Ike's Spies (30 page)

THE MANNER
in which Ike dealt with these three incidents is the measure of how gravely he regarded the Communist threat to the United States, and of the importance he attached to espionage and counterespionage activities. All involved hard decisions that had to be made on the basis of what the President thought was best for the country.

The Rosenberg case was on Eisenhower's desk when he took office.
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Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were members of the Communist Party, U.S.A., and allegedly at the center of a Soviet spy ring. David Greenglass, Ethel's brother, had worked as a machinist on the Manhattan Project, and in January 1945 he supposedly gave the Rosenbergs rough drawings of the detonating device for the atomic bomb (how to set off an atomic bomb had been one of the
most vexing problems of the Manhattan Project). Later in 1945, via a courier named Harry Gold, Greenglass gave the Rosenbergs drawings of the bomb itself, along with explanatory notes.

Four years later, the Russians exploded their first atomic device. Shortly thereafter, in England, Klaus Fuchs confessed to espionage for the Soviet Union. He put the finger on Gold, who in turn named Greenglass. In June 1950, Greenglass confessed. He named the Rosenbergs. Greenglass got a fifteen-year sentence, Gold got thirty years, while in England, Fuchs was sentenced to fourteen years.

But the Rosenbergs pleaded not guilty. They were tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death on the charge of espionage.
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They appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Supreme Court. By January of 1953, when Ike took office, the Rosenbergs' only hope was executive clemency.

Communists and their fellow travelers, joined by innumerable liberals and such luminaries as Martin Buber, Pope Pius XII, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell, launched a campaign to convince Ike to stay the execution. They charged that the Rosenbergs had been framed, that their death sentence was the result of anti-Semitism and runaway McCarthyism. They staged demonstrations in America and around the world. Humanitarians, meanwhile, objected to the severity of the sentence. Greenglass, Gold, and Fuchs had gotten off with their lives, and even without life imprisonment. In addition, the Rosenbergs had two small boys. Some of Ike's most trusted advisers told him he would have to grant a stay of execution because the nation simply could not put to death the mother of small children. Many in the Cabinet recommended clemency.
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Ike nevertheless decided to allow the executions to be carried out. He expressed his reasons in private letters to his son John and to a Columbia University friend, Clyde Miller. To John he wrote, “I must say that it goes against the grain to avoid interfering in the case where a woman is to receive capital punishment. Over against
this, however, must be placed one or two facts that have great significance. The first of these is that in this instance it is the woman who is the strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one. She has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy ring. The second thing is that if there would be any commuting of the woman's sentence without the man's then from here on the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women.”

To Miller: “As to any intervention based on consideration of America's reputation or standing in the world, you have given the case for one side. What you did not suggest was the need for considering this kind of argument over and against the known convictions of Communist leaders that free governments—and especially the American government—are notoriously weak and fearful and that consequently subversive and other kinds of activity can be conducted against them with no real fear of dire punishment on the part of the perpetrator. It is, of course, important to the Communists to have this contention sustained and justified. In the present case they have even stooped to dragging in young and innocent children in order to serve their own purpose.

“The action of these people has exposed to greater danger of death literally millions of our citizens.… That their crime is a very real one and that its potential results are as definite as I have just stated, