The Devil's Chessboard:
Allen Dulles,the CIA,and the Rise of
America's Secret Government
By David Talbot
8
Scoundrel Time
In late August 1947, Richard M. Nixon, a freshman congressman from Southern
California, arrived in New York City to board the luxurious Queen Mary for a
fact-finding tour of war-ravaged Europe that he would later call “one of the
greatest thrills of my life.” Nixon’s parents came to see off their ambitious son,
and before the ocean liner embarked, the family took in a performance of the
long-running Broadway musical Oklahoma! The young congressman was part of
a nineteen-member delegation chaired by Representative Christian Herter, a
patrician Republican from Massachusetts tasked with investigating the
devastation of the war. President Truman hoped the bipartisan delegation’s well publicized trip would help him win congressional approval for the Marshall
Plan, his ambitious, multibillion-dollar aid package to reconstruct Europe.
Truman’s sweeping proposal was generating stiff opposition from GOP
conservatives, who saw it as another example of Democratic extravagance.
Back home in Whittier, California, one of the conservative businessmen who
had helped pave Dick Nixon’s successful entry into politics the previous year
warned the young congressman not to be taken in by the slick State Department
types during the European junket. The country could only rid itself of “the
hangover philosophies of the New Deal” if Republican congressmen like Nixon
were “wise enough to refuse to be drawn into support of a dangerously
unworkable and profoundly inflationary foreign policy.”
Herter, a Boston Brahmin who was married to a Standard Oil heiress, was
part of the bipartisan, internationalist political elite who rejected this type of
thinking as narrow-minded and isolationist. Herter’s circle saw the Marshall Plan
not only as an essential antidote to the growing appeal of Communism in
poverty-stricken Western Europe, but as a financial boon for America’s export
industries and international banks, which would profit enormously from the
revival of European markets. Herter asked one of his oldest friends to
accompany the delegation—Allen Dulles, a man who shared his views and was
well known for his powers of persuasion. (Dulles had another motive for
backing the Marshall Plan: he and Frank Wisner would later use funds skimmed
from the program to finance their anti-Soviet operations in Europe.) As young
diplomats in Bern during World War I, Dulles and Herter had shared the joys of
bachelor life. Now, the Herter Committee’s round-trip, transatlantic journey and
lengthy tour of Europe—a political expedition that would stretch for longer than
two months—would give Dulles and Herter ample opportunity to win over
conservative skeptics like young Dick Nixon.
The opulent accommodations on board the Queen Mary were a far cry from
the drab veterans’ halls and school auditoriums where Nixon had been spending
his days just a few months earlier on the campaign trail. On the eve of his trip,
Nixon had earnestly declared, “This will be no junket. It will be no cross Atlantic cocktail party.” But in between delegation meetings, the luxury liner
offered a wealth of diversions, from its grand, three-story-high dining salon, to
its elegant, tiled swimming pool, to its Art Deco–style observation bar with
dazzling ocean views. The storied cruise ship had hosted the likes of Clark
Gable, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, Winston Churchill, and General Eisenhower.
It was all heady stuff for the thirty-four-year-old Nixon, whose Quaker family’s
grocery store and gas station had always wobbled on the brink of bankruptcy.
Throughout his career, Nixon’s all-consuming ambition was fueled by
resentment and envy, by the sense that he would always be excluded from the
top decks where men like Allen Dulles and Christian Herter belonged. When
Nixon was finishing law school at Duke University in 1937, he spent a frigid
Christmas week in New York searching for a starting position with a prestigious
Wall Street firm. He managed to get on the appointments calendar at Sullivan
and Cromwell, the firm of his dreams. As he waited in the lobby, he marveled at
the “thick, luxurious carpets and the fine oak paneling,” a picture of corporate
power and comfort that stayed with him for many years. But he did not meet the
Dulles brothers during his job interview, and Sullivan and Cromwell—which,
like all the top New York firms of the day, drew their young talent almost
exclusively from the Ivy League—showed no interest in this product of Whittier
College and Duke Law. Nixon, who could only afford a room in the Sloane
House YMCA on West Thirty-Fourth Street during his week long job hunt, felt a
bitter sense of rejection by the time he returned to school. “He was not charmed
by New York,” remembered a Duke classmate of Nixon’s. He felt the city had
kicked him in the teeth.
Yet here he was, ten years later, being wined and dined on the Queen Mary in
the same privileged company as Allen Dulles. The spymaster and Herter took
the young congressman under their wing during the ocean crossing. They
schooled him about the importance of foreign aid as a facilitator of U.S.
economic and political interests. By the time the delegation returned to the
United States in early October, Nixon was fully on board as a supporter of the
Marshall Plan. The congressman’s new enthusiasm for Truman’s ambitious
proposal did not go down well with his conservative supporters back home. But
Nixon was shrewd enough to figure out that senior members of the GOP’s East
Coast elite like Dulles and Herter could be of more benefit to him than the
Southern California citrus growers and businessmen who had launched his
career.
The political relationship forged between the rising politician from California
and Dulles’s East Coast circle would become one of the most significant
partnerships of the postwar era. Nixon grew into a potent political weapon for
the Dulles group, a cunning operator who managed to accrue solidly
conservative credentials with the Republican Party’s popular base while
dependably serving the interests of the GOP’s privileged leadership class.
Together, the Dulles circle and Richard Nixon would bring about a sharp,
rightward shift in the nation’s politics, driving out the surviving elements of the
New Deal regime in Washington and establishing a new ruling order that was
much more in tune with the Dulles circle’s financial interests. The Dulles-Nixon
alliance proved masterful at exploiting the Cold War panic that gripped the
nation, using it to root out Rooseveltian true believers from government, along
with a few genuine Communist infiltrators who posed a marginal threat to
national security. When Washington’s anti-Communist witch hunt raged out of
control and threatened to consume even those who had lit the flame, Nixon again
proved of great use to Dulles, working with him to keep the inferno within safe
boundaries. In return for his services, Nixon won the patronage of the
kingmakers in the Dulles circle, ensuring the politician’s steady rise toward
Washington’s top throne.
Years later, after Nixon’s climb to power was stalled by his loss to John F.
Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, Dulles sent Nixon a warm letter,
reminiscing about their relationship and noting that “we have worked together
since the days of the mission on the Marshall Plan.” The Dulles-Nixon alliance
actually preceded their voyage on the Queen Mary, but the spymaster was
understandably loath to officially record its true origins. According to John
Loftus, the former Justice Department Nazi hunter, the two men first came in
contact in late 1945, when young naval officer Richard Nixon was shuttling up
and down the East Coast, wrapping up war-related business for the Navy. While
sifting through the military paperwork, Nixon came across eye-opening Nazi
documents that had been shipped to an old torpedo factory on the Virginia side
of the Potomac. Some of these documents revealed how the Dulles brothers had
helped launder Nazi funds during the war. Loftus, citing confidential intelligence
sources, alleged that Dulles and Nixon proceeded to cut a deal. “Allen Dulles,”
reported Loftus, “told him to keep quiet about what he had seen and, in return,
[Dulles] arranged to finance the young man’s first congressional campaign
against Jerry Voorhis.”
Dulles and his clients in the banking and oil industries had ample reason to
target Voorhis, a five-term Democratic congressman and ardent New Dealer
from Nixon’s home district in Southern California. The crusading congressman
was a particularly troublesome thorn in the sides of Wall Street and Big Oil.
Voorhis shook the banking industry by pushing for the federal government to
take over the nation’s privately owned, regional Federal Reserve Banks—a
radical proposal that briefly won President Roosevelt’s support, but ultimately
failed to overcome the banking lobby. Voorhis was more successful in his efforts
to curb the power of the major oil companies. In 1943, after learning that the
Navy was about to grant Standard Oil exclusive drilling rights in the sprawling
Elk Hills naval reserve in central California, Voorhis exposed the sweetheart deal
and succeeded in blocking it. The congressman earned yet more of the oil
industry’s wrath by taking aim at one of the industry’s most cherished tax breaks,
the oil depletion allowance, and by stopping offshore drilling plans along the
California coast.
Voorhis also posed a direct legal threat to the Dulles brothers through his efforts to shine a light on the wartime collusion between Sullivan and Cromwell clients like Standard Oil and DuPont chemical company and Nazi cartels such as IG Farben. Voorhis further unnerved the Dulles circle by demanding a congressional investigation of the controversial Bank for International Settlements, charging that bank president Thomas McKittrick, a close associate of the Dulles brothers, was a Nazi collaborator.
Corporate America viewed Washington politicians like Voorhis as the personification of their New Deal nightmare. In his mid forties, Voorhis had the granite-jawed good looks of a movie star. He also combined the same upperclass breeding and populist instincts that made Roosevelt such a formidable threat. The son of an automobile executive, Voorhis was educated at the Hotchkiss School and Yale. But as a young man, he rejected his privileged background, marrying a social worker, going to work on a Ford assembly line, and becoming a Socialist. He changed his registration to the Democratic Party in 1934 when he entered California politics, but his congressional voting record demonstrated he was a stalwart of the party’s left wing.
In 1944, Voorhis published a book titled Beyond Victory, making clear that, as a leader of the progressive caucus in Congress, he was determined to keep pushing for ambitious reforms in postwar America. Voorhis sent alarms through the ranks of his corporate foes by calling for the nationalization of the transportation, energy, and utility industries as well as sweeping banking reforms. He wanted to create a national credit union to compete with private banks and to expand the Social Security system as a way to establish a nationwide minimum income.
Voorhis’s business opponents began searching for a strong candidate to unseat their nemesis long before the 1946 congressional race. While still in uniform, Nixon was recruited to run against the popular progressive by Herman Perry, a family friend who managed the Bank of America’s Whittier branch. Nixon later insisted that no powerful interests were behind his political debut, just “typical representatives of the Southern California middle class: an auto dealer, a bank manager, a printing salesman, a furniture dealer.” But Voorhis knew the truth. He later wrote in an unpublished memoir that he had been targeted by powerful East Coast bankers and oilmen, who saw him as “one of the most dangerous men in Washington.” In the fall of 1945, according to Voorhis, one major New York banker flew to Southern California, where he sat down with local bankers and “bawled them out” for allowing such a progressive firebrand to represent their district.
Nixon knew that it would take a large campaign war chest to defeat the fiveterm Voorhis—and he also made clear that he was not interested in running for office if it meant taking a pay cut. Republican business circles in New York and Los Angeles quickly rallied to make the campaign against Voorhis worth the effort of their candidate. An executive for Gladding, McBean, a major ceramics manufacturer whose chairman sat on Standard Oil’s board, later recalled how the corporate message on behalf of Nixon was delivered. At a meeting of seventy five executives held at an exclusive Ojai, California, resort, the president of Gladding, McBean touted the “young man fresh out of the Navy” who had been lined up for the congressional race. “Smart as all get out. Just what we need to get rid of Jerry Voorhis. . . . He says he can’t live on a congressman’s salary. Needs a lot more than that to match what he knows he could make in private law practice. The boys need cash to make up the difference. We’re going to help.”
Gladding, McBean became a key generator of cash for Nixon, shaking down its own executives for campaign contributions and spreading the word to other corporate donors. The company president demanded that his fellow executives deliver the money in cash to his office. “We just gotta get rid of that pinko Voorhis,” he exhorted his team. The strong-arm appeal worked. Gladding, McBean alone raised at least $5,000 from its executive ranks, the equivalent of over $65,000 today. Together, Nixon’s corporate backers amassed a campaign “pot big enough to engulf the world,” as the Gladding, McBean financial officer later put it.
Gladding, McBean had a modest enough corporate profile to escape the scrutiny of election officials, but its board of directors boasted a variety of high profile connections in the political and financial worlds. One director, Los Angeles corporate attorney Herman Phleger, had worked with Allen Dulles in postwar Germany and would later serve his brother as the State Department’s legal adviser. The Nixon-Voorhis contest took place on the opposite side of the country from the East Coast power centers—in a remote suburban California district where orange groves still dominated the landscape—but its outcome would help shape national politics for years to come.
As the congressional race heated up in summer 1946, it became clear to Nixon’s wealthy supporters that they had backed the right man to unseat Voorhis. The Republican challenger ran a ruthless campaign, cutting up the incumbent as an ineffectual left-wing dreamer, a Communist Party sympathizer, and a tool of Red-dominated labor unions—none of which was true. In fact, Voorhis had long battled against Communist Party encroachment in liberal organizations and had even spearheaded a 1940 bill requiring the registration of political groups that were affiliated with foreign powers—a law aimed as much at the Moscow dominated CPUSA as it was against the pro-Hitler German-American Bund. But in Nixon’s skilled hands, Voorhis’s support for New Deal programs like school lunches became evidence of his obedience to the Communist Party line. In the final stretch of the campaign, Nixon released one last cloud of poison. Voters throughout the district began receiving anonymous phone calls, which turned out to emanate from Nixon campaign boiler rooms. “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you who I am,” went a typical call. “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?”
Voorhis also posed a direct legal threat to the Dulles brothers through his efforts to shine a light on the wartime collusion between Sullivan and Cromwell clients like Standard Oil and DuPont chemical company and Nazi cartels such as IG Farben. Voorhis further unnerved the Dulles circle by demanding a congressional investigation of the controversial Bank for International Settlements, charging that bank president Thomas McKittrick, a close associate of the Dulles brothers, was a Nazi collaborator.
Corporate America viewed Washington politicians like Voorhis as the personification of their New Deal nightmare. In his mid forties, Voorhis had the granite-jawed good looks of a movie star. He also combined the same upperclass breeding and populist instincts that made Roosevelt such a formidable threat. The son of an automobile executive, Voorhis was educated at the Hotchkiss School and Yale. But as a young man, he rejected his privileged background, marrying a social worker, going to work on a Ford assembly line, and becoming a Socialist. He changed his registration to the Democratic Party in 1934 when he entered California politics, but his congressional voting record demonstrated he was a stalwart of the party’s left wing.
In 1944, Voorhis published a book titled Beyond Victory, making clear that, as a leader of the progressive caucus in Congress, he was determined to keep pushing for ambitious reforms in postwar America. Voorhis sent alarms through the ranks of his corporate foes by calling for the nationalization of the transportation, energy, and utility industries as well as sweeping banking reforms. He wanted to create a national credit union to compete with private banks and to expand the Social Security system as a way to establish a nationwide minimum income.
Voorhis’s business opponents began searching for a strong candidate to unseat their nemesis long before the 1946 congressional race. While still in uniform, Nixon was recruited to run against the popular progressive by Herman Perry, a family friend who managed the Bank of America’s Whittier branch. Nixon later insisted that no powerful interests were behind his political debut, just “typical representatives of the Southern California middle class: an auto dealer, a bank manager, a printing salesman, a furniture dealer.” But Voorhis knew the truth. He later wrote in an unpublished memoir that he had been targeted by powerful East Coast bankers and oilmen, who saw him as “one of the most dangerous men in Washington.” In the fall of 1945, according to Voorhis, one major New York banker flew to Southern California, where he sat down with local bankers and “bawled them out” for allowing such a progressive firebrand to represent their district.
Nixon knew that it would take a large campaign war chest to defeat the fiveterm Voorhis—and he also made clear that he was not interested in running for office if it meant taking a pay cut. Republican business circles in New York and Los Angeles quickly rallied to make the campaign against Voorhis worth the effort of their candidate. An executive for Gladding, McBean, a major ceramics manufacturer whose chairman sat on Standard Oil’s board, later recalled how the corporate message on behalf of Nixon was delivered. At a meeting of seventy five executives held at an exclusive Ojai, California, resort, the president of Gladding, McBean touted the “young man fresh out of the Navy” who had been lined up for the congressional race. “Smart as all get out. Just what we need to get rid of Jerry Voorhis. . . . He says he can’t live on a congressman’s salary. Needs a lot more than that to match what he knows he could make in private law practice. The boys need cash to make up the difference. We’re going to help.”
Gladding, McBean became a key generator of cash for Nixon, shaking down its own executives for campaign contributions and spreading the word to other corporate donors. The company president demanded that his fellow executives deliver the money in cash to his office. “We just gotta get rid of that pinko Voorhis,” he exhorted his team. The strong-arm appeal worked. Gladding, McBean alone raised at least $5,000 from its executive ranks, the equivalent of over $65,000 today. Together, Nixon’s corporate backers amassed a campaign “pot big enough to engulf the world,” as the Gladding, McBean financial officer later put it.
Gladding, McBean had a modest enough corporate profile to escape the scrutiny of election officials, but its board of directors boasted a variety of high profile connections in the political and financial worlds. One director, Los Angeles corporate attorney Herman Phleger, had worked with Allen Dulles in postwar Germany and would later serve his brother as the State Department’s legal adviser. The Nixon-Voorhis contest took place on the opposite side of the country from the East Coast power centers—in a remote suburban California district where orange groves still dominated the landscape—but its outcome would help shape national politics for years to come.
As the congressional race heated up in summer 1946, it became clear to Nixon’s wealthy supporters that they had backed the right man to unseat Voorhis. The Republican challenger ran a ruthless campaign, cutting up the incumbent as an ineffectual left-wing dreamer, a Communist Party sympathizer, and a tool of Red-dominated labor unions—none of which was true. In fact, Voorhis had long battled against Communist Party encroachment in liberal organizations and had even spearheaded a 1940 bill requiring the registration of political groups that were affiliated with foreign powers—a law aimed as much at the Moscow dominated CPUSA as it was against the pro-Hitler German-American Bund. But in Nixon’s skilled hands, Voorhis’s support for New Deal programs like school lunches became evidence of his obedience to the Communist Party line. In the final stretch of the campaign, Nixon released one last cloud of poison. Voters throughout the district began receiving anonymous phone calls, which turned out to emanate from Nixon campaign boiler rooms. “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you who I am,” went a typical call. “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?”
The uniformly conservative Southern California press, including the mighty
Los Angeles Times, echoed Nixon’s baseless charges against Voorhis and
enthusiastically endorsed the Republican candidate. On Election Day, Nixon
rolled to an impressive victory, winning 56 percent of the vote. Voorhis was so
dismayed by the experience that he abandoned the political arena for the rest of
his life.
An outraged Voorhis aide later confronted Nixon. “Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” Nixon told the man. “I had to win,” he went on, as if enlightening a political innocent. “That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win. You’re just being naïve.”
As promised, Nixon was well compensated for his efforts. When he and his family embarked for Washington, they took with them $10,000 (about $130,000 in today’s dollars), a new Ford, and a generous life insurance policy. Nixon also arrived in the nation’s capital with a game plan for Republican success that would embolden the likes of Senator Joseph McCarthy and change American history. Nixon’s bare-knuckled race against the idealistic Voorhis was the political overture of a new era—a “scoundrel time” of patriotic bullying and rampant fear.
On August 11, 1948, a warm, sticky evening in New York, Rep. Dick Nixon walked into the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel—the grand, midtown palace named after Teddy, not FDR—and took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor where Governor Tom Dewey, the Republican candidate for president, kept a suite. The freshman congressman was, once again, about to demonstrate his value to the Dulles brothers.
Nixon carried in his briefcase the congressional testimony of two men— Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers—whose epic duel would become one of the defining public spectacles of the Cold War. Chambers—a senior writer and editor at Time in Henry Luce’s right-leaning publishing empire—had ignited a firestorm by alleging that he had worked as a courier for a Soviet spy ring in Washington during the 1930s, a ring that included Alger Hiss. The resounding denial by Hiss, a former high-ranking official in Roosevelt’s State Department, was so persuasively delivered that the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee on which Nixon served seemed on the verge of terminating its investigation amid a chorus of catcalls from the press.
When the committee later reconvened in executive session after Hiss’s “virtuoso” performance, Nixon recalled, his fellow congressmen were “in a virtual state of shock.” Furious committee members turned on the staff, berating them for not thoroughly vetting Chambers before putting him on the stand. “We’ve been had! We’re ruined,” moaned one Republican. But Nixon stood firm. If HUAC shut down its probe of alleged Communists in federal government, he argued, “far from rescuing the committee’s reputation, it would probably destroy it for good. It would be a public confession that we were incompetent and even reckless in our procedures.” His impassioned plea succeeded in steadying the committee’s nerves, and they agreed to carry on. But Nixon knew that before HUAC resumed its public hearings, he needed to get outside help if the committee was to prevail in the arena of popular opinion.
