Nixon: Man Behind the Mask - Gary Allen |
The Eisenhower-Nixon team triumphed in the 1952 election by promising to stem Communist aggression abroad, root out Red infiltrators at home, and reverse the socialistic policies of the New Deal. The party platform promised:
"We shall eliminate from the State Department and from every Federal office, all, wherever they may be found, who share responsibility for the needless predicaments and perils in which we find ourselves. We shall also sever from the public payrolls the hordes of loafers, incompetents and unnecessary employees who clutter the administration of our foreign affairs . . . The Government of the United States, under Republican leadership, will repudiate all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta which aid Communist enslavements . . . We shall again make liberty into a beacon light of hope that will penetrate the dark places . . .
"We shall see to it that no treaty nor agreement with other countries deprives our citizens of the rights guaranteed them by the Federal Constitution . . . There are no Communists in the Republican party. . . . We never compromise with Communism and we have to expose it and eliminate it in government and American life. A Republican President will appoint only persons of unquestioned loyalty . . . Reduction of expenditures by the elimination of waste and extravagance so that the budget will be balanced and a general tax reduction can be made."
But all this was not to be. A former assisstant to J. Edgar Hoover, Dan Smoot, has declared:
"If Stevenson had won in 1952, the growing anti-Communist, anti-socialist, anti-world government sentiment of the people would have continued to grow with accelerated speed, because it was apparent that Stevenson meant a continuation of Truman's policies.
"But millions thought their revolt had succeeded when Eisenhower and Nixon were elected. Eisenhower and Nixon, riding into office on the crest of a great wave in the swelling anti-communist, anti-socialist movement, destroyed the movement by giving it lip service, while vigorously supporting the very policies they were elected to oppose."
Calling this "the most tragic irony in the history of America," Smoot continued by saying:
". . . The Eisenhower-Nixon team, elected in 1952 because it was considered strongly anti-communist, broke the back of the anti-communist movement in the United States!"
Given Ike's debt to FDR and the Insiders around him, this is not surprising. Exactly as George C. Marshall had been elevated to Chief of Staff, Ike was picked by the Roosevelt Administration in 1942 to be Allied Commander in North Africa, over the heads of 366 Army officers who outranked him. To contend that these were both coincidences is to insult all logic. How much Eisenhower owed to the Roosevelt Administration may be seen in the fact that he was only a Lieutenant Colonel at the outset of the war, and his career, like Marshall's, was considered a flop. In 1943, with the same backing that Marshall had, he became Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe.
History has shown that the man who bears the actual title of President of the United States is not always the man who really wields the power. Behind Woodrow Wilson there was Colonel House. Behind FDR was Harry Hopkins. Those who really ran the United States while Eisenhower was on the putting green were Sidney Weinberg, Milton Eisenhower (CFR), Sherman Adams (CFR), John Foster Dulles (CFR), and Paul Hoffman (CFR), all lifelong devoted Leftists. This group came to be known as the "Palace Guard."
The Hearst newspapers of July 6, 1953, over the byline of their Washington Bureau, said: "The man-behind-the-guns in the Eisenhower Administration is Sidney James Weinberg, Wall Street investment banker." Weinberg, until his recent death, was a partner in the international banking firm of Goldman, Sachs and Company. An article in the New Yorker magazine in 1956 pointed out:
"[Weinberg] has been a liaison between Wall Street and the White House ever since the inception of the New Deal. In the early '30's, he was among the few prominent men in big-money circles whom President Roosevelt could count on for support, and during both the 1932 and 1936 Presidential campaigns he was assistant treasurer of the Democratic National Committee."
The same article quotes Business Week as calling Weinberg "an ambassador between financiers and politicians," and says that:
". . . though largely unknown to the man in any street but Wall, [Weinberg] is among the nation's most influential citizens. In his role as a power behind the throne, he probably comes as close as Bernard Baruch."
Continuing, the New Yorker article observes: "There is hardly a ramification of the money and credit business in which Goldman, Sachs is not active." In FDR's administration Weinberg was one of the organizers of the Business Advisory Council, an unofficial arm of the Council on Foreign Relations created to get the approval of businessmen for the New Deal.
A hallmark of the true Insider is that he is equally at home in either political party, since he knows that while the parties talk a slightly different language they are controlled by the same people. In 1940, having supposedly concluded that a third term for FDR was unsound, "Weinberg popped up as a founder of and diligent fund-raiser for the Democrats for Willkie."
In 1951, Weinberg became a financial backer of Republican Advance, the ADA of the Republican party. In 1952, Republican Advance, of which, it will be remembered, Richard Nixon was a charter member, changed its name to Citizens for Eisenhower-Nixon, and Weinberg became its treasurer. Was it very difficult for this super-insider to infiltrate the Republican Party? Not at all. "The Republicans are not very bright," observed Weinberg. The New Yorker article informed us:
"When Eisenhower was President-elect, he asked three trusted and well-informed agents—Lucius Clay [CFR], Sherman Adams [CFR] and Herbert Brownell [CFR]—to draw up a list of recommendations for the cabinet he would have to appoint. These three men, in a sense, were acting as Eisenhower's advisors, but in this complex political age even advisors need advisors, and among those the trio turned to was, most notably, Weinberg."
Goaded by his mysterious backers, Ike began purging Conservatives from the Republican Party instead of Communists from the government. First to feel the wrath of the "New" Republicans were the followers of Robert Taft. The Taft-Conservative wing of the party had closed ranks behind the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket, thanks largely to the work of Nixon, despite the fact that following the convention Eisenhower's advisor and intimate, Paul Hoffman, had returned to Pasadena and held a press conference, at which he said, in substance, according to a story by Morrie Ryskind: "The GOP has finally rid itself of the Taft incubus, and our job now is to get rid of all the Taft adherents."
