14—
The Republicans Take Over

Despite Dwight D. Eisenhower's landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson, the Republicans were able to win only a slim majority in the Congress. In the Senate, they had a one-seat edge, with 48 Republicans, 47 Democrats, and maverick Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, the Republican turned independent. Some future leaders joined the Senate, including Democrat John F. Kennedy, who defeated Eisenhower advisor Henry Cabot Lodge; Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican; and Democrats Stuart Symington of Missouri, Mike Mansfield of Montana, Henry Jackson of Washington, and Albert Gore of Tennessee. In the House, the Republicans gained twenty-two seats, putting them just three over the total needed to give them control. But despite the slim margins, the Republicans controlled Congress and their man was in the White House.

Bill Knowland wanted to be majority leader when the Senate session opened in January, but Robert Taft had his own agenda. He could have denied Knowland any position of significance, but he saw promise in the brash Californian. He also knew that the Republicans had to develop new leadership and naturally was predisposed to favor Knowland, who really had been a Taft man during the 1952 Republican convention. "Besides," observed veteran Associated Press writer Jack Bell, "Taft had no taste at that point for intra-squad fighting when he wasn't sure how hard he would have to battle the man in the White House to get his way."^[1]

The two strong-willed men managed to avoid any real confronta-

tion over the job. Taft liked Knowland's stand on the Far East. After all, no one had worked harder than the California Republican to oppose the Communists in Asia. Taft had no trouble persuading Knowland to step in as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, making him second in command of the Senate Republicans. Knowland was satisfied, because the job would allow him to attend the weekly meetings of Senate leaders with Eisenhower.

The Republicans were in power, but they had to deal with an unknown in the White House. Taft had the political experience, and Eisenhower had virtually none. Most presidents had moved up to the job through the governor's office or Congress. Eisenhower had never been elected to political office before. That worried Republican leaders; and according to Knowland, that lack of political experience made it difficult for them to deal with the president.

In the week before Eisenhower's inauguration, Knowland, together with Taft and Gene Milliken, chairman of the Republican conference, met with Eisenhower in New York. Knowland said he was chosen as a spokesman for the group because he knew Eisenhower best, having traveled with him extensively during the campaign. The group asked the president-elect to recommend that the top policy positions in several departments be removed from the civil service. Because of his landslide victory and Republican control of both houses of Congress, they assured Eisenhower, the Democrats would let the legislation be passed. Knowland, Taft, and Milliken told Eisenhower that they were not suggesting a return to the spoils system or the abolition of civil service; but unless they could remove the top people in some departments and appoint their own people, the Republican cabinet would be "flanked by the same people who had flanked the Cabinet under the Truman administration."^[2]

While Eisenhower understood the significance of such an act, he was concerned that it might look like the spoils system was returning. The group continued to argue their position, and Eisenhower agreed to consider the recommendation. A few weeks later, he turned down the suggestion, saying it would appear to be an attack on the merit system. After the next congressional election, Knowland said, Eisenhower admitted that he had made a mistake, but by then it was too late. The honeymoon was over and the Democrats' voice in Congress was stronger. Knowland recalled, "it was quite clear to [Eisenhower] that even some of his own Cabinet officials and their undersecretaries had been hamstrung."^[3]

With the Republicans in charge, all should have gone smoothly, but it did not. Taft immediately was "flabbergasted" when Eisenhower presented his first budget, which was far higher than Republicans in Congress had expected. After all, the Korean War was winding down; now was a good time to substantially reduce the budget. "Taft, I won't say lost his temper, but he certainly expressed himself in no uncertain terms as to how he felt this was letting the Republican voters down, and the Democrats who had voted for Eisenhower because they felt a change was needed, with this kind of budget," Knowland said. "It was quite a tense scene there, in the Cabinet Room that day." Eisenhower flushed a little but maintained his composure.^[4]

As unhappy as Taft was, Knowland said the majority leader had enough political experience to know "that the party couldn't survive if, in the first few months of a new president's term, his leadership in the Senate or House broke with him on this kind of issue." Moreover, Eisenhower also realized that he needed Taft's help. "So I think it was reason triumphing over what may have been some very strong feelings on both of their parts, right at that time."^[5] Knowland also observed, "I think he envisioned himself . . . as being more the 'father of his country' in the Washington tradition, than he did as a rough-and-tumble party presidential leader." Even so, he added, Eisenhower "very rapidly . . . learned the cold hard facts of political life in Washington and on Capitol Hill. . . . Eisenhower made it clear from the inception that while, as far as the administration was concerned, the ultimate decision had to be his, that he respected the judgment of the party leaders, he wanted them to deal frankly and lay it on the line."^[6]

