Eisenhower (24 page)

There is no way to know how the world might have changed had the Soviet Union joined in Eisenhower’s proposal, whether common cause in peaceful development of the atom might have dimmed mutual suspicions of the era’s great adversaries. All that is knowable is that those suspicions ran too deep in 1953 for the Soviet Union to see the potential of what became known as “Atoms for Peace.” And yet while one path toward peace was blocked, another opened. Though the central proposal of the speech never materialized, the attempt itself helped establish that Eisenhower would search for ways to lessen tension and signaled that there was a difference between the Cold War leaders in Washington and their brutish counterparts in Moscow. “Atoms for Peace” did not lead directly to peace, but it indirectly contributed to victory.

The speech capped an extraordinarily eventful year in the life of America and its new president. In his first twelve months, Eisenhower ended the Korean War, overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh, appointed Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States, fought Senator Joe McCarthy, reimagined America’s national security and defense posture, and laid out markers for future relations with the Soviet Union. At times, the administration’s actions could seem inconsistent: Ike spoke passionately about the immorality of nations tampering in the affairs of others, only to authorize Kermit Roosevelt to topple Iran’s prime minister; he summoned great eloquence on the common lot of all peoples and yet could be hamstrung in addressing inequality in his own country. Eisenhower and his advisers—his cabinet, his brothers, his “Gang” of bridge and golfing friends—believed America was a force of moral leadership in the world and that its strength was indispensable to the cause of freedom. He was occasionally wrong in the application of those principles, but he was consistently right about the ideals themselves.

Ike governed in those months determined to project calm. In private, he could be grumpy and short-tempered. But he marshaled his public persona—the optimism that he had appreciated in Marshall and Churchill—to deliberate effect. Worried that Washington’s crisis addiction deprived Americans of their right to tranquil lives, Ike conspicuously vacationed, intentionally was photographed at ease. He believed in the opportunity that freedom afforded Americans to choose lives of fulfillment, and he led by quiet example.

His nation, however, was restless. Civil rights stirred in the South, Hugh Hefner launched
Playboy
magazine in December with Marilyn Monroe on its cover. The feminist revolution was nascent, sexual freedom rising, vindictive politics heightened by McCarthy.

In fact, even as Eisenhower rounded out 1953, he was in for one more brutal surprise. Having spent much time fending off McCarthy’s charges of Communist infiltration of government and many months building “Atoms for Peace,” Eisenhower received shocking news about Oppenheimer. On the night of December 2, he called Charlie Wilson to discuss ways to reduce American armed forces. As they were talking, Wilson asked whether the president had seen a new FBI report on Oppenheimer (in fact, the document was a letter sent to the bureau, not a report by it). Ike had not yet received it, so he asked Wilson what it contained. The material, Wilson said, included “very grave” allegations against the scientist. In addition to old charges that Oppenheimer’s wife and brother were former Communist Party members, there were new suspicions about Oppenheimer himself. “Some of his accusers,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary, “seem to go so far as to accuse him of having been an actual agent of the Communists.”

The implications of Oppenheimer spying for the Soviet Union were mind-boggling. Over the past decade, no man had greater access to America’s most delicate national security secrets. He had overseen construction of the most secretive and important undertaking of the war and knew more about the atom bomb and the science behind it than Ike himself. If Oppenheimer was a spy—had been a spy through the war—no American nuclear secret was safe, and no damage he could do now, as a mere government consultant, could compare to that which he had already done. “It would not be a case of merely locking the stable door after the horse is gone,” Eisenhower wrote in his diary. “It would be more like trying to find a door for a burned-down stable.”

Eisenhower was under no illusion about the threat posed by these allegations. For months, McCarthy had been pounding about the presence of Communists in government, and the best he had been able to come up with was an obscure Asia specialist working on the margins of the State Department. This was an accusation of an entirely different order. If McCarthy seized the case before Eisenhower could act to contain it, Ike would join Truman as a dupe of Communist infiltration at the highest level of government. In fact, unbeknownst to Eisenhower, McCarthy had already caught wind of questions about Oppenheimer, but J. Edgar Hoover, again for reasons of which Ike was unaware, had succeeded in persuading McCarthy to tread lightly, at least for the moment.

