The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

By 1954 the issue of disloyalty would “no longer be considered a serious menace.” Far more important was to enact a “progressive, dynamic program enhancing the welfare of the people of our country.” So fraught was the atmosphere in Washington that even this mild statement was taken by the press as a direct counterstroke to McCarthy. An editorial in the Washington Post was titled simply “Ike Takes Command.”

The Old Guard Republicans in the Senate shared many of McCarthy’s prejudices and fears and were sympathetic to his brand of reactionary, isolationist, conspiracy-laden, communist-obsessed, vulgar populism. Eisenhower might have had a stronger hand to play if Majority Leader Taft had not died of cancer in July 1953, just six months after the new administration took office. Taft, though ideologically at odds with Eisenhower, had played a crucial role in salvaging the Bohlen nomination and could have helped at least keep McCarthy in check. Unfortunately Taft’s successor was William Knowland, a 44-year-old

old from California—the youngest ever to hold the post of majority leader—and an ambitious, politically naïve, and inflexible politician who consistently disappointed Eisenhower as a congressional ally. Knowland had long been a rival of Nixon’s, and he held a grudge against the administration. Harry McPherson, a longtime staffer for Senator Lyndon Johnson, acidly noted that Knowland’s “mind had a single trajectory—flat—and a point-blank range.” He was conservative, unimaginative, bullish, and proved deeply hostile to any interference by the Executive branch in McCarthy’s Senate activities.

In these years, when FDR’s personal diplomacy with Stalin had come under attack and when the newly formed United Nations seemed to be probing into domestic matters

such as racial inequality, many American legislators felt that it was important to make more precise the relative powers of Congress and the president to forge international agreements that might impinge upon domestic law, especially the rights of states.

A long fight with the Old Guard over the Bricker amendment finally led to a narrow defeat for the proposal in February 1954, but not without creating more bad blood between Ike and his right wing.

The crisis came over McCarthy’s growing interest in the security procedures of the U.S. Army, of all things.

The army, moving in a plodding bureaucratic fashion, eventually found Peress to be a security risk and recommended that he be discharged. But the army took almost a year before acting on his case, and by that time Peress had actually been promoted to the rank of major.

“In opposing Communism,” he stated, “we are defeating ourselves if either by design or through carelessness we use methods that do not conform to the American sense of fair play.”

McCarthy’s audacity was taking a serious political toll on Eisenhower. The senator seemed to be breaking the GOP apart, pushing the Old Guard into an open confrontation with the president. Eisenhower beseeched Knowland to control his members in the Senate. “If we pursue the course we have taken so far, the Republican Party will be wrecked,” he predicted. But Knowland, whose sympathies were with the Old Guard, was little help.

The dean of the Washington columnists, Walter Lippmann, added a scathing assessment of the state of play: “There is no doubt whatever that McCarthy is a deliberate aggressor, that he is fighting Eisenhower’s leadership and control of the party. . . . The fight is unavoidable because McCarthy refuses to be appeased. Until he is stopped and his power is checked, he will go on until he is the master of the party.” Lippmann declared that Eisenhower’s “prolonged appeasement has failed.”

Angry as he was at McCarthy, Eisenhower remained determined to avoid lowering himself to the senator’s level. Besides, he had Nixon for that sort of thing.

Directing his remarks at McCarthy’s frenzied and undisciplined Red hunting, Nixon said, “When you go out to shoot rats, you have to shoot straight, because when you shoot wildly it not only means that the rat may get away

more easily, you make it easier on the rat. But you might hit someone else who’s trying to shoot rats, too. And so we’ve got to be fair.” Nixon stated that certain “men who have in the past done effective work exposing Communists in this country have, by reckless talk and questionable methods, made themselves the issue.” When it came to hunting down the bad guys, Nixon seemed to suggest, Ike was Gary Cooper—restrained, cool, and precise—and McCarthy was the angry drunk in the street, his pistols blazing away wildly and shooting up the storefronts. Once again Nixon had proven his worth to the Eisenhower team.