The Hiss case, Nixon later wrote in his soul-baring memoir Six Crises, was one of the defining crucibles in his career. Nixon was often wracked by self doubt, and this was one of those contests that brought out his deepest anxieties. Nixon’s antagonist boasted all the credentials that had eluded him in life. Hiss had been one of the most brilliant law students in his class at Harvard. After graduating, he was picked to serve as a law clerk to octogenarian Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a living legend of American jurisprudence. Hiss quickly became one of the rising stars in the Roosevelt administration, capping his Washington career by accompanying FDR to his final summit at Yalta and playing a key role in the formation of the United Nations.
When he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Hiss made a striking impression—thin, handsome, smartly dressed, and self assured. Even Nixon had to admit that his performance was a striking contrast to his accuser’s “lackluster” appearance before the committee. Chambers was “short and pudgy,” observed Nixon. “His clothes were unpressed. His shirt collar was curled up over his jacket. He spoke in a rather bored monotone.” Hiss insisted that he had never met anyone named Whittaker Chambers—and he and the rumpled Chambers seemed to come from such different worlds that it was easy to believe him. But it was Chambers whom Nixon found convincing: he simply knew too many details about Hiss’s personal life. And there was something about this sad sack—a troubled but intelligent man who seemed to exude a strange mix of admiration, envy, and resentment toward Hiss—that strongly resonated with Nixon.
Nixon quickly emerged as Hiss’s most dangerous inquisitor, but Hiss held his ground under the young congressman’s relentless questioning, slyly taking aim at the most vulnerable part of his psyche. “I am a graduate of Harvard Law School,” Hiss coolly informed the committee. He let that sink in, and then fixed Nixon with a level gaze. “And I believe yours is Whittier?” It was an expertly aimed harpoon, certain to deeply wound the man who was so obviously afflicted by what sociologists would later term “the hidden injuries of class.”
“It absolutely ripped Nixon apart,” recalled Robert Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator. “I realized from that moment on that he could not stand Hiss.”
Nixon knew that he was facing a formidable opponent. Hiss clearly had the Washington press on his side, as well as the White House. While the committee was interrogating him, President Truman told a press conference that the HUAC spy scare was nothing more than a “red herring” to divert Washington from more important business. Hiss’s testimony was full of references to leading political personalities with whom he was on a familiar basis. And they weren’t all Democrats. The biggest name he dropped—John Foster Dulles—produced a mighty echo in the cavernous caucus room of the Old House Office Building. Hiss reminded the committee that it was the Republican wise man who had offered him his current position as president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Foster Dulles served as chairman of the board.
Nixon was well aware that Hiss, who accepted Foster Dulles’s offer and took over the Carnegie Endowment in January 1947, belonged to a Washington aristocracy that transcended party lines. By accusing Alger Hiss of being a traitor to his country, Nixon was not only threatening the career of a well connected and widely respected public citizen, he was jeopardizing the reputations of Hiss’s prominent patrons—powerful men like the Dulles brothers, whom Nixon was counting on to advance his own career.
When he phoned Foster Dulles at his Wall Street office on the morning of August 11—the same office where he had been snubbed as a young law student —Nixon understood that it was another make-or-break moment for him. Foster agreed to meet that evening at Dewey’s hotel suite to discuss the Hiss-Chambers case. The Wall Street attorney appreciated the delicacy of the situation. As Dewey’s top foreign affairs adviser, Foster was poised to become the next secretary of state. The last thing he needed was a Washington tempest that tied him to a Soviet spy.
For Nixon, the anxiety hovering around the meeting was heightened by the fact that he harbored his own doubts about the case against Hiss. But men of action learn to conquer these disquieting voices inside, Nixon reminded himself. “One of the most trying experiences an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or fly from it,” Nixon wrote in Six Crises. “It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers.” A leader acted decisively. The failures are “those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee.”
Published in 1962, Six Crises was Nixon’s strangely belated answer to Profiles in Courage—the 1957, Pulitzer Prize–winning book by the charismatic man who had just beat him for president. Nixon intended his book to be a leadership manual, but it only highlighted his neuroses. Many observers thought Nixon’s desperate self-puffery bordered on hysteria. Writing in his journal after the book’s publication, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it “an orgy in unconscious self-revelation.” President Kennedy told Schlesinger it showed that Nixon was a “sick” man.
But, as usual, Nixon’s opponents underestimated him. Nixon may have suffered from a tortured psyche, but it made him acutely sensitive to the nuances of power. He had a Machiavellian brilliance for reading the chessboard and calculating the next series of moves to his advantage. When Nixon walked into Suite 1527 at the Roosevelt Hotel that summer night in 1948, he faced a formidable array of power. With Foster were his brother Allen, Christian Herter, and Wall Street banker C. Douglas Dillon, who would later serve President Eisenhower in the State Department and presidents Kennedy and Johnson as Treasury secretary. These men made up a significant section of the Republican Party’s ruling clique. If Nixon failed to convince them that he had a solid case against Hiss, HUAC would have to close its noisy show, and his political career would be wrecked just as it was gaining traction.
Foster felt that Nixon approached the group with the proper sense of humility, and no doubt trepidation. “It was clear he did not want to proceed [with the Hiss investigation] until people like myself had agreed that he really had a case to justify going ahead,” Foster later remarked. Nixon knew that he was facing a skeptical audience. Herter, a mentor ever since their Marshall Plan junket, had already told Nixon he didn’t think he had a case. Herter had checked with his friends at the State Department, who assured him Hiss was not a Communist.
But Nixon was also aware that he came into the room with his own unique leverage. As the leading inquisitor in the Hiss case—an affair whose tendrils laced their way as far as John Foster Dulles himself—Nixon had the power to upend the Republican presidential campaign.
An outraged Voorhis aide later confronted Nixon. “Of course I knew Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist,” Nixon told the man. “I had to win,” he went on, as if enlightening a political innocent. “That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win. You’re just being naïve.”
As promised, Nixon was well compensated for his efforts. When he and his family embarked for Washington, they took with them $10,000 (about $130,000 in today’s dollars), a new Ford, and a generous life insurance policy. Nixon also arrived in the nation’s capital with a game plan for Republican success that would embolden the likes of Senator Joseph McCarthy and change American history. Nixon’s bare-knuckled race against the idealistic Voorhis was the political overture of a new era—a “scoundrel time” of patriotic bullying and rampant fear.
On August 11, 1948, a warm, sticky evening in New York, Rep. Dick Nixon walked into the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel—the grand, midtown palace named after Teddy, not FDR—and took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor where Governor Tom Dewey, the Republican candidate for president, kept a suite. The freshman congressman was, once again, about to demonstrate his value to the Dulles brothers.
Nixon carried in his briefcase the congressional testimony of two men— Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers—whose epic duel would become one of the defining public spectacles of the Cold War. Chambers—a senior writer and editor at Time in Henry Luce’s right-leaning publishing empire—had ignited a firestorm by alleging that he had worked as a courier for a Soviet spy ring in Washington during the 1930s, a ring that included Alger Hiss. The resounding denial by Hiss, a former high-ranking official in Roosevelt’s State Department, was so persuasively delivered that the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee on which Nixon served seemed on the verge of terminating its investigation amid a chorus of catcalls from the press.
When the committee later reconvened in executive session after Hiss’s “virtuoso” performance, Nixon recalled, his fellow congressmen were “in a virtual state of shock.” Furious committee members turned on the staff, berating them for not thoroughly vetting Chambers before putting him on the stand. “We’ve been had! We’re ruined,” moaned one Republican. But Nixon stood firm. If HUAC shut down its probe of alleged Communists in federal government, he argued, “far from rescuing the committee’s reputation, it would probably destroy it for good. It would be a public confession that we were incompetent and even reckless in our procedures.” His impassioned plea succeeded in steadying the committee’s nerves, and they agreed to carry on. But Nixon knew that before HUAC resumed its public hearings, he needed to get outside help if the committee was to prevail in the arena of popular opinion.
The Hiss case, Nixon later wrote in his soul-baring memoir Six Crises, was one of the defining crucibles in his career. Nixon was often wracked by self doubt, and this was one of those contests that brought out his deepest anxieties. Nixon’s antagonist boasted all the credentials that had eluded him in life. Hiss had been one of the most brilliant law students in his class at Harvard. After graduating, he was picked to serve as a law clerk to octogenarian Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a living legend of American jurisprudence. Hiss quickly became one of the rising stars in the Roosevelt administration, capping his Washington career by accompanying FDR to his final summit at Yalta and playing a key role in the formation of the United Nations.
When he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Hiss made a striking impression—thin, handsome, smartly dressed, and self assured. Even Nixon had to admit that his performance was a striking contrast to his accuser’s “lackluster” appearance before the committee. Chambers was “short and pudgy,” observed Nixon. “His clothes were unpressed. His shirt collar was curled up over his jacket. He spoke in a rather bored monotone.” Hiss insisted that he had never met anyone named Whittaker Chambers—and he and the rumpled Chambers seemed to come from such different worlds that it was easy to believe him. But it was Chambers whom Nixon found convincing: he simply knew too many details about Hiss’s personal life. And there was something about this sad sack—a troubled but intelligent man who seemed to exude a strange mix of admiration, envy, and resentment toward Hiss—that strongly resonated with Nixon.
Nixon quickly emerged as Hiss’s most dangerous inquisitor, but Hiss held his ground under the young congressman’s relentless questioning, slyly taking aim at the most vulnerable part of his psyche. “I am a graduate of Harvard Law School,” Hiss coolly informed the committee. He let that sink in, and then fixed Nixon with a level gaze. “And I believe yours is Whittier?” It was an expertly aimed harpoon, certain to deeply wound the man who was so obviously afflicted by what sociologists would later term “the hidden injuries of class.”
“It absolutely ripped Nixon apart,” recalled Robert Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator. “I realized from that moment on that he could not stand Hiss.”
Nixon knew that he was facing a formidable opponent. Hiss clearly had the Washington press on his side, as well as the White House. While the committee was interrogating him, President Truman told a press conference that the HUAC spy scare was nothing more than a “red herring” to divert Washington from more important business. Hiss’s testimony was full of references to leading political personalities with whom he was on a familiar basis. And they weren’t all Democrats. The biggest name he dropped—John Foster Dulles—produced a mighty echo in the cavernous caucus room of the Old House Office Building. Hiss reminded the committee that it was the Republican wise man who had offered him his current position as president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Foster Dulles served as chairman of the board.
Nixon was well aware that Hiss, who accepted Foster Dulles’s offer and took over the Carnegie Endowment in January 1947, belonged to a Washington aristocracy that transcended party lines. By accusing Alger Hiss of being a traitor to his country, Nixon was not only threatening the career of a well connected and widely respected public citizen, he was jeopardizing the reputations of Hiss’s prominent patrons—powerful men like the Dulles brothers, whom Nixon was counting on to advance his own career.
When he phoned Foster Dulles at his Wall Street office on the morning of August 11—the same office where he had been snubbed as a young law student —Nixon understood that it was another make-or-break moment for him. Foster agreed to meet that evening at Dewey’s hotel suite to discuss the Hiss-Chambers case. The Wall Street attorney appreciated the delicacy of the situation. As Dewey’s top foreign affairs adviser, Foster was poised to become the next secretary of state. The last thing he needed was a Washington tempest that tied him to a Soviet spy.
For Nixon, the anxiety hovering around the meeting was heightened by the fact that he harbored his own doubts about the case against Hiss. But men of action learn to conquer these disquieting voices inside, Nixon reminded himself. “One of the most trying experiences an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or fly from it,” Nixon wrote in Six Crises. “It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or the other. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers.” A leader acted decisively. The failures are “those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee.”
Published in 1962, Six Crises was Nixon’s strangely belated answer to Profiles in Courage—the 1957, Pulitzer Prize–winning book by the charismatic man who had just beat him for president. Nixon intended his book to be a leadership manual, but it only highlighted his neuroses. Many observers thought Nixon’s desperate self-puffery bordered on hysteria. Writing in his journal after the book’s publication, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it “an orgy in unconscious self-revelation.” President Kennedy told Schlesinger it showed that Nixon was a “sick” man.
But, as usual, Nixon’s opponents underestimated him. Nixon may have suffered from a tortured psyche, but it made him acutely sensitive to the nuances of power. He had a Machiavellian brilliance for reading the chessboard and calculating the next series of moves to his advantage. When Nixon walked into Suite 1527 at the Roosevelt Hotel that summer night in 1948, he faced a formidable array of power. With Foster were his brother Allen, Christian Herter, and Wall Street banker C. Douglas Dillon, who would later serve President Eisenhower in the State Department and presidents Kennedy and Johnson as Treasury secretary. These men made up a significant section of the Republican Party’s ruling clique. If Nixon failed to convince them that he had a solid case against Hiss, HUAC would have to close its noisy show, and his political career would be wrecked just as it was gaining traction.
Foster felt that Nixon approached the group with the proper sense of humility, and no doubt trepidation. “It was clear he did not want to proceed [with the Hiss investigation] until people like myself had agreed that he really had a case to justify going ahead,” Foster later remarked. Nixon knew that he was facing a skeptical audience. Herter, a mentor ever since their Marshall Plan junket, had already told Nixon he didn’t think he had a case. Herter had checked with his friends at the State Department, who assured him Hiss was not a Communist.
But Nixon was also aware that he came into the room with his own unique leverage. As the leading inquisitor in the Hiss case—an affair whose tendrils laced their way as far as John Foster Dulles himself—Nixon had the power to upend the Republican presidential campaign.
Nixon sat quietly in the suite while the Dulles brothers carefully read through
the Hiss and Chambers transcripts. When they were done, Foster got to his feet
and began pacing the room with his hands clasped behind him. The brothers
realized that Nixon was right—and they had a problem. “There’s no question
about it,” Foster frowned. “It’s almost impossible to believe, but Chambers
knows Hiss.”
The Republican wise men took Nixon into their confidence, and once again the ambitious young politician came to a mutually convenient arrangement with the Dulles circle. It was another significant step for Nixon through the portals of power. With the Republican brain trust’s full support, Nixon would continue his aggressive pursuit of Hiss while keeping the spotlight carefully away from Foster and other GOP luminaries who were tied to the accused man. Meanwhile, Foster moved quickly to distance himself from Hiss, pressuring him behind the scenes to resign his Carnegie Endowment post, while Allen fed incriminating intelligence to Nixon to bolster his case. Some of this confidential information about Hiss likely came from the Venona project, the Army intelligence program that had been set up in 1943 to decrypt messages sent by Soviet spy agencies. The Venona project was so top secret that it was kept hidden from President Truman, but the deeply wired Dulles might have enjoyed access to it.
Nixon was impressed by the Dulles brothers’ bold decision to politically exploit the Hiss affair rather than run from it. The HUAC investigation could have been “acutely embarrassing” to Foster, Nixon later noted. The Dulles's “could have suggested that I delay the proceedings until after the election.” But instead, with Nixon’s help, they turned the Hiss case to their advantage, with Dewey fulminating against the laxity of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations that had allowed Communists to penetrate the government. The meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel proved a turning point. For the next decade, Republicans would use Cold War hysteria not just to indict Communist Party members and sympathizers as traitors but to brand the entire New Deal legacy as un-American. Even former high-ranking New Dealers with impeccable credentials like Alger Hiss would be fair game in Washington’s new inquisitorial climate.
The age of paranoia brought out Nixon’s brilliance as a political performer. He had a deep, demagogic instinct for playing on the public’s darkest fears. Robert Stripling, his right-hand man on HUAC, came to believe that there was no genuine ideological passion in Nixon’s pursuit of the “traitor” Hiss, just the same cold-blooded calculation he had brought to his campaign against Jerry Voorhis. “He was no more concerned about whether Hiss was [a Communist] than a billy goat,” the HUAC investigator later remarked.
This was not an entirely fair assessment of Nixon. The young politician clearly had developed deeply felt convictions about the brutality of the Communist system. When his Marshall Plan tour took him to Greece, Nixon was horrified to meet a young woman whose left breast had been hacked off by Communist guerrillas. He returned from the trip with a firm belief in the implacability of Communist regimes, and the conviction that they only understood force—a view that he would modify when he became president and engaged both the Soviet Union and China in strenuous diplomacy.
But at home, Nixon’s anti-Communism reeked of political cynicism, earning him the nickname “Tricky Dick.” He smeared his opponents with reckless abandon, labeling them as Reds or “dupes” or, in the case of his 1950 senatorial opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, a woman who was “pink down to her underwear.” Nixon never proved that Hiss was a card-carrying Communist or a Soviet agent, but, with typical hyperbole, he treated him like he was a mortal threat to the American way of life.
The highlight of Nixon’s obsessive, Javert-like pursuit of Hiss came when Chambers dramatically led HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm, where he produced a hollowed-out pumpkin containing sixtyfive pages of retyped State Department documents, four pages of copied government documents in Hiss’s handwriting, and five rolls of classified film— all of which, Chambers claimed, had been slipped to him by Hiss in 1938. Nixon staged a dramatic return to Washington from a Caribbean vacation cruise, with the help of a Coast Guard rescue plane, in order to publicize the so-called pumpkin papers. The documents, which seemed to prove that Hiss did have an espionage connection to Chambers, sealed the diplomat’s fate. He was indicted in December 1948 by a federal grand jury for lying to Congress.
Hiss continued to vigorously deny his guilt, insisting that the pumpkin papers had been forged by Chambers. Neither he nor his wife, Priscilla, could have retyped the State Department documents, said Hiss, because they had given away the Woodstock model typewriter that they allegedly used to copy the classified memos before 1938. Four jury members at his first deadlocked trial believed Hiss, agreeing that someone other than Hiss or his wife had retyped the State Department documents. Hiss’s suspicion that he was framed was given further credence years later by John Dean, the former White House attorney who became a key witness in the Watergate scandal that ended the Nixon presidency. Writing in his memoir Blind Ambition, Dean alleged that Nixon told fellow White House aide Charles Colson, “We built [the typewriter] in the Hiss case,” implying that with the help of FBI technicians, Nixon had used a replica of the Woodstock machine to trap his prey.
Hiss’s second trial did not go in his favor. Among the witnesses who testified against him was John Foster Dulles, who disputed Hiss’s recollection of the events leading to his resignation from the Carnegie Endowment. It was the final nail in Hiss’s coffin by his former patron. In January 1950, Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to federal prison, where he would serve three and a half years. Meanwhile, Chambers, a man who had launched his writing career by working for the Communist Party press, continued to enjoy his new life as a polemicist for the conservative media, first in Henry Luce’s plush Time-Life tower and then in the more modest Manhattan offices of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
For Nixon, the Washington spy spectacle demonstrated not only the moral turpitude of Alger Hiss but the intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal elite. His successful pursuit of Hiss brought him national fame, Nixon later observed, but it also attracted the “unparalleled venom and irrational fury” of the liberal intelligentsia, which saw Hiss as a New Deal icon. He was convinced that he would never be forgiven by “substantial segments of the press and intellectual community” for exposing how the New Deal had been compromised by the Communist underground. Nixon brooded that it was this “hatred and hostility” that might have cost him the 1960 presidential election.
Chambers, too, saw his decision to incriminate Hiss as part of a broader assault on New Deal–style government and its “drift toward socialism.” In his 1952 memoir Witness, Chambers conflated the Roosevelt presidency with the evils of Communist rule. The New Deal, he wrote, “was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking.” Both types of revolution, he argued, led to a triumph of the state over the individual. [So very true DC]
The Cold War furies that Nixon and the Dulles brothers helped to unleash scoured all nuance and charity from American politics. There were indeed a few committed Communist agents embedded here and there in Roosevelt’s bureaucracy, such as Nathan Silvermaster, a Russian-born economist with the War Production Board during World War II who was dedicated to the dream of a Soviet America. But by far the more common “traitors” were men like Hiss: well-educated, progressive idealists. They were the type who had come of age after the stock market crash of 1929 and had grown sick of a hands-off government that allowed encampments of hungry and homeless people to spring up all over the country without taking action.[I would have found me some woods to live and hunt in,screw that hungry stuff DC]
When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and Hiss received a telegram from Felix Frankfurter, his former Harvard law professor and an adviser to FDR, urging him to come work for the new administration “on the basis of national emergency,” Hiss knew that he had to sign up. For young New Dealers, “it was a call to arms, being told that the nation was in danger. I think many of us who went down [to Washington] in those first few weeks thought of ourselves as civilian militia going down for the duration of a real emergency, as if we were going to war. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address, used the sacrifices of war as an analogy.”