At the same time, once the FBI “report” caught up with Eisenhower, he recognized that the case against Oppenheimer was far less damning than it first seemed. The information was not a new FBI analysis but rather a letter written to the bureau by William Liscum Borden, a thirty-three-year-old Democrat who had recently lost his post as executive director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy under the new Congress. He and Oppenheimer had charted sharply different views on the preeminent nuclear weapons issue of the day, whether or not the United States should build a hydrogen bomb. So fervently did Borden believe in the necessity for the weapon that he concluded that Oppenheimer’s resistance signaled a larger disloyalty. Borden undertook his own investigation of Oppenheimer’s history, and “based upon years of study of the available classified evidence,” he determined that “more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.”

Borden’s letter checked off a long list of reasons for suspecting Oppenheimer, but the majority had already been investigated when Oppenheimer was cleared for work at Los Alamos. Yes, his wife had been a party member, as had his brother and his onetime mistress; yes, he had supported Communist causes and affiliated with Communists before entering top secret service in construction of the bomb. By 1953, however, all those ties had been long broken. Borden’s evidence of Communist involvement in the postwar period was fresher, but far weaker. Indeed, his entire litany of suspicious acts by Oppenheimer from 1946 on consisted of Oppenheimer’s attempts to discourage development of the hydrogen bomb and other atomic projects. That Oppenheimer’s objections to nuclear proliferation might have been professional and principled seems not to have occurred to Borden. Instead, Borden transformed policy disagreement into suspicion of treason.

What was hidden from Eisenhower, however, was the real reason that these issues were returning to the surface ten years after they had first been examined by the U.S. government. The truth was that Borden was not acting alone; his chief but silent collaborator was Eisenhower’s friend whom he had recently appointed to head the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss.

Owlish, combative, and piercingly intelligent, Strauss was the son of a shoe wholesaler who grew up in South Carolina. His plans to attend college were derailed, first by a bout with typhoid fever, and then by his family’s need for him to help their business through a downturn. He was a gifted shoe salesman, and he helped restore the family business. That duty accomplished, Strauss chanced upon a report of Herbert Hoover’s famine relief efforts in Belgium and offered his services to Hoover as his assistant. Thus began a long and contentious career in which Strauss oscillated between public and private service—his private years characterized by a genius for investment; his public service by a ferocious belief in the secret development of American nuclear weapons.

Oppenheimer consistently foiled that effort, particularly with his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Though Strauss prevailed when Truman gave approval to the weapon, the salesman remained convinced that the scientist was untrustworthy. Strauss had watched with horror as Oppenheimer’s call for “candor” had initially found favor with Eisenhower. Strauss, denying all along that he was at odds with Oppenheimer, had tried to scuttle “Atoms for Peace” and had succeeded in dampening that aspect of the address.

Named by Ike to head the Atomic Energy Commission in May 1953, Strauss made classified material in the AEC’s files available to Borden. Strauss also moved to head off any investigation by McCarthy—not to protect Oppenheimer, but rather to preserve his own line of attack. Strauss feared that if McCarthy attacked Oppenheimer, the senator’s flamboyance would ruin the case and turn Oppenheimer into a martyr. Unwilling to risk that, Strauss took great pains, legal and illegal, to insure that he would be the one to destroy his adversary. At Strauss’s request, the FBI bugged the office of Oppenheimer’s lawyer and, later, his home in Princeton. Through those illegal wiretaps, Strauss monitored Oppenheimer’s consultations with his lawyers and insisted on leaving the taps in place even when the FBI suggested removing them.

While Strauss hemmed in Oppenheimer, Ike’s first concern was to contain any possible damage should the worst fears about the scientist be realized. Though skeptical of the charges—“they consist of nothing more than the receipt of a letter from a man named Borden,” Ike recorded in his diary—Eisenhower was not inclined to entertain any risk of espionage under any circumstances. Less than twenty-four hours after receiving Wilson’s warning, and now having read Borden’s letter, Ike instructed Brownell “to place a blank wall between the subject of the communication and all areas of our government operations, whether in research projects of a sensitive nature or otherwise.”