The dossier had been in the works since January 21, when the army’s chief counsel, John G. Adams, alerted the White House to a pattern of pressure and bullying of the army by

McCarthy and by his committee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn. The two men had been using threats and intimidation to demand that Cohn’s assistant, David Schine, who had been drafted into the army the previous November, be granted preferential treatment in the form of light duties, desk work, and plum assignments.

Cohn threatened to destroy the army through ceaseless investigations unless Schine got special treatment. “We’ll wreck the Army,” Cohn screamed over the phone at Adams. “We’ve got enough stuff on the Army to have the investigation run indefinitely.” More shocking, McCarthy was present at a number of meetings with Adams and Cohn, and he piled on, asking the army to get Schine a cushy desk job in New York City.46

The accusations were so damaging to the integrity of the Senate’s investigatory powers that the Senate itself

was now put on trial. If the allegations were true, then McCarthy and Cohn stood guilty of abuse of power. Within days McCarthy was asked to step aside from his position as chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations.

Senator Karl Mundt took the chair in his ...

quite unwillingly—began hearings into the army’s allegations against McCarthy. In a dramatic reversal, the senator from Wisconsin was now placed under the spotlight by the very com...

Two days later Eisenhower brilliantly explained to the press that his order asserting executive privilege was designed not to cut off information but to keep the hearings from becoming a fishing expedition. “Far from trying to get any investigation off track,” he said with no hint of guile, “I was merely trying to keep it on the rails.” It was important, he stressed, that “the public know the facts.”50

“If we allow ourselves,” he told the audience, “to be persuaded that every individual, or party, that takes issue with our own convictions is necessarily wicked or treasonous—then

then indeed we are approaching the end of freedom’s road. . . . Our dedication to truth and freedom, at home and abroad, does not require—and cannot tolerate—fear, threat, hysteria, and intimidation.”

Oppenheimer was now labeled a Red, or at least a fellow-traveling Pink. His reputation was ruined, his career in physics largely over, and his great contributions to science and to victory in World War II now tarnished by allegations of communist

sympathies. If the Gray board’s methods had been more scrupulous than McCarthy’s, the results were the same: the personal destruction of a decent patriot whose only crime was a persistent sympathy toward political ideals considered dubious in an age of peril.

By late August the president and Congress had hammered out the Communist Control Act of 1954, which outlawed the Communist Party in America. The CPUSA was not in fact a “party,” Congress asserted, but a criminal conspiracy. Furthermore labor unions that contained any communists would be stripped of their legal standing. The Senate passed the bill 79–0, and the House could find but two nay votes against this assault on the political freedoms of American citizens to organize. Eisenhower embraced the bill

and hailed its usefulness “in our fight to destroy communism in this country.”

The CIA was initially designed to analyze intelligence gathered by a variety of government and military entities. With Eisenhower’s active support, Dulles transformed the agency into the operational headquarters of a secret struggle against the Soviet Union and many other nations considered threatening to American interests.

In fact the CIA became an incubator for a much wider and arguably more consequential set of ideas and innovations about how America could use its power—its intellectual, scientific, military, economic, and moral power—to defeat communism everywhere in the world.

The coups in Iran and Guatemala were symptoms of a larger

pathology, namely, the delegation by the American president and Congress of enormous power and resources to a largely unaccountable and opaque agency to conduct a range of subversive and violent operations against the nation’s...

The OSS, which had begun as a shoestring operation run by amateurs and oddballs, was by war’s end a global enterprise, active in Europe, the Mediterranean, and China. It had 3,500 civilian employees and over 8,000 military personnel. But all this was dismantled after the war as the nation demobilized. Not until July 1947, under the pressures of the intensifying cold war, did President Truman devote attention to building up the intelligence services. The National Security Act created the National Security Council, chaired by the president, which in turned would supervise the new Central Intelligence Agency, whose director reported to the president.

In June 1949 Truman signed into law the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which gave a free pass to the CIA to receive and spend government money off the books: “In the interests of the security of the foreign intelligence activities of the United States,” and so that “the Director of Central Intelligence shall be responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods

from unauthorized disclosure, the Agency shall be exempted from . . . any other laws which require the publication or disclosure of the organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency.”

