No Sense of Decency: The Army-McCarthy Hearings: a Demagogue Falls and Television Takes Charge of American Politics - Rilegato

Shogan, Robert

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1566637708 ISBN 13: 9781566637701

Casa editrice: Ivan R Dee, 2009

Riassunto

"Have you no sense of decency, sir?" asked attorney Robert Welch in a climactic moment in the 1954 Senate hearings that pitted Joseph R. McCarthy against the United States Army, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the rest of the political establishment. What made the confrontation unprecedented and magnified its impact was its gavel-to-gavel coverage by television. Thirty-six days of hearings transfixed the nation. With a journalist's eye for revealing detail, Robert Shogan traces the phenomenon and analyzes television's impact on government. Despite McCarthy's fall, Mr. Shogan points out, the hearings left a major item of unfinished business—the issue of McCarthyism, the strategy based on fear, smear, and guilt by association.

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Robert Shogan, a former prizewinning national political correspondent for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, has also written Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal; Bad News; Constant Conflict; Hard Bargain; Riddle of Power; The Fate of the Union; and The Battle of Blair Mountain. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Robert Shogan, a former prizewinning national political correspondent for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, has also written Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal; Bad News; Constant Conflict; Hard Bargain; Riddle of Power; The Fate of the Union; and The Battle of Blair Mountain. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

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NO SENSE OF DECENCY

The Army-McCarthy Hearings: A Demagogue Falls and Television Takes Charge of American PoliticsBy ROBERT SHOGAN

Ivan R. Dee

Copyright © 2009 Robert Shogan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56663-770-1

Contents

Preface................................................ix1 The Curtain Rises....................................32 A Torch in the Troubled World........................263 Racket Buster........................................434 The Road to Room 318.................................605 St. Ed and the Dragon................................886 At War with the Army.................................1157 The Soldiering of Private Schine.....................1428 Turning the Tide.....................................1639 The Purloined Letter.................................18910 Time Out for Tears..................................20711 To the Bitter End...................................23312 Unfinished Business.................................263Notes..................................................285Bibliography...........................................299Index..................................................305

Chapter One

The Curtain Rises

With its Corinthian pilasters, marble columns, ornate ceiling, and three-tiered chandeliers, the Senate caucus room, Room 318 in what is now called the Russell Senate Office Building, resembles a mausoleum and is usually just as dreary and barren. But on Thursday morning, April 22, 1954, this cavernous space hummed with tension and overflowed with politicians, lawyers, and journalists. They had been drawn by the prospect of a power struggle that promised to be one of the most memorable of the twentieth century, now just past its halfway mark. In one corner was Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the most feared politician in the land and perhaps the most powerful. Against him were arrayed one of the nation's proudest institutions, the Army of the United States, and along with the Army, the reigning administration of the country.

Spectators had begun collecting in the rotunda of the building before dawn. By mid-morning more than eight hundred had gained entrance past the massive oaken doors into the seventy-four-foot-long room designed to hold no more than three hundred persons. Conducting the hearings was a committee of the United States Senate, officially styled as the Special Subcommittee on Investigations, known more popularly-or just as often unpopularly-as the McCarthy Committee, after its chairman.

But no one, friend or foe, was calling it that today.

Senator McCarthy had been forced to step aside from his chairmanship. After four fractious years of stirring up trouble for others, he had ignited a firestorm that threatened to engulf this prodigious troublemaker himself. Like all the other furors initiated by McCarthy this one had begun by his choosing a target for charges of Communist subversion. But in this case his intended victim, the Department of the Army, after weeks of enduring abuse from McCarthy, had struck back and leveled charges of its own. It claimed that McCarthy had threatened to depict the Army to the country "in the worst light" unless it gave preferential treatment to a recently inducted McCarthy aide, G. David Schine. The Army alone would have made a formidable foe. But in challenging the Army McCarthy also had to reckon with the prestige and power of the Army's commander-in-chief, the thirty-second president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Since for the time being, at least, Eisenhower chose to remain in the background, it was Senator McCarthy who most commanded attention as the hearings prepared to open. During his three-year crusade against what he proclaimed to be the insidious threat of Communist subversion in America, McCarthy had made himself into the great intimidator of American politics. He had won the admiration, indeed the devotion, of millions of Americans. Other millions regarded him with scorn and derision. But even among his enemies, most-if they were honest-would admit they were too fearful of political retribution to speak against him.

