Eisenhower (26 page)

The hearing was scheduled to open at 10:00 a.m., but Oppenheimer and his lawyers were late. Once it began, the first order of business was to read the allegations against Oppenheimer. The hearing was not styled as a criminal proceeding; Oppenheimer’s liberty was not at stake, merely his access to classified and top secret material. Though essential for his work as a government consultant, denial of access to such material would not necessarily imply disloyalty, much less espionage. Rather, the case against Oppenheimer would turn on whether the panel believed he could be trusted with secrets. In 1942, despite his flirtations with Communism and Communists, the government had cleared him for service at Los Alamos; now those same old affiliations would come under the scrutiny of a Cold War government, one implacably at odds with Communism, again in contrast to the World War II years, when the Soviets were American allies.

When the hearing convened the following morning, the entire controversy had changed. The front page of the
New York Times
carried a dazzling exclusive. James Reston, the paper’s premier Washington reporter and its recently named Washington bureau chief, broke the news that Oppenheimer was under investigation. Reston had known of the inquiry for weeks but had agreed to hold off reporting it at Oppenheimer’s request. With the hearings now commenced in secret, Oppenheimer released him to report what he knew. Strauss, informed that a story was in the works, gave his blessing as well. The next morning’s
Times
led with the Oppenheimer scoop: “Dr. Oppenheimer Suspended by A.E.C. in Security Review; Scientist Defends Record.” The subhead was even more shocking: “Access to Secret Data Denied Nuclear Expert—Red Ties Alleged.” Beneath those headlines was a pensive picture of Oppenheimer, chin in his hand, staring blankly downward. Accompanying the article were the letter of accusations against Oppenheimer and his formal reply.

It was a world exclusive, and the members of the board—all of whom were prominently named near the top of the story—were mightily displeased. As the hearing opened that morning, Chairman Gordon Gray grilled Oppenheimer’s lawyer about who had spoken to Reston and provided him the material. “I think it only fair to say for the record,” the chairman declared, “that the board is very much concerned.” The lawyer, Lloyd Garrison, began an involved story of Reston’s inquiries and his own entry into the case when Oppenheimer himself interrupted him. “May I correct that,” he said. “I believe the initial conversation was with me.” If anything, Eisenhower was even more angry than the commissioners. “This fellow Oppenheimer is sure acting like a Communist,” he complained to Hagerty. “He is using all the rules that they use to try to get public sentiment in their corner.”

Ike fulminated in private; publicly, he said nothing. That afternoon, he threw out the first pitch at the Washington Senators’ game and stayed to watch them beaten by his favorite team, the Yankees, 5–3, in a three-hour game; in New York, the day’s most closely watched matchup, the Giants and the Dodgers, ended in a 4–3 Giants victory, with Willie Mays clobbering the winning home run.

If Oppenheimer assumed that the public would back him once it knew the facts, he guessed wrong. As Americans became aware of his connections to Communism, some naturally sympathized with the scientist. But in the inclement climate of the Cold War, Oppenheimer’s casual and continuing friendships with Communists struck many Americans as at best naive. Through that prism, Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb could appear to some as treason. Strauss and Borden, most importantly, but also more reasonable critics came to see Oppenheimer as sinister. Nor did he do much to help his case. Oppenheimer’s cold manner—his curious blend of what McGeorge Bundy described as “charm and arrogance, intelligence and blindness, awareness and insensitivity”—made him an unlikely receptacle of public sympathy. He suffered through a long, aggressive cross-examination, his strength slowly ebbing away as he endured questions about his mistress and gave up names—all of them already known to authorities—of Communists he had known. Oppenheimer’s sharp descent, from America’s most respected military scientist to a haggard and broken suspect, took just three weeks.

Reston brought the Oppenheimer story to public view, but it just as quickly retreated into the closed hearing room. From April 12 through May 6, the commissioners took testimony behind closed doors. Much mischief had already been concealed by secrecy.