Although he did not know it yet, Oppenheimer was cut off. Over the next three weeks, Strauss prepared his response to the allegations he had helped to generate. Meeting with top White House officials on December 18, he proposed creating a special panel of the AEC to consider whether to renew Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The group agreed and suggested that Oppenheimer be offered a choice: he could resign and avoid the hearing, or he could fight and risk public as well as private humiliation. Three days later, Strauss presented Oppenheimer with his options and demanded a swift answer. Oppenheimer agonized—“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” he muttered after his meeting with Strauss—but elected to fight. Having made that decision, he collapsed on the floor of his lawyer’s bathroom. The hearing was set for 1954.

Ike was worn out, too. Oppenheimer, Bermuda, and “Atoms for Peace” unfolded within a single month. He pushed himself almost to “the point of exhaustion,” but he ended the year in an upbeat mood. Looking back, he confided in a Christmas note to Swede Hazlett, he found “moments of real satisfaction that have made all the rest of it seem worthwhile.”

The year closed out with the normal press of business. The cabinet and the NSC held their regular sessions. Eisenhower met with legislative leaders to discuss the St. Lawrence Seaway, statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, public works and farm programs, and the coming budget. He shuffled ideas and drafts for the State of the Union and happily embraced one piece of advice. He would deliver a “message of hope,” a reminder that despite difficulties for some, “there is a clear prospect of encouraging opportunity for the betterment of all groups, classes and individuals.”

The holidays offered a few moments of respite, and Ike enjoyed them. Tom Stephens arranged a series of performances at the White House Christmas party—though it was meant for the staff, Ike and Mamie dropped in—and the president was delighted. Even irritations seemed more amusing than disabling. France elected a new president, and Eisenhower cabled his congratulations to the winner, René Coty. He then wrote to Al Gruenther, stationed in Paris. “In view of the number of people I have known in the various French governments, it is exasperating to find out that they picked the one I cannot remember meeting.” Ike added: “That’s the French of it.”

On Christmas Day, Ike and Mamie departed for Augusta. The year ended quietly on the golf links and with cheerful gatherings of staff and friends. For a few days, Oppenheimer and McCarthy, covert action, nuclear weapons, civil rights, economic recovery, and the mysteries of the Soviet Union all receded. Though not for long.

8

“McCarthywasm”

B
rothers can argue about almost anything, and Little Ike and Big Ike were no exception. Through the first year of Little Ike’s presidency, his brother Edgar badgered him over a deeply divisive proposal to amend the Constitution. Sponsored by Senator John Bricker of Ohio, the measure tapped a vein of Republican dogma left over from the party’s long ostracism during the FDR presidency. There lingered an abiding suspicion from the Yalta Conference that the president would abuse his power to make foreign treaties and might straitjacket domestic policy or overwhelm states’ rights. An agreement, for instance, to honor human rights abroad might constrain the criminal sentencing systems adopted in various American states.

To remedy that, Bricker introduced an amendment intended to circumscribe the reach of foreign entanglement. If approved by two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the state legislatures—the president himself has no role in amending the Constitution—the Bricker Amendment would block any treaty that conflicted with the Constitution; Congress would acquire the power to regulate all treaties and other executive agreements. Treaties would only affect “internal law in the United States” if their provisions were specifically enacted by separate legislation. The proposed amendment was first introduced in 1952, during the final year of the Truman administration; the Senate failed to enact it, and Bricker reintroduced a slightly rewritten version as Senate Joint Resolution 1 at the beginning of the 1953 session.

There was room for honest disagreement, but the debate surrounding it was soon swamped in emotional dispute over distrust of the presidency and the right of states to resist federal preeminence. Among those who felt most strongly—and who lobbied Eisenhower most avidly—was his brother Edgar. In March 1953, having just returned from Ike’s inauguration, Edgar wrote two letters, four days apart, vigorously championing the Bricker Amendment. Without it, he said, the states would be at the mercy of foolish foreign agreements. Imagine, Edgar argued, if the United States’ ratification of a human rights treaty pending at the United Nations stipulated certain protections for new mothers. That could require states to pay for milk for mothers who could not breast-feed and compensate mothers who could the same amount in order to prevent unequal treatment. “Just how silly can you get?” Edgar asked. The same week, he wrote again, this time quoting John Foster Dulles on the power of treaties—Dulles had since recanted a statement in which he suggested that treaty law could override the Constitution. Edgar complained that his nonlawyer brother was not heeding his recommendation: “I think that someone is giving you bad advice.”