In despair over the enormous human suffering of the Depression, with some fifteen million jobless—a quarter of the U.S. labor force—some of these New Dealers found themselves drawn, at least for a time, to the discipline and militancy of the Communist Party. Some were intrigued by the Soviet economic experiment, which appeared at least comparatively functional, and thought their own ailing capitalist system might learn something from it. During World War II, when the Roosevelt administration urged Americans to regard the Russians as indispensable comrades-in-arms, some of these federal officials looked for ways to strengthen these bonds by sharing information with our allies. But while some of these men and women crossed the line, most saw themselves as patriots whose dreams for the future were deeply rooted in American traditions, not European ideologies. Roosevelt was their guiding light, not Stalin.
To this day, Alger Hiss—who was convicted of perjury, not treason— remains a conundrum, his guilt or innocence still hotly debated along ideological lines. When the Venona decrypts were declassified in the 1990s, some saw smoking-gun proof of his guilt, while others argued that the case had only entered an even murkier stage. In the end, Hiss will likely be seen as a perplexingly mixed bag: a fundamentally loyal American who had associated with left-wing circles in Washington and was not entirely forthcoming with Congress, but was never a serious threat to national security.
The least credible aspect of Hiss’s testimony was his insistence that he had never known “an individual by the name of Whittaker Chambers.” When Nixon later staged a face-to-face meeting between the two men, Hiss finally acknowledged that he had known Chambers, though under another name, and only briefly in 1935. But the evidence pointed to a more intricate relationship than that. The political complexity of the Hiss case was further entangled by its interpersonal complications. Although a married man with children, Chambers confessed to the FBI that he had led a secret homosexual life. He was clearly enamored of Hiss and his family. In Witness, he wrote that he came to regard Alger and Priscilla Hiss “as friends as close as a man ever makes in life.” Under questioning from Nixon, Chambers warmly described Hiss—the man whose life he was in the process of ruining—as “a man of great simplicity and a great gentleness and sweetness of character.” It was a far cry from how Nixon viewed the “cold and callous” Hiss.
The Republican wise men took Nixon into their confidence, and once again the ambitious young politician came to a mutually convenient arrangement with the Dulles circle. It was another significant step for Nixon through the portals of power. With the Republican brain trust’s full support, Nixon would continue his aggressive pursuit of Hiss while keeping the spotlight carefully away from Foster and other GOP luminaries who were tied to the accused man. Meanwhile, Foster moved quickly to distance himself from Hiss, pressuring him behind the scenes to resign his Carnegie Endowment post, while Allen fed incriminating intelligence to Nixon to bolster his case. Some of this confidential information about Hiss likely came from the Venona project, the Army intelligence program that had been set up in 1943 to decrypt messages sent by Soviet spy agencies. The Venona project was so top secret that it was kept hidden from President Truman, but the deeply wired Dulles might have enjoyed access to it.
Nixon was impressed by the Dulles brothers’ bold decision to politically exploit the Hiss affair rather than run from it. The HUAC investigation could have been “acutely embarrassing” to Foster, Nixon later noted. The Dulles's “could have suggested that I delay the proceedings until after the election.” But instead, with Nixon’s help, they turned the Hiss case to their advantage, with Dewey fulminating against the laxity of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations that had allowed Communists to penetrate the government. The meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel proved a turning point. For the next decade, Republicans would use Cold War hysteria not just to indict Communist Party members and sympathizers as traitors but to brand the entire New Deal legacy as un-American. Even former high-ranking New Dealers with impeccable credentials like Alger Hiss would be fair game in Washington’s new inquisitorial climate.
The age of paranoia brought out Nixon’s brilliance as a political performer. He had a deep, demagogic instinct for playing on the public’s darkest fears. Robert Stripling, his right-hand man on HUAC, came to believe that there was no genuine ideological passion in Nixon’s pursuit of the “traitor” Hiss, just the same cold-blooded calculation he had brought to his campaign against Jerry Voorhis. “He was no more concerned about whether Hiss was [a Communist] than a billy goat,” the HUAC investigator later remarked.
This was not an entirely fair assessment of Nixon. The young politician clearly had developed deeply felt convictions about the brutality of the Communist system. When his Marshall Plan tour took him to Greece, Nixon was horrified to meet a young woman whose left breast had been hacked off by Communist guerrillas. He returned from the trip with a firm belief in the implacability of Communist regimes, and the conviction that they only understood force—a view that he would modify when he became president and engaged both the Soviet Union and China in strenuous diplomacy.
But at home, Nixon’s anti-Communism reeked of political cynicism, earning him the nickname “Tricky Dick.” He smeared his opponents with reckless abandon, labeling them as Reds or “dupes” or, in the case of his 1950 senatorial opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, a woman who was “pink down to her underwear.” Nixon never proved that Hiss was a card-carrying Communist or a Soviet agent, but, with typical hyperbole, he treated him like he was a mortal threat to the American way of life.
The highlight of Nixon’s obsessive, Javert-like pursuit of Hiss came when Chambers dramatically led HUAC investigators to a pumpkin patch on his Maryland farm, where he produced a hollowed-out pumpkin containing sixtyfive pages of retyped State Department documents, four pages of copied government documents in Hiss’s handwriting, and five rolls of classified film— all of which, Chambers claimed, had been slipped to him by Hiss in 1938. Nixon staged a dramatic return to Washington from a Caribbean vacation cruise, with the help of a Coast Guard rescue plane, in order to publicize the so-called pumpkin papers. The documents, which seemed to prove that Hiss did have an espionage connection to Chambers, sealed the diplomat’s fate. He was indicted in December 1948 by a federal grand jury for lying to Congress.
Hiss continued to vigorously deny his guilt, insisting that the pumpkin papers had been forged by Chambers. Neither he nor his wife, Priscilla, could have retyped the State Department documents, said Hiss, because they had given away the Woodstock model typewriter that they allegedly used to copy the classified memos before 1938. Four jury members at his first deadlocked trial believed Hiss, agreeing that someone other than Hiss or his wife had retyped the State Department documents. Hiss’s suspicion that he was framed was given further credence years later by John Dean, the former White House attorney who became a key witness in the Watergate scandal that ended the Nixon presidency. Writing in his memoir Blind Ambition, Dean alleged that Nixon told fellow White House aide Charles Colson, “We built [the typewriter] in the Hiss case,” implying that with the help of FBI technicians, Nixon had used a replica of the Woodstock machine to trap his prey.
Hiss’s second trial did not go in his favor. Among the witnesses who testified against him was John Foster Dulles, who disputed Hiss’s recollection of the events leading to his resignation from the Carnegie Endowment. It was the final nail in Hiss’s coffin by his former patron. In January 1950, Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to federal prison, where he would serve three and a half years. Meanwhile, Chambers, a man who had launched his writing career by working for the Communist Party press, continued to enjoy his new life as a polemicist for the conservative media, first in Henry Luce’s plush Time-Life tower and then in the more modest Manhattan offices of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
For Nixon, the Washington spy spectacle demonstrated not only the moral turpitude of Alger Hiss but the intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal elite. His successful pursuit of Hiss brought him national fame, Nixon later observed, but it also attracted the “unparalleled venom and irrational fury” of the liberal intelligentsia, which saw Hiss as a New Deal icon. He was convinced that he would never be forgiven by “substantial segments of the press and intellectual community” for exposing how the New Deal had been compromised by the Communist underground. Nixon brooded that it was this “hatred and hostility” that might have cost him the 1960 presidential election.
Chambers, too, saw his decision to incriminate Hiss as part of a broader assault on New Deal–style government and its “drift toward socialism.” In his 1952 memoir Witness, Chambers conflated the Roosevelt presidency with the evils of Communist rule. The New Deal, he wrote, “was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking.” Both types of revolution, he argued, led to a triumph of the state over the individual. [So very true DC]
The Cold War furies that Nixon and the Dulles brothers helped to unleash scoured all nuance and charity from American politics. There were indeed a few committed Communist agents embedded here and there in Roosevelt’s bureaucracy, such as Nathan Silvermaster, a Russian-born economist with the War Production Board during World War II who was dedicated to the dream of a Soviet America. But by far the more common “traitors” were men like Hiss: well-educated, progressive idealists. They were the type who had come of age after the stock market crash of 1929 and had grown sick of a hands-off government that allowed encampments of hungry and homeless people to spring up all over the country without taking action.[I would have found me some woods to live and hunt in,screw that hungry stuff DC]
When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and Hiss received a telegram from Felix Frankfurter, his former Harvard law professor and an adviser to FDR, urging him to come work for the new administration “on the basis of national emergency,” Hiss knew that he had to sign up. For young New Dealers, “it was a call to arms, being told that the nation was in danger. I think many of us who went down [to Washington] in those first few weeks thought of ourselves as civilian militia going down for the duration of a real emergency, as if we were going to war. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address, used the sacrifices of war as an analogy.”
In despair over the enormous human suffering of the Depression, with some fifteen million jobless—a quarter of the U.S. labor force—some of these New Dealers found themselves drawn, at least for a time, to the discipline and militancy of the Communist Party. Some were intrigued by the Soviet economic experiment, which appeared at least comparatively functional, and thought their own ailing capitalist system might learn something from it. During World War II, when the Roosevelt administration urged Americans to regard the Russians as indispensable comrades-in-arms, some of these federal officials looked for ways to strengthen these bonds by sharing information with our allies. But while some of these men and women crossed the line, most saw themselves as patriots whose dreams for the future were deeply rooted in American traditions, not European ideologies. Roosevelt was their guiding light, not Stalin.
To this day, Alger Hiss—who was convicted of perjury, not treason— remains a conundrum, his guilt or innocence still hotly debated along ideological lines. When the Venona decrypts were declassified in the 1990s, some saw smoking-gun proof of his guilt, while others argued that the case had only entered an even murkier stage. In the end, Hiss will likely be seen as a perplexingly mixed bag: a fundamentally loyal American who had associated with left-wing circles in Washington and was not entirely forthcoming with Congress, but was never a serious threat to national security.
The least credible aspect of Hiss’s testimony was his insistence that he had never known “an individual by the name of Whittaker Chambers.” When Nixon later staged a face-to-face meeting between the two men, Hiss finally acknowledged that he had known Chambers, though under another name, and only briefly in 1935. But the evidence pointed to a more intricate relationship than that. The political complexity of the Hiss case was further entangled by its interpersonal complications. Although a married man with children, Chambers confessed to the FBI that he had led a secret homosexual life. He was clearly enamored of Hiss and his family. In Witness, he wrote that he came to regard Alger and Priscilla Hiss “as friends as close as a man ever makes in life.” Under questioning from Nixon, Chambers warmly described Hiss—the man whose life he was in the process of ruining—as “a man of great simplicity and a great gentleness and sweetness of character.” It was a far cry from how Nixon viewed the “cold and callous” Hiss.
Chambers recounted the final meeting he allegedly had with Hiss—when he
went to Hiss’s Washington home in 1938 to beg the diplomat to leave the
Communist Party—with the wounded clarity of a man remembering a lovers’
breakup: “We looked at each other steadily for a moment, believing that we were
seeing each other for the last time and knowing that between us lay . . . a molten
torrent. When we turned to walk in different directions from that torrent, it
would be as men whom history left no choice but to be enemies. As we
hesitated, tears came into Alger Hiss’s eyes—the only time I ever saw him so
moved. He has denied this publicly and derisively. . . . He should not regret those
few tears, for as long as men are human, and remember our story, they will plead
for his humanity.”
Hiss came to believe that Chambers’s accusations against him were those of a rejected suitor. Chambers had never made sexual advances, said Hiss, but “his attitude to me, and his relations, were strange . . . he had a hostility to the point of jealousy about my wife. . . . My guess is that he had some obscure kind of love attachment . . . about me.”
Hiss’s reluctance to acknowledge his relationship with his accuser might have been due to his uneasiness about the nature of his involvement with the man. Nixon concluded that Hiss had reciprocated Chambers’s passion and that a homosexual drama lay at the heart of the political tempest. “The true story of the Hiss case,” Nixon revealed to a congressional confidante on board his presidential yacht a quarter century later, was that Hiss and Chambers had been “queers.”
But whatever human subtleties might have explained the Hiss affair were pounded to dust by the blunt instruments of Cold War discourse. The investigative apparatus that Nixon and his patrons built in Washington had no way to measure political nuances and peculiarities of the heart.
Alger Hiss had moved in political circles viewed as benign in Roosevelt’s Washington but would take on a sinister cast in the panicky atmosphere of the Cold War. Even Allen Dulles had worked with Communists during the war. After the war, you could remain a Communist or Socialist in Western Europe and still be granted a place in the democratic arena. But not in Washington. There, even New Dealers were in danger.
On August 13, 1948, two days after Nixon met with the Dulles group at the Roosevelt Hotel, the HUAC “show trial”—as the hearings were being called in the liberal press—resumed in the Old House Office Building. Once again, the palatial caucus room, with its Greek revival décor and glittering chandeliers, was the scene of a media extravaganza. The day’s leading witness was a man whom many considered the committee’s top target, since he had held a considerably more important post in the Roosevelt administration than Hiss.
Harry Dexter White was a slight, bespectacled, fifty-five-year-old former
government economist whose name meant little to the general public. But as the
big thinker in Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department, White had played a
major role in shaping New Deal policy. Among his many accomplishments was
the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two
linchpins of the postwar global financial order that White was widely credited
with spearheading. White joined forces with the esteemed British economist
John Maynard Keynes to hammer out the plans for the world’s new financial
system, but while Keynes provided substantial intellectual input, it was the
politically savvy White who was key to bringing the plans to fruition. White
would later be hailed as “arguably the most important U.S. government
economist of the 20th century.”
There is little doubt that Harry Dexter White was one of the main topics for discussion, along with Alger Hiss, at the Roosevelt Hotel that night in August 1948. In fact, the Dulles group saw White as a bigger threat to their postwar plans than Hiss. The formidable White was intent on building a new financial order that would be a “New Deal for a new world,” with the new global institutions channeling investment to needy countries in ways that produced the broadest public good rather than the greatest private gain. When the Roosevelt administration unveiled its plans for the World Bank and IMF, Secretary Morgenthau declared that the goal was “to drive . . . the usurious money lenders from the temple of international finance.” Not surprisingly, Wall Street banks saw the new institutions, which were to be “instrumentalities of sovereign governments and not of private financial interests,” as dangerous new competitors in the global capital markets. [Oh please,not competitors,the mistake is referring to the Wall St bankers giving off the air that they are American,but the bankers were already global in scope, so no,not competition DC]
For the Dulles group, there were a number of disquieting developments at the Bretton Woods Conference, held in the green foothills of New Hampshire in the summer of 1944, where 730 delegates from around the world thrashed out the final plans for the new financial system. Morgenthau and White led a movement at the conference to abolish the Bank for International Settlements, an institution they saw as an instrument of financial collaboration among New York, London, and Nazi Germany. It took a major, behind-the-scenes campaign at Bretton Woods—an effort mounted by representatives of Wall Street, the State Department, and the Bank of England—to head off the Morgenthau-White assault on BIS, which the New Dealers wanted to replace with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
White further unnerved Wall Street and Republican circles by pushing for the Soviet Union to be integrated into the new international framework. The Treasury Department’s financial wizard saw this postwar partnership with the Soviet Union—a nation with vast markets and resources—as a potentially enormous boon for the U.S. economy, which he feared could slip back into depression after the wartime stimulus disappeared. White also saw this East/West financial partnership as a way to continue the wartime alliance with Moscow and to ensure world peace, a goal that President Roosevelt had made clear was a priority.
By 1948, the visionary internationalism of the Roosevelt years was being rapidly replaced by the hardening nationalism of the Truman presidency. Men like Harry White had been driven from Washington, but he still served as a consultant to the IMF and he was still widely respected throughout the world. And White still had detailed, inside knowledge from his years as Morgenthau’s top aide about the wartime activities of the Dulles group.
If the political winds had been blowing in a different direction in 1948, it might well have been men like Foster and Allen Dulles, Thomas McKittrick of BIS, and Walter Teagle and William Stamps Farish of Standard Oil instead of New Dealers like Hiss and White who were put under the investigative spotlight for treason. But by turning the table on New Deal officials such as White, who had long wanted to prosecute these high-level Nazi collaborators, the Dulles group ensured their own legal protection. By seizing the investigative momentum, Republicans like Dick Nixon, whom Loftus called “Allen Dulles’s mouthpiece in Congress,” made sure that the Dulles circle would never have to answer for their wartime actions.
By the time Harry Dexter White walked into the packed hearing room on the
morning of August 13, he had been under FBI investigation for seven months. J.
Edgar Hoover’s agents had tapped his phones and conducted scores of
interviews in a determined effort to find evidence that he was a Russian spy.
White’s two principal accusers were Chambers and an emotionally unstable
alcoholic named Elizabeth Bentley, who had taken Chambers’s place as a Soviet
spy courier in wartime Washington after he fled the Communist Party in 1938.
HUAC made Bentley, who appeared in front of the committee two weeks before
White, one of its star witnesses. Earlier, she had told the FBI that White was not
a “card-carrying Communist,” but when she stepped in front of the dazzling
newsreel lights, her story grew more dramatic. White was no longer simply a
“misguided idealist” but a central player in the Nathan Silvermaster spy ring,
feeding confidential information to the group and using his influence to place
Communist “contacts” in key government positions.
Bentley, however, proved a highly problematic witness for HUAC. The
former spy admitted she had never met White, and over time, as her alcoholism
grew worse, she became an increasingly erratic “expert”—as the committee
billed her—on Communist Party machinations. As her life spun out of control,
Bentley blackmailed the FBI into putting her on its payroll. She would remain a
deeply troubled ward of the bureau for the rest of her life, a witness-for-hire
whom government investigators would drag into the spotlight in between
blackouts, car wrecks, and tumultuous lovers’ quarrels. Instead of the glamorous
“red spy queen” of the tabloid media’s dreams, the matronly, weak-chinned
Bentley grew to become a pathetic symbol of Cold War exhibitionism.
When Chambers testified about White before HUAC, he was more circumspect than Bentley. He claimed that he had met with White from time to time as a Soviet courier, but he conceded that the Treasury economist was always cautious and never gave him government documents. “I cannot say he was a Communist,” he testified. In fact, Chambers seemed not to know what to make of White. “His motives always baffled me,” he wrote in his memoir.
Nixon and his fellow HUAC members knew that their case against White was weak. Earlier in the year, the former Treasury official had already made a successful appearance before a federal grand jury in New York that was investigating government subversion. The jury, which would later bring charges against Hiss, found insufficient evidence to indict White. And despite the FBI’s obsessive surveillance of White, even Hoover’s intimate colleague Clyde Tolson acknowledged that there was simply not enough proof to label him a “Soviet espionage agent” and warned that FBI officials were “making a great mistake in using this phraseology.”
In his appearance before HUAC, White conducted himself with dignity and eloquence. The committee’s badgering style often brought out the worst in witnesses, with many resorting to obfuscating tactics or outraged histrionics, and others cowering cravenly and surrendering all that was asked of them, including their self-respect. But White responded to the committee’s questions head-on, and when he felt compelled to enlighten his inquisitors on constitutional principles and the fundamentals of the American legal system, he did so with a respectful, professorial calm. White began his testimony by firmly denying that he had ever been a Communist, explaining that he adhered instead to a set of beliefs that he called “the American creed.”
Hiss came to believe that Chambers’s accusations against him were those of a rejected suitor. Chambers had never made sexual advances, said Hiss, but “his attitude to me, and his relations, were strange . . . he had a hostility to the point of jealousy about my wife. . . . My guess is that he had some obscure kind of love attachment . . . about me.”
Hiss’s reluctance to acknowledge his relationship with his accuser might have been due to his uneasiness about the nature of his involvement with the man. Nixon concluded that Hiss had reciprocated Chambers’s passion and that a homosexual drama lay at the heart of the political tempest. “The true story of the Hiss case,” Nixon revealed to a congressional confidante on board his presidential yacht a quarter century later, was that Hiss and Chambers had been “queers.”
