Fear Itself (73 page)

President Truman vetoed the bill on September 22.
⁸⁹
His objections, like those of the supporters of the Kilgore detention legislation, were to Title I, which contained the registration stipulations. Truman declared these to be unworkable, a waste of time and money, and a misguided sacrifice of liberty that “would put the Government of the United States in the thought control business.” Further, having received an objection to the immigration regulations from the CIA, which had seen them as “deterrents to our intelligence activities,” a point of view backed by the National Security Council, he argued that the bill “would deprive us of the great assistance of many aliens in intelligence matters,” since it would seem to make it necessary to exclude persons who had once belonged to Communist or Nazi parties. About detention, he was silent, except to note that this course might not be effective because the title did not clearly provide for the suspension of habeas corpus, and to recommend study of the issue “along these lines.”
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Within hours, an aggressively determined House overrode the president, voting 286–48, with the negative votes coming mainly from northern liberal Democrats. Likewise in the Senate, which voted to reject the veto by a 57–10 margin on September 23, with support for the president limited to such leading Democratic liberals as Paul Douglas of Illinois, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and Herbert Lehman of New York—all of whom, however, had supported the Kilgore detention bill. Their position was much like the one Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had articulated three years earlier when he had searched for a liberal standpoint. While rejecting the simplistic approach of HUAC and the many demands for “more extreme action” by Congress, he conceded “that a serious problem for national security has been created by that fanatical group which rejects all American interests in favor of those of the Soviet Union.” In circumstances characterized by “the grim dangers of foreign espionage,” and with “Soviet totalitarianism” being “massive, well-organized, and on the march,” he identified “an inescapable conflict between civil liberty and national security” and called on the country’s political leaders to “face up to the problem of resolving the conflict.”
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IV.

“T
HERE IS
much to fear in the atomic age, and our fear is the more naked because it touches on the unknown.” The political scientist Clinton Rossiter published these words two months after the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb in Kazakhstan in 1949. Recording the “brutal fact that within five years at the outside an atomic attack on the American continent will be a scientific-military-political possibility,” he bluntly identified “distressing questions” he thought it would be irresponsible to evade by asking how the United States would be governed and what would happen to civil liberty should the country have to face a “hail of bombs,” “cities laid waste,” “a fear-crazed population,” and “mass panic.”
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Faced with a collapse of normal government, the only option, he suggested, would be “dictatorship, military dictatorship under the direction, I hope, of the President or acting President of the United States.” He must, of course, have seen the irony of projecting how “the absolute weapon” designed to preserve democracy “will have brought absolute government.”
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He added, “almost completely.” Rossiter’s dystopian, almost science fiction, imagination anticipated “the one alternative to no Congress at all,” a joint interim committee of some fifteen to twenty members “with a specific mandate to act for the whole Congress until a constitutional session is once again physically possible.”
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Strikingly, seven of the eleven Democrats he enumerated as the most significant younger representatives who might be tapped to serve were southern: Alben Barkley of Kentucky, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, and Millard Tydings of Maryland in the Senate; and A. S. “Mike” Monroney of Oklahoma, Sam Rayburn of Texas, Hugo Sims of South Carolina, and Carl Vinson of Georgia in the House.

This vision reflected and reinforced the country’s unprecedented sense of unending vulnerability. It was no longer possible even in peacetime, he concluded, to imagine an American government that “can be strong enough to maintain its own existence without at the same time being so strong as to subvert the liberties of the people it has been instituted to defend.” No longer was the strength of the federal government at issue. “It is going to be powerful or we are going to be obliterated.”
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Based on planning and secrecy, and designed to fight totalitarianism and crusade for democracy, American might had seeped homeward.
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EPILOGUE
January 1953

G
EN.
D
WIGHT
E
ISENHOWER
prepared for the White House from his home at 60 Morningside Drive, Columbia University’s presidential residence, during the period between his election, on November 4, 1952, and his inauguration, on January 20, 1953. At 4:30
A.M.
on November 19, he emerged, collar turned up. Entering a waiting sedan, he was quickly whisked away to Mitchell Air Base on Long Island to begin a clandestine journey, starting with a twelve-hour flight to Travis Field in California and quickly followed by a ten-hour journey to Hawaii’s Hickam Field. Meanwhile, the press was told that Eisenhower was spending the afternoon in front of his television to watch the Army-Navy football game.

No one left the plane either in California or in Honolulu. On it flew to Midway, then Iwo Jima, adding another twelve hours. There, Ike paid homage to the Allied war dead at the war memorial on Mount Suribachi, where the American flag had been raised by five marines and one navy corpsman, an event that had been immortalized in an iconic photograph. Eisenhower stayed the night in a Quonset hut before leaving for Korea, where he arrived fully seventy-three hours after he had first left home.
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Such was air travel in 1953.

