not want to be alienated from the mainstream. Instead, they wished "very much to be a part of American life. More and more writers have ceased to think of themselves as rebels and exiles."
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This indeed was so. The majority of left-liberal intellectuals in the early 1950s had come to perceive—some reluctantly—that American culture was dominated by a moderate-to-conservative, middle-class "consensus." Indeed, a contemporary barometer of conservatism was the founding in 1955 of the
National Review
, the anti-Communist creation of William Buckley, a young Catholic intellectual not long out of Yale. The magazine gradually became a leading organ of conservative opinion—the most successful of its kind to appear in years.

Democrats, too, seemed tame and chastened following the 1952 election. In the Congress the dominant group centered about two moderate Texans, Democratic House leader Sam Rayburn and Senator Lyndon Johnson, who became majority leader between 1955 and 1960. Among intellectual circles a few Democratic liberals, including the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, championed progressive domestic causes within the newly formed Democratic Advisory Council (DAC), a pressure group. DAC policy proposals helped to establish a liberal Democratic domestic agenda for the 1960s but did not attract great attention before then. Other liberals, including Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, covered their flanks against conservative attack by championing tough legislation to fight Communism. In 1954 Congress overwhelmingly approved Humphrey's Communist Control Act, which defined the Communist party as a "clear, present, and continuing danger to the security of the United States" and deprived the party of "all rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies."
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As Humphrey's stance made clear, anti-Communist fervor seemed politically irresistible in these years. One manifestation of this fervor was the fate of Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel. Accused of being part of a ring (including Fuchs) that had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets in the 1940s, they had been convicted in March 1951 of conspiracy to commit espionage, at which time Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced them to death. Their crime, Kaufman declaimed from the bench, was "worse than murder." Critics of the judgment maintained that Kaufman, the Justice Department, and the FBI had been guilty of misconduct during the trial. Other critics asserted correctly that the punishment was severe: Fuchs, a much more important figure than the Rosenbergs, was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment in England.
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But campaigns on behalf of the Rosenbergs, who were Communists, failed utterly in the Red Scare of the early 1950s. As the date of their execution approached, counter-demonstrators appeared outside the White House. One held a sign,
FRY 'EM
well done. Another had a placard,
LET'S DON'T ELECTROCUTE THEM, HANG THEM.
Eisenhower refused to commute the sentence, which he thought would deter others. On June 19, 1953, a month before the cease-fire in Korea, the Rosenbergs went silently to their deaths.
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The Eisenhower administration moved quickly to establish its anti-Communist credentials in other ways. In April the President issued Executive Order No. 10450, which replaced the network of loyalty decrees created by Truman. The new system was broader than Truman's, including not only loyalty and security as criteria for dismissal but also "suitability," a vague and open-ended category. The order widened the power of summary dismissal, until then available only to heads of sensitive departments such as State and Defense, by giving it to chiefs of all federal departments and agencies.
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The Eisenhower administration also continued ongoing anti-Communist efforts, including the purging of the foreign service, prosecutions of Communists under the Smith Act, deportation of Communist aliens, and exclusion of alleged subversives seeking entrance to the United States. The President supported efforts to legalize the use of wiretaps in national security cases and gave a free hand to the FBI's continuing harassment of left-wingers. In 1956 the FBI established COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program), whose primary target was the Communist party.
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One of the most famous casualties of such governmental efforts was J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," who was stripped of his security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission in June 1954. He was thereupon terminated as a governmental consultant.
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This action followed six months of investigations during which it became clear that the FBI had bugged and tapped his activities for fourteen years. Oppenheimer had many left-wing friends and relatives, including his wife, who had been a Communist; during the war he had lied to investigators about their connections in order to protect them. But this was old, known information, and many of his scientific associates, including Harvard president James Conant, were shocked at what was happening to him. They realized that Oppenheimer was being punished primarily for his opposition to development of the hydrogen bomb. And Oppenheimer's fate was sad. He lost access to scientific developments—his life and career—and was cut off from other scientists, many of whom were afraid to talk to him.
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The ultimate test of Eisenhower's approach to loyalty and security was of course the question of McCarthy. Once the GOP regained control of the Senate, McCarthy was in his element, for he now had a chairmanship—of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—from which he launched probes that irritated the new administration. Assisting him was a subcommittee staff headed by chief counsel Roy Cohn, a sour, troubled, and fervently anti-Communist attorney. In April 1953 Cohn and a close friend, G. David Schine, set off on a well-publicized tour of Europe in which they called for the purging of allegedly subversive literature from government libraries. The State Department panicked and issued a directive excluding books and works of art by "Communists, fellow travelers, et cetera" from United States information centers abroad. A few books were actually burned.