But whatever human subtleties might have explained the Hiss affair were pounded to dust by the blunt instruments of Cold War discourse. The investigative apparatus that Nixon and his patrons built in Washington had no way to measure political nuances and peculiarities of the heart.
Alger Hiss had moved in political circles viewed as benign in Roosevelt’s Washington but would take on a sinister cast in the panicky atmosphere of the Cold War. Even Allen Dulles had worked with Communists during the war. After the war, you could remain a Communist or Socialist in Western Europe and still be granted a place in the democratic arena. But not in Washington. There, even New Dealers were in danger.
On August 13, 1948, two days after Nixon met with the Dulles group at the Roosevelt Hotel, the HUAC “show trial”—as the hearings were being called in the liberal press—resumed in the Old House Office Building. Once again, the palatial caucus room, with its Greek revival décor and glittering chandeliers, was the scene of a media extravaganza. The day’s leading witness was a man whom many considered the committee’s top target, since he had held a considerably more important post in the Roosevelt administration than Hiss.
There is little doubt that Harry Dexter White was one of the main topics for discussion, along with Alger Hiss, at the Roosevelt Hotel that night in August 1948. In fact, the Dulles group saw White as a bigger threat to their postwar plans than Hiss. The formidable White was intent on building a new financial order that would be a “New Deal for a new world,” with the new global institutions channeling investment to needy countries in ways that produced the broadest public good rather than the greatest private gain. When the Roosevelt administration unveiled its plans for the World Bank and IMF, Secretary Morgenthau declared that the goal was “to drive . . . the usurious money lenders from the temple of international finance.” Not surprisingly, Wall Street banks saw the new institutions, which were to be “instrumentalities of sovereign governments and not of private financial interests,” as dangerous new competitors in the global capital markets. [Oh please,not competitors,the mistake is referring to the Wall St bankers giving off the air that they are American,but the bankers were already global in scope, so no,not competition DC]
For the Dulles group, there were a number of disquieting developments at the Bretton Woods Conference, held in the green foothills of New Hampshire in the summer of 1944, where 730 delegates from around the world thrashed out the final plans for the new financial system. Morgenthau and White led a movement at the conference to abolish the Bank for International Settlements, an institution they saw as an instrument of financial collaboration among New York, London, and Nazi Germany. It took a major, behind-the-scenes campaign at Bretton Woods—an effort mounted by representatives of Wall Street, the State Department, and the Bank of England—to head off the Morgenthau-White assault on BIS, which the New Dealers wanted to replace with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
White further unnerved Wall Street and Republican circles by pushing for the Soviet Union to be integrated into the new international framework. The Treasury Department’s financial wizard saw this postwar partnership with the Soviet Union—a nation with vast markets and resources—as a potentially enormous boon for the U.S. economy, which he feared could slip back into depression after the wartime stimulus disappeared. White also saw this East/West financial partnership as a way to continue the wartime alliance with Moscow and to ensure world peace, a goal that President Roosevelt had made clear was a priority.
By 1948, the visionary internationalism of the Roosevelt years was being rapidly replaced by the hardening nationalism of the Truman presidency. Men like Harry White had been driven from Washington, but he still served as a consultant to the IMF and he was still widely respected throughout the world. And White still had detailed, inside knowledge from his years as Morgenthau’s top aide about the wartime activities of the Dulles group.
If the political winds had been blowing in a different direction in 1948, it might well have been men like Foster and Allen Dulles, Thomas McKittrick of BIS, and Walter Teagle and William Stamps Farish of Standard Oil instead of New Dealers like Hiss and White who were put under the investigative spotlight for treason. But by turning the table on New Deal officials such as White, who had long wanted to prosecute these high-level Nazi collaborators, the Dulles group ensured their own legal protection. By seizing the investigative momentum, Republicans like Dick Nixon, whom Loftus called “Allen Dulles’s mouthpiece in Congress,” made sure that the Dulles circle would never have to answer for their wartime actions.
When Chambers testified about White before HUAC, he was more circumspect than Bentley. He claimed that he had met with White from time to time as a Soviet courier, but he conceded that the Treasury economist was always cautious and never gave him government documents. “I cannot say he was a Communist,” he testified. In fact, Chambers seemed not to know what to make of White. “His motives always baffled me,” he wrote in his memoir.
Nixon and his fellow HUAC members knew that their case against White was weak. Earlier in the year, the former Treasury official had already made a successful appearance before a federal grand jury in New York that was investigating government subversion. The jury, which would later bring charges against Hiss, found insufficient evidence to indict White. And despite the FBI’s obsessive surveillance of White, even Hoover’s intimate colleague Clyde Tolson acknowledged that there was simply not enough proof to label him a “Soviet espionage agent” and warned that FBI officials were “making a great mistake in using this phraseology.”
In his appearance before HUAC, White conducted himself with dignity and eloquence. The committee’s badgering style often brought out the worst in witnesses, with many resorting to obfuscating tactics or outraged histrionics, and others cowering cravenly and surrendering all that was asked of them, including their self-respect. But White responded to the committee’s questions head-on, and when he felt compelled to enlighten his inquisitors on constitutional principles and the fundamentals of the American legal system, he did so with a respectful, professorial calm. White began his testimony by firmly denying that he had ever been a Communist, explaining that he adhered instead to a set of beliefs that he called “the American creed.”
I believe in freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of thought,
freedom of the press, freedom of criticism, and freedom of movement. I
believe in the goal of equal opportunity, and the right of each individual
to follow the calling of his or her own choice, and the right of every
individual to an opportunity to develop his or her capacity to the fullest.
I believe in the right and duty of every citizen to work for, to expect, and to obtain an increasing measure of political, economic, and emotional security for all. I am opposed to discrimination in any form, whether on the grounds of race, color, religion, political belief or economic status.
I believe in the freedom of choice of one’s representatives in government, untrammeled by machine guns, secret police, or a police state. I am opposed to arbitrary and unwarranted use of power or authority from whatever source or against any individual or group. I believe in the government of law, not of men. . . .
I consider these principles sacred. I regard them as the basic fabric of our American way of life, and I believe in them as living realities, and not as mere words on paper. . . .
“That is my creed. Those are the principles that I have worked for. Those are the principles that I have been prepared in the past to fight for,” concluded White, who had enlisted in the Army during World War I, “and am prepared to defend at any time with my life, if need be.”
White’s statement, a ringing invocation of the embattled New Deal philosophy that was in full retreat in Washington, evoked a loud and sustained round of applause from the audience. The former FDR official’s performance was so self-assured that committee members lunged at ways to rattle him. HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Republican who sought to ride the investigation to political glory but instead ended his career in prison for corruption, aimed a particularly low blow at White.
For a number of years, the economist had been grappling with a serious heart condition. The FBI had been forced to delay its interrogation of White the previous year, after he suffered a heart attack. Before his HUAC appearance, he informed the committee of his medical history in a confidential letter. But when White began speaking about his connection with Nathan Silvermaster, explaining that it was a harmless relationship that consisted of such recreational activities as playing Ping-Pong in the accused spy’s basement, Thomas shocked the room by interjecting a comment about White’s illness. “For a person who had a severe heart condition, you certainly can play a lot of sports,” sneered Thomas. It was a typically ugly moment for the HUAC chairman, and when White replied with gentlemanly restraint, pointing out that his athletic days were far behind him, the audience again burst into applause.
Nixon also got into a losing sparring match with White, clashing with the witness over whether or not the HUAC hearings were “star-chamber proceedings.” The congressman insisted that they did not meet that definition because they were open to the public. But White pointed out that by denying alleged “subversives” the right to confront and cross-examine their accusers, HUAC veered dangerously close to operating as a royal tribunal. “Congressman,” White patiently explained, “I am sure you appreciate that you need to balance the need for conducting a hearing of this kind against the dangers of doing irreparable harm to some innocent persons. That is a patient heritage which Americans have, that a man is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty . . . and certainly you would be the first to recognize that, in order for a man to have a fair trial, it requires all the rules and regulations of a court hearing.”
Nixon, who had acknowledged that he was locking horns with a “rather noted scholar,” a man who held degrees from Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard, could only bow in agreement. “You are absolutely correct,” he told White.
The only committee member who found a weakness in White’s story that morning was John McDowell, a Pennsylvania Republican, who suggested that the former Treasury official had kept some suspicious company when he served in the Roosevelt administration. Several of the men whom he called “good friends,” including Silvermaster, were accused spies, McDowell pointed out. “In case we proved that these men are all part of an espionage ring, your place in history is going to be changed considerably, would you not think?” It proved to be a prophetic remark, since, after his death, White would indeed be widely condemned as a spy, a conclusion that was based largely on guilt by association.
White was certainly not entirely blameless. As the smartest man in Secretary Morgenthau’s inner council, he had sometimes operated in the Washington arena with a reckless arrogance. He was dismissive of bureaucratic protocols and saw nothing wrong with pursuing his own diplomatic initiatives with the Soviets. As White’s biographer, R. Bruce Craig, would conclude, he probably was guilty of “a species of espionage,” but a fairly benign one. There is no evidence that White handed over classified documents or subverted U.S. policy to correspond with the Soviet line. But he was guilty of frequent indiscretion when discussing policy issues with Soviet officials or with his left-wing friends and colleagues.
To White this boldness was all in service to a higher good—his dream of a harmonious global financial order. White felt that his communications with the Soviet camp were not only in line with American interests but were in keeping with the sentiments of his bosses, Morgenthau and FDR. By pursuing this dialogue, he believed he could help rope the Soviets into Roosevelt’s new world order. But White knew that he was taking a risk, and when the political mood in Washington shifted after FDR’s death, he suddenly seemed not merely idealistic but dangerous.
White claimed not to know the political affiliations of the men he helped bring into the federal government, yet he certainly must have known that some were close to the Communist Party if not actual members. To White, what mattered was that they were talented economists who brought impressive skills to government. The fact that most of them were, like him, products of eastern European Jewish families, who had worked hard to climb the academic and professional ladders while maintaining a strong sense of public service, only reinforced the bonds that he felt with them.
Despite the committee’s insistence that he disown former colleagues such as Silvermaster, White refused to do so. “You cannot erase seven or eight years of friendship with a man that way unless I see evidence, unless the court declares he is [guilty]—and until they prove he is guilty, I believe he is innocent.” It was one final, heartfelt declaration of principle from White, and it brought forth yet another eruption from the crowd. White, at pains to avoid coming across as a grandstander, apologized to Thomas. “I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, this applause is not my fault.”
After concluding his testimony, White left Capitol Hill for Union Station, where he boarded a train for New Hampshire. He and his wife had recently bought a farm there, known as Blueberry Hill, and he looked forward to some much-needed relaxation after the relentless stress of the FBI, grand jury, and HUAC investigations. On board the train, White felt chest pains, but when he arrived at the local station he insisted on continuing on to his remote farm, which lay at the end of a three-mile dirt road. The following day, August 14, he suffered a massive heart attack. Two physicians were summoned, but they declared the patient beyond their medical powers. Two days later, Harry Dexter White died at home, surrounded by his family.
For many, White seemed to be the victim of HUAC’s “special sort of tyranny,” in the words of one partisan reporter. An unusually passionate editorial in The New York Times condemned the committee for its coarse handling of White. HUAC could not be blamed for his heart disease, stated the editorial, but it could certainly be charged with having “aggravated” his condition by putting him through an investigative “ordeal” without “the due protection of laws. . . . This procedure is not the American way of doing things. It is the un-American way.” But Nixon appeared unfazed by the press furor, moving quickly forward with his inquisition of Hiss—who, after White’s passing, would serve as the next best emblem of Rooseveltian treachery.
Harry Dexter White’s death signified the final collapse of Washington’s New Deal order and the unique brand of utopian internationalism that he had championed. It was men like Nixon and Dulles who now moved into the vacuum.
I believe in the right and duty of every citizen to work for, to expect, and to obtain an increasing measure of political, economic, and emotional security for all. I am opposed to discrimination in any form, whether on the grounds of race, color, religion, political belief or economic status.
I believe in the freedom of choice of one’s representatives in government, untrammeled by machine guns, secret police, or a police state. I am opposed to arbitrary and unwarranted use of power or authority from whatever source or against any individual or group. I believe in the government of law, not of men. . . .
I consider these principles sacred. I regard them as the basic fabric of our American way of life, and I believe in them as living realities, and not as mere words on paper. . . .
“That is my creed. Those are the principles that I have worked for. Those are the principles that I have been prepared in the past to fight for,” concluded White, who had enlisted in the Army during World War I, “and am prepared to defend at any time with my life, if need be.”
White’s statement, a ringing invocation of the embattled New Deal philosophy that was in full retreat in Washington, evoked a loud and sustained round of applause from the audience. The former FDR official’s performance was so self-assured that committee members lunged at ways to rattle him. HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Republican who sought to ride the investigation to political glory but instead ended his career in prison for corruption, aimed a particularly low blow at White.
For a number of years, the economist had been grappling with a serious heart condition. The FBI had been forced to delay its interrogation of White the previous year, after he suffered a heart attack. Before his HUAC appearance, he informed the committee of his medical history in a confidential letter. But when White began speaking about his connection with Nathan Silvermaster, explaining that it was a harmless relationship that consisted of such recreational activities as playing Ping-Pong in the accused spy’s basement, Thomas shocked the room by interjecting a comment about White’s illness. “For a person who had a severe heart condition, you certainly can play a lot of sports,” sneered Thomas. It was a typically ugly moment for the HUAC chairman, and when White replied with gentlemanly restraint, pointing out that his athletic days were far behind him, the audience again burst into applause.
Nixon also got into a losing sparring match with White, clashing with the witness over whether or not the HUAC hearings were “star-chamber proceedings.” The congressman insisted that they did not meet that definition because they were open to the public. But White pointed out that by denying alleged “subversives” the right to confront and cross-examine their accusers, HUAC veered dangerously close to operating as a royal tribunal. “Congressman,” White patiently explained, “I am sure you appreciate that you need to balance the need for conducting a hearing of this kind against the dangers of doing irreparable harm to some innocent persons. That is a patient heritage which Americans have, that a man is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty . . . and certainly you would be the first to recognize that, in order for a man to have a fair trial, it requires all the rules and regulations of a court hearing.”
Nixon, who had acknowledged that he was locking horns with a “rather noted scholar,” a man who held degrees from Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard, could only bow in agreement. “You are absolutely correct,” he told White.
The only committee member who found a weakness in White’s story that morning was John McDowell, a Pennsylvania Republican, who suggested that the former Treasury official had kept some suspicious company when he served in the Roosevelt administration. Several of the men whom he called “good friends,” including Silvermaster, were accused spies, McDowell pointed out. “In case we proved that these men are all part of an espionage ring, your place in history is going to be changed considerably, would you not think?” It proved to be a prophetic remark, since, after his death, White would indeed be widely condemned as a spy, a conclusion that was based largely on guilt by association.
White was certainly not entirely blameless. As the smartest man in Secretary Morgenthau’s inner council, he had sometimes operated in the Washington arena with a reckless arrogance. He was dismissive of bureaucratic protocols and saw nothing wrong with pursuing his own diplomatic initiatives with the Soviets. As White’s biographer, R. Bruce Craig, would conclude, he probably was guilty of “a species of espionage,” but a fairly benign one. There is no evidence that White handed over classified documents or subverted U.S. policy to correspond with the Soviet line. But he was guilty of frequent indiscretion when discussing policy issues with Soviet officials or with his left-wing friends and colleagues.
To White this boldness was all in service to a higher good—his dream of a harmonious global financial order. White felt that his communications with the Soviet camp were not only in line with American interests but were in keeping with the sentiments of his bosses, Morgenthau and FDR. By pursuing this dialogue, he believed he could help rope the Soviets into Roosevelt’s new world order. But White knew that he was taking a risk, and when the political mood in Washington shifted after FDR’s death, he suddenly seemed not merely idealistic but dangerous.
White claimed not to know the political affiliations of the men he helped bring into the federal government, yet he certainly must have known that some were close to the Communist Party if not actual members. To White, what mattered was that they were talented economists who brought impressive skills to government. The fact that most of them were, like him, products of eastern European Jewish families, who had worked hard to climb the academic and professional ladders while maintaining a strong sense of public service, only reinforced the bonds that he felt with them.
Despite the committee’s insistence that he disown former colleagues such as Silvermaster, White refused to do so. “You cannot erase seven or eight years of friendship with a man that way unless I see evidence, unless the court declares he is [guilty]—and until they prove he is guilty, I believe he is innocent.” It was one final, heartfelt declaration of principle from White, and it brought forth yet another eruption from the crowd. White, at pains to avoid coming across as a grandstander, apologized to Thomas. “I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, this applause is not my fault.”
After concluding his testimony, White left Capitol Hill for Union Station, where he boarded a train for New Hampshire. He and his wife had recently bought a farm there, known as Blueberry Hill, and he looked forward to some much-needed relaxation after the relentless stress of the FBI, grand jury, and HUAC investigations. On board the train, White felt chest pains, but when he arrived at the local station he insisted on continuing on to his remote farm, which lay at the end of a three-mile dirt road. The following day, August 14, he suffered a massive heart attack. Two physicians were summoned, but they declared the patient beyond their medical powers. Two days later, Harry Dexter White died at home, surrounded by his family.
For many, White seemed to be the victim of HUAC’s “special sort of tyranny,” in the words of one partisan reporter. An unusually passionate editorial in The New York Times condemned the committee for its coarse handling of White. HUAC could not be blamed for his heart disease, stated the editorial, but it could certainly be charged with having “aggravated” his condition by putting him through an investigative “ordeal” without “the due protection of laws. . . . This procedure is not the American way of doing things. It is the un-American way.” But Nixon appeared unfazed by the press furor, moving quickly forward with his inquisition of Hiss—who, after White’s passing, would serve as the next best emblem of Rooseveltian treachery.
Harry Dexter White’s death signified the final collapse of Washington’s New Deal order and the unique brand of utopian internationalism that he had championed. It was men like Nixon and Dulles who now moved into the vacuum.
By 1952, Richard Nixon’s triumph as a Cold War inquisitor had won him the
number-two spot on the Republican presidential ticket headed by war hero
Dwight D. Eisenhower. But on September 29, Drew Pearson, Washington’s
leading muckraker, dropped a bombshell on Nixon—one of his favorite targets
—that briefly threatened to end his political career. The story was part of a larger
theme of corruption that reporters like Pearson believed hovered over Nixon’s
career. Nixon, the humble son of Whittier, always seemed hungry for ways to
profit from his public service.
Earlier in the race, Pearson had discovered that Nixon’s wealthy Southern California supporters had set up a slush fund for the politician’s personal use—a revelation that had nearly forced the vice presidential candidate to resign as Eisenhower’s running mate. It took Nixon’s brilliantly homespun TV address to the nation—which would go down in history as the “Checkers speech” after the black-and-white cocker spaniel that had been given to Nixon’s daughters by a supporter—to preempt the budding scandal and save his political career. “And you know, the kids love the dog,” Nixon told the largest audience that had ever tuned in for a political speech. “And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” His shameless performance managed to transform a case of blatant political corruption into a domestic drama that touched the hearts of millions of Americans.
Nixon’s enormous relief was shared by the GOP power brokers who had picked him for the race. It was the Dulles-Dewey group that had tapped Nixon for vice president. Their decision was conveyed to Eisenhower by Herbert Brownell Jr., a fellow Wall Street attorney who had taken a leave from his bluechip firm to run the Republican campaign for the White House. The GOP brain trust convinced the aging general that the young senator from California not only brought regional balance to the ticket but the kind of slashing energy and anti-Communist fervor that the campaign needed.
But now, in the final weeks of the presidential contest, Pearson was again on the verge of blowing up Nixon’s career. Reporting in his widely syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column, Pearson revealed that the vice presidential candidate had left out something very important from his Checkers speech: namely, his crooked relationship with a Romanian industrialist named Nicolae Malaxa. The wealthy Romanian émigré had collaborated with the Nazis during the war, and later with the Communist regime that took over his homeland. But Malaxa’s reputation, Pearson reported, did not discredit him with Senator Nixon, who pulled strings on his behalf to allow him to continue living in the United States and to procure a major tax break for him.
