False Praise of Eisenhower
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
False Praise of Eisenhower Who Killed Joe McCarthy? By William Bragg Ewald Jr. Simon & Schuster. 399pp. $17.95. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of History, Rutgers; author, "A Conspiracy...
...The Cold War was easing, at home and abroad...
...McCarthy already had unlimited press coverage by 1953, and his supporters—by definition—were already behind him...
...By 1954, McCarthy was in deep trouble...
...This is a puzzling statement, to say the least...
...As Bohlen recalled, the President listened attentively, asked some questions, but said that "more harm than good" would come from a confrontation with the McCarthyites...
...He was already an alcoholic...
...There is, in fact, much to be said for the new Eisenhower scholarship...
...Furthermore, in comparing President Harry Truman's record with Eisenhower's, Ewald seems oblivious to the advantages enjoyed by his hero...
...We are given to understand, for example, that when Eisenhower deleted a ringing defense of General George C. Marshall, his mentor, from a speech in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin, others were to blame...
...No one knew this better than Bohlen, who visited the White House after his confirmation to warn about the consequences of remaining silent...
...Ewald continues: "Eisenhowerwon, next, because he never engaged in a personal vituperative attack on McCarthy as an individual, which might have swelled McCarthy's press coverage and forced his followers to rally behind a man they saw as a martyr...
...His power will cease to grow and will diminish . . . when he is resisted, and it has been shown to our people that those to whom we look for leadership and to preserve our institutions are not afraid of him...
...Who killed Joe McCarthy...
...by Senators William Benton and Ralph Flanders...
...Ewald's thesis is simple enough: Senator McCarthy was "brought down by many people and many forces . . . but above all he [was] defeated by Dwight Eisenhower...
...But the key roles were played by others—by Drew Pearson and Edward R. Murrow...
...So Fred [Sea-ton] became the point man [and] I gave him the nominal support of the President's office...
...It is based on important primary material—personal interviews, oral histories, Presidential documents, and the newly released files of Fred Sea-ton, an assistant secretary of defense during the Eisenhower years...
...He took a tough stand on Executive privilege as the hearings unfolded...
...Ewald concludes that Eisenhower's "devoted, canny, and streetwise organization" helped him bring down "the detested foe...
...The great bulk of Ewald's book is centered around the Army-McCarthy hearings...
...According to his account, Eisenhower and Dulles "stuck their necks out a long way," because Bohlen was despised by the McCarthy-ites...
...Only 46, his life was disintegrating—quite literally—at a wicked rate...
...The people were tiring of his antics...
...The fact that these procedures were unnecessary, that many of them were declared unconstitutional, and that Brownell offended prominent Republican journalists with his puffed-up rhetoric, is never discussed...
...The answer is more complicated than Ewald suggests...
...There are few connecting paragraphs...
...His Eisenhower is always wise, decent, progressive, compassionate, and principled...
...This, perhaps, was his greatest talent of all...
...There is some truth to this...
...Eisenhower, supreme organization man, had bowed to his organization," writes Ewald...
...There is no mention of Stalin's death, and no hint that a Republican President could end the Korean War on Truman's terms without worrying about the inevitable backlash from McCarthy and his friends...
...One can only wonder why Ike, a former nato commander, did not exert some leadership on an issue so close to his heart...
...And the organization had let him down...
...by Roy Cohn, the scheming assistant...
...There were no bulging deficits, no inflationary spirals, no foreign wars...
...It is true that Eisenhower stood by his friend "Chip" Bohlen...
...But he seems to be overwhelmed by his own material...
...Ewald's writing can be skillful...
...asked a group of academic experts to rank the American presidents...
...It is difficult to tell where one ends and the following one begins...
...When he left the White House in 1961, he was as popular as the day he was inaugurated...
...is the latest, and least convincing, of the pro-Eisenhower books...
...Bohlen left with the grim feeling that things were not about to change...
...But the question remains: Where did Ike fit in...
...His use of covert activity actually was effective—in Guatemala, and again in Iran...
...His anecdotes are effective, his personality sketches often superb...
...Memos, interviews and phone conversations run on for pages...
...As Walter Lippmann wrote in 1954: "McCarthy's influence has grown as the President has appeased him...
...Ewald is even more charitable in his discussion of Charles "Chip" Bohlen, who was selected as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1953...
...With rare exceptions, McCarthy brought out the worst in everyone he touched...
...and by McCarthy himself...
...Ewald demonstrates, as others have before him, that the President took part in several key decisions...
...This is a fair assessment—as far as it goes...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower came out near the bottom, tied with Chester A. Arthur for 21st place...
...First, by tightening loyalty-security procedures and by encouraging Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Nixon, and other notables to beat the Wisconsin Senator at his own game...
...In recent years, however, scholars and journalists have begun to seriously revise the notion that Ike was a weak and lazy leader, a man who golfed at Augusta while his subordinates—White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams, Vice President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—ran the show in Washington...
...There were few heroes in this drama...
...More significantly, there is a great difference between a "personal vituperative attack" and a strategy of public leadership—a strategy that might have encouraged McCarthy's opponents while demonstrating Ike was unafraid of the Senator and fully aware of the dangers he posed to the nation's well-being...
...He worked with a "hidden hand," they believe, and his leadership paid big dividends in the end...
...William Ewald Jr., one of Ike's former staffers, is an idolater par excellence...
...And he supported Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens' demand that the hearings be televised to the bitter end, thereby affording McCarthy the chance to self-destruct in front of a national audience...
...He won, Ewald tells us, because his Administration "took away the Communist issue from McCarthy...
...He approved publication of the so-called Adams chronology, which led directly to the Army-McCarthy showdown...
...Charm has its benefits, of course, but so does success...
...He remained a bystander...
...How...
...In its place, we get a cut-and-paste job that reads like random samplings from a cluttered desk top...
...Murray Kempton, Herbert Parmet of the City University of New York, and Fred Greenstein of Princeton have ably demonstrated the strengths of Ike and his Administration...
...author, "A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy" In 1962 Arthur Schlesinger Jr...
...There are no failings to speak of...
...Near the end, President Eisenhower, his aides, and attorney Joseph Welch played important roles in McCarthy's demise...
...Yet Ewald himself quotes Sherman Adams as saying: "We knew that the President would neither be a spokesman nor delegate formal authority for solving the McCarthy problem...
...it is also true that Ike said nothing about the victimization of so many others in the Foreign Service...
...The press was now investigating—not merely reporting—his many charges...
...Although the President had "no master plan, no week-by-week, month-by-month blueprint for carefully controlled action . . . Eisenhower, nevertheless, did win...
...The narrative flow, so vital to a book of this sort, is missing entirely...
Vol. 67 • May 1984 • No. 9