Eisenhower had never cared for McCarthy, and he fumed when the senator considered contesting the confirmation of Walter Bedell Smith, a close friend who had been Ike's chief of staff in the army, as Undersecretary of State early in 1953. By then Ike was becoming increasingly friendly with Taft, GOP leader in the Senate, and Taft managed to get Smith confirmed. Meanwhile, the President tried quietly to undermine McCarthy in other ways: encouraging GOP senators to oppose him; getting a reluctant Vice-President Nixon to stave off McCarthy's probes into network television; trying to prevent McCarthy from speaking at party gatherings; and suggesting (very indirectly) to publishers and other media executives that they give the rampant senator less time and space. Fred Greenstein, a political scientist, later cited these moves as evidence for what he called Eisenhower's shrewd, subtle, and effective "hidden-hand presidency."
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Eisenhower, however, refused to go beyond indirection or to challenge McCarthy head-on. There were several reasons for his reluctance to do battle. First, he agreed with many of McCarthy's goals. As his policies made clear, he was a staunch Cold Warrior. Second, he feared an intra-party brawl that would further imperil his shaky GOP majorities in Congress. McCarthy, after all, was a Republican, and the President was leader of the party. Third, Eisenhower recognized that a direct confrontation with McCarthy would give the rambunctious, often uncontrollable senator even more publicity—on which McCarthy thrived—than he already had. It was better, he thought, to try to ignore him and to hope that given enough rope the senator would eventually hang himself. Eisenhower, finally, was afraid that a fight with McCarthy would diminish the all-important dignity of the presidency. Why use up vital presidential resources to scrap with an alley-fighter? "I will not get into the gutter with that guy," he said privately. Later in the year he added—again privately—"I just won't get into a pissing contest with that skunk."
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Ike's worries about the dignity of the presidential office rested on two even deeper concerns. One was to protect his own personal popularity with the American people. Eisenhower, while self-confident, nonetheless craved popular approval. He generally avoided tough decisions that might threaten it.
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Second, Ike very much wanted to promote domestic tranquility. Throughout his presidency he feared to take actions that might undermine what he considered to be the harmony of American society. He also believed that his mission should be to restrain the role of government, not to force it to fulfill great goals or obligations. These aspirations—protecting his own standing, sustaining domestic tranquility, and curbing the activity of the State—complemented one another in his mind and helped to explain why he often chose
not
to do potentially controversial things: advance ambitious social programs, push for civil rights, get involved in war in Vietnam. They also accounted for his restrained approach to McCarthy. To wade into the arena with such a demagogue, he thought, would endanger his popularity, incite discord, and damage social harmony.

Whether Eisenhower should have been more bold remains one of the most contested questions about his presidency. As it turned out, McCarthy did overreach himself and crash in mid-1954. The President thereby stayed out of the gutter. And his personal popularity—always high—did not suffer. On the other hand, these were in many ways dispiriting times. Federal employees, whom Eisenhower was supposed to protect, were hurt under his watch. If Ike had risked even a little of his immense personal popularity and presidential prestige, he might have slowed the senator down or hastened his demise. It could not have hurt him much to try. His refusal to challenge McCarthy represented a major moral blot on his presidency.