Pearson knew that Nixon had performed these favors for Malaxa in return for an impressive bribe. But, lacking the documentary evidence, the columnist had to leave this crucial piece of evidence out of his story.
There was indeed a smoking gun: a $100,000 check from Malaxa deposited in Nixon’s Whittier bank account. But Pearson was unable to get his hands on it. In a twist of bad luck for Nixon, one of the tellers at his bank branch turned out to be a Romanian refugee who loathed Malaxa. He sent a photostatic copy of the check to political rivals of the notorious industrialist in the exile community, who in turn forwarded the copied check to their contact in the CIA, Gordon Mason, chief of the agency’s Balkans desk.
By fall 1952, Allen Dulles was the number two man at the CIA and was in
line to take over the agency with an Eisenhower-Nixon victory in November. As
deputy director, Dulles was already making the agency his own, working with
loyal associates like Frank Wisner—who would soon take over the agency’s
action arm—on ways to escalate the covert war against the Eastern bloc. But the
ambitious plans that Dulles and Wisner were hatching for a long-awaited
Republican presidency suddenly seemed in peril when Gordon Mason walked
into Wisner’s office with a copy of the Malaxa check. “Jesus Christ!” Wisner
burst out. “We’d better see Allen Dulles.”
As he had long demonstrated, Frank Wisner was quite willing to recruit from among the ranks of ex-fascists for his espionage operations in Eastern Europe— many of whom he had slipped past immigration authorities into the United States despite their barbaric wartime records. But Wisner, somewhat mysteriously, had insisted on drawing the line with Nicolae Malaxa, whom he considered a particularly “unsavory” character. In a March 1951 CIA memo, Wisner had even urged that Malaxa—who had finagled his way into the United States after the war as part of a Romanian trade delegation—be deported. Wisner had served as the OSS station chief in Romania, and he considered the country his turf. He was acutely sensitive to the factions and feuds within the Romanian exile community, where Malaxa provoked feelings passionate enough to tear apart all hope of a united anti-Soviet front.
Despite Wisner’s feelings about Malaxa, he realized that Allen Dulles was deeply implicated in the Romanian’s “unsavory” story. Dulles had not only been Malaxa’s lawyer, he had introduced him to Nixon. The Malaxa money trail, in fact, led in many compromising directions, including Nixon’s bank account, Dulles’s law firm, CIA front organizations like the National Committee for a Free Europe, and even some of Wisner’s own secret combat groups. The Romanian industrialist, who reportedly stashed away as much as $500 million (worth over $6.5 billion today) in overseas accounts before he fled to the United States, had made himself extremely useful as a shadow financier for the underground Cold War.
Malaxa was the type of charming scoundrel with whom Dulles enjoyed doing business. The Romanian oligarch had no ideology; he believed only in opportunity. He had a witty sense of humor and the dark good looks of a dashing werewolf, with thick black hair and a pronounced widow’s peak. He conducted himself with a cynical, Mittel-European confidence that everyone had a price, greasing his way through life by smoothly slipping cash to all the right people. Bribery came so naturally to Malaxa that he once tried to buy off the dedicated U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service prosecutor who was handling his case—a man who, to Malaxa’s great surprise, turned out to be incorruptible.
He began his career in modest fashion, as a locomotive repairman, but he
had a talent for making connections and opening doors, and soon he amassed a
small fortune as a manufacturer of railroad equipment. In the 1920s, he and his
family moved into a mansion in Bucharest, where he entertained the capital’s
high society, and befriended the mistress of King Carol II, Madame Magda
Lupescu.[Looks like a crossdresser to me DC] In a deft, Game of Thrones–like move, he cemented his royal
connections by arranging for his own daughter to become the mistress of the
king’s son, Prince Michael. By forging a partnership with the king, who proved
equally avaricious, Malaxa became a dominant player in the country’s steel,
munitions, and oil industries.
In the 1930s, as Hitler built his war machine in Germany, King Carol’s rule came under increasing pressure from a homegrown fascist movement known as the Iron Guard. The virulently anti-Semitic organization blamed Jews for Romania’s woes and targeted prominent Jewish figures such as Madame Lupescu. Despite the debt he owed the king’s mistress for her patronage, the ever-opportunistic Malaxa began currying favor with the Iron Guard as the group grew more powerful, financing its activities and flying its flag from the roof of his stone mansion.
In September 1940, the Iron Guard forced King Carol to abdicate and a proGerman fascist government took power in Bucharest. With Hitler’s influence expanding in Romania, Malaxa made another nimble move, merging his industrial empire with that of Herman Goering’s brother Albert. “Your interests, my dear Mr. Malaxa, are the same as ours,” the Nazi industrialist warmly assured him.
In January 1941, Malaxa’s green-uniformed Iron Guard thugs, feeling betrayed by Romania’s new fascist government, launched a coup attempt, using the industrialist’s mansion as a base for their assault. During the coup, the Iron Guard fell upon the country’s Jews in one of the most horrific spasms of violence in Romania’s history. Thousands of Jews in Bucharest were rounded up and beaten and tortured, including one group of more than a hundred—among them children as young as five—who were marched into a municipal slaughterhouse and butchered. The Iron Guardsmen hung their victims, some still alive, on meat hooks and “mutilated them in a vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices,” according to one later account. The Iron Guard’s Bucharest pogrom was so depraved that it shocked even the country’s fascist regime, which appealed to Hitler to help put down the uprising.
After the coup was suppressed, Malaxa was jailed as a leader of the conspiracy and his industrial empire was confiscated by the Nazis and the Romanian government. But, in 1944, as the advancing Soviet army drove the Germans out of Romania, Malaxa again rose from the ashes, insinuating himself into the new Moscow-backed regime. He was the only Romanian capitalist to whom the Communist government returned his industrial property.
Nevertheless, Malaxa was savvy enough to realize that his future was not bright in a Communist Romania. He had already taken the precaution of salting away much of his huge fortune in U.S. accounts. After the war, by making a generous distribution of bribes—including jewels, Cadillacs, and cash—Malaxa persuaded Romanian officials to allow him to travel to the United States, ostensibly on trade business for the country. He arrived in 1946 and never returned home.
Malaxa wisely chose to apply for permanent residency, instead of American citizenship, knowing the process was not as demanding. But his résumé was so eyebrow raising that his battle to stay in the United States would drag on for years. Malaxa’s OSS, CIA, FBI, and INS files bulged with condemnations of his morally dexterous, shape-shifting life. One government report labeled him “notorious.” Another called him “the most perfidious man in Romania.” He was a “master of the art of bribery” who had ushered in an “era of corruption” in Romania. He was a flagrant “opportunist” who “had been on all sides of the fence at various times.” He had gone from playing “Hitler’s game” to someone who “must be considered an agent of the Soviet government and of the Romanian Communists in the United States, even if he himself is not a Communist at heart.”
According to a 1952 CIA memo, “perhaps the most concise appraisal of Malaxa” came from an American diplomat who found him “entirely unscrupulous, turning with the wind, and like a cat [he] has developed to a high art the knack of landing on his feet. He is considered to be essentially a dangerous type of man.”
None of this mattered to Allen Dulles when Malaxa turned up at his office at Sullivan and Cromwell. The pertinent fact was that the Romanian had a huge fortune, and he was willing to spend millions of it where Dulles wanted him to. In return for financing Dulles’s far-flung anti-Communist network—which stretched from Buenos Aires to Bucharest—Malaxa secured Dulles’s influential help in his battle to stay in the United States. Some of Malaxa’s treasure went to prominent Romanian exile leaders who hoped to take power after the Communist regime was toppled. Other funds went to Juan Perón’s Argentina, where Malaxa was involved in a rising neo-fascist movement, and France, where he underwrote “scholarships” for exiled Romanian “students” who turned out to be veterans of the vicious Iron Guard.
Earlier in the race, Pearson had discovered that Nixon’s wealthy Southern California supporters had set up a slush fund for the politician’s personal use—a revelation that had nearly forced the vice presidential candidate to resign as Eisenhower’s running mate. It took Nixon’s brilliantly homespun TV address to the nation—which would go down in history as the “Checkers speech” after the black-and-white cocker spaniel that had been given to Nixon’s daughters by a supporter—to preempt the budding scandal and save his political career. “And you know, the kids love the dog,” Nixon told the largest audience that had ever tuned in for a political speech. “And I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.” His shameless performance managed to transform a case of blatant political corruption into a domestic drama that touched the hearts of millions of Americans.
Nixon’s enormous relief was shared by the GOP power brokers who had picked him for the race. It was the Dulles-Dewey group that had tapped Nixon for vice president. Their decision was conveyed to Eisenhower by Herbert Brownell Jr., a fellow Wall Street attorney who had taken a leave from his bluechip firm to run the Republican campaign for the White House. The GOP brain trust convinced the aging general that the young senator from California not only brought regional balance to the ticket but the kind of slashing energy and anti-Communist fervor that the campaign needed.
But now, in the final weeks of the presidential contest, Pearson was again on the verge of blowing up Nixon’s career. Reporting in his widely syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column, Pearson revealed that the vice presidential candidate had left out something very important from his Checkers speech: namely, his crooked relationship with a Romanian industrialist named Nicolae Malaxa. The wealthy Romanian émigré had collaborated with the Nazis during the war, and later with the Communist regime that took over his homeland. But Malaxa’s reputation, Pearson reported, did not discredit him with Senator Nixon, who pulled strings on his behalf to allow him to continue living in the United States and to procure a major tax break for him.
Pearson knew that Nixon had performed these favors for Malaxa in return for an impressive bribe. But, lacking the documentary evidence, the columnist had to leave this crucial piece of evidence out of his story.
There was indeed a smoking gun: a $100,000 check from Malaxa deposited in Nixon’s Whittier bank account. But Pearson was unable to get his hands on it. In a twist of bad luck for Nixon, one of the tellers at his bank branch turned out to be a Romanian refugee who loathed Malaxa. He sent a photostatic copy of the check to political rivals of the notorious industrialist in the exile community, who in turn forwarded the copied check to their contact in the CIA, Gordon Mason, chief of the agency’s Balkans desk.
As he had long demonstrated, Frank Wisner was quite willing to recruit from among the ranks of ex-fascists for his espionage operations in Eastern Europe— many of whom he had slipped past immigration authorities into the United States despite their barbaric wartime records. But Wisner, somewhat mysteriously, had insisted on drawing the line with Nicolae Malaxa, whom he considered a particularly “unsavory” character. In a March 1951 CIA memo, Wisner had even urged that Malaxa—who had finagled his way into the United States after the war as part of a Romanian trade delegation—be deported. Wisner had served as the OSS station chief in Romania, and he considered the country his turf. He was acutely sensitive to the factions and feuds within the Romanian exile community, where Malaxa provoked feelings passionate enough to tear apart all hope of a united anti-Soviet front.
Despite Wisner’s feelings about Malaxa, he realized that Allen Dulles was deeply implicated in the Romanian’s “unsavory” story. Dulles had not only been Malaxa’s lawyer, he had introduced him to Nixon. The Malaxa money trail, in fact, led in many compromising directions, including Nixon’s bank account, Dulles’s law firm, CIA front organizations like the National Committee for a Free Europe, and even some of Wisner’s own secret combat groups. The Romanian industrialist, who reportedly stashed away as much as $500 million (worth over $6.5 billion today) in overseas accounts before he fled to the United States, had made himself extremely useful as a shadow financier for the underground Cold War.
Malaxa was the type of charming scoundrel with whom Dulles enjoyed doing business. The Romanian oligarch had no ideology; he believed only in opportunity. He had a witty sense of humor and the dark good looks of a dashing werewolf, with thick black hair and a pronounced widow’s peak. He conducted himself with a cynical, Mittel-European confidence that everyone had a price, greasing his way through life by smoothly slipping cash to all the right people. Bribery came so naturally to Malaxa that he once tried to buy off the dedicated U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service prosecutor who was handling his case—a man who, to Malaxa’s great surprise, turned out to be incorruptible.
In the 1930s, as Hitler built his war machine in Germany, King Carol’s rule came under increasing pressure from a homegrown fascist movement known as the Iron Guard. The virulently anti-Semitic organization blamed Jews for Romania’s woes and targeted prominent Jewish figures such as Madame Lupescu. Despite the debt he owed the king’s mistress for her patronage, the ever-opportunistic Malaxa began currying favor with the Iron Guard as the group grew more powerful, financing its activities and flying its flag from the roof of his stone mansion.
In September 1940, the Iron Guard forced King Carol to abdicate and a proGerman fascist government took power in Bucharest. With Hitler’s influence expanding in Romania, Malaxa made another nimble move, merging his industrial empire with that of Herman Goering’s brother Albert. “Your interests, my dear Mr. Malaxa, are the same as ours,” the Nazi industrialist warmly assured him.
In January 1941, Malaxa’s green-uniformed Iron Guard thugs, feeling betrayed by Romania’s new fascist government, launched a coup attempt, using the industrialist’s mansion as a base for their assault. During the coup, the Iron Guard fell upon the country’s Jews in one of the most horrific spasms of violence in Romania’s history. Thousands of Jews in Bucharest were rounded up and beaten and tortured, including one group of more than a hundred—among them children as young as five—who were marched into a municipal slaughterhouse and butchered. The Iron Guardsmen hung their victims, some still alive, on meat hooks and “mutilated them in a vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices,” according to one later account. The Iron Guard’s Bucharest pogrom was so depraved that it shocked even the country’s fascist regime, which appealed to Hitler to help put down the uprising.
After the coup was suppressed, Malaxa was jailed as a leader of the conspiracy and his industrial empire was confiscated by the Nazis and the Romanian government. But, in 1944, as the advancing Soviet army drove the Germans out of Romania, Malaxa again rose from the ashes, insinuating himself into the new Moscow-backed regime. He was the only Romanian capitalist to whom the Communist government returned his industrial property.
Nevertheless, Malaxa was savvy enough to realize that his future was not bright in a Communist Romania. He had already taken the precaution of salting away much of his huge fortune in U.S. accounts. After the war, by making a generous distribution of bribes—including jewels, Cadillacs, and cash—Malaxa persuaded Romanian officials to allow him to travel to the United States, ostensibly on trade business for the country. He arrived in 1946 and never returned home.
Malaxa wisely chose to apply for permanent residency, instead of American citizenship, knowing the process was not as demanding. But his résumé was so eyebrow raising that his battle to stay in the United States would drag on for years. Malaxa’s OSS, CIA, FBI, and INS files bulged with condemnations of his morally dexterous, shape-shifting life. One government report labeled him “notorious.” Another called him “the most perfidious man in Romania.” He was a “master of the art of bribery” who had ushered in an “era of corruption” in Romania. He was a flagrant “opportunist” who “had been on all sides of the fence at various times.” He had gone from playing “Hitler’s game” to someone who “must be considered an agent of the Soviet government and of the Romanian Communists in the United States, even if he himself is not a Communist at heart.”
According to a 1952 CIA memo, “perhaps the most concise appraisal of Malaxa” came from an American diplomat who found him “entirely unscrupulous, turning with the wind, and like a cat [he] has developed to a high art the knack of landing on his feet. He is considered to be essentially a dangerous type of man.”
None of this mattered to Allen Dulles when Malaxa turned up at his office at Sullivan and Cromwell. The pertinent fact was that the Romanian had a huge fortune, and he was willing to spend millions of it where Dulles wanted him to. In return for financing Dulles’s far-flung anti-Communist network—which stretched from Buenos Aires to Bucharest—Malaxa secured Dulles’s influential help in his battle to stay in the United States. Some of Malaxa’s treasure went to prominent Romanian exile leaders who hoped to take power after the Communist regime was toppled. Other funds went to Juan Perón’s Argentina, where Malaxa was involved in a rising neo-fascist movement, and France, where he underwrote “scholarships” for exiled Romanian “students” who turned out to be veterans of the vicious Iron Guard.
By 1948, Malaxa was ensconced in a luxurious apartment on Manhattan’s
Fifth Avenue, but his wheeling and dealing had begun to attract unwanted press
attention. In May, gossip columnist Walter Winchell exposed the notorious
collaborator who was freely enjoying the city’s pleasures—the “Balkanazi on
Broadway,” he called Malaxa. Winchell noted that the “distinguished” firm of
Sullivan and Cromwell had recently dropped the Romanian as a client,
presumably because he had grown too hot.
But Dulles did not abandon Malaxa; behind the scenes, he entrusted the Romanian’s immigration battle to his political protégé Nixon. In return for Malaxa’s substantial gift of $100,000, the California senator began vigorously lobbying INS officials on his behalf and pushing an immigration bill through Congress that was designed to win Malaxa U.S. residency. When those efforts stalled due to determined resistance from legislators who were repelled by the émigré’s past, Malaxa and Nixon tried a different tack. With the help of Nixon cronies in Southern California, Malaxa announced that he was setting up a pipeline factory in Whittier that he called the Western Tube Corporation. Nixon wrote a letter to the Defense Production Administration, claiming that Malaxa’s project was “strategically and economically important, for both California and the entire United States.” The Western Tube factory was never built, but the phantom project succeeded in winning Malaxa a huge tax windfall. And it kept alive the Romanian’s immigration campaign. California congressman John Shelley later denounced the Western Tube affair as “a complete fraud, a springboard for [Malaxa’s] entry to the United States.”
As the smoldering Malaxa scandal threatened to erupt into flames in the final days of the 1952 presidential race, Dulles moved quickly to douse it. After Wisner and Mason showed him Malaxa’s $100,000 check, the deputy CIA director knew that he would have to send it up the chain of command to his boss, General Walter Bedell Smith. But Dulles also realized that, in this case, passing the buck was as good as destroying the evidence. CIA director “Beetle” Smith had served as Eisenhower’s intensely dedicated chief of staff during the war, and he was just as devoted to Ike’s presidential victory as Dulles.
It was Gordon Mason who was given the unpleasant task of showing the evidence of Nixon’s corruption to General Smith, who predictably flew into a rage. “Smith was a man who could cuss in three languages and in almost every sentence,” recalled Mason. “He also had a violent temper, and he acted as though I personally was trying to scuttle Eisenhower.” Smith demanded that Mason immediately gather up every scrap of incriminating material against Nixon and bring it to his office. “The story was cleaned from the books,” said Mason. Wisner, too, had no doubt what was done with the evidence. “Beetle just flushed it all down the toilet.”
Without a copy of the Malaxa check, Drew Pearson could not keep the story going, and it soon petered out. On Election Day, Eisenhower and Nixon swept to a decisive victory, winning 55 percent of the vote and carrying thirty-nine of the forty-eight states.
After the Republican triumph, Dulles and Nixon were finally able to speed Malaxa’s immigration case through the bureaucracy. In December 1953, officials in Eisenhower’s Justice Department bypassed Congress and the INS and granted Malaxa permanent residence through an administrative decree. Justice Department officials explained that they had reached their decision due to the unique technical services provided by the Western Tube Corporation. The fact that Malaxa’s company did not actually exist—and never would—was politely overlooked by the new administration.
Nicolae Malaxa lived out the rest of his days in the comfort of his Fifth Avenue apartment. He began to fancy himself a great benefactor. In January 1953, shortly before Eisenhower’s inauguration, Malaxa reached out the hand of friendship to a prominent Jewish exile named Iancu Zissu. Malaxa sent word that he was eager to meet with Zissu, who was the cofounder of a Romanian exile group. The odd meeting took place in the New York apartment of a popular Romanian singer. According to one witness, “Malaxa told Zissu that he had wanted for some time to know him because he is a great friend of the Jews and a great admirer of the Jewish religion. Malaxa stated that if he could change his own religion, he would adopt the Jewish faith.”
As he bid Zissu farewell, Malaxa “assured him that those who had been his friends had never had reasons to regret it.” It was a surprising burst of goodwill —or, more likely, another attempt by the wily millionaire to buy political support.
From the financial patron of Iron Guard butchers to “great friend of the Jews”—it was just one more grotesque twist in a life filled with them.