“The sums made available to the Agency,” the law stated, “may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds; and for objects of a confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature, such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the Director and every such certificate shall be deemed a sufficient voucher for the amount therein certified.”

Dulles had long been a believer in the promise of covert activities to frustrate the expansion of communism. He would now get a chance to prove his ideas. Truman approved a policy document in October 1951 called NSC 10/5 that demanded “the intensification of covert operations” in order to “place the maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power.” Truman’s security team wanted more of everything:

The CIA that Dulles took over in February 1953 had gone from monitoring and studying the enemy to waging all-out subversive war.

When Eisenhower looked at the world map in early 1953, he saw a landscape dotted with brush fires. What he called “the free world” faced threats from nationalism, anticolonial liberation movements, socialist and communist agitation, and direct military aggression.

On March 1, 1953, Eisenhower received a memo from the CIA about the worsening of the Western position in Iran. In words surely designed to catch the president’s attention, the CIA reported that “a Communist takeover [in Iran] is becoming more and more of a possibility.”

Iran should fall to the communists, he told the president, not only would the Soviet Union gain access to Iran’s oil, but “there was little doubt that in short order the other areas of the Middle East, with some 60% of the world’s oil reserves, would fall into Communist control.”

In 1941, as the Second World War raged, the Soviet Union and Britain occupied Iran under an agreement that ensured vital Iranian oil would keep flowing northward into the Soviet war machine then fighting Hitler. The two Great Powers pledged to withdraw their military forces within six months of the end of the war. Until that time they used Iran as a valuable supply depot and transit station to supply the USSR in its hour of need.

Although the Soviets had departed, Britain still exercised enormous influence in Iran through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which since the start of the century had pumped, refined, transported, and sold Iranian oil on the world market. Its principal stockholder was the British government, and for many Iranians the AIOC represented the foreign exploitation of Iranian resources.

Mossadeq rallied many Iranians to his cause by arguing that Iran could not modernize, nor democratize, as long as it was ruled by a powerful monarchy and policed by a royalist army, and as long as its principal source of wealth—oil—was controlled by foreigners. Just a few weeks after taking office, Mossadeq won approval from Parliament for the nationalization of the oil industry. His actions pleased Iranians but deeply worried American officials. According to the CIA, “the policy of the National Front at this time plays directly into Soviet hands.”

Mossadeq was a populist, a nationalist, and

an anti-imperialist, but he was certainly not a communist. The CIA’s Iran analysts were smart enough to understand the difference. Yet the problem they faced was that Mossadeq’s power and popularity depended upon sweeping anti-British and anti-Western sentiments that, they feared, would surely open the way to more radical political ideas.

Mossadeq’s radicalism had also legitimated the political platform of the Tudeh Party (the Party of the Masses, or communists), which since the early 1940s had emerged as a major political actor in Iran, drawing support from labor groups, youth organizations, and intellectuals. If Mossadeq’s government were to fall, the CIA worried, the Tudeh might profit.

extensive contacts in the Iranian Army, industrial circles, the press, and police, as well as among politicians who were hostile to Mossadeq. Using these well-placed and well-bribed assets, the CIA would help to stir up intense anti-Mossadeq fervor in the press and on the streets. The shah would then dismiss Mossadeq from office in order to reestablish order. His replacement would be a senior army officer, Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi, a former member of Mossadeq’s cabinet, whose supporters in the army would stand at the ready to rally to him and the shah.

Most important, “the Tudeh Party will be ruthlessly curbed.” Secretary Dulles asserted that “the United States now had a second chance in Iran.” In the following months thousands of Mossadeq supporters, National Front members, and Tudeh Party members were arrested. Mossadeq himself was tried and convicted and would spend the rest of his life under house arrest. The bureaucracy and military were thoroughly purged of unreliable elements. Zahedi successfully put into place the foundations of an authoritarian regime that would endure until 1979.18

The NSC reasoned that although Iran’s army was many years away from being an effective force, “military aid to Iran has great political importance apart from its military impact. Over the long term, the most effective instrument for maintaining Iran’s orientation toward the West is the monarch, which in turn has the Army as its only real source of power.” Military aid would “cement Army loyalty to the Shah and thus consolidate the present regime.”