After helping to defeat Adlai Stevenson handily. Conservatives hoped that Eisenhower would appoint some Taft supporters to key cabinet positions, to implement the promises of the Republican Party platform. But the only Taft supporter to be appointed to the cabinet was Ezra Taft Benson, who served in the post of Secretary of Agriculture. Former Republican Congressman Howard Buffett explained how cleverly Conservatives were being purged in the Eisenhower Administration:
"During Ike's first weeks in office, a list of Taft Republicans to be purged was prepared at the White House. In this strategy the Modern [Liberal] Republicans did not make Roosevelt's mistake in announcing their aims. Instead they laid their plans secretly and no public exposure of their tactics ever appeared. The frequent disappearance of conservative Republicans from public office and political influence in the following years was mute testimony to the effectiveness of this liquidation policy."
It had not taken Bob Taft long to read the handwriting on the Eisenhower Administration's wall. In the White House on April 30, 1953, before a dozen Congressmen and others, Taft told Eisenhower:
"You're taking us right down the same road that Truman traveled. It's a repudiation of everything we promised in the [1952] campaign."
Instead of building his administration around Conservatives and anti-Communists, Eisenhower continued the reign of the CFR members who had controlled the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. CFR members holding key slots in the Eisenhower Administration included:
The Republican Party platform of 1952 had stated: "We shall eliminate from the State Department and from every Federal office, all, wherever they may be found, who share responsibility for the needless predicaments and perils in which we find ourselves."
The "Palace Guard" carried this plank out—and buried it. Instead of eliminating those in the State Department responsible for Yalta, China, and other tragic disasters, the Eisenhower Administration promoted to Secretary of State one of the individuals who were most responsible, John Foster Dulles. Dulles had been a protege of Colonel House and was a founder of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a protege of Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State on whose record of successive losses for America the Republicans had based much of their campaign against the Democrats. Senator William Jenner of Indiana wrote: "Mr. Dulles is Mr. Acheson's identical twin." Dulles had become officially a right-hand man of Acheson in 1950, and was so completely a part of the Truman foreign policy menagerie that he no longer gave his address to Who's Who in America as 48 Wall Street, New York, where his law office was, but as "Department of State, Washington."
Dulles was a strange individual to oversee the promised clean-up of the State Department. The appointment of Dulles as Secretary of State appeared strange and disillusioning even to William F. Buckley Jr., who wrote in Human Events of April 18, 1953:
"The principal reason why the Senate and the people should have no confidence in Dulles on matters relating to loyalty and security is his reversal, in February, of the Civil Service Loyalty Board's findings that a 'reasonable doubt' does indeed exist as to John Carter Vincent's loyalty. Not only did Dulles overrule this highly cautious board, he also exonerated Vincent on the lesser, looser, laxer score by declaring that neither is there 'reasonable doubt' that Vincent is a security risk. Now, the evidence against Vincent, garnered from a study of his career, is very persuasive . . .
"But even apart from Vincent's activities and associations in China, there is the testimony of Louis Budenz, who asserts that he knew Vincent to be a member of the Communist Party . . .Mr. Dulles in effect declared that there is no reasonable doubt that Louis Budenz is a liar. And this in spite of the fact that on the basis of thousands of pages of secret testimony, corroborating wherever possible, the FBI gives Budenz the highest reliability rating . . . Mr. Dulles dealt the federal security program . . . an Achesonian blow."
It was John Foster Dulles, then, who was appointed by Ike, or for Ike, to clean the security risks out of the State Department and to put a termination to the "America last" CFR foreign policy, as had been promised in the 1952 Republican Party platform. It has been observed of Dulles that he always said the right thing and always did the wrong one. In speeches and public statements, Dulles was always the proponent of the real American position, the man who announced the policies and intentions which the American people wanted to hear and which they recognized as right. The American people for the most part were not aware that he did just the opposite of what he proclaimed. But that, one must remember, is the way the Insiders operate.
During World War II Dulles was appointed chairman of the "Federal Council of Churches' Inter-Church Commission to Study the Bases of the Just and Durable Peace". In early March of 1942, that organization held a conference at Delaware, Ohio. Chairman John Foster Dulles submitted the report, which had been approved by the members of his committee. It included the following recommendations:
Chairman Dulles, an in-law of the Rockefellers and long-time attorney for the international bankers, placed on the United States much of the blame for the Second World War. His report said:
"It should be a matter of shame and humiliation to us that actually the influences shaping the world have largely been irresponsible forces. The natural wealth of the world is not evenly distributed. Accordingly, the possession of such natural resources . . . is a grant to be discharged in the general interest."
Time magazine of March 16, 1942, which carried under Dulles' picture the caption, "Shame on U.S.," stated:
"Some of the conference's economic opinions are almost as sensational as the extreme internationalism of its political program.
"It held that a 'new order of economic life is both imminent and imperative'—a new order that is sure to come either 'through voluntary cooperation within the framework of democracy or through explosive political revolution.' Without condemning the profit motive as such, it denounced various defects in the profit system for breeding war, demagogues and dictators, 'mass unemployment, widespread dispossession from homes and farms, destitution, lack of opportunity for youth and of security for old age.' Instead, 'the church must demand economic arrangements measured by human welfare . . . '"
Dulles was a prominent and much publicized member of the first meeting of the World Council of Churches, held in Amsterdam in 1948, at which that body officially declared capitalism to be just as evil as Communism. Dulles neither protested nor disavowed the resolution.