But Dulles did not abandon Malaxa; behind the scenes, he entrusted the Romanian’s immigration battle to his political protégé Nixon. In return for Malaxa’s substantial gift of $100,000, the California senator began vigorously lobbying INS officials on his behalf and pushing an immigration bill through Congress that was designed to win Malaxa U.S. residency. When those efforts stalled due to determined resistance from legislators who were repelled by the émigré’s past, Malaxa and Nixon tried a different tack. With the help of Nixon cronies in Southern California, Malaxa announced that he was setting up a pipeline factory in Whittier that he called the Western Tube Corporation. Nixon wrote a letter to the Defense Production Administration, claiming that Malaxa’s project was “strategically and economically important, for both California and the entire United States.” The Western Tube factory was never built, but the phantom project succeeded in winning Malaxa a huge tax windfall. And it kept alive the Romanian’s immigration campaign. California congressman John Shelley later denounced the Western Tube affair as “a complete fraud, a springboard for [Malaxa’s] entry to the United States.”
As the smoldering Malaxa scandal threatened to erupt into flames in the final days of the 1952 presidential race, Dulles moved quickly to douse it. After Wisner and Mason showed him Malaxa’s $100,000 check, the deputy CIA director knew that he would have to send it up the chain of command to his boss, General Walter Bedell Smith. But Dulles also realized that, in this case, passing the buck was as good as destroying the evidence. CIA director “Beetle” Smith had served as Eisenhower’s intensely dedicated chief of staff during the war, and he was just as devoted to Ike’s presidential victory as Dulles.
It was Gordon Mason who was given the unpleasant task of showing the evidence of Nixon’s corruption to General Smith, who predictably flew into a rage. “Smith was a man who could cuss in three languages and in almost every sentence,” recalled Mason. “He also had a violent temper, and he acted as though I personally was trying to scuttle Eisenhower.” Smith demanded that Mason immediately gather up every scrap of incriminating material against Nixon and bring it to his office. “The story was cleaned from the books,” said Mason. Wisner, too, had no doubt what was done with the evidence. “Beetle just flushed it all down the toilet.”
Without a copy of the Malaxa check, Drew Pearson could not keep the story going, and it soon petered out. On Election Day, Eisenhower and Nixon swept to a decisive victory, winning 55 percent of the vote and carrying thirty-nine of the forty-eight states.
After the Republican triumph, Dulles and Nixon were finally able to speed Malaxa’s immigration case through the bureaucracy. In December 1953, officials in Eisenhower’s Justice Department bypassed Congress and the INS and granted Malaxa permanent residence through an administrative decree. Justice Department officials explained that they had reached their decision due to the unique technical services provided by the Western Tube Corporation. The fact that Malaxa’s company did not actually exist—and never would—was politely overlooked by the new administration.
Nicolae Malaxa lived out the rest of his days in the comfort of his Fifth Avenue apartment. He began to fancy himself a great benefactor. In January 1953, shortly before Eisenhower’s inauguration, Malaxa reached out the hand of friendship to a prominent Jewish exile named Iancu Zissu. Malaxa sent word that he was eager to meet with Zissu, who was the cofounder of a Romanian exile group. The odd meeting took place in the New York apartment of a popular Romanian singer. According to one witness, “Malaxa told Zissu that he had wanted for some time to know him because he is a great friend of the Jews and a great admirer of the Jewish religion. Malaxa stated that if he could change his own religion, he would adopt the Jewish faith.”
As he bid Zissu farewell, Malaxa “assured him that those who had been his friends had never had reasons to regret it.” It was a surprising burst of goodwill —or, more likely, another attempt by the wily millionaire to buy political support.
From the financial patron of Iron Guard butchers to “great friend of the Jews”—it was just one more grotesque twist in a life filled with them.
9
The Power Elite
For the Dulles brothers, the Eisenhower-Nixon victory was the culmination of
years of political strategizing dating back to the Roosevelt era. They had come
achingly close to achieving their dreams in the 1948 election, only to see their
longtime ally Tom Dewey lose in the most shocking upset in American history.
But now they were headed for the very center of Washington power. As the new
heads of the State Department and the CIA, they would direct the global
operations of the most powerful nation in the world. The fraternal partnership
gave the Dulles brothers a unique leverage over the incoming administration,
and they were imbued with a deep sense of confidence that these were the roles
they were destined to play. The 1952 presidential election represented the triumph of “the power elite,” in the phrase coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills, academia’s most trenchant observer of Cold War America. Mills was a ruggedly independent, Texas-born scholar. He lived in a farmhouse forty miles outside of New York City and rode a motorcycle that he had built with his own hands to the classes he taught at Columbia University. He favored flannel shirts and work boots, and confided to friends that “way down deep and systematically I’m a goddamned anarchist.” Mills rejected both the tired Marxist discourse that had dominated New York intellectual circles since the 1930s and the “romantic pluralism” that characterized conventional theories about American politics. According to Mills, power in America was not solely in the hands of Marx’s “ruling class”—those who owned the means of production. Nor was it a balancing act of competing interests, such as big business, organized labor, farmers, and professional groups. This ebb-and-flow concept of power—which was clung to by liberal and conservative scholars alike—was a “fairy tale,” in Mills’s words, one that was “not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works.”
Instead, Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite, America was ruled by those who control the “strategic command posts” of society—the big corporations, the machinery of the state, and the military establishment. These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in the “permanent war economy” that had emerged during the Cold War. Though political tensions could flare within the power elite, Mills wrote, there was a remarkable unity of purpose among these ruling groups. The top corporate executives, government leaders, and high-ranking military officers moved fluidly in and out of one another’s worlds, exchanging official roles, socializing in the same clubs, and educating their children at the same exclusive schools. Mills called this professional and social synchronicity “the fraternity of the successful.”
Within this system of American power, Mills saw corporate chiefs as the first among equals. Long interlocked with the federal government, corporate leaders came to dominate the “political directorate” during World War II. The United States had largely become a democracy in form only. More than half of a century before the John Roberts–era Supreme Court that legally sanctioned corporate control of the electoral process, Mills recognized that the shift toward oligarchy was already well under way: “The long-time tendency of business and government to become more intricately and deeply involved with each other has [now] reached a new point of explicitness. The two cannot now be seen clearly as two distinct worlds.”
The crucial task of unifying the power elite, according to Mills, fell to a special subset of the corporate hierarchy—top Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers. These men were the “in-between types” who shuttled smoothly between Manhattan corporate suites and Washington command posts. Little known to the general public, these skilled executors of power constituted in Mills’s words America’s “invisible elite.” They were the men who forged the consensus on key decisions of national significance and who made certain that these decisions were properly implemented. Their work was largely unseen and vaguely understood, but it had enormous impact on the lives of ordinary men and women. It was men like John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles whom Mills had in mind when he wrote of the power elite’s inner core.
Born in Waco to an insurance salesman and a housewife and educated at the University of Texas and the University of Wisconsin, Mills was steeped in a native populism rather than the European ideologies of the New York intelligentsia. A big, broad man with an endless appetite for argument, he could debate for hours on end with the likes of Dwight Macdonald and Irving Howe. But he eschewed the hothouse sectarianism of the New York left, as well as the compulsory mood of “American celebration” that had been embraced by nearly all of his intellectual colleagues in the Eisenhower years, searching instead for a new language to explain the American colossus that had emerged in the postwar era. Mills took aim at the most important topics in American society: the soul killing, “cheerfully robotic” regimentation of corporate life; the unique terrors of the nuclear age—an age, he argued, when war itself had become the enemy, not the Russians; and, of course, the overworld of American power, a realm that he believed few average citizens could grasp, even though it cast a long shadow over their daily existence.
“Take it big!” the intellectually ambitious Mills liked to exclaim. He wrote in a vigorous, clear style that rejected the academic caste’s “bloated puffery of Grand Theory,” in sociologist Todd Gitlin’s words. Soon after The Power Elite was published, it began stirring wide debate, catapulting over the ivy-covered walls of academia onto the bestseller list.
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, corporate lawyer and presidential adviser Adolf Berle—a member in good standing of the power elite —found “an uncomfortable degree of truth” in Mills’s book but fought off his discomfort by concluding that it was essentially “an angry cartoon, not a serious picture.” Mills also struck a sensitive nerve with Cold War liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whom he accused of abandoning their intellectual independence by joining the era’s American celebration. Schlesinger fired back, charging that Mills’s book seemed more intent on stirring the masses than on stimulating serious academic debate. “I look forward to the time when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet’s robes and settles down to being a sociologist again,” he wrote in the New York Post. [Nothing wrong with that DC]
Mills considered himself an intellectual loner—“I am a politician without a party,” he wrote in a letter. But The Power Elite touched a deep chord with a rising new generation of revolutionaries and radicals that was soon to make its impact on history. Young Fidel Castro and Che Guevara pored over the book in the Sierra Maestra mountains. And, at home, Tom Hayden drew heavily on Mills’s writing for the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of the emerging New Left.
By the time the Port Huron Statement was presented to the Students for a Democratic Society convention in June 1962, C. Wright Mills was dead—felled by a heart attack in March of that year, at age forty-five. But his critique of the power elite—and his sense of its fundamental, undemocratic illegitimacy— would continue to heavily influence the 1960s generation. Six years after his death, in the wake of the global youth uprisings of 1968, the CIA continued to identify him as one of the leading intellectual threats to the established order.[yeah most likely a CIA heart attack DC]
Schlesinger was partly right about Mills. Though he was a rigorous researcher and a careful craftsman, The Power Elite did indeed resound here and there with a prophet’s moral urgency. Mills, who was deeply concerned about the runaway nuclear arms race of the Eisenhower era, knew that America’s rulers not only possessed terrifying instruments of violence, these men felt largely unrestrained by democratic checks and balances. The ability of American leaders to end life on the planet imbued them with a dark power in Mills’s mind —one that inspired impassioned passages like the concluding paragraph of The Power Elite:
The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. . . . They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.
Men like the Dulles brothers rejoiced in such “organized irresponsibility.” Democracy, in their minds, was an impediment to the smooth functioning of the corporate state. John Foster Dulles had made this clear early in his Wall Street career as he jousted with FDR’s New Deal bureaucracy. Complaining to Lord McGowan, chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, about government efforts to control the spiraling power of global cartels, Foster once acidly remarked, “The fact of the matter is that most of these politicians are highly insular and nationalistic . . . [so] business people . . . have had to find ways for getting through and around stupid political barriers.” Allen, for his part, had gone through his espionage career with similar disdain for presidential directives and “stupid political barriers.” As Richard Helms put it, with typically droll understatement, “There can be no question that Dulles felt most comfortable running things on his own with a minimum of supervision from above.”
When Franklin Roosevelt moved into the White House in 1933, he was well aware of the entrenched interests that he would be confronting as he attempted to reform the country’s financial system and to create a social buffer against the havoc of the Depression. “The real truth,” FDR wrote to Colonel Edward M. House, President Wilson’s close adviser, “as you and I know, is that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” For a brief period during the widespread devastation of the 1930s, the New Deal was able to challenge this “plutocracy,” as Roosevelt called it. The Roosevelt presidency did not dismantle the power elite, Mills later wrote, “but it did create within the political arena, as well as in the corporate world itself, competing centers of power that challenged those of the corporate directors.”
But the militarization of government during World War II began to return power to the corporate elite, as captains of industry and finance moved into key government posts. The Eisenhower presidency would complete this political counterreformation, as Washington was taken over by business executives, Wall Street lawyers, and investment bankers—and by a closely aligned warrior caste that had emerged into public prominence during World War II.
During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena. In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality. Elevated to the pinnacle of Washington power, they continued to forcefully represent the interests of their corporate caste, conflating them with the national interest. [And so it came to pass,and so has it been DC]
C. Wright Mills was among the first to take note of how “national security” could be invoked by the power elite to more deeply disguise its operations. The Dulles brothers would prove masters at exploiting the anxious state of permanent vigilance that accompanied the Cold War. “For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without foreseeable end,” Mills wrote. “Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”
This chilling observation, which still has disturbing echoes today, captured the gloomy zeitgeist of the Eisenhower-Dulles era. It was a time of American celebration—of unprecedented prosperity and unparalleled military prowess—as well as hair-trigger nuclear tensions. Only a few maverick voices—like that of the intellectual loner from Texas—grasped the frightening amorality that prevailed at the pinnacle of American power.
President Eisenhower enjoyed being in the company of wealthy and powerful men. He filled his administration with power players from the Dewey-Dulles– Rockefeller-Luce–dominated New York nexus, as well as from the higher rungs of industry and the Pentagon. Wall Street lawyer Herbert Brownell was named attorney general after running Ike’s campaign, General Motors CEO Charles Wilson was tapped to run the Defense Department, and Chase Manhattan chairman and former diplomat John McCloy—the very personification of the power elite—was called upon as a national security adviser. Even the Eisenhower administration’s second rung of power—the undersecretaries and deputies level—was weighted with men like Wall Street banker C. Douglas Dillon, another close associate of the Dulles brothers. The exclusive ranks of the Council on Foreign Relations, where the brothers had long held sway, was a particularly fertile ground for administration recruiters.[And people act like Eisenhower was warning the people about this Military/Industrial complex,when in reality he had seen to it,it's ensured success in his 8 years DC]
Ike also liked to spend his leisure time with the high and mighty. The avid “golfer-in-chief” often had prominent business executives and Army generals in tow during his twice-weekly trips to the verdant links at Burning Tree Country Club in Bethesda, including the CEOs of General Electric, Coca-Cola, Reynolds Tobacco, and Young & Rubicam.
Merriman Smith, the longtime White House wire service reporter, defended Ike’s strong affinity for the power elite: “It would be unfair to say that he likes the company of kings of finance and industry purely because of their Dun and Bradstreet ratings. He believes that if a man has worked up to become president of the Ford Motor Company [or] head of the Scripps-Howard newspapers . . . then certainly the man has a lot on the ball, knows his field thoroughly and will be literate and interesting.” To which one observer, quoted by Mills, mordantly responded: “This business of working your way up will come as quite a surprise to young Henry Ford or young Jack Howard [the scion who inherited the Scripps-Howard chain].”
Eisenhower was comfortable in the company of these men because he shared their conservative, business-oriented views. President Truman, who had helped pave the general’s path to the White House by appointing him the first supreme commander of NATO forces in 1951, tried to persuade Eisenhower to run for president as a Democrat, promising that he would “guarantee” him his party’s nomination. But Eisenhower replied, “What reason have you to think I have ever been a Democrat? You know I have been a Republican all my life and that my family have always been Republican.” When Truman persisted, Ike made it even more plain, telling him that his differences with the Democrats, particularly when it came to the party’s pro-labor positions, were simply too immense for him to consider such a course.
Meanwhile, the Dewey-Dulles group’s courtship of Eisenhower to become the Republican standard-bearer, which had begun two years earlier, was coming to a successful conclusion. Dewey had first broached the subject of a White House run at a private meeting with Eisenhower in July 1949, following the governor’s own traumatic presidential defeat. Dewey had beseeched the reluctant general to jump into the political arena, telling him that he was the only man who could “save this country from going to Hades in the handbasket of paternalism, socialism [and] dictatorship.”
By early 1952, the Dulles brothers had come to agree that throwing their support behind the popular war hero was their best path to the White House. In May, Foster flew to France, meeting with the general twice at NATO headquarters in Fontainebleau and urging him to run. The two men did not immediately hit it off. Foster was uncharacteristically diffident and uncertain in the presence of the legendary warrior. Eisenhower, accustomed to crisp military briefings, found Foster’s discursive and lawyerly monologues boring. Foster quickly wore out the general’s patience, which he was in the habit of communicating by tapping out a restless drumbeat on his knee with a pencil and, when that failed to end the ordeal, by gazing blankly at the ceiling and “signaling the end of all mental contact,” in the words of one aide. Foster later brought out the wicked wit in Churchill, who proclaimed him “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”
But the foreign policy paper that Foster presented to Eisenhower in France was far from dull. The memo, which Foster appropriately titled “A Policy of Boldness,” urged the next president to take a much sharper stand against the Soviet bloc than Truman, aiming to roll back Communism in Eastern Europe rather than simply containing it. Foster called for an escalation of the underground war against Moscow that his brother was already operating, including a redoubled commitment to psychological warfare. “We should be dynamic, we should use ideas as weapons, and these ideas should conform to moral principles. That we do this is right, for it is the inevitable expression of a faith—and I am confident that we still do have a faith.” Foster’s paper had the italicized cadences of a preacher’s sermon; it was filled with the missionary fervor that had run for generations through his family.
Foster was at his most zealous in his discussion of nuclear arms policy. He proposed an unsettling shift in thinking about America’s fearsome nuclear arsenal, moving away from the concept of doomsday weapons as an instrument of last resort to one of first resort. The United States must reserve the right to massively retaliate against any Soviet aggression in the world, wherever and whenever it chose, he wrote. By making it clear to the world that Washington was not afraid to wield its nuclear arms as if they were conventional weapons of war, the United States would gain a commanding strategic advantage. It was the type of leverage enjoyed by a heavily armed madman in a crowded room. But Foster had a more diplomatic way of expressing it. Weapons of mass destruction “in the hands of statesmen . . . could serve as effective political weapons in defense of peace.”
Foster further sweetened his argument by pointing out that a nuclear-based military strategy would help contain the growing costs of America’s “far-flung, extravagant” defense complex that was threatening to bankrupt the nation. Instead of maintaining an expensive troop presence at every global flashpoint, Foster wrote, all the United States had to do was keep a ready finger on its nuclear trigger.
Even master of war Eisenhower was initially taken aback by Foster’s proposal for a “first-use” nuclear strategy. After making his presentation to the noncommittal general, Foster returned to his suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where he frantically paced the room, telling a confidant that Eisenhower somehow failed to grasp that the world was facing a dire Soviet threat. But Eisenhower did share Foster’s passionate anti-Communism. And the cost efficiencies of the massive retaliation strategy appealed to the budget-minded general, who was equally concerned about the growing burden of military spending on the economy. So began the reign of nuclear terror—or “brinksmanship”—that would hold the world in its grip for the next decade.
Foster’s new “policy of boldness” became a centerpiece of Eisenhower’s presidential campaign, and the Wall Street lawyer was widely touted as the next secretary of state. Henry Luce helped enshrine Foster by running his foreign policy paper in Life magazine in May 1952. “No one has a broader bipartisan understanding of U.S. foreign policy than John Foster Dulles,” stated the respectful biography that accompanied the article.
After Foster was duly confirmed as secretary of state in January 1953—a position he had long coveted and felt he was destined to hold—he addressed several hundred foreign service employees gathered in front of the State Department building in Foggy Bottom. The weather was uncomfortably cold, but the sixty-five-year-old Foster stood on the steps overlooking the crowd with a sturdy self-confidence—a “solid tree trunk of a man,” in the words of one biographer, “gnarled and weathered and durable.” He carried himself like someone who owned the place. “I don’t suppose there is any family in the United States,” he told his assembled workforce, “which has been for so long identified with the Foreign Service and the State Department as my own family.”
Once installed at Foggy Bottom, Foster quickly took command of Eisenhower’s foreign policy, elbowing aside other experts in international affairs who sought the president’s ear. Sherman Adams, President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, found the new secretary of state a “tough-fibered individual . . . an aristocrat in his own domain” who insisted on maintaining his own direct line to the president. Foster was “a rather secretive person,” Adams added, who assiduously deflected efforts by the White House staff to enter the tight loop he had built with the commander in chief. After their initial uneasiness with each other, Eisenhower ultimately decided that even though his secretary of state was “a bit sticky at first . . . he has a heart of gold when you know him.” Foster soon had Eisenhower “in his palm,” observed a State Department aide.
Allen Dulles felt as firmly entitled to run the CIA under Eisenhower as his brother did the State Department. The junior Dulles had worked uncomplainingly for two years as Walter Bedell Smith’s deputy director at the agency, though he had considerably more intelligence experience than “Beetle.” Dulles good-naturedly put up with the crusty general’s foulmouthed explosions, with the expectation that Smith would anoint him his successor. “The general was in fine form this morning, wasn’t he? Ha, ha, ha!” Dulles would chuckle, after returning to his office from what his CIA colleagues called one of Smith’s “fanny-chewing sessions.”
During the 1952 presidential race, Dulles proved his loyalty to the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign by channeling funds to the Republican ticket through CIA front groups and by leaking embarrassing intelligence reports to the media about the Truman administration’s handling of the Korean War—flagrant violations of the CIA charter that forbids agency involvement in domestic politics.