One savvy step by the new administration was its choice for secretary of state: John Foster Dulles, who had worked in the field of foreign affairs for half a century as a public servant and as an international lawyer. Early on, Dulles's strategy was never to oppose the will of Congress. He believed that the main reason the Truman administration's foreign policy failed was its inability to gain the confidence of Congress. One of the first senators Dulles wanted to pacify and bring into the Eisenhower camp was Knowland. As a gesture of goodwill toward Knowland, Dulles convinced Eisenhower to include in his State of the Union speech to Congress on February 2 the statement that because the "Red Chinese" had intervened in the Korean War he had no problem with sending Nationalist Chinese troops to Korea to fight the Communists.^[7]

Knowland was delighted with Eisenhower's speech. But even though Dulles was more to his liking than Acheson, he still badgered the secretary of state about the nation's foreign policy. The so-called China

Lobby had faded somewhat by 1953, but the efforts to protect Formosa from Communist incursion had not. Now they centered in the Committee of One Million against the Admission of Communist China into the United Nations. Former president Herbert Hoover, Congressman Walter Judd of Minnesota, and, of course, Bill Knowland were major forces on the committee. In nine months, the committee succeeded in gaining one million anticommunist signatures. The committee later became known just as the Committee of One Million.

Knowland found himself in the middle of one of Eisenhower's first controversies when on February 27 the president nominated Charles E. "Chip" Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bohlen, who came from a wealthy family, was a lifelong diplomat described as a tough, seasoned, trained, authentic authority on the Soviet Union. The nomination went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Knowland was a ranking member.

In early March the security chief for the State Department, Scott McLeod, learned that the FBI had found some derogatory information about Bohlen. The information was rumored to indicate that Bohlen had several close friends and intimate associates who were known homosexuals, though the FBI found no "direct" evidence that Bohlen had engaged in homosexual activities.^[8] McLeod told Dulles and Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy complained that Bohlen had been at the disastrous Yalta Conference when President Roosevelt "gave away" Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.^[9] Bohlen didn't particularly help his cause when he praised the conference, where he had served as a Russian translator. He also denied that Alger Hiss had any role at Yalta.

Knowland announced that Dulles had given him, in confidence, a classified document proving that three senior Foreign Service officers had recommended Bohlen for the job, just as Dulles had said. McCarthy then asked that Senator Everett Dirksen be allowed to see the document. Knowland, the back of his neck a bright crimson, angrily replied, "When a letter comes to the Senate from the Department of State, I do not want to have to call in a handwriting expert to determine whether a forgery has been committed. . . . God help us if that is the basis upon which we have to operate."^[10] When Dulles testified, Knowland and others grilled him on Bohlen's role at Yalta. The secretary of state assured them that Bohlen was beyond reproach, and the committee approved Bohlen's nomination, 15-0.

That was not the end of it. McCarthy insisted on seeing the raw data that the FBI had collected on Bohlen. Knowland argued that no one should be allowed to see the files and that Congress should trust Eisenhower and Dulles rather than relying on rumors. The FBI's L. B. Nichols summarized the agency's role as follows:^[11] Dulles had earlier told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Eisenhower wanted the director's views on Bohlen. Hoover pointed out that it was against policy to make such judgments, but he would honor the request because it came from the president. Hoover told Dulles that he could not give Bohlen a complete clearance because of his homosexual friends. When CIA Director Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles's brother, suggested that Bohlen be given a lie detector test, Hoover recommended against it. Hoover warned Allen Dulles not to reveal the contents of their private conversation to the Foreign Relations Committee.

Four days later, on March 21, Knowland met with Hoover at Attorney General Herbert Brownell's office. The California senator had asked Hoover if one or two members of the Senate committee could review the FBI report, an action that would dissipate the opposition to Bohlen. Hoover refused, and then Knowland asked whether a committee made up of Vice President Richard Nixon and a cabinet officer or two could examine the report. Hoover said that would be up to Brownell, who disapproved of the proposal. The meeting adjourned with Hoover holding fast to his opinion that the report should not be made available to any senator.

Three days later Hoover received a call from Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, who asked if he had heard that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had assigned Bob Taft and Democrat John Sparkman of Alabama, who had been Adlai Stevenson's running mate, to look at the FBI report. Rogers told him that to refuse to allow such prominent senators to view the files would put the department in a bad light. After reading the raw data, Taft and Sparkman announced that the report contained no suggestion of any tolerance toward communism. If there was anything in the data about Bohlen's homosexual friends, it was not revealed by Taft or Sparkman. On March 25, the Senate confirmed Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union by a vote of 74 to 13.

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican, had first claimed that Communists were working in the State Department in a speech

made in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950. Although he had continued his charges of communist influence throughout the government, he didn't really gain center stage until early 1953, when he was named chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee. There, he investigated the State Department, the Voice of America, the Department of the Army, and other departments and organizations. Early on, he had a willing ally in Bill Knowland.