An idea of what John Foster Dulles had in mind in his pursuit of American foreign policy was given in U.S. News & World Report, December 28, 1956, where Dulles said: "It is very important that this satellite situation should develop in a way that the Soviet Union is surrounded by friendly countries." Commenting upon an earlier similar statement, Frank Meyer, now of National Review magazine, wrote:
"Surely if the administration had the faintest sense of reality about the character of the struggle, the tightest possible encirclement of the Soviet Union by the most hostile peoples would be one of our first aims. What is Secretary Dulles saying? That any friends we have in the periphery of the Soviet empire are to be sacrificed to the Russian desire for captive neighbors? How does this differ from the policy of Yalta, the sellout of Poland in 1945?"
You will recall that during the 1952 campaign, Nixon had called the Truman-Acheson policy of "containment" of Communism "cowardly." Under Dulles the Eisenhower Administration did not repudiate the Yalta agreements as promised in the platform, but instead repudiated any repudiation of the agreements. Since Dulles was a founder of 'the Council on Foreign Relations it is not surprising that he was a strong supporter of Atlantic Union, which advocates changing NATO from a defense alliance into a complete political union. The San Francisco Examiner of May 4, 1956, called Dulles' program "world government in disguise," and said that Eisenhower "fully supports the 'Dulles plan.'"
Despite the fact that Nixon had achieved great political mileage out of horsewhipping Dean Acheson for his, at best, badly mistaken policies towards Communism, he quickly gravitated toward Acheson's protege, Dulles. Writing in Look magazine, Earl Mazo was to note:
"Only a few have known that the relationship between Nixon and Dulles was perhaps the warmest in the Administration . . . Dulles was Nixon's behind the scenes adviser in many cases, especially during Eisenhower's illness."
It is not surprising that Nixon would feel an affinity for Dulles. Both possessed the ability to project a public image which ran quite counter to their actions. But sophisticated Washington watchers must have laughed to see the supposedly militant anti-Communist Nixon cozy up to Acheson's sidekick, Dulles. Acheson, in 1971 an unofficial Nixon adviser, was Nixon's favorite target in 1952, with statements like this:
"Stevenson himself hasn't even backbone training, for he is a graduate of Dean Acheson's spineless school of diplomacy which cost the free world six hundred million former allies in the past seven years of Trumanism."
Four days later Nixon again linked Stevenson with Acheson, the man who said he would not turn his back on Alger Hiss after Hiss was convicted of perjury regarding his activities in spying for the USSR:
"[Stevenson's] entire record shows that he is incurably afflicted with Acheson color-blindness—a form of pinkeye—toward the Red threat."
While campaigning for the Presidency in 1952, Ike told a Milwaukee audience that Communism had:
". . . insinuated itself into our schools . . . and our government itself. What did this contamination into government mean? It meant contamination to some degree of virtually every section of our government . . . We have all had enough, I believe, of those who have sneered at the warnings of men trying to drive Communists from high places—but who themselves have never had the sense or the stamina to take after the Communists themselves . . ."
Eisenhower's Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, started to expose some of the Communist influence in the Truman Administration. One week after Brownell's public revelation about Communist spy Harry Dexter White in 1953, he was silenced. Brownell got the picture. The exposures ceased.
After promising to investigate the Communists in "every department," Eisenhower let stand an order issued by Truman in 1947, prohibiting access by Congress to government files on the loyalty of personnel. Another 1948 directive by Truman forbidding government officials to give information to Congressional committees without White House permission was also left standing by Eisenhower. And on Friday, May 17, 1954, Eisenhower issued an order forbidding government departments to provide any information to investigating committees, which went far beyond the Truman "gag" rule. Chairman Francis Walter of the House Committee on Un-American Activities called the Eisenhower Executive Order "incredibly stupid."
No one, apparently, considered that from the standpoint of the Insiders the move was incredibly smart. Congressional committees were now, for all practical purposes, out of the business of investigating Communists and other subversives in the government—in complete repudiation of Eisenhower's campaign promises. This was also a complete repudiation of the idea that the American public has the right to know what its government is doing. As early as October 18, 1953, after campaigning on promises to clean the Communists out of the government, Eisenhower told a news conference that he hoped the whole security issue of Communists in government would be "a matter of history and memory by the time the next election comes around." He deplored the fear of Communism in government and "the suspicion on the part of the American people that their government services are weak in this regard."
The "great crusade" that Eisenhower during his campaign had promised to lead turned out to be a pied piper's pipe dream. The "Communist threat" disappeared under Eisenhower just as the "missile gap" did right after John F. Kennedy's election. Eisenhower did, however, lead one "crusade": the crusade to "get" Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Human Events stated:
"It is now obvious the Administration, striving desperately to down Senator McCarthy, has embarked upon a series of moves which, if successful, will take the nation a long way toward dictatorial government. These moves are depicted as an effort of President Eisenhower to shield himself from a McCarthy "domination" of the Republican party which, of course, is sheer moonshine. Back of these moves are the leftwing groups that have successfully penetrated the Republican party and who see in Senator McCarthy a chance to build an omnipotent executive who will have the power to hasten the establishment of a Socialist state in America."
McCarthy had been tolerated during the 1952 campaign, even though Eisenhower's backers despised him, because at that time the monumental smear job against him had been largely ineffective. In 1952, McCarthy had more supporters than detractors. In the years since then little has been said in defense of McCarthy, but the Liberal Establishment has continued to defame him to such a point that today there is hardly an American who does not believe that the Wisconsin Senator made outlandish and unprovable charges.