But even though Smith recruited Dulles for the agency and made him his deputy, he never warmed up to his number two man. “Beetle”—who, as Eisenhower’s former wartime aide, enjoyed unique access to the president-elect —became an impediment to Dulles’s CIA ascension following the Republican victory. “After two years of close personal observation,” wrote a CIA historian, “Smith lacked confidence in Dulles’s self-restraint.” The general felt that Dulles was too enamored of the dark arts of the spy trade. Smith would tell friends that running the CIA sometimes made it necessary to leave his moral values outside the door. But, he quickly added, clinging to his soldierly code of conduct, “You’d damned well better remember exactly where you left them.”
Dulles struck Smith as a man who was all too blithe about abandoning his scruples. The deputy CIA director had no qualms about advocating the assassination of foreign leaders, even presenting a plan to Smith in early 1952 to kill Stalin at a Paris summit meeting. Smith firmly rejected the plan. He shuddered at the thought of Dulles taking over the top spot at the agency.
As Smith prepared to step down at the CIA, he lobbied against Dulles as his replacement, advising Eisenhower that it would be politically unwise to have the brother of the secretary of state serve as the administration’s intelligence chief. Instead, Smith urged Eisenhower to select another one of his agency deputies, Lyman Kirkpatrick. Like Dulles, Kirkpatrick was a product of Princeton and had an impressive espionage résumé dating back to the war—but, as his career at the CIA would prove, he also had a well-tuned sense of proper conduct. (Years later, Kirkpatrick would be called upon to direct the internal investigation of the Bay of Pigs debacle that nearly ruined the agency, doing such an honest job that some CIA old boys, including Dulles himself, never forgave him.)
Despite Beetle Smith’s close ties to Eisenhower, he found himself outmaneuvered by the Dulles brothers. Anticipating Smith’s objections, Foster got to Eisenhower first and convinced him that having his brother in charge of the CIA would actually be an asset, ensuring smooth cooperation in the running of foreign policy. When Smith began making his case against Dulles, Eisenhower cut him off, telling his old friend that he had already talked to Foster, who saw no problem at all with a fraternal reign of power.
Smith had never really stood a chance of blocking Allen Dulles. Eisenhower was deeply beholden to the Wall Street Republican power brokers who had not only recruited him for the presidential race but had helped finance his electoral battle, loaned him one of their own—white-shoe lawyer Herbert Brownell Jr.— to run his campaign, and had even tapped Dick Nixon as his running mate. The Dewey-Dulles group was Ike’s brain trust and bank. When these men spoke, the general listened.
Under Allen Dulles, the CIA would become a vast kingdom, the most powerful and least supervised agency in government. Dulles built his towering citadel with the strong support of President Eisenhower, who, despite occasional misgivings about the spymaster’s unrestrained ways, consistently protected him from his Washington enemies. As America extended its postwar reach around the world, with hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries and U.S. oil, mining, agribusiness, and manufacturing corporations operating on every continent, Eisenhower saw the CIA (along with the Pentagon’s nuclear firepower) as the most cost-effective way to enforce American interests overseas. Presidential historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of The Declassified Eisenhower, initially regarded Ike as “a presidential pacifist.” But after examining the administration’s documentary evidence for her 1981 book, Cook arrived at the conclusion that “America’s most popular hero was America’s most covert president. Eisenhower participated in his own cover-up. His presidency involved a thorough and ambitious crusade marked by covert operations that depended on secrecy for their success.”
The rise of Dulles’s spy complex in the 1950s would further undermine a U.S. democracy that, as Mills observed, was already seriously compromised by growing corporate power. The mechanisms of surveillance and control that Dulles put in motion were more in keeping with an expanding empire than they were with a vibrant democracy. As journalist David Halberstam later observed, “The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington—the transition from an isolationist America to imperial colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did. . . . What was evolving was a closed state within an open state.”
On a bright afternoon in September 1953, forty-three-year-old Senator Joseph McCarthy married his office aide, a twenty-nine-year-old former college beauty queen named Jean Kerr, with great pomp and ceremony at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington. Pope Pius XII bestowed his apostolic blessing on the couple, and twelve hundred guests—including Vice President Nixon, CIA director Allen Dulles, and young senator John F. Kennedy, whose father was a strong McCarthy supporter—crowded into the cathedral for the nuptials. Afterward, McCarthy and his new wife were whisked away by limousine to a celebrity-studded party held amid the Beaux-Arts splendor of the Patterson Mansion on Dupont Circle, where the couple cut their towering wedding cake and prizefighter Jack Dempsey kissed the bride. Feted by the capital’s political luminaries and Hollywood royalty, McCarthy stood at the pinnacle of his power on his wedding day. Packed into his monkey suit and slugging champagne, the thick-built Washington heavyweight with the dark-stubbled jaw had the champion swagger of Dempsey himself.
The Republican senator had come a long way from the Wisconsin dairy farm where he had grown up. He had financed his political rise by taking payoffs from Pepsi-Cola bottlers and prefab construction moguls. In truth, he never lost his taste for the glitzy swag of politics. One of his wedding gifts, it was reported, was a pink Cadillac Coupe de Ville presented to him by a Houston businessman who shared his militant anti-Communism.
By 1953, McCarthy’s anti-Red witch hunt was in full blaze, torching the careers of distinguished senators and statesmen and even beginning to flicker ominously outside the White House itself. The FBI’s Hoover, long a powerful supporter, was growing increasingly anxious about McCarthy’s inflamed ambitions. That summer Hoover warned the new administration that he had learned there was a “conspiracy” to sabotage Eisenhower’s presidency and replace Ike with the hard-charging Wisconsin senator.
The carnival of shame and humiliation that McCarthy brought to Washington held the capital in its grip from February 1950—when he delivered the infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that kicked off his inquisition (“I have in my hand a list of names . . .”)—to December 1954, when the Senate finally voted to censure him, triggering his rapid political and physical collapse. No one—from the loftiest general or cabinet member to the lowliest government clerk—was immune from Joe McCarthy’s suspicious gaze. When he ran out of alleged Communist sympathizers to drag before his Kafkaesque-sounding Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he began prowling the halls of Washington in search of closeted homosexuals—or “powder puffs,” as he liked to call them.
The florid McCarthy pageant is a fascinating case study in the dynamics of Washington power. The senator was a glaring outsider in the capital’s elite salons —a crude, hard-drinking ex-marine. He seemed to defy the neat power categories of C. Wright Mills, fueled more by the sort of ideological fervor, demagoguery, and murky sponsorship that would characterize the later Tea Party era of American politics.
McCarthy was not educated at Ivy League schools, and he was never courted by Wall Street firms. He had worked his way through law school at Marquette University in Milwaukee by pumping gas and going door-to-door selling caulking compound for doors and windows. He liked to drink bourbon, and in 1952, when an operation for a herniated diaphragm cut him open from gut to shoulder and left him in chronic pain, he drank harder still. Even after he was elected to the august U.S. Senate, he carried around a barroom bully’s sense of grievance. He once assaulted Drew Pearson in the cloakroom of the exclusive Sulgrave Club, pinning the muckraker’s arms behind him and kneeing him in the balls—vicious payback for all the columns Pearson had written about McCarthy’s career. And yet, backed in the beginning by Hoover’s investigative apparatus, as well as by the Catholic Church and the right-wing Hearst and McCormick press, the thuggish senator was able to turn his chairmanship of the previously obscure subcommittee into one of the capital’s most powerful perches. Washington’s VIPs hated and feared him, but most paid homage to him.
McCarthy was a monster of the Republican leadership’s own creation. By the time he claimed the national spotlight in 1950, the GOP had long been using the dark incantations of “treason” and “un-Americanism” for political advantage against the Democrats. It was only a matter of time before a specter like McCarthy began to rise up in this toxic atmosphere. Nixon had exploited these themes to great effect in his congressional and Senate races, as did Tom Dewey —though with less success—in his 1948 presidential campaign. Despite Truman’s victory, he was constantly on the defensive against Republican charges that Communists were honeycombed throughout the federal bureaucracy. In response, Truman imposed a loyalty test on federal employees and created an extensive surveillance apparatus to go with it, which turned up few real security threats. He also shredded the Bill of Rights by unleashing a wave of prosecutions against Communist Party officials, thereby effectively outlawing the party and demolishing much of the organized left. Realizing that he had crossed a constitutional Rubicon, a troubled Truman wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt—the New Deal’s aging but unbending icon—and insisted that he was not trying to set off a witch hunt. But that’s indeed what he did.
As Eisenhower took over the White House in 1953, it was uncertain whether the most dynamic force in Washington would be the new president or the senator from Wisconsin. Eisenhower confided that he reviled McCarthy nearly as much as he had Hitler—but he kept pulling back from confronting him. When Ike had ventured into McCarthy’s home state during the 1952 campaign, making a whistle stop in Green Bay, the senator shared the platform with him. Before speaking to the crowd, Eisenhower leaned over to McCarthy and told him, “I’m going to say that I disagree with you.” McCarthy looked the general squarely in the face: “If you say that, you’ll be booed.” Eisenhower stood his ground. “I’ve been booed before.” But when it came time to speak, Eisenhower buckled, carefully smoothing over their differences.
The GOP campaign in 1952 thoroughly embraced McCarthyism. Nixon took the leading Republican role as hatchet man so that Eisenhower could assume a more dignified posture; in September Nixon vowed to make the “Communist conspiracy” the “theme of every speech from now until election.” McCarthy, in turn, performed loyally for the party, putting his gutter techniques to use at the service of the campaign. Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, he declared in a widely broadcast speech in October, “would continue the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation.” At one point McCarthy pretended to confuse Stevenson with the accused traitor Hiss, calling him “Alger—I mean Adlai.”
But after Eisenhower’s victory, McCarthy quickly made clear that he considered the new Republican administration fair game. The monster was loose and nobody in Washington was safe. Before the Dulles-dominated Eisenhower administration could get on with its ambitious plans for running the world, it first had to secure the capital, where the dangerous senator continued to make strong men cower. During the first year of Eisenhower’s presidency, McCarthy would boldly target the three institutions at the very center of Washington’s global power: the State Department, the CIA, and finally the Army.
The different ways these institutions grappled with the assaults from McCarthy shed a fascinating light on Washington’s pyramid of power—as well as on the distinctive personalities of the Dulles brothers. It would become clear in the course of this labyrinthine power struggle just who wielded the biggest sword on the Potomac.
There was little doubt about who the big brother was in the Dulles family. Foster had carried himself with a grave sense of familial responsibility ever since he was a boy, while Allen felt free to pursue more mischievous pleasures well into adulthood. Family members inevitably brought their requests and troubles to Foster, not Allen—though the elder brother’s advice, as Eleanor discovered, was not always sound. She once lost her savings on a bad investment that Foster advised her to make. Nonetheless, the Wall Street wise man projected a sober wisdom; titans of industry paid close heed to his counsel, which he dispensed in a deliberative manner, confident that his every word was money.
As the brothers assumed their positions in the Eisenhower government, they brought with them a unique working chemistry, one that had been forged from the time they shared tasks on their Lake Ontario fishing expeditions. Their relationship was not without its tensions and petty squabbles. Allen thought he actually should have been named secretary of state, since he had more experience with foreign affairs and had a more intricate network of overseas connections. He sometimes chafed under his older brother’s imperial rule.
Foster seemed blithely unaware of Allen’s frustrations. “The thing that has puzzled me a great deal is that I’m not sure how much Foster realized this situation,” Eleanor observed years later, after the older brother was dead. “If he realized it, he didn’t show it by any overcompensation or by any over consideration. All his dealings with Allen were as if there was no psychological essence or problem that had to be dealt with. They dealt with the subject matter and not with each other as people with certain sensitivities and certain prejudices, and so on.”
But Eleanor, the psychologically acute sister, could feel Allen’s jealousy and competitiveness. “I felt it in Allen. I didn’t feel it in Foster. I think you can imagine why. Foster did have more power and more experience, and,” she added matter of factly, “I think Foster had the better brain.”
Allen was well aware of the Washington chatter about the unusual brother act. “Every once in a while we were teased, of course, as brothers are likely to be when each of them has a position of a certain amount of importance and are working together,” he remarked in later years. “But I was very conscious of the danger in that situation and I tried to avoid either appearances or actions which would justify any criticism on that score.”
It was very important to Allen that people not think he got his CIA position because of his brother. “You see,” he told an oral historian after his brother’s death, “I was in there before my brother became secretary of state. I was deputy director [of the CIA]. . . . So then when Bedell Smith retired, it was more or less normal that I would be appointed. I mean, that was not considered a particular show of nepotism on the part of Eisenhower. Personally, Eisenhower and I were very close to each other. We’d gotten to know each other very well. Nobody, as far as I know—I’m sure Foster exercised no pressure at all—because it was quite normal that I would take over that place.” But the truth is that Foster did exert his influence on his brother’s behalf, and Eisenhower never felt close to the younger Dulles, regarding him as a necessary evil in his shadow war with world Communism.
Despite its underlying complexities, the Dulles brothers’ partnership proved very effective. They conferred on a regular basis during their Washington reign. “Normally they saw each other once, twice, maybe three times a week. Allen used to go to Foster’s house on Saturday and sit down and talk to him for two or three hours,” recalled Eleanor, who—after Foster reluctantly agreed to give her the State Department’s Bonn desk—sometimes joined her brothers at the spacious stone house in a wooded neighborhood of Washington. “I know Foster valued these conversations.”
Unlike the gregarious Allen, Foster was somewhat of a loner. “I’m not sure that there are more than a half dozen people in Washington that he felt really at home with. Maybe a dozen,” said Eleanor. Allen was Foster’s essential link to the Georgetown power circles where the spymaster easily circulated. He collected vital gossip and inside information from his social outings, bringing it back to his brother. Allen was the only frequent visitor that Eleanor ever saw in Foster’s home.
It was Allen, the master of persuasion and seduction, who also expertly handled relations with the press. He counted among his friends not only press barons such as Luce and New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and TV network moguls like William Paley of CBS, but also leading Washington pundits such as Joseph and Stewart Alsop. Allen enjoyed wining and dining the nation’s opinion makers, while Foster would “almost rather negotiate with the Russians than be bothered by that,” in Eleanor’s estimation.
The brothers sometimes clashed. David Atlee Phillips, a CIA counterintelligence official whose career flourished under Allen Dulles, later recalled the time Foster instructed his brother to arrange a secret CIA payment to a foreign political candidate. After consulting with his operatives in the field, Allen informed his brother that it was a bad idea. “The secretary of state, in crisp terms, said he had not asked whether the idea was good or bad,” Phillips recounted, “but that he had instructed the CIA chief that it be done.” The cash was duly delivered—and the candidate still lost (a fact noted by Phillips with evident satisfaction).
On other occasions, Allen expressed his opposition to his brother in more vehement terms. He once told Foster that a speech he planned to deliver on the Soviet Union was “rotten” and he should scrap it. “I am the secretary of state and it is my speech,” Foster insisted. “And I damned well will say it if I want to.” But Allen would not back down. “My Soviet expert here says it is wrong. And I won’t let you make a damned fool of yourself, secretary of state or not!”
By and large, though, the Dulles fraternal partnership was a machine of humming efficiency. “We didn’t realize in the early winter months of 1953 as the new administration took shape just how cozy the Dulles brothers’ arrangement for handling all American business abroad would be,” recalled veteran CIA officer Joseph Smith. “It came to mean very quickly that when a situation would not yield to normal diplomatic pressure, Allen’s boys were expected to step in and take care of the matter.”
Before business abroad could be addressed, however, there was some messiness at home that needed to be taken care of. Allen Dulles might have labored under the shadow of his more esteemed older brother through most of his career, but he was about to show Washington who was the tougher power player.
As the Eisenhower presidency got under way in January 1953, the State Department was the target of no less than ten separate, ongoing congressional probes by McCarthy and his Capitol Hill confederates, who saw Foggy Bottom as a hotbed of pansies, pointy-headed intellectuals, parlor room pinkos, and other soft types who were vulnerable to the siren song of Communism. In the beginning, Foster thought McCarthy’s reign of terror could be useful. He was just as eager as the Republican right wing to purge the State Department of all New Deal remnants.
Foster, courting favor with party hard-liners, agreed to hire a security deputy to oversee the massive screening of all State Department employees. Scott McLeod, the man he hired, was an ex-FBI agent and former reporter for the influential right-wing New Hampshire newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader. McLeod, who proudly displayed an autographed photo of McCarthy on his desk inscribed “To a Great American,” was the Wisconsin senator’s man inside the State Department. Like McCarthy, McLeod brought a cynical Irish beat cop’s attitude to the complex task of sorting out the beliefs and allegiances of the U.S. diplomatic corps. McLeod was “anti-intellectual, shrewd, conspiratorial, quick-tempered and vindictive,” as John Foster Dulles biographer Townsend Hoopes later observed. A State Department colleague of McLeod put it more sympathetically: “Scotty lived in an essentially simple world.”
As with the other paroxysms of paranoia that seized Washington during the Cold War, McLeod’s witch hunt turned up very few genuinely worrisome suspects. Most of its victims were highly competent, experienced members of the foreign service whose policy differences with the new Dulles regime simply rendered them “incompatibles,” in McLeod’s Orwellian term. A number of these purge victims, such as John Carter Vincent and John Paton Davies Jr., were veterans of the China desk, where their only crime was infuriating the right-wing Taiwan lobby by honestly evaluating why Communist revolutionary Mao Tsetung had been able to defeat corrupt warlord Chiang Kai-shek. The civil service apparatus was supposed to protect respected officials like this, many of whom had made valuable contributions to the U.S. government’s understanding of the world. But ideology trumped ability in Foster’s intensely politicized State Department.
Foster even forced out one of the brightest, most respected intellectual stars in the foreign service firmament, Soviet expert George F. Kennan, simply because he took exception to the secretary of state’s “liberation” strategy aimed at Eastern Europe—a policy so dangerously unviable that even Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers themselves would soon make clear that they had no intention of following through on this campaign promise to “roll back” the Iron Curtain.
As McLeod’s quickly assembled battalion of some 350 inexperienced but gung ho investigators began snooping through State Department employee records, a cloud of fear settled over Foggy Bottom. Those whose files were tagged and sent over to McCarthy’s subcommittee knew their days in government were over—nobody who endured the snide and relentless grilling at the hands of McCarthy and his equally ruthless chief counsel, Roy Cohn, could expect their career to survive. By the time McCarthy’s Washington bonfires were extinguished two years later, the careers of several hundred State Department officers and employees lay in ashes.
Early in the McCarthy-McLeod inquisition, Foster realized that it could burn out of control. While he was happy to see political opponents consumed in its flames, he soon grew worried that the State Department itself was at stake. By subjecting employees to humiliating loyalty tests and exposure of their private lives, the wide-reaching security program was emptying the State Department of its best and brightest.
Even Eleanor Dulles, who was reluctant to confront her impregnably self confident brother, felt compelled to complain to him. After all, the State Department was the family business, it had been entrusted to Foster—and now he was allowing McCarthy to ruin it. Eleanor had seen the danger early on, when the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign made its unsavory alliance with McCarthy. She first confronted Foster then. “I went over to New York. I called up Foster and said I was coming. He said, ‘Come to dinner.’ You know, he was generous and friendly in that sort of thing, even if he was busy. He was very frank though, if he didn’t want you, he would tell you. . . . But I went to dinner, and he made a very fine martini. I had one. Then he started to fill my glass again, and I said, ‘No, I don’t need another.’
“He looked at me sort of queerly and he said, ‘You must have come over here for a serious purpose, if you won’t have two martinis.’
“I said, ‘I have.’ So then I said to him, ‘I want you to know that I think this is an evil business that’s going on. If the Republicans don’t repudiate McCarthy, I’m going to vote the Democratic ticket.’”
Eleanor’s threat only had the effect of “amusing” Foster, who asked his sister a few questions about why she felt the way she did, and then simply dropped the subject.
In the end, Foster Dulles never confronted McCarthy—even when the senator repeatedly embarrassed both the president and the secretary of state. The administration had no sooner taken office than McCarthy began using his Senate power to hold up the nominations of key appointments, including close Eisenhower associates like Beetle Smith, who had been nominated to serve as Foster’s undersecretary of state. Smith had annoyed McCarthy at some point by saying something positive about a State Department official whom the senator considered a card-carrying Communist.
