Chris Powell: Eisenhower's secret campaign to defeat Joe McCarthy

Ike and McCarthy, by David A. Nichols (Simon and Schuster. $27.95. 379 pages).

With demagoguery now running rampant  across America,  in large part because of a president indifferent to the truth and the dignity of his office, David A. Nichols's book is a fascinating voyage to a similarly threatening time that at least had a happy ending.

Nichols, a scholar of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, aims to correct the misimpression that Ike was timid in the face of the country's second great Red Scare (the first one came right after World War I). Rather, Nichols writes, in his first two years in office Ike became devoted to breaking the scare's primary perpetrator, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with a secret political campaign run from the White House by the president's aides.

The impression of Eisenhower's timidity arose in part from his steady refusal to confront McCarthy or even mention his name as the senator kept charging, usually without evidence, that the federal government was riddled with Communists who were security risks if not outright spies for the Soviet Union. Of course there were Communists and spies, but McCarthy seldom got near one of any importance. Yet Eisenhower restrained himself even when McCarthy updated his smear of the Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations, Democratic administrations -- from "20 years of treason" to "21 years of treason" -- encompassing the first year of the Eisenhower administration, the administration of a fellow Republican.

Eisenhower, Nichols writes, loathed McCarthy from the start but didn't want to talk back to him, believing -- or maybe rationalizing -- that this would elevate the senator and give him even more attention. Eventually Eisenhower and his aides decided that the country needed to see more of McCarthy, not less, so that the senator's bullying, intemperance and distortions would become his most prominent characteristics in the public mind.

The result was the famous Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954 before a Senate committee, largely staged by the president and his supporters, at which the central issue became not Communist infiltration at all but McCarthy aide Roy Cohn's confidential and unseemly hectoring of the Army to get favors for another McCarthy aide, G. David Schine, who had just been drafted into the Army. Cohn and Schine were suspected of having a homosexual relationship. {Roy Cohn was later a close mentor of Donald Trump.}

Here Nichols makes plain that the supposed good guys were not above McCarthyite tactics themselves. For the Army's lead lawyer, Joseph Welch, who has gone down in history for puncturing the senator with the famous rebuke at a televised hearing -- "Have you no sense of decency, Sir?" -- had just used televised innuendo to suggest Cohn's homosexuality and to exploit prejudice against homosexuals.

Further, Nichols shows, Eisenhower himself, as president, initially flirted with and patronized the fascism of anti-communist politics, at one point proposing to outlaw membership in the Communist Party. The president also dissembled and induced his associates to dissemble about the creation of the Army's report on Cohn's interventions for Schine, even getting Secretary of the Army Robert T.B. Stevens to commit perjury about it.

Journalists of the time don't come out so well either, as Nichols shows many of them sensationalizing McCarthy's reckless allegations and others, including CBS's Edward R. Murrow, colluding with the White House press office against the senator.

Eisenhower, in light of some of those who followed him, turned out to be a pretty good president, siding soon enough with free thought and speech and due process of law. But it is hard not to wonder if the president would have come around so soon if McCarthy had not targeted the Army, from which Ike had retired as the general who had led the Western armies against Hitler.

And while McCarthy quickly fell from national influence, sunk into alcoholism, and died prematurely, his censure by the Senate remains misunderstood. The two counts of the censure had nothing to do with McCarthy's abuse of supposed Communists and their sympathizers and his contempt of due process but rather his affronting the dignity of the Senate itself.

Nichols has told and extensively documented a compelling story. Anyone interested in American history and politics may have a hard time putting this book down.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the {Manchester, Conn.} Journal Inquirer and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.