As it became obvious that Acheson's old subordinate, John Foster Dulles, had no intention of carrying out the campaign promises of Eisenhower and Nixon to clean out the State Department, McCarthy began to turn the heat on the Eisenhower administration. The ex-Marine was proving to be disturbingly nonpartisan on the Communist infiltration issue. Nixon was assigned to try to divert McCarthy onto other issues.
The Vice President had been a close friend of McCarthy's, and McCarthy apparently trusted Nixon. For a while he toned down his attacks. Nixon is credited with persuading McCarthy to call off his threat to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency, which the Dulles brothers had been primarily responsible for founding. Nixon also talked McCarthy into firing J.B. Matthews as his chief investigator, after Matthews published a magazine article thoroughly documenting the depth of penetration by Communists of religious bodies, including the National Council of Churches, and the success with which the Communists had enticed tens of thousands of non-Communist, liberal clergymen into joining their fronts. McCarthy was also upset with the Eisenhower Administration's position on relaxing aid and trade restrictions against the Iron Curtain countries. The Wisconsin Senator had written a scathing letter to Eisenhower on the subject, but Nixon persuaded McCarthy to let him intercept the letter before it reached the President.
The Vice President attempted to divert McCarthy's energies to other matters. He told the Wisconsin Senator: "You should not be known as a one-shot Senator." After visiting McCarthy in Florida, Nixon told reporters that McCarthy would turn his attention to Democratic corruption and away from the Communist issue. McCarthy apparently decided that whatever promises had been made to him that the Eisenhower administration would slowly and without fanfare get around to the "subversion in government" issue were not going to be kept. He denounced as a lie Nixon's statement to the press that McCarthy would lay off the Communism issue.
When it became obvious to the "Palace Guard" that Nixon could no longer control McCarthy, a way had to be found to engineer the Senator's downfall. The three most important men in arranging the destruction of McCarthy were William Rogers, then Assistant Attorney General and now Secretary of State; Henry Cabot Lodge, currently Nixon's ambassador to the Vatican; and Ford Foundation official Paul Hoffman. Fulton Lewis Jr. said:
"One man above all others in the White House family hated Joe McCarthy, and that man was Paul G. Hoffman, the President's confidante whom he named to the United Nations . . . Paul Hoffman, in his hatred, helped to pay for the lawyers who drew up the censure charges which Senator Flanders of Vermont lodged against Senator McCarthy, and which finally—though proven to be false—resulted in McCarthy's censure.[Hoffman was the darling of the United World Federalists, of whom Flanders was one.]
"On July 19th of last year, Senator Flanders openly admitted this act on the floor of the United States Senate, at that time he publicly apologized to Senator McCarthy for what he had done. He said he wished the whole thing could be forgotten, but he did admit that Mr. Hoffman contributed $1,000 for the drafting of those false charges.
"Hoffman, who hated Taft, McCarthy and all the anti-communists with a passion, you will remember, married a Communist. [Hoffman's wife is Anna Rosenberg, who has been the public relations brains behind Nelson Rockefeller's political career.] What the "Palace Guard" was attempting to do was to make the White House into a Bergen with only Charlie McCarthys in Congress, not Joe McCarthys."
In his article for Colliers magazine, "How Ike Saved the Republican Party," Hoffman had made it plain that McCarthy and the anti-Communists were to be purged from the party. He said:
"[McCarthy and his group were] creating the illusion both at home and abroad that the Republican party was anti-Communist and nothing else, that it had lost its interest in the quest for peace abroad and for human welfare at home. Such a negative image of the Republican party could prove disastrous; if the Republican party were to win, it had to be for something."
The reason the Eisenhower Administration was so eager to get McCarthy was not merely that he was exposing subversives who had infiltrated the government bureaucracy, but that following the trail of the lower echelon conspirators had led him to start knocking at the doors of the upper-level conspirators of the so-called "legitimate world." When McCarthy began making the connection between the Communists and the penthouse conspirators above them, his career was doomed. The same was true of the Reece Committee, which had been investigating foundations until the probe was killed on orders from Eisenhower. Whenever any government investigation gets above the level of exposing the gutter revolutionaries and begins following the trail to the "legitimate world," the investigation is always quashed.
Although the issue of Communist infiltration of government, which the Republicans had used to get elected in 1952, was buried as soon as they assumed office (and McCarthy with it, when he attempted to force the Republicans to carry out their campaign promises), it was resurrected for the 1954 off-year elections. Nixon was used again, as he had been in 1952, as a Judas goat, to lead naive anti-Communist sheep into the "New" Republicans' ideological slaughterhouse. This time Nixon claimed that the Eisenhower Administration had rooted the Reds out of government. In Omaha on September 20, 1954, Nixon stated:
"[The Eisenhower Administration is] kicking Communists, fellow travelers, and bad security risks out of the federal government by the thousands. The Communist conspiracy is being smashed to bits by this administration . . . Previous Democratic administrations underestimated the Communist danger at home and ignored it. They covered up rather than cleaned up."
A week later at New Bedford, Massachusetts, Nixon again claimed:
"We have driven the Communists, the fellow-travelers, and the security risks out of government by the thousands."
Soon, Nixon began playing the numbers game as he toured the country campaigning for Republican office seekers. The number of ousted "security risks" escalated from 1,456 to 2,200 to 2,429 to 2,486, and then climaxed at 6,926. Using this figure, Nixon told an audience in Rock Island, Illinois, on October 21:
"The President's security risk program resulted in 6,926 individuals removed from the federal service . . . The great majority of these individuals were inherited largely from the Truman regime . . . . Included in this number were individuals who were members of the Communist Party and Communist controlled organizations."
