Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower's Secret Campaign against Joseph McCarthy

by David A. Nichols

But he would never live down the egregious decision he had made to eliminate seventy-four words of praise for George Marshall from his speech on October 3, 1952.

Deputy Attorney General William Rogers’s private assessment of McCarthy was critical: “Joe never plans a damn thing, he doesn’t know from one week to the next, not even from one day to the next, what he’s going to be doing. . . . He just hits out in any direction, no plan, no forethought.”

least twelve drafts, not counting the president’s penciled edits,

Eisenhower eloquently recounted the human costs of the Cold War: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

“It is not enough merely to say I love America,” he declared, “and to salute the flag and take off your hat as it goes by, and to help sing the Star Spangled Banner.” Then he delivered the provocative declaration that would be quoted the next day around the globe: Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?