Earlier that month, days before Americans would cast 34,075,529 ballots for the war hero Eisenhower and the young California senator Richard Nixon, who had been making his name as a congressional investigator of disloyalty, and 27,375,090 for the uncommonly intellectual Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois and his segregationist running mate, Alabama senator John Sparkman, the United States successfully tested “Ivy Mike,” its first hydrogen bomb.
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The secret was revealed when sailors who had witnessed the blast at the Pacific Eniwetok testing ground in the Marshall Islands wrote home, in violation of the secrets provisions of the Atomic Energy Act, to tell family members what they had seen. Reluctantly, the Atomic Energy Commission had confirmed the explosion shortly before Eisenhower departed for Korea. The blast generated by this new type of bomb produced a mushroom cloud twenty-seven miles high and eight miles wide, with a canopy that extended one hundred miles. The test island simply disappeared. “It would take at least ten suns,” one navy navigator wrote, to equal the explosion’s light.” “I could hardly believe my eyes,” another testified. “A flame about two miles wide was shooting five miles into the air. . . . Then we saw thousands of tons of earth being thrown straight into the sky. . . . You would swear that the whole world was on fire.”
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Touring the Korean front, inspecting combat battalions, and visiting with the wounded in standard army-issue winter clothing with no insignia over the course of three days, Eisenhower witnessed the trials of a “long, dreary war.”
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Following a meeting with South Korea’s president, Syngman Rhee, the president-elect stated that he had found “no panaceas, no trick ways of solving problems.” He also made clear that he would not heed the advice he had received to extend the war to the Asian mainland. “How difficult it seems to be in a war of this kind,” he announced, “to work out a plan that would bring a positive and definite victory without possibly running the grave risk of enlarging the war.”
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We know that as a five-star general, Eisenhower was well informed about atomic weapons well before the H-bomb was detonated. In early December 1951, he had been briefed at the Allied Powers Supreme Headquarters in Rocquencourt, France, by Robert Oppenheimer, who reported, over the course of five days, on the state of the country’s stockpile, the results of recent tests in Nevada, and Project Vista, a research enterprise at the California Institute of Technology that was exploring whether tactical nuclear weapons could repulse a conventional Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Their last meeting also included other scientists and military leaders to review how America’s atomic capability might be deployed in the event of a European war.

This session was followed by a lunch, hosted by Eisenhower, with the commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. Curtis LeMay. Both Oppenheimer and LeMay, reported the
Washington Post,
“went into detail with Eisenhower and his staff on exactly what the United States can deliver from its atomic arsenal if war comes.”
⁶
Later that month, Oppenheimer broadcast the last of his six Reith Lectures in London for the BBC on the topic “Science and the Common Understanding.” Delivered on December 20, “The Sciences and Man’s Community” was his concluding subject. Both rueful and hopeful, he closed the talk by contrasting a vision of the “open society” with the Communist idea that “all truth is one truth,” and he articulated the faith that notwithstanding the birth of the atomic age “there is a harmony between knowledge in the sense of science, that specialised and general knowledge which it is our purpose to uncover, and the community of man.”
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We can be less sure that Eisenhower had been comparably informed about how atomic diplomacy was being deployed in Korea, or how military planners were considering how to take advantage of U.S. nuclear superiority. In 1950, with the war just under way, the United States had more than 260 SAC bombers and 300 atomic weapons at the ready; the USSR, by contrast, could only threaten to strike American shores in one-way suicide missions with a very small stock of bombs. During especially grim moments—in July 1950, as North Korean troops moved south; in November 1950, as the Chinese crossed the Yalu River into Korea; and in April 1951, as Allied troops were pushed southward across the thirty-eighth parallel—the United States transferred B-29s and partially assembled atomic bombs to Guam, signaling their potential use. The National Security Council minutes of January 25, 1951, record how Missouri’s future Democratic senator, Stuart Symington, then chairman of the National Security Resources Board, declared that the bomb was “America’s ace,” and how Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA, told his colleagues that the U.S. stockpile was a wasting asset, “best used before the Soviet stockpile grew to such a point that Moscow would be willing to risk atomic war.”
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During the first two crises, the bombers sent into the Pacific were accompanied only by bomb parts. In April 1951, President Truman ordered that complete and ready atomic weapons accompany the bombers “for possible action” against Soviet forces that might join the battle in Korea or invade Japan. When North Korea and China renewed their offensive later that month, the president approved a second movement of bombs and bombers to the Pacific. There they stayed until June, when the Soviet Union announced its readiness to open armistice negotiations.