These individuals numbered 1,743, according to Nixon. The Vice President went so far as to assert November 1, in Denver, Colorado, that:
"96 percent of the 6,926 Communists, fellow travelers, sex perverts, people with criminal records, dope addicts, drunks, and other security risks removed under the Eisenhower security program were hired by the Truman administration."
Fifteen months later the Eisenhower-appointed Civil Service Chairman Philip Young informed a Senate committee that a subsequent survey showed that 41.2 percent of the dismissed or resigned security risks actually had been hired after Eisenhower had taken over the executive department from the Democrats. Since Eisenhower had been in office for so short a time, it would appear that things were getting worse under Ike than they had been under Truman. Young had earlier testified that he knew of no single government employee who had been fired by the Eisenhower Administration for being a Communist or fellow traveler! During Truman's last full year, the administration fired 21,626 for cause. Nixon's claims were clearly fraudulent, but they did make for exciting campaign rhetoric. His boss had made investigation of Communist penetration in government a dead letter by continuing Truman's gag rule.
By the 1956 campaign Nixon was burying the issue entirely. On October 17, Nixon told an audience at Cornell University, according to the Associated Press, that investigations of Communist activities of the kind formerly conducted by McCarthy were no longer needed. He gave credit to the Eisenhower Administration's security policies for taking "this issue . . . out of the political arena." In a sense he was telling the truth. The issue had been taken out of the political arena. The Democrats certainly weren't going to bring it up if the Republicans didn't. Yet seventeen days earlier, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nixon had asserted that the GOP would never do what it soon did. According to the Vice President:
"We will never underestimate or pooh-pooh the Communist danger, either abroad or in the United States of America. . . In a political campaign, it is tempting to tell the American people that we can get rid of our draft, cut our defenses, find a cut-rate way to meet our international obligations, but American security must come before any political ambitions."
What made Nixon's burial of the internal subversion issue all the more ironic was his earlier claim that the Democrats had buried it, as in this September 21, 1948 statement: "The full story of Communist espionage will not be told until we get a Republican President who is not afraid of skeletons in the closet." Nixon advanced his own career with statements like the following, made shortly before he ran for the Senate:
"Because they treated Communist infiltration into our American institutions like any ordinary petty political scandal, the [Truman] Administration officials responsible for this failure to act against the Communist conspiracy rendered the greatest possible disservice to the people of this nation."
This was made all the more significant because Elizabeth Bentley, who had served as a courier for the Communist party, had testified that of the many Communist cells in the U.S. government, only two, the Silvermaster and Perlo cells, had been partially uncovered. It should be duly noted that Nixon had full knowledge of the depth and extent of Communist penetration of the government from his activities on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Hiss case. To tell the American public that the issue was dead can only be described as deceitful, although it doubtless enhanced his stock among the Insiders, to whom he was catering in every possible way.
Another extremely important issue that Nixon used to sabotage Conservatives and anti-Communists was the Bricker Amendment. The Bricker Amendment was framed by Ohio Senator John Bricker, who was concerned that treaties entered into by the President superseded the Constitution. His argument was based on a statement made by John Foster Dulles before the American Bar Association in Louisville in April 1952. Dulles had discussed the status of treaties in international law and under the Constitution. He pointed out that the Constitution specifically says (Article VI) that approved treaties "shall be the supreme law of the land." He added that such treaties "are indeed more supreme than ordinary laws, for congressional laws are invalid if they do not conform to the Constitution, whereas treaty law can override the Constitution."
The Bricker Amendment forbade the President to enter into any treaty that would supersede the Constitution of the United States and deny to any citizen the rights guaranteed by it. One would assume that no elected official could oppose the Bricker Amendment. The Amendment was specifically aimed at the United Nations Charter, which is a treaty. Bricker feared we were headed for "socialism by treaty" through the United Nations. Under the Bricker Amendment, it would be impossible to surrender our sovereignty to a world government by treaty.
Naturally, the Amendment was anathema to all the world government clan, the CFR in particular. It was denounced as an attempt to undermine the treaty-making power of the President—which it was, assuming that the President sought to enter into a treaty that would violate the Constitutional rights of Americans. Eisenhower fought the Bricker Amendment bitterly right down to its hairline defeat on the Senate floor, denouncing its supporters as "nuts and crackpots." The man responsible for the defeat of the Bricker Amendment was Richard M. Nixon.
While in the Senate, Nixon had favored the Amendment, but as a hatchetman for the Eisenhower Administration, he worked for the defeat of this crucially important bill. White House correspondent William Costello wrote:
"The Bricker amendment . . . called for Nixon's best talents. The White House set itself adamantly against the amendment's proposed limitation on the President's treaty-making powers, and it was Nixon who brought the report that sentiment both in and out of Congress was more sympathetic to Bricker than the President had supposed. The Vice President, after first proposing compromise, found himself in loyalty to the White House stalling. placating, instructing, and negotiating and finally joined Eisenhower in opposition to Bricker's demand."
The Bricker Amendment lost in the Senate by a single vote. Some day Americans may realize how crucial that betrayal of the Constitution was.
The Vice President made a convincing "yes man" for the Eisenhower-Dulles version of the Truman-Acheson appeasement of the Communist program. Nixon's support of such anti-anti-Communist programs helped drown resistance to them.
On March 17, 1960, Eisenhower told Los Angeles Times reporter Don Shannon: "So far as I know, there has never been a specific difference in our points of view on any important problems in seven years."