By contrast, the McCarthy hearings went live on the morning of April 22. And unlike the conclusions about Oppenheimer that the public was forced to reach by his absence, its understanding of McCarthy would be enriched by observation. The senator wasted no time in making his mark. As the
New York Times
put it, “New and special rules failed to restrain Senator McCarthy from interrupting witnesses and other Senators whenever he wished on what he called points of order.”

General Miles Reber was the first to feel his lash as McCarthy insinuated that Reber was fashioning his testimony in order to retaliate for the committee’s investigation of his brother, who had resigned his Army commission a year earlier. There was no connection between Samuel Reber’s retirement and the McCarthy proceedings, but McCarthy asserted that the State Department had deemed him a “bad security risk,” then withdrew the question when its relevance was challenged. General Reber demanded the right to reply and vigorously denied both that his brother was such a risk and that his retirement in any way influenced the general’s testimony. Having warmed up on one general, McCarthy then proceeded to turn his fire against Secretary Stevens, the second witness to take the stand. Sarcastic, insulting, and rude, McCarthy browbeat Stevens for more than a week as millions of viewers looked on, many increasingly appalled by the senator’s behavior. The senator, who often stayed up all night drinking, was heavy lidded as well as heavy-handed, his speech thick and slow and seething. All of that was picked up by the cameras, and McCarthy’s downfall accelerated. It was, Ike confided to his friend Swede Hazlett, “close to disgusting.”

Emphasizing McCarthy’s defects were the characters of those arrayed against him. Stevens was mild, almost demure. Joseph Welch, the lawyer representing the Army, was incisive and witty. McCarthy introduced a photograph of Stevens smiling at Schine—suggesting that influence was not required to secure his special treatment—but Welch deftly demonstrated that the photograph had been cropped to excise the image of General Bradley, at whom Stevens actually was smiling. When a McCarthy aide tried to suggest that there was something unseemly about how Welch acquired the photograph, Welch baited his trap: “Did you think it came from a pixie?” McCarthy fell into it: “Will counsel for my benefit define—I think he might be an expert on that—what a pixie is?”

Welch happily answered: “I would say, senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.” Gay-baiting was hardly an attractive response to red-baiting, but this was powerful theater, and Welch was the better actor.

A few blocks away, the Oppenheimer panel wrapped up testimony and took a ten-day break after hearing from its last witness. Oppenheimer waited nervously at home, Strauss eagerly in Washington.

Back up on Capitol Hill, the sparring continued into May, when Eisenhower finally played the card he had held so closely for weeks. The witness was John Adams, the Army’s lawyer, who took the stand to corroborate Stevens’s account of the pressure brought by Roy Cohn to secure desirable assignments for Schine. In the course of testifying, he was asked about a meeting on January 21 at the office of Herbert Brownell, the attorney general, at which strategy for the hearings was discussed. Senator Stuart Symington inquired about the role played in it by Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But Adams refused to answer, saying he had been instructed by Robert Anderson, the deputy secretary of defense, not to reveal details of that meeting. Adams said he believed Anderson was acting under instructions to deliver that message, but he did not know who issued the original order. He was asked to inquire during the lunch break but returned without an answer. The hearings then ended for the week.

That night, Eisenhower addressed the fifth annual Armed Forces Day dinner at Washington’s Statler Hotel. Departing from his text, he spoke of the nation’s inner strength and virtue: “We know we value the right to worship as we please, to choose our own occupation. We know the value we place on those things. If at times we are torn by doubts by unworthy scenes in our national capital …” At that reference to the McCarthy hearings, the audience began to clap and shout approval. Ike stood without speaking for a full half minute. Then he continued: “We know that we are Americans,” he said. “The heart of America is sound.”

When the hearings reconvened on Monday, May 17, Adams carried a letter, addressed to Secretary Stevens, dated that same day and signed by Eisenhower himself. After acknowledging the right of Congress to convene hearings and pledging to supply information to such inquiries, Stevens read the heart of Eisenhower’s order: “Because it is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the Executive Branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising with each other on official matters, and because it is not in the public interest that any of their conversations or communications, or any documents or reproductions, concerning such advice be disclosed, you will instruct employees of your Department that in all of their appearances before the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Operations regarding the inquiry now before it, they are not to testify to any such conversations or communications or to produce any such documents or reproductions.” In short, no one who counseled Eisenhower was to divulge those conversations. Or, as he bluntly put it: “Any man who testifies as to the advice he gave me won’t be working for me that night.”