Under these conditions, even as the hearings commenced, it was difficult to predict who if anyone would rise to challenge McCarthy in this public arena. But it was clear who besides McCarthy himself had the most at stake. This was Eisenhower, the most admired American of his time. Despite his plain reluctance to square off against McCarthy, Eisenhower's own advisers wondered whether he could afford not to confront the senator. Unless McCarthy was stopped, if he continued unchecked on his reckless course, he would be well positioned to wreck Eisenhower's presidency in midstream. And it was clear to everyone on both sides of this struggle that if McCarthy were ever to be taken down, it had better happen at the Senate hearings on which the curtain was about to rise.

The conflict between the Army and McCarthy was not the only troublesome news about national security that month. Ten days before the hearings opened, the country learned that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had directed development of the atomic bomb, had been denied his security clearance and suspended by the Atomic Energy Commission. The charges against Oppenheimer included associating with Communists and opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb after President Truman had given the project a green light. Oppenheimer admitted his past Communist sympathies but denied resisting development of the H-bomb. Although he later appealed the action against him, his security clearance was never restored.

Even more ominous was the news from halfway around the world, in Indochina. There Communist Vietminh forces had laid siege to the French fortress of Dienbienphu in what many viewed as the climactic battle in the struggle to overthrow French rule of its colony. On the day the hearings opened, the French admitted that Vietminh forces had tightened their band of flesh and steel around the fortress, in preparation for a final assault. Only a week earlier, Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon, in remarks he tried to keep off the record, warned the nation's newspaper editors that if France were forced to surrender Indochina, the United States might have to send its own troops there. Washington could not afford further retreat in Asia, Nixon claimed.

But in the nation's capital, all the news, no matter how portentous, was transcended by the remarkable events that were about to unfold in Room 318. Although officially designated as a legislative hearing, these proceedings would in reality be more like a trial. And when they concluded, the judgment of the participating lawmakers would be far outweighed by the opinions of millions of ordinary Americans who would function as an informal but potent jury.

Not that there was space in the hearing room for average folk. The great demand for seats from the capital's officialdom and the need to accommodate the national press corps left little room for any but officials and celebrities. Even the senators on the committee found themselves surrounded by relatives of the witnesses who would be called. The witnesses themselves were crammed in by the spectators. Aides to committee members wandered among the chairs and tables, seeking a place to work.

But there was no danger the public would be left in the dark. A glance around the room made clear why. A three-tiered platform had been constructed along the back wall of the hearing room to accommodate a battery of television cameras, which glared out at the senators as they sat at their table. Other cameras behind the committee table faced the witness table and the spectators. Still more cameras were positioned at one side of the room, able to pivot at various angles. And along the outside wall, in front of the room's three windows that would have offered its occupants a glimpse of the changing spring sky, four high-powered floodlights had been positioned to provide television the illumination it needed.

As the presence of the cameras testified, the senators, without much debate and without fully realizing the consequences, had agreed to allow television coverage of these hearings. It was a decision that would assure an audience of millions, define the nature of the proceedings and their outcome, and have a profound impact on the nation's politics for generations.