Ultra-Liberal columnist Marquis Childs (CFR) quoted Nixon as stating: "My beliefs are very close, as it has turned out, to the philosophy of the Eisenhower Administration on both foreign and domestic policy." Mr. Childs added: "In embracing the Eisenhower philosophy and the "new Republicanism", Nixon has gone against his own conservative voting record when he was in the Senate and House." Taking the Vice President at his word, we see that he supported the Eisenhower policies of:
All of these events were critical, with long-term implications that still affect us today.
In order to ingratiate himself with the International Left, Nixon did such things as escort the notorious Indonesian Communist Achmed Sukarno around the capital and introduce him to the Senate as the George Washington of Indonesia. He did the same for Fidel Castro. Although our military intelligence, our ambassadors to Cuba and Mexico, and all of South America had known for years that Castro was a Communist and had tried to so inform our government, Nixon did his best to try to keep up the pretense that Castro was just another of those George Washingtons.
On April 18, 1959, Vice President Nixon stated: "[The] Cuban people themselves will not tolerate a Communist government or a Communist takeover." Five days later, in an address to newspaper editors, he remarked:
"I mentioned Dr. Castro's visit, and I am looking forward to the opportunity of seeing him tomorrow in my office . . . No one can come to the United States, no one can talk to American audiences, no one can talk to the officials of our government, as Dr. Castro will have, without going back convinced that the U.S. government and people share whole-heartedly the aspirations of the people of Latin America for peaceful existence, for Democratic freedom, for economic progress, and for the strengthening of the institutions of representative government."
Nixon vocally supported extending foreign aid to Communist Poland and the Cultural Exchange Program, despite the fact that J. Edgar Hoover had warned that the latter was a ruse for smuggling spies into the country. Nixon proved to be an excellent tranquilizer for Conservative Republicans while Eisenhower and the "Palace Guard" tugged and hauled the party Leftward.
One of the major themes of the 1952 Eisenhower-Nixon campaign had been a pledge to reverse the onrushing movement towards socialism. In those days Republicans used the word "socialism" to describe the program of the Democrats. Today, since Eisenhower and Nixon adopted the Democrats' programs, the word is as thoroughly taboo among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Pollster Samuel Lubell observes that "to solidify itself permanently in American life the New Deal needed at least one Republican victory . . . [which would] endorse much of the New Deal through the simple device of leaving things untouched." That is exactly what the Eisenhower Administration did. As M. Stanton Evans, editor of the Indianapolis Star, has written:
"One result of this was to alienate from the party the new majority which had temporarily surfaced in 1952: the taxpayers and homeowners who looked to the Republicans for relief, and who were rudely disappointed as augmented federal spending and taxes shifted the cost of government more heavily on them than before. In consequence the GOP emerged from the White House with little to show for its eight years' occupancy: a party base more shrunken than ever, repeated defeats in the battles for Congress, and no strategy for reversing things."
In 1950, middle-class Americans paid thirty-three percent of the total tax burden. By 1958, they found themselves paying forty-seven percent of it. By the end of Ike's career the federal government owned three million more acres of land in the continental United States than it had when he was inaugurated. During the Eisenhower years federal employment continued to climb and bureaus to expand. While Ike was getting publicity for paring personnel in one place, he was quietly adding more in other places, resulting in large net gains in federal employment—breaking yet another of his campaign pledges. Eisenhower's proposed budget for 1957-58 called for domestic spending of $31 billion, against the highest figure under Truman, who had the Korean War to finance, of $20 billion.
Under Eisenhower the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was created, a department which Republicans and Conservative Democrats had successfully kept the ADA crowd from creating under either Roosevelt or Truman. HEW has now grown into the most expensive department in the federal government.
During the eight years of the Eisenhower Administration the national debt increased by almost $27 billion. Truman, in seven budgets, had increased the national debt by only $5 1/2 billion, in spite of the fact that he had a full-blown Korean War to deal with. In April 1957, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, stated: "The United States is making greater strides towards socialism under Eisenhower than even under Roosevelt."
Result of all this; the Republican party was swept under in the 1958 elections, sustaining a defeat second only to the disaster of 1936 in modern Republican history.
Nixon had been, as Paul Hoffman said, a faithful servant of the Eisenhower Administration. His job had been to quash any revolt by the rank and file against Ike's socialism by making strong public statements, just as Vice President Agnew has done for Nixon. When he was out speechifying, Nixon sounded as hard-core as ever. During his campaigning in 1954, he was still castigating the Democratic program as socialism. "A Democratic victory," he said, "will mean a sharp turn to the left, back down the road to socialism." He told a group of the faithful in Van Nuys, California: "When the Eisenhower Administration came to Washington on January 20, 1953, we found in the files a virtual blueprint for socializing America." The Democratic plans, he stated, "call for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized agriculture, socialized water and power and perhaps most disturbing of all, socialization of America's greatest source of power, atomic energy."
The Vice President really became carried away one night and blurted out this statement: ". . . speaking for a unanimous Supreme Court, a great Republican Chief Justice, Earl Warren, has ordered an end to racial segregation in the nation's public schools."
But pacifying grass-roots Republicans with Conservative rhetoric was not Nixon's only job in the Eisenhower Administration. He worked behind the scenes, pushing and shoving recalcitrant Republican Congressmen and Senators into supporting the "New Republicanism" of Ike and his "Palace Guard."
The Council on Foreign Relations and the "Palace Guard" had done their job well. During the entire Eisenhower Administration there was no interruption of "America last" policies abroad and the welfare state at home. The Insiders had proved that they could not only control the selection of Republican Presidential candidates, but could actually control a Republican administration.