I.

T
AKING HIS
oath of office during this winter of heightened fear, General Eisenhower placed his hand on the Bible that George Washington had selected for his, and the nation’s, first inauguration. Conducted in the Senate chamber on April 30, 1789, just days before France’s Estates General convened in Versailles and less than three months before the Bastille was stormed, Washington had asserted that America’s “new and free government,” a republic of laws, rights, and the separation of powers, was ready to “auspiciously commence.”
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Eisenhower selected this Bible, which had been present at the funeral of President Lincoln, and at the laying of cornerstones for the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the Statue of Liberty, as a symbol of American continuity following two decades of crisis.

President Washington had said that he would “dwell . . . with every satisfaction” on the prospect that Congress, a “great assemblage of communities and interests,” would act with “tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent” to advance “the preeminence of free government” and “win the affections of its citizens and command the respect of the world.” It was just this capacity to govern though a representative legislature that was in question when Franklin Roosevelt took his initial oath of office on March 4, 1933. Across the globe, President Woodrow Wilson’s crusade for democracy was a spent force. Parliamentary governments were toppling. Many doubted the surviving democracies could effectively address the troubles of the time without modifying their basic commitments to individual rights and political representation. When FDR spoke of how “withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone,” and, “more important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence,” his listeners understood that in that “dark hour of our national life” even more was at stake than whether capitalism’s spectacular collapse could be rectified. If Roosevelt were to prove wrong in his claim that “our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form,” alternative models based on absolute executive power would beckon.

Over the course of the New Deal, that possibility had been quashed. America’s system, and especially the central role played by Congress, persisted. Lawmaking flourished. Capitalism was managed in novel ways. Labor was given a place. American might grew by leaps and bounds. Prosperity returned. The country’s cohesion was maintained. The Constitution held.

Fear, though, persisted, and palpably so. Breaches of rights within the United States included the internment of nearly eighty thousand citizens and assaults on due process, privacy, and civil liberty. Loyalty investigations produced a corrosive atmosphere of suspicion in the name of national security. The period was also marked by deplorable acts of omission, including the failure to rescue those desperate to evade Nazi persecution or, subsequently, to offer refuge to persons who somehow had survived the worst. Demagogic figures like Father Charles Coughlin and Huey Long appealed to many millions.
¹⁰
Across America’s racial divide, battles for the future of white supremacy and black possibility gathered force. And at the core of the New Deal enterprise stood the segregated South and its representatives in Congress, whose partnerships with nonsouthern members of their Democratic Party and, on some issues, with Republicans, were, as we have seen, indispensable to the period’s lawmaking.

Fear also gained intensity through perilous confrontations with the Soviet Union and the failure to prevent an atomic arms race. Many worried that Soviet unity, industrial strength, military power, and ideological appeal would gain adherents as the more tempting, formally egalitarian, alternative. What was clear on the eve of Eisenhower’s inauguration was that the Soviet bloc was combining defensive repression with assertive threats in Europe and Asia. News reports talked of purged Czech Communists put on trial in Prague and sentenced to death; a Russian UN aide deported as a spy; and nine Jewish doctors who had been arrested in Moscow on charges of plotting to kill Soviet leaders at the behest of Zionists and British and U.S. intelligence. There were also reports of new Soviet pressure on West Berlin, with President Wilhelm Pieck of East Germany threatening a blockade should the government in Bonn ratify the European Defense Community Treaty.
¹¹

Speaking at the imposing East Portico of the Capitol, Eisenhower focused in his first presidential address on such global sources of alarm, dangers that “dwarfed . . . the preoccupations absorbing us at home.” Speaking in plain tones, he invoked the dramatic battles “through the forests of the Argonne, to the shores of Iwo Jima, and to the cold mountains of Korea” on the very day combat was raging in the Mundung-ni Valley, northwest of Kansong and south of Kasong, and American Sabre jets were battling Chinese MiG fighters near the Yalu River in a war whose outcome was indeterminate.
¹²

Calling on the country to “acquire proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose,” Eisenhower defined the stakes as more than geopolitical. “Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark.” The United States, he reported, was engaged in an encompassing crusade against a Communist enemy that knows “no god but force, no devotion but its use,” a foe led by persons who “tutor men in treason,” and who “torture, especially the truth.” This struggle, he insisted, “confers dignity upon the French soldier who dies in Indo-China, the British soldier killed in Malaya, the American life given in Korea.”
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