Americans would be drawn to this spectacle in part by the uneasy realization that the federal government was seriously out of joint. Eisenhower, the crusader who had brought down Hitler, now had as his command post the Oval Office, seat of ultimate political power. But much of Ike's authority had been undercut by Senator McCarthy. A relative upstart in national life, Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a man of modest intellect and limited experience. He was nevertheless possessed of boundless ambition, exceptional cunning, and unsurpassed gall. McCarthy obstructed Eisenhower's nominations for high office, upstaged his State Department, abused his generals, and waged a vendetta against the institution that had propelled Ike to greatness, the U.S. Army. For many in the capital, including Eisenhower's own supporters, the president's timidity in the face of McCarthy's excesses was epitomized in a drawing by the Washington Post's Herbert Block, who depicted McCarthy wielding a bloody meat cleaver as he confronted a pathetic-looking Eisenhower. "Have a care, sir," the president says, as he pulls from his scabbard a feather.

As the second year of Eisenhower's presidency began in 1954, it was McCarthy, not the man in the White House, who in many respects ruled American politics. He had already established his primacy during his meteoric rise to national prominence that had begun only four years earlier. Democrats cowered before his vindictive anger, having witnessed the political demise of colleagues who dared to challenge him. "You may get a lot of moral support for fighting Joe," one Democrat more candid than most explained, "but if you lose your seat in the Senate, that's no good."

In private conversation with a trusted journalist, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, then the leader of the Senate Democrats, put the matter with characteristic succinctness, laced with hyperbole: "I will not commit my party to some high school debate on the subject 'Resolved that communism is good for the United States' with my party taking the affirmative."

"Let the Republicans take him on," was the almost unanimous response of Democrats when called upon to confront McCarthy as a matter of conscience. But the Republicans, with a bare handful of exceptions, clearly had no intention of doing any such thing.

For all the tongue-clucking that some of them did, many believed they benefited from McCarthy's swinging the bludgeon of anti-communism against the Democrats, leaving them to remain sanctimoniously aloof from such crude tactics. Besides, some of them feared that if they questioned McCarthy's methods, they themselves might be scarred with the same axe. Whatever their motives, when it came to any criticism of McCarthy, the silence of the Republicans was thunderous.

Eisenhower the war hero, the man whose patriotism was presumably immune from attack even by McCarthy, intentionally or not had established in his 1952 presidential campaign the pattern that his party now followed. When Ike made plans to defend the reputation of his old comrade in arms, George C. Marshall, his advisers warned that if he went ahead with his intended statement on Marshall's behalf, he would lose votes in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin. Where upon Eisenhower backed down.

The consequence of Eisenhower's passivity became apparent barely three months into his presidency when McCarthy secretly negotiated an agreement with Greek shipowners to halt their flourishing trade with Red China, whose troops were then battling American soldiers in Korea. The agreement was in blatant violation of diplomatic protocol and federal statutes. But no less an eminence than Secretary of State John Foster Dulles excused this outrage. While foreign relations were the responsibility of the executive branch, Dulles said, in shutting down the Greek trade to China McCarthy had acted in the national interest.

A striking indication of McCarthy's status in the capital was provided in September 1953 at his wedding to Jeannie Kerr, a longtime member of his Senate staff. Some 2,500 well-wishers crowded the curbside after the ceremony in St. Matthews Cathedral. More than 1,000 attended the reception. Eisenhower begged off, pleading the need to entertain the visiting president of Panama. But Vice President Nixon, White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, and Attorney General Herbert Brownell were on hand. So were prominent Democrats, notably ex-New Dealer, ex-ambassador, and current staunch McCarthy admirer Joseph P. Kennedy, and three of his children, John, the junior senator from Massachusetts, his younger brother Robert, a staff member of the McCarthy Committee, and their sister Pat. As if this bipartisan demonstration of admiration were not enough, from the Vatican came a cable offering Pope Pius XII's "paternal apostolic blessing."