In one respect the Eisenhower Administration was a monumental success: it was undeniably successful at purging Conservatives from the party. Ike's "confidante," Paul Hoffman in his October 1956 article in Colliers, laid out in the very bluntest terms the strategy for purging Conservatives from the Republican party.
On February 16, 1957, Human Events reported that Hoffman claimed that the White House had suggested the idea of the article and that he "wrote a draft and submitted it to members of the Palace Guard. The latter returned it to him, saying it was not strong enough and urging him to name names. Hoffman acceded to this request and the Colliers piece appeared in print in a new and tougher version, with the names."
Hoffman admitted that, when Eisenhower was elected, only "thirty percent of the local and county leaders of the party and less than twenty percent of the Congressmen and Senators" within the Republican Party supported Eisenhower's Liberal foreign and domestic policies. Eisenhower was upset, Hoffman said, because even as leader of the ticket he could not control all Republicans. He stated: "What Eisenhower did not grasp was the entrenched power of some of the greater figures on Capitol Hill and how deep and firm were the rusty, old-fashioned convictions in which they believed."
If you wanted to make progress within the new Republican establishment, you had to sell out and go Liberal. Hoffman quoted Charles Halleck as shaking his head and saying: "I had to swallow hard two or three times because the boss believes in things I don't, but he's the boss . . ." Halleck soon got the picture. "You have to go along to get along," as the politicians say. Hoffman wrote: "By now, I should add, Charlie Halleck has turned out to be a tower of strength for the Eisenhower program."
Hoffman admitted in the Colliers article that during the Eisenhower regime Conservative Republicans were moved out and Liberals in. He said:
"Forty-two new state chairmen of the Republican party are new, solid, Eisenhower men. Eighty-five of the one hundred forty-six members of the national committee in 1952, have been replaced by new faces. In state after state the young men and women [many of them Democrats] first brought into politics through the Citizens for Eisenhower have begun to occupy commanding posts in the regular structure. There are, to be sure, areas where the old guard still retains its control . . . But by and large, the nature of the party in 1956, is almost totally different from what it was in 1952—either in personalities, or in philosophy of Republican stalwarts. We have come to accept Eisenhower leadership wholeheartedly."
Hoffman continued:
"Eisenhower's overriding political directive to Leonard Hall, our national chairman, is to find young people, new people of the Citizens for Eisenhower stripe and bring them into the organization. This fall, in New York and Wisconsin, bitter intra-party fights for the Republican Senatorial nomination in these great states have been won by two distinguished liberals, [Communist Party protege] Jacob Javits and Alexander Wiley—both of them 100% Eisenhower men—over opposition from the right wing."
"This is not to say that the battle to remake the Republican Party is entirely won," wrote Hoffman. "There still remains . . . the Senate, where years of power built up men whose entrenched positions still let them resist the philosophy of the Twentieth Century." Then Hoffman continued:
"In the Senate, there are too many Republican Senators claiming the label Republican who embrace none or very little of the Eisenhower program and philosophy. This group can be divided into two splinters. One splinter contains men like Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, Senator William Jenner of Indiana, Senator Herman Welker of Idaho, Senator George Malone of Nevada, who can be called the unappeasables. I shall not try to stigmatize the dangerous thinking and reckless conduct of these men except to say that, in my opinion, they have little place in the new Republican party.
"The other splinter within the dissident third [the conservative, anti-Communist one-third] consists of what I consider the "faint-hope" group: men like Senator Henry Dworshak of Idaho, Senator Andrew Schoeppel of Kansas, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. This splinter has been unable to demonstrate, conclusively and permanently, that it accepts the modern America with its needs of social security or balanced labor-management relations, or government partnership and guardianship of our complex economy. Nor, being still wedded to the old-fashioned idea of fortress-America-isolated-in-space, can it accept America's role as the chief champion of peace and decency in active international relations."
All of the Senators except Goldwater soon met their political Waterloo. Is it rational to believe that this article would have appeared in Colliers magazine without the prior approval of Eisenhower and the "Palace Guard?" Could Hoffman's message have been any clearer? There is no room in the "modern" Republican Party for Conservatives. All the "modern" Republicans want from Conservatives is their vote on election day.
In the same article, however, Hoffman did have praise for one Republican:
"In the Senate, from the very beginning, the President's program has had the unqualified and vigorous support of Vice President Nixon. Some liberal Republicans are still unconvinced as to the Vice President's attitude, holding that he had supported the program only out of personal loyalty to the President, and that his original ultra-conservative views are unchanged. Based on what Nixon has said both publicly and privately, it is my view that he genuinely and deeply believes—that the Eisenhower program is best for the country".
On September 15, 1954, Human Events had charged that no administration in history had so strikingly disregarded party loyalty in job appointments, many key positions having gone to CFR Democrats. Eisenhower also succeeded in destroying a coalition of Southern Conservative Democrats and Northern Republicans that had blocked much socialist legislation. Now Republicans were put in the position of being traitors if they did not support the Eisenhower Administration's programs. The Chicago Tribune of January 1, 1958, commented editorially:
"The fact is that the Republican party, as it has developed, or, more properly, degenerated under Mr. Eisenhower and his Palace Guard, now stands for pretty nearly everything that can be found in unadulterated form under a Democratic wrapper. The great achievement of the occupant of the White House, if such it can be called, is to have destroyed the Republican party as a repository for any recognizable body of orthodox doctrine."
The elections of 1954, 1956, and 1958 were Republican debacles, except for Eisenhower's personal success in 1956. As Theodore White observed:
"Divorced from the personal curing power of his great name, in each measurable off-year Congressional election under his administration, the Republican party lost ground . . . With the Democratic triumph in the election of 1958, the fortunes of the Republican party, as a party, had sunk to their lowest ebb since the zenith of the New Deal in 1936."
