G-Man, page 65
The program resulted in a swift escalation of both investigations and dismissals of government employees, especially at the State Department, where former FBI agent R. W. Scott McLeod took the lead. Following the model set by the congressional committees, McLeod hired several former agents to assist with his investigations and met repeatedly with Hoover for advice and encouragement. According to one estimate, in just seven months McLeod succeeded in ousting nearly two hundred State Department employees for offenses ranging from homosexuality to alcoholism to political subversion. Such a record would have been impossible, he wrote to Hoover, “if it were not for the fact that you have offered your cooperation.” By the fall of 1953, Eisenhower reported a total of 1,456 employees dismissed across the federal agencies. In a graduation speech before the National Academy, Brownell contrasted this record with that of the Truman years, when so much of the FBI’s work had been ignored or disparaged. “We are now making certain that this fine work is not wasted,” he told the graduating police officers, assuring them that the FBI finally had the “backing” and “follow-through” that it needed.[25]
* * *
—
Just what Brownell meant by this became clear on November 6, 1953, when he took the opportunity of an afternoon talk before the Executives’ Club of Chicago to revisit a case that had long rankled Hoover. Brownell’s remarks that afternoon set off “one of the greatest controversies of our controversial times,” in the words of Washington columnist Doris Fleeson. The subject was the late Harry Dexter White, the Treasury official whose promotion to the IMF had first convinced Hoover that he could not rely on Truman. Parts of the story had been aired before, most notably in White’s 1948 appearance before HUAC, which had been followed by his heart attack and death. Brownell brought it up again in 1953 to showcase Hoover’s version of events, in which White was no mere victim of committee pressure and rumor mongering, but a longtime Soviet source whose disloyalty had been ignored by Truman. “I can now announce officially, for the first time in public, that the records in my department show that White’s spying activities for the Soviet government were reported in detail by the F.B.I. to the White House by means of a report delivered to President Truman,” Brownell informed the surprised Chicago executives.[26]
Hoover himself was feeling far more confident about White than he had been in 1946, when even he admitted that the evidence had been circumstantial rather than definitive. Among the documents revealed by Chambers during the Hiss affair had been a memo in White’s handwriting, apparent substantiation that the assistant treasury secretary had passed along government information. Two years later, the Venona team had linked White “conclusively” to the cover name “Jurist,” who appeared in at least one Soviet cable as an “active” source. Hoover’s ongoing bitterness toward Truman showed up in his comments about the Venona discovery. “Wouldn’t it be swell to send substance to [Truman’s aide] Ad. Souers for information of the President,” he wrote. But Truman did not know the details of Venona, and Hoover was determined to keep it that way.[27]
Truman denied that he had ever been informed of White’s alleged Soviet connections. “I don’t know what they’re talking about. No such thing happened,” he maintained. Almost immediately, Hoover’s ex-employee Harold Velde, now head of HUAC, sent Truman a subpoena, the first time that anyone could remember a former president being called before Congress as a hostile witness. Truman refused to respond, ratcheting up the situation into what one paper described as “a political brawl of almost unprecedented rancor.” On November 11, five days after the Chicago speech, Eisenhower held a press conference in which he expressed support for Brownell and Hoover, confirming that he had encouraged Brownell to go public with the White story. Five days later, having endured more than a week of such talk, Truman took to the airwaves to deliver a “volcanic outburst” in rebuttal, pointing out that the New York grand jury had itself rejected the FBI’s supposedly stellar evidence of Soviet espionage by government officials. In an eleven p.m. broadcast carried live on both television and radio, Truman insisted that the matter was wildly overblown, and that Brownell had “lied to the American people” by suggesting that Truman would knowingly appoint a Soviet source to high international office. He said that the FBI had admitted that its information about White was inconclusive. According to Truman’s version of events, everyone agreed that White should move on to the IMF without any public disclosure in order to allow the FBI investigation to continue.[28]
At this point Hoover’s Republican friends at the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee stepped in with an offer: Did Hoover want to testify before the committee and give his own account of what had happened? The negotiations occurred quickly. Truman’s broadcast ended around midnight on November 16. The next afternoon, the hundreds of spectators and reporters in the Senate caucus room gasped with surprise—and then burst into applause—as Hoover pushed open the main doors and strode to the witness table, an unannounced guest at the day’s proceedings. During previous committee appearances, reporters had been struck by Hoover’s poised and methodical affect. This time, they described him as “red-faced,” “annoyed,” and “tight-lipped,” his wrath barely contained. Beyond the caucus room, far more people were watching than even just a few years earlier, thanks to the rapid spread of television. “We’d never seen Hoover on TV before,” one viewer reflected. “It was quite an experience.”[29]