That was a bald assertion of a power that Ike may not actually have possessed, but it served its purpose. The committee hearings were canceled for a week, and McCarthy was confronted at last by public presidential opposition. It was, McCarthy said, an “Iron Curtain” that blocked further inquiry. Others welcomed it as overdue. “By his statement of yesterday the President has finally recognized [his] responsibility in unmistakable terms,” the
Times
editorial board wrote. Eisenhower’s claim of executive privilege did not shut down McCarthy completely—when the session resumed, he attempted to enlist government workers to report subversives directly to him, angering Ike further—but the senator’s investigation was now no longer ignored but actively opposed by his president.

During the recess forced by Eisenhower’s invocation of presidential privilege, the Oppenheimer board returned its verdict. To the surprise of few—certainly not Oppenheimer—the panel recommended that he lose his security clearance. By a vote of 2–1, it concluded that the inventor of the American atomic bomb could not be trusted with American secrets. That vote, like the rest of the hearing, was taken in secret. A month later, the full Atomic Energy Commission convened in public and reviewed the findings. The full commission voted 4–1 to uphold the board. Oppenheimer lost. The
New York Times
had warned at the outset against any “implication of disloyalty because a scientist (or anyone else, for that matter) expressed his honest opinion, which later turned out to be unpopular or erroneous.” Now, however, the paper weighed the evidence and applauded the commission for having uncovered “substantial defects of character.” The board’s work, according to the
Times
, was performed by “four experienced and able commissioners.”

Oppenheimer had been, in some respects, the cause of his own undoing. Lesser men understood in the 1950s that those entrusted with secrets needed to watch their friends. Oppenheimer’s most sturdy connections to Communism were long behind him by 1954; his wife no longer was a party member, nor his brother. His mistress was dead. True, he had recently visited in Paris with a Communist who had once raised the idea of Oppenheimer divulging secrets from the Los Alamos project, but there was no evidence that Oppenheimer had done any such thing. Instead, his censure was the result of naïveté and unwillingness to accept what eventually became an American consensus: that the hydrogen bomb was an essential instrument of national security. Never again, after 1954, would Oppenheimer lift a hand to help the government to which he had once devoted his life. Reston would long wonder about his role in the tragedy, whether his report had antagonized the board and turned it against the scientist. Garrison assured him that it had not, that the board was set to vote against Oppenheimer from the beginning. Still, the episode echoed into history, leaving behind many troubled participants. As Reston wrote late in life, “Many … intelligent men, including Eisenhower, Strauss, and Oppenheimer himself, contributed to the tragedy.”

Meanwhile, McCarthy’s hearings approached their climax. By June, the senator’s desperation, fueled by his alcoholism and raw nerves, carried his intensity to new heights, with Welch acting as the principal adversary. As usual, McCarthy’s weapon of choice was the smear. This time, he turned on a young associate in Welch’s Boston law firm. Frederick G. Fisher had worked for the National Lawyers Guild and had briefly assisted Welch in preparing for the hearings. Once he disclosed his work with the lawyers’ guild, Welch recommended that he drop off the case, fearful that McCarthy would suggest something untoward about Fisher’s past association. (The guild, a progressive legal organization that still exists today, refused to administer loyalty oaths, and members of the organization had represented clients accused of Communist affiliations, including the Rosenbergs. To some fervid anti-Communists, including McCarthy, that made the guild a Communist or “communist-front” organization.)

On June 9, after Welch had questioned Cohn, McCarthy raised the issue of Fisher’s association and suggested that Welch had tried to “foist” Fisher on the committee and allow him access to its files. Because Welch anticipated that McCarthy might make an issue of Fisher, he was ready with a reply. At first Welch struggled to get the senator’s attention, as McCarthy commented that he could listen with “one ear” while summoning the attention of an aide.