While Republican candidates were being defeated, Eisenhower never campaigned for any other Republican, with the exception of the ultra-ultra-Liberal Clifford Case (CFR), when he ran for the Senate in 1954. So successful was Ike at purging Conservatives from the GOP that at the end of the 1958 elections Harold Lavine, senior editor of Newsweek, wrote:
"Eisenhower has succeeded where Roosevelt and Truman failed . . . The Republican party is a thoroughly demoralized body . . . Republican morale has been able to sustain five successive defeats, but it has crumbled completely as a result of Eisenhower's two great victories."
Eisenhower made no bones about the fact that there were no ideological differences, as far as he was concerned, between the two parties. Since he was really a Liberal Democrat who became a Liberal Republican only in order to run for the Presidency, this is not surprising. Writing in the Saturday Evening Post, Eisenhower stated his philosophy that the Republican party had a better delivery system for socialism.
"The difference between parties is, in most instances, a matter of approach to problems and programs. We Republicans want our government at appropriate levels to be responsive to our needs, but not to invade our individual rights, liberties, and responsibilities. Though we have many of the same ultimate goals as the Democrats, we disagree with them on methods and in their application, believing that ours are safer and more effective in preserving individual rights, responsibilities, and initiatives, which, after all, are the basis of self-government."
Conservative strength at the national level of the Republican party was decimated by the Eisenhower-Nixon Administration, so that when the grass-roots Conservative groundswell of the 1960's developed, it was strictly at the local level, with little support within the national party machinery. The result of eight years of Eisenhower-Nixon was that the New Deal had not only been saved from threatened extinction, but had been expanded. William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in 1958:
". . . The passion to federalize social and economic functions is as ardent today as it was in 1952, and beyond a few ritualistic rhetorical dampeners, Mr. Eisenhower has done nothing to check it. The problem of internal security, on the way to a solution when Mr. Eisenhower was elected, has, by his inattention, relapsed to a state worse than that under Mr. Truman. The labor barons, who posed in 1952 an acute problem understood by Senator Taft, have waxed stronger in five years, and have got virtual guarantees of non-interference from the Eisenhower Administration: for to interfere with them would mean to dig in and take a stand, and Eisenhower does not take stands, except against McCarthy and the Bricker Amendment . . ."
It is important to note from Mr. Buckley's concluding sentence that Mr. Eisenhower could be extremely tough and resolute when he wanted to be. Yet Mr. Buckley attributed Eisenhower's disastrous policies with regard to Communism to lack of understanding and will. Buckley wrote:
"There is no other intelligible explanation for Eisenhower's movements in the past five years than that he does not take the Communists at their word as to the aims of Communism. What man who knows Communism would have gone to Geneva to act as a sounding board for Communist propaganda? What man, having made the mistake of going, would have declared, the whole world breathless at his feet, that he believed the Communists—as he put it—'want peace as much as we do'?
"Where is the man who understands Communism who would say, as Eisenhower did at a press conference last summer, that '. . . I was very hard put to it when [Marshal Zhukov] insisted that [the Communist] system appealed to the idealistic, and we completely to the materialistic, and I had a very tough time trying to defend our position.
"Who except a man incapable of understanding Communism could, after so many demonstrations that the Communists mean exactly what their high priests say, permit the national policy to bog down one more time over so palpable a ruse as Marshal Bulganin's call for the one-millionth conference at which to 'reconcile the world's differences'? . . . The tranquil world of Mr. Eisenhower is the world in which the Communists are thriving."
Mr. Buckley ['Skull and Bones' Society] described the effect admirably and ignored the cause, i.e., that Dwight Eisenhower was the creation of the CFR and the men behind it, and was their willing tool if not their partner. Instead of being in retreat after eight years of "Republican" leadership, the world Communist movement was stronger than ever. It even had a foothold on our own doorstep in Cuba, thanks to brother Milton Eisenhower and the uncleansed State Department, which ignored reports that Castro was a long-time Communist. The "crusade" that had been promised was never launched. Instead, it was business as usual, with a new group of operators running the same show for the same Insiders behind the scenes.
NOTE: Many people have tried to condone Eisenhower's sins by contending that he was too dumb to know what he was really doing, citing the tongue-tangled syntax he displayed at press conferences. Not so, says Garry Wills in his highly readable (but in spots very misleading) book, Nixon Agonistes. Wills writes: "Eisenhower was not a political sophisticate; he was a political genius." Behind that infectious smile there resided a cold and calculating mind. Although Eisenhower did not do well scholastically at West Point, he scored extremely high at the even more competitive General Staff School. He was an excellent bridge player and turned poker into an extremely profitable pastime.
More important, says Wills, Eisenhower's army career was largely built on his ability as a writer of manuals and ghost writer of speeches, and he was regarded as an excellent editor, with dogmatic insistence on precise syntax. The fumbling and bumbling and the garbled circumlocutions were so much show biz. This was a conscious strategy of Eisenhower's to avoid answering questions in detail. For example. Wills reports during the Quemoy-Matsu crisis, the President's press secretary, James Hagerty, advised him to take a "no comment" position on the whole issue. "Don't worry, Jim . . . . If that question comes up. I'll just confuse them," replied Eisenhower. It takes superior intelligence to be able to deliberately double-talk one's way out of tough situations. The President's speech writer, Emmett John Hughes, acknowledged that Eisenhower "made not one politically significant verbal blunder throughout eight years of press conferences and public addresses."