As McCarthy's biographer William Ewald Jr. put it, "Knowland would have stood shoulder to shoulder with McCarthy at every turn but for one thing: McCarthy's carelessness with fact. Sure, the State Department contained Communists. No doubt about that. But get the names and addresses straight. On the imperative of accuracy, McCarthy and Knowland parted company."^[12] McCarthy's liability, Knowland said, "was a tendency to overstate his case. . . . He offended a lot of Republican senators by some of the statements he made. . . . I really resented when McCarthy got up on the floor and referred to [Sen. J. William Fulbright as] Senator Halfbright. I mean, it was this kind of thing, you know, that just isn't done. . . . To make references of this kind, I felt, cost McCarthy a lot of support that otherwise he might have had." To be sure, he had no doubt that there were Communists trying to infiltrate the government: "Just know the communist animal as it is, I think this is the thing that they try to do in every country of the world. . . . To the extent that he was trying to expose this and get them out, I think McCarthy commanded the support of a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans."^[13]

Still, Knowland found himself backing away from McCarthy. While Knowland was staunchly anticommunist, he played by the rules. In addition, he wasn't sure those people in the State Department that McCarthy branded Communists really were Communists. "There are a lot of people who may play into the Communist hands who think they're as patriotic and in their own mind perhaps are, as anyone else," he said. "But their weakness is the fact that they haven't seen the menace and they haven't realized that they may have added at least one bit to the Chinese jigsaw puzzle of Communist intelligence which helped the Communists get the whole picture. The government employee may have done it inadvertently by just dropping something in the niche which did not seem too important at the time. Others knew they were betraying our country."^[14]

Critics of Knowland's leadership in the Senate would later accuse him of doing little to control McCarthy. Knowland chose to remain

silent, neither encouraging McCarthy openly nor condoning his conduct—but taking no action to curb his excesses. McCarthy obviously was a dangerous man who posed a real threat to those who might wish to take him on. Most—including President Eisenhower—chose to protect their own prestige by doing nothing.

Knowland was appalled at what was going on in the Far East, writing angrily to his father on May 10, 1953: "I believe we are getting mouse-trapped on the Korean cease fire. On the P.O.W. issue the Communist proposal for supervision by five 'neutrals' is stacked against us. Two of the five (Poland and Czechoslovakia) are Communist nations. One (India) has voted with the Communists about 80% of the time in the U.N. since the Korean war started. Two of them (Sweden and Switzerland) while neutral have recognized Communist China. This means that all five consider the Communist Chinese the legal government of China." He predicted a cease-fire on the present battle line in Korea and the admission of Communist China into the United Nations within six months. "I am disgusted and shocked. We will lose all of Asia within four years and the balance of power will have overwhelmingly shifted to the Soviet Union and their satellites. It is my intention to speak in the Senate within the next ten days to lay out the implications of what is being done. The American people should not get sugar coated cyanide without at least knowing the cold hard facts." Knowland opposed any truce that failed to restore Korea as one nation and that didn't send the Communist Chinese home.

As a fear grew among senators that Communist China might be admitted to the United Nations, they prepared to fight. On May 28, 1953, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a bill rider that would prohibit financial aid to the United Nations if Communist China were given membership. The committee chairman, Styles Bridges, told Eisenhower that all Republicans supported the bill. On June 2, Eisenhower met with Knowland, Styles Bridges, Leverett Saltonstall, and House Speaker Joe Martin, among others. He came right to the point. "I oppose [the rider] because I believe that the United States cannot properly serve notice on the United Nations in such a manner, and more fundamentally, that the United States cannot live alone," the president said.^[15] Bridges told Eisenhower that he, Knowland, and Saltonstall approved the rider because they thought that laying down the rules before

a crisis began would strengthen the president's hand. They didn't want to embarrass the president, he said, but they wanted the world to know what they thought of admitting Red China to the United Nations.

Knowland made his views clear. "The admission of Red China," he said, "would violate every one of my basic beliefs. Already rumors are rampant that the British will start pushing for admission of Red China soon after the negotiation of the cease fire in Korea. Under ordinary procedures the United States could not possibly come out on top in this issue if it came to a United Nations vote; therefore, we have to take an active and aggressive stand now." Eisenhower disagreed, saying that the United States could not be expected to win every battle in the UN and that if the UN failed, NATO would fail—"and where would we be then, how could we then maintain our own security?" Knowland then backed off, saying the senators might find another way to make their point without putting the president in such a bind. With that, Eisenhower said he would let the leaders of other countries know the attitude of Congress and tell them that they should be wary of admitting Red China because he "could not answer for the response of the United States."^[16]

Although Knowland's main interest was the growing presence of the Communists in the Far East, the next few months would provide him with a new and greater challenge much closer to home.