Eisenhower was infuriated by McCarthy’s antics. The senator was challenging the new president’s authority to control his own government. Ike’s Cold War propaganda adviser, C. D. Jackson—a fascinating and somewhat mysterious character who had a background in the OSS and served as a sort of intelligence link among the White House, the CIA, and Henry Luce’s media empire—advised the president to launch an all-out attack on McCarthy. But Nixon, who thought of McCarthy as a friend and essential ally, urged that the administration try to make the troublesome senator a member of the team. Nixon was supported by others in the president’s inner circle, including even the hot tempered Beetle Smith himself, who warned that a direct assault on McCarthy would risk splitting the Republican Party.
Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers decided to use Nixon as their mediator with McCarthy. The two men were, in some ways, cut from the same rough cloth. Aggrieved outsiders in the Ivy League/Wall Street world of the power elite, they had both grabbed onto the club of anti-Communism as the blunt tool of their ferocious ambition. They had a working stiff’s bitterness that they clearly enjoyed venting at Harvard types like Alger Hiss as much as they did at hard-core Communists. McCarthy went as far as challenging the nomination of Harvard University president James B. Conant as high commissioner to Germany, before Nixon talked him down.
But Nixon was more sophisticated and intelligent than McCarthy. McCarthy’s ambition was a raw force that he wielded with little or no concern for where his blows might land—even if President Eisenhower or the mighty Dulles brothers stood in his way. Nixon, on the other hand, knew that men like these controlled his path to the top, and he was eager to please them. He was, in Adlai Stevenson’s words, “McCarthy with a white collar.” The vice president kept setting up private meetings with the headstrong senator, where he would try to talk sense into him, dangling political favors before his eyes.
The easily dazzled McCarthy would take Nixon’s bait for a while, but a few days later he would come out swinging again, usurping Eisenhower’s power by announcing his own anti-Communist measures or accusing another administration nominee of some shocking infamy. In the end, not even the wily Nixon could bring McCarthy under control as he thrashed about in the Washington arena.
Foster, deathly afraid of losing the job for which he had been groomed since boyhood, did everything he could to placate the reckless McCarthy. The elder Dulles, observed the veteran diplomat Charles “Chip” Bohlen, was a man “with one obsession: to remain secretary of state.” To do that, Foster was willing to sacrifice nearly everything, including his dignity and the integrity of his department.
“My brother was never a witch hunter,” Allen insisted years later, still defensive about the reputation his brother had developed during the McCarthy era. “I mean, he realized the subtleties of Communist penetration, and all that. But he didn’t go along with the sort of blanket condemnation of people.” The truth, however, is that Foster Dulles’s groveling efforts to pacify McCarthy not only encouraged his aggression but institutionalized his witch hunt within the State Department.
When Eisenhower nominated Chip Bohlen, who had served in the U.S. embassy in Moscow before and during the war, to be his ambassador to the Soviet Union, McCarthy inevitably detected something amiss with the distinguished diplomat—a hint of homosexuality somewhere in his family (it turned out that the allegations involved his brother-in-law). Bohlen was as upstanding a member of the foreign service club as the American establishment had ever produced: grandson of a U.S. senator, graduate of Harvard, respected member of the diplomatic corps since 1929, adviser to three presidents. Eisenhower decided that this time he would take a stand, and he recruited his rival—Senator Robert Taft, leader of the GOP’s right wing—to help push through Bohlen’s nomination.
But Foster remained a bundle of nerves throughout the Bohlen confirmation process, terrified that if the nominee’s head were lopped off, his would be next. The secretary of state was ready at any moment to urge Eisenhower to abandon Bohlen if things got too hot on Capitol Hill. When Foster and Bohlen were being driven to the nominee’s Senate confirmation hearing, Foster awkwardly asked Bohlen not to be photographed with him. Later, after Bohlen was finally confirmed, Foster asked the new ambassador—who planned to fly to Moscow a week or two ahead of his family—to delay his trip, so his solo arrival in Russia would not set off another round of heated speculation about his sexuality.
During the early months of the Eisenhower presidency, Foster repeatedly surrendered to the McCarthy onslaught. When the senator shifted his target from Communists to homosexuals in the State Department, Foster allowed his employees’ privacy to be blatantly violated. Ironically, it was McCarthy’s aggressive chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who took the lead in questioning suspected homosexuals. Cohn, whose heavy-lidded eyes and leathery, perpetually tanned skin gave him a serpentine look, was not only gay but had installed his twenty six-year-old playmate, a rich golden boy with no particular credentials named David Schine, on his staff. The son of a hotel and movie theater tycoon, Schine was known while a Harvard undergraduate for paying secretaries to take class notes for him. “Essentially,” observed one Cold War historian, “Schine was Cohn’s dumb blonde.” Despite his own sexual leanings, Cohn took obvious pleasure in humiliating the gay witnesses who appeared before the subcommittee, demanding to know the locations of their illicit trysts and the names of their sexual partners.
McCarthy next went after the Voice of America, the State Department’s Cold War propaganda arm, which Allen Dulles had helped create, absurdly declaring it another hotbed of Communist infestation. By April, 830 of the Voice of America’s 1,400 employees had been purged, including its chief.
That same month, Cohn and Schine announced that they were setting off for Europe together to inspect the libraries maintained by U.S. embassies. These embassy libraries were supposed to be a “balanced collection of American thought”—showcases for U.S. tolerance and diversity. But Cohn and Schine were determined to cleanse the libraries of all books they suspected of a leftward tilt. The pair’s investigative junket, which one subpoenaed author labeled “a book burning,” turned into a public relations disaster for the United States, provoking widespread revulsion and ridicule in the European press.
While visiting Frankfurt, Cohn and Schine found other ways to embarrass their country, according to a local newspaper, engaging in flirtatious antics in a hotel lobby and leaving their hotel room in a shambles after a vigorous round of horseplay that the reporter left up to the reader’s imagination. But instead of criticizing McCarthy’s rowdy henchmen, Foster Dulles dutifully culled the embassy libraries of all ideologically impure books, including works by Jean Paul Sartre and Langston Hughes. Cohn even wanted to ban the soaring American music of Aaron Copland from the libraries, which also loaned records, because the composer had made the mistake of signing petitions defending the civil rights of labor leader Harry Bridges and other beleaguered left-wing heroes.
This was Washington at the dawn of the Eisenhower-Dulles era, when the most powerful men in the capital lived in fear of being served subpoenas by a drunken senator, when even John Foster Dulles trembled before McCarthy’s brute force. It would take Foster’s more iron-nerved brother to bring the beast to heel.
In July 1953, after having his way with Foster Dulles’s State Department, McCarthy came after his brother’s CIA, announcing in his usual imprecise way that he possessed “tons” of evidence that revealed widespread Communist infiltration of the spy agency. McCarthy’s prime suspect was a bespectacled, Ivy League–educated CIA analyst named William Bundy, whose profile made him the perfect embodiment of the Dulles agency man. A member of Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society—breeding ground for future spooks—Bundy joined Army intelligence during the war, working at Bletchley Park in England as part of the Ultra operation that cracked Nazi codes. Dulles was close to Bundy’s father, Harvey, a top diplomat who had helped oversee the Marshall Plan, as well as his younger brother, McGeorge, another product of Skull and Bones and Army intelligence who had worked with Dulles at the Council on Foreign Relations and on the Dewey presidential campaign.
McCarthy hoped to make Bill Bundy his Alger Hiss, and, in fact, one of the main pieces of incriminating evidence he waved against him was that Bundy had contributed $400 to the Alger Hiss defense fund. But the Bundys were solid members of Allen Dulles’s inner circle, and Dulles did not easily abandon men like Bundy. The spymaster finally decided to draw the line with McCarthy—and the ensuing, explosive confrontation led ultimately to the inquisitor’s downfall.
Taking on McCarthy at the height of his power was a daunting task, even for the director of the CIA. Dulles knew that, despite J. Edgar Hoover’s growing doubts about McCarthy, the FBI still fed him a stream of damaging information about his Washington enemies. Hoover, a sworn rival ever since Dulles outmaneuvered him to create the CIA in 1947, had amassed a thick file on Dulles and his busy adulterous life. Hoover even suspected Dulles of “secret communist leanings,” a delusion as fantastic as any of McCarthy’s wild claims. At least one high-ranking CIA official—Robert Amory, the agency’s top intelligence analyst—was convinced that the FBI had tapped his office phone.
But Dulles, too, was a master at this sort of game, and he made sure his agency kept its own files on Hoover. Jim Angleton liked to say that any intelligence service that didn’t keep a close eye on its own government wasn’t worth its salt. “Penetration begins at home,” he quipped. The CIA counterintelligence chief was rumored to occasionally show off photographic evidence of Hoover’s intimate relationship with FBI deputy Clyde Tolson, including a photo of Hoover orally pleasuring his longtime aide and companion. Dulles’s wisecracking mistress Mary Bancroft liked to call the FBI director “that Virgin Mary in pants,” but there was nothing virginal about Hoover.
Dulles compiled even more scandalous files on Joe McCarthy’s sex life. The senator who relentlessly hunted down homosexuals in government was widely rumored to haunt the “bird circuit” near Grand Central Station as well as gay hideaways in Milwaukee. Drew Pearson got wind of the stories but was never able to get enough proof to run with them. But the less discriminating Hank Greenspun, editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, who was locked in an ugly war of words with McCarthy, let the allegations fly. Greenspun had been given access to the Pearson files, and he had picked up his own McCarthy stories involving young hotel bellboys and elevator operators during the senator’s gambling trips to Vegas. “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years,” wrote Greenspun. “He seldom dates girls and if he does, he laughingly describes it as window dressing. . . . It is common talk among homosexuals who rendezvous at the White Horse Inn [in Milwaukee] that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities.”
McCarthy’s wedding announcement triggered more wicked chatter in the capital, where many saw it as an obvious ploy to dispel the rumors. The senator was as surprised as many others to read the announcement of his pending nuptials—it was his mother-in-law-to-be who placed the notice in the newspapers. McCarthy’s young bride was described in one gossip magazine as “a bright, shrewd and very ambitious young lady. ‘Opportunist’ was the word many people used.”
One Hoover aide later denied the gay reports about McCarthy, insisting that the allegations were blowback against the senator because he had dared to take on the Dulles brothers. But Hoover kept his own secret files on McCarthy, one of which was filled with disturbing stories about McCarthy’s habit of drunkenly groping young girls’ breasts and buttocks. The stories were so widespread that they became “common knowledge” in the capital, according to one FBI chronicler. Walter Trohan, Washington bureau chief of the conservative Chicago Tribune, who witnessed McCarthy’s molesting behavior, said, “He just couldn’t keep his hands off young girls. Why the Communist opposition didn’t plant a minor on him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don’t know.”
“The Communist opposition” might have missed the opportunity, but the CIA was clearly prepared to leak stories about McCarthy’s behavior—stories so sordid, they would have destroyed his career. This gave Dulles leverage in his battle with McCarthy that none of the senator’s other political opponents enjoyed. There was an explosive sexual subtext to the CIA’s power struggle with McCarthy, one that was largely hidden from the public but would eventually erupt in the Senate hearings that brought him down.
What the public witnessed was fascinating enough: a clash of titans that verged on a constitutional crisis. When McCarthy tried to subpoena Bill Bundy, Dulles simply stonewalled him. The agency had Bundy spirited away to an undisclosed location, and when Roy Cohn called to demand that he testify before the subcommittee—that very day—he was told that Bundy was on leave. Walter Pforzheimer, the CIA’s legislative liaison, later remembered the phone call. “Roy was furious. . . . What a fight! Later that day, my secretary tracked me down to tell me Cohn wanted to talk to me [again]. And he wanted me to testify about Bundy’s file.” But Dulles simply “wouldn’t allow it.” When a subpoena arrived for Pforzheimer, the CIA director was unfazed. “Allen Dulles just took it and gave it to somebody. I wanted it for posterity, but no one’s ever found it.”
On July 9, 1953, an outraged McCarthy took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Dulles’s “blatant attempt to thwart the authority of the Senate” and demanded that Dulles himself appear before his subcommittee. Dulles still refused to bend, but he did drop by McCarthy’s office to explain his position. Because of the highly sensitive nature of the CIA’s work, Dulles informed the senator, his agency must be granted immunity from congressional investigations. McCarthy just had to take his word that there were no Communists hidden in the agency. If he ever did find any Reds, Dulles later explained to the press, “I’d kick them out. I have the power to do it and don’t have to have proof they work for the Kremlin. The fact that a man is a Communist would be enough.”
Dulles’s defiant position on congressional oversight astonished even the anti-McCarthy Democrats on the subcommittee, like Senator Stuart Symington. But the CIA director never wavered from his stand, and he soon won Eisenhower’s support. Nixon was again dispatched to meet with McCarthy, to work out a face saving way for the senator to back down. Soon after, McCarthy announced that he and Dulles had come to a mutual agreement to suspend the probe of the CIA. Dulles drove home his victory by making sure that his friends in the Washington press corps reported McCarthy’s losing confrontation with the CIA as a major humiliation for the senator.
On July 17, syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop—a journalist so deeply entwined with the CIA that he once declared it was his patriotic duty to carry the agency’s water—announced that “Senator Joseph R. McCarthy has just suffered his first total, unmitigated, unqualified defeat. . . . [Administration strategists] have allowed McCarthy to conceal his defeat behind a typical smoke screen of misleading statements. But the background story proves that the junior Senator from Wisconsin went down for the count of ten, all the same.”
Dulles proudly collected newspaper coverage of his battle with McCarthy. He was no doubt particularly pleased by one of the clippings he gathered, an article by The Buffalo Evening News’s Washington correspondent, which reported that the CIA director is “known here as ‘John Foster Dulles’s tougher, younger brother.’”
Not all of the press reaction to Dulles’s display of defiance was so enthusiastic. Two journalistic pillars whom the CIA director considered old friends—syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann and New York Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin—took strong issue with the way Dulles had flouted Senate authority. “The argument that the CIA is something apart, that it is so secret that it differs in kind from the State Department or, for that matter, the Department of Agriculture, in untenable,” Lippmann opined. Baldwin struck an even more critical note, warning of “a philosophy of secrecy and power” taking hold in Washington under the banner of national security.
But Dulles’s firm stand against McCarthy—a man Richard Helms compared to Goebbels—proved enormously popular within the CIA, particularly among the ranks of the liberal, intellectual types whom Dulles had recruited. While Dulles and his family were stalwart Republicans, he recognized that many of the most passionate Cold Warriors were ex-Communists and liberals who not only had firsthand knowledge of bare-knuckled Communist Party practices but were eager to prove their patriotism and join the American celebration. Dulles further cemented his position with this liberal crowd when he stood by CIA recruit Cord Meyer, another bright young product of Yale, who came under FBI suspicion in August 1953 for his postwar peace activities.
After enduring years of relentless harassment from Red hunters, many Washington liberals cheered Dulles as a savior. His CIA became known as a haven for the intelligentsia and for others looked on with suspicion by McCarthyites. “I emerged from [my FBI] ordeal with increased respect for Allen Dulles,” Meyer later wrote. “Dulles proved to be a pillar of courageous strength inside the Eisenhower administration during the McCarthy era. Once he had determined the facts and satisfied himself as to the loyalty of a CIA official, he was prepared to defend him and he refused to give in to the pressures that McCarthy was able to bring to bear. As a result, morale within the agency was high during this period, in contrast to morale in the State Department where John Foster Dulles was less willing to defend the innocent victims of McCarthy’s campaign.”
Dulles’s defiance of McCarthy won the widespread devotion of liberals, but it established a dangerous precedent. In his very first year as director, Dulles began molding an image of the CIA as a super agency, operating high above mere senators. The CIA would grow more powerful and less accountable with each passing year of Dulles’s reign.
McCarthy never got over his rough treatment at the hands of the CIA, and he would threaten on more than one occasion to reopen his investigation of the agency. But if he had, he might have encountered an even more severe response. In March 1954, McCarthy’s subcommittee convened a hearing on “alleged threats against the chairman.” One witness—a military intelligence officer named William Morgan who had worked for C. D. Jackson in the White House —stunned the subcommittee by recounting a conversation that he had the previous year with a CIA employee named Horace Craig. As the two men were discussing how to solve the McCarthy problem, Craig flatly stated, “It may be necessary to liquidate Senator McCarthy as was [assassinated Louisiana senator] Huey Long. There is always some madman who will do it for a price.”
The Dulles slapdown of McCarthy proved to be a fateful turning point for the senator, inspiring a new boldness within the Eisenhower administration that would lead to his collapse. A month later, in August 1953, when McCarthy took aim at Reds in the Agriculture Department, of all places, Nixon advised Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson to “take a firm stand, like Allen Dulles, if McCarthy gets out of line.” In September, after returning from his honeymoon, McCarthy made his final—and fatal—mistake, by taking on another central institution of U.S. national security, the Army.
Like Foster Dulles, the spineless Army Secretary, a former textile executive named Robert Ten Broeck Stevens, had done everything he could to appease McCarthy, but the senator had only grown more frothing in his attacks, accusing the Army of sloppy security measures that had led to the hiring of subversive civilians. At one point, McCarthy dragged a decorated D-day hero, General Ralph W. Zwicker, before his panel and dressed him down like he was a bumbling Beetle Bailey, barking at the dignified, ramrod-stiff officer that he was “not fit to wear that uniform.”
Much of the anti-Army spleen in the McCarthy office was inspired by the adolescent frustrations of the senator’s twenty-six-year-old chief counsel, Roy Cohn. When Cohn’s boyfriend, David Schine, was drafted into the Army in October 1953, McCarthy’s point man began frantically pulling strings on his behalf. Assigned to Fort Dix in New Jersey for basic training, Schine was showered with special privileges, including frequent exemptions from KP duty and weekend passes so he could be chauffeured to New York City for R&R with Cohn. (Their chauffeur would later testify that the two men also used his vehicle’s backseat for their passionate reunions.) Schine, who found his Army issue boots uncomfortable, was even allowed to wear custom-made boots. When Cohn was told that his boyfriend might be transferred overseas, he flew into a rage. “We’ll wreck the Army,” he spluttered at the Army’s liaison to the subcommittee. “The Army will be ruined . . . if you pull a dirty, lousy, stinking, filthy, shitty double cross like that.”
After months of trying to manage McCarthy, Eisenhower finally reached his breaking point. In February 1954, Massachusetts Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a close ally of the president, privately warned that the Army investigation was “an attempt to destroy the president politically. There is no doubt about it. He is picking on the Army because Eisenhower was in the Army.” The following month, the president authorized Lodge to ask for the publication of a damning report that the Army had been secretly compiling on the numerous ways that McCarthy and Cohn had bullied and blackmailed military authorities on Schine’s behalf. In response to the scorching Schine report, McCarthy’s subcommittee removed him as chairman and called for hearings on the Army’s allegations. The stage was set for the Army-McCarthy hearings, a televised spectacle that turned the inquisitional tables on the senator and finally ended his infamous reign.
McCarthy—who was allowed to participate in the proceedings—gave his usual crude performance, badgering witnesses and shouting “point of order” whenever he felt the urge to disrupt the drama. But captured in the glare of the TV lights, his coarse act had a repellent effect on the viewing public. By the time the Army’s distinguished Boston attorney, Joseph Nye Welch, uttered his devastating and instantly memorable line—“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”—the American people knew the answer.
In December 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, and he continued his slide toward oblivion, drinking more and more heavily until he was polishing off a bottle of the hard stuff a day. By 1956, those who knew the senator were describing him as a “sick pigeon” suffering from a host of physical ailments and shuttling in and out of detox. During a visit home to Wisconsin in September, he was seized by delirium tremens and saw snakes flying at him. In May 1957, he was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he died of acute liver failure at age forty-eight. Joe McCarthy had drunk himself to death.
McCarthy’s confrontation with the Army would become famous for his undoing, but it was his earlier battle with Allen Dulles that had drawn first blood and made him vulnerable. As McCarthy’s stature in Washington shrank, Dulles’s grew. No politician during the Eisenhower era would ever again seriously challenge the CIA director’s rule. With his Washington power base secure, Dulles was ready to take on the world.
Next
The Dulles Imperium
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