The newlyweds flew off for a three-week honeymoon in the British West Indies. But even his own nuptials could not keep McCarthy from pursuing the danger he perceived to the Republic. After only a week in the islands, McCarthy was alerted by his chief aide, Roy Cohn, that the committee's investigators had turned up evidence of one of the most serious security threats they had yet encountered, in of all places the United States Army. So McCarthy left the pleasures of the Caribbean and the comforts of the conjugal bed to return to the United States. Immediately he launched a probe of one of the nation's most vital military installations, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the main research center for the Signal Corps, which liked to bill itself as the eyes and ears of the Army.

At first it seemed that McCarthy was off on another wild ride that would bring him new headlines and new influence while the rest of the government quailed. But this investigation would have ramifications that no one, not even the senator from Wisconsin, could have anticipated. The wild card was the major role to be played in the proceedings by an imponderable force-television. Over time this new medium would transform American politics in many ways, and in the Army-McCarthy hearings it would find its impetus toward political influence. As these chapters will show, the clash of ambitions, personalities, and beliefs in politics and in journalism during the decade following the end of World War II set the stage for television's decisive role in the climactic episode of the saga of Joe McCarthy.

In the spring of 1954, television was scarcely a brand-new feature of American politics. As far back as 1950 Democratic senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had exploited the still nascent power of the medium by leading hearings into organized crime. Despite the minuscule size of the television audience at the time, Kefauver's investigations transfixed the nation. A flock of Damon Runyonesqe characters paraded before the Kefauver Committee and its klieg lights, attracting enough attention to elevate Kefauver from the obscurity of the Senate backbenches to the pantheon of national political celebrity. But once the hearings ended, memories faded quickly. Nothing much came of this crime inquiry, in part because there was no urgent imperative for it to happen in the first place, except as a promotion for Kefauver's career. Nevertheless, to anyone watching closely, the hearings demonstrated the political potency of such a televised event.

Among those impressed was a veteran North Carolina lawman named Frank N. Littlejohn, the police chief of Charlotte, his state's largest city. Littlejohn had won national recognition in 1933 for his role in capturing Basil "The Owl" Banghart and other henchmen of Chicago mobster Roger "The Terrible" Touhy after they robbed a mail truck in Charlotte of $120,000. The money supposedly was intended to help pay lawyers for Touhy, who was in a Chicago jail facing kidnapping charges. The exploits earned Littlejohn praise from FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, not known for applauding the work of local cops, as the finest detective in the country. In the midst of his other duties, Littlejohn had trouble keeping his eye off the TV screen and the Kefauver hearings. He raved about them to his son, Fritz, an editor with NBC radio in New York City. And Fritz Littlejohn mentally filed away his father's enthusiastic reaction until the spring of 1954, by which time he had become news director of ABC television. He was now well positioned to exploit the potential demonstrated by the Kefauver hearings by broadcasting what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings.

As a test of television's power, what made the Army-McCarthy hearings all the more stringent was that the medium would take on these proceedings with one, or more precisely, two hands tied behind its back. Initially all four networks had been expected to carry the full hearings live; but NBC, after trying it for a day, and CBS, which never even tried, balked at the loss of revenues from commercial programming. That left only ABC, the weakest of the Big Three, which had little in the way of other programming to lose. What ABC did have was Fritz Littlejohn as its news editor. Bolstered by his father's judgment, Littlejohn persuaded ABC president Robert Kintner to cover the hearings gavel to gavel. The DuMont network, the financially strapped stepsister of the industry, which would go out of business in a couple of years, also decided to provide coverage. And even the two holdouts, NBC and CBS, would broadcast nightly roundups edited from kinescope recordings of the daytime ABC telecasts. (Continues...)

Excerpted from NO SENSE OF DECENCYby ROBERT SHOGAN Copyright © 2009 by Robert Shogan. Excerpted by permission.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Ivan R Dee
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1566637708
• ISBN 13: 9781566637701
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 320
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: SALON SERVICE SRL; +393358150541; tamagnaleandro@gmail.com; ; Via dell'Angelo, 2; Ameglia; 19031; Italia