Hoover repeated much of what he had said before, explaining that the FBI did not make policy but only followed the lead of Congress and the White House. In this case, however, he felt duty bound to correct the record, even if it meant contradicting a former president. With clipped precision, he retold the events of 1945 and 1946, insisting that “at no time was the F.B.I. a party to an agreement to promote Harry Dexter White.” According to the media, “it wasn’t what he said but the way that he said it” that made his testimony effective, “forceful, fairly and with a vibrant, competent ring to his voice.” By the time he was finished, he had shown himself to be the “decisive witness” in the White controversy, according to The New York Times, as well as “probably the most powerful figure on Capitol Hill.”[30]
In the days that followed, the praise for Hoover reflected his status as the toast of Eisenhower’s Washington, a man of gravitas and long experience, now backed by both Congress and the White House. “I don’t think I ever saw a more impressive witness,” gushed a Dallas radio host. “I thrilled at the sight of Hoover—a great patriot, a great administrator, a great official dedicated to keeping your country free.” In Washington, columnist John O’Donnell noted that the streets of the capital seemed “strangely empty” during Hoover’s testimony, with everyone inside glued to the television or the radio, “looking and listening to the greatest story of foreign spying and internal treason ever told in the history of the Republic.” O’Donnell declared November 17, 1953, one of the most exciting days the city had ever seen. “A century hence, if our Republic still survives in its tradition of freedom, our children’s children will be reading in their history books how FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover told the U.S. Senate of his efforts to block the Communist conspiracy of the Roosevelt-Truman era,” he predicted.[31]
Public opinion polls bore out the perception of Hoover’s testimony as an unmitigated triumph—not only the final word in the White case but also a sign that Hoover deserved the trust and free rein that Eisenhower and Brownell had been offering. According to a Gallup survey, 78 percent of Americans came away with a favorable opinion of Hoover, while just 2 percent expressed any doubts. (The other 20 percent registered no opinion at all.) Gallup once again declared the numbers all but unparalleled in the annals of American politics. “On other occasions the public has tossed bouquets to Government officials,” the pollster explained, “but rarely is the attitude as favorable as that expressed in today’s vote.” By Gallup’s calculations, thirty-nine out of forty Americans either liked or accepted what Hoover had done, whether they happened to be Democrats, Independents, or Republicans.[32]
Among the dissident few were longtime critics whose concerns about Hoover’s concentrated power and increasingly conservative politics would eventually find a wider audience. But for at least a moment in 1953, with friends in the White House and the American public firmly behind him, even Hoover found it difficult to worry. On the night after his testimony, he attended a formal dinner at the White House, joining Eisenhower, Brownell, and Rev. Elson to honor the justices of the Supreme Court. The next day, he ventured out to the Bowie racetrack to enjoy opening-day festivities. When reporters approached him for further reflections on the White case, Hoover said he would prefer to enjoy lunch with friends on that warm and golden afternoon, offering only a “contented smile” in the way of comment.[33]
Chapter 36
No Sense of Decency
(1953–1954)
After years of controversy, Joseph McCarthy met his downfall in 1954. Cartoon depicts the Army-McCarthy hearings, where McCarthy claimed to have a letter from Hoover about communist infiltration of the army. Hoover denied the letter’s authenticity.
Reading Times/National Archives and Records Administration
On November 23, a week after his appearance at the Senate, Hoover dined with Eisenhower once again. Crammed into a banquet room at the Mayflower Hotel, they were joined by hundreds of other people, including Brownell and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Anti-Defamation League. To mark the occasion, the League staged an hourlong televised variety show, with acts from comedians Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, newsman Walter Cronkite, and Broadway belter Ethel Merman, Hoover’s old friend from his Stork Club days. Even in such august company, Hoover stood out as a man of consequence. “A significant development at the banquet was the spontaneous applause which greeted each mention of the name of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover,” one paper reported. When it came time for the speech that would close out the show, Eisenhower chose to focus his attention on another figure who had been making a stir in Washington. He never mentioned the subject’s name, speaking in parable about Wild Bill Hickok, the Wild West gunslinger who supposedly made it a point to “meet anyone face to face with whom you disagree” and to act with integrity when he did. But everyone understood that the message was directed at a particular man: Senator Joseph McCarthy, the one Republican who did not much like what had happened in the Harry Dexter White matter, and who seemed determined to turn the spotlight back in his own direction.[1]
In theory, McCarthy should have been thrilled that Eisenhower was focusing on “communists in government,” the issue on which the senator had made his name. Instead, McCarthy saw a threat to his own prominence. As a Republican, he had benefited from the Eisenhower sweep, assuming control of the Senate’s Committee on Government Operations (now known as the McCarthy Committee). But he never quite managed to fit in with the Eisenhower crowd, which viewed the senator as an uncouth and irresponsible caricature of anticommunism. The White affair brought these conflicts into the open. In his midnight broadcast, Truman had accused the Eisenhower administration of embracing “McCarthyism,” which he defined as the “use of the big lie and the unfounded accusation.” McCarthy worried that the opposite was happening, that “the old battler, Joe McCarthy” was being “pushed off the front pages” in favor of Hoover, Eisenhower, and Brownell, as one radio show put it. So he set out to reclaim the limelight.[2]
In a live television broadcast on the night after Eisenhower’s ADL address, McCarthy delivered what would become one of the most notorious speeches of his career—on par with the Wheeling episode, at least among Republicans. He initially framed the address as a response to Truman. Toward the end of the speech, however, he turned to the Republican Party, confessing fears that Eisenhower, like Truman, might not have what it takes to root out communist treachery. “Let me make it clear that I think the new Administration is doing a job so infinitely better than the Truman Acheson regime that there is absolutely no comparison,” he declared. But better, he suggested, was not good enough.[3]
As the conservative columnist and FBI ally George Sokolsky reflected a few days later, McCarthy’s “blockbuster” of a speech “shook and split the Republican party,” at just the moment when the White episode had seemed to deliver such a clear and unifying punch. The story of McCarthy’s fall from grace over the year that followed has become one of the great legends of American political history, a combination of morality tale and hard-boiled combat, the symbolic end of the Red Scare. As the Republican Party split apart on the McCarthy question, Hoover found himself once again forced to choose sides against a friend. But the showdown of 1954 also turned out to be a period of pride and satisfaction, in which Hoover solidified his status as one of the Eisenhower administration’s favored sons. When it was all over, one paper asserted, there were “no clearcut winners—only losers.” But this was not quite true. By the end of 1954, Hoover was the nation’s unchallenged anticommunist authority, his combination of good-government bromides and conservative political zeal more popular than ever.[4]
* * *
—
When he ran for president, Eisenhower had hoped to get through the campaign without coming into much contact with McCarthy, whose methods he loathed. In an election year with so much at stake for Republicans, though, he was reluctant to alienate a senator who had powerfully captured the public imagination. Hoover’s office recognized Eisenhower’s tolerance of McCarthy as political expediency and nothing more. “Despite fact that Eisenhower and McCarthy have reached some form of working agreement,” a Bureau assessment noted, “the relationship between the two men is far from being friendly.” At a campaign stop in Wisconsin, Eisenhower ordered an aide to stand between him and McCarthy, lest the senator attempt to sneak up and embrace him for the cameras.[5]
The Republican sweep in November 1952 offered McCarthy a chance to start anew—not only with Eisenhower but also with Hoover. The spat over FBI files that had divided them after Wheeling was more than two years in the past. McCarthy seemed eager to put the whole thing behind them. In the wake of the election, the Republican leadership awarded him the chairmanship of the Senate’s Committee on Government Operations, an obscure and relatively powerless committee, but one in which he saw great potential to revive his anticommunist work. Created to root out corruption and inefficiency in federal expenditures, the committee maintained a Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy saw no reason that the subcommittee couldn’t investigate other matters as well. He immediately reached out to Hoover to express hopes for “closer cooperation with and more extended use of the FBI and its facilities” as he set out to make his committee famous.[6]
He had good reason to think Hoover might go along. Despite their methodological differences, the two men still shared an outsize commitment to anticommunism. By 1953, McCarthy also shared more and more of Hoover’s social world. Like Hoover, the senator had become a darling of the Texas oil set, pampered and celebrated by the country’s richest men. During the 1950 election, Clint Murchison had given McCarthy ten thousand dollars to defeat Millard Tydings, the senator who had sounded the alarm against McCarthy’s tactics. (Tydings lost after McCarthy’s staff distributed a fake, composite photograph showing Tydings with Communist Party leader Earl Browder.) Murchison gave the Wisconsin senator a similar gift in 1952, this time targeting Connecticut senator William Benton, who had tried to get McCarthy expelled from the Senate. The oilman claimed to have “spoken to J. Edgar Hoover about McCarthy,” and to have gotten Hoover’s sign-off before taking action. According to Murchison, Hoover’s only complaint was that McCarthy was “not general enough” in his accusations—that the senator claimed to have facts and details that only the FBI could or should know.[7]
With his committee assignment secured after the 1952 election, McCarthy took pains to create additional ties to Hoover, starting with his choice of investigative staff. Donald Surine, the former FBI agent personally recommended by Hoover, was still working as the senator’s chief investigator. Several other staffers departed after McCarthy’s reelection, but he quickly replaced them with men close to the FBI, in hopes of establishing the same sort of relationship that Hoover maintained with other committees. For general counsel, McCarthy chose Francis Flanagan, the former FBI agent who had run the Senate inquiry into homosexuals in government. As research director, he hired ex-communist Howard Rushmore, now a prolific journalist for the Hearst chain, who prided himself on publicizing the “quiet but grim struggle between the FBI and the Communist Party.” And when Flanagan and Rushmore departed after just a few months on the job, McCarthy recruited still more FBI men, including Frank Carr, the head of communist investigations at Hoover’s New York office, and Jim Juliana, who had worked as Carr’s assistant. “With these newcomers on board,” one McCarthy biographer has noted, “every major staff position . . . was filled by a former FBI agent or a man with superb contacts inside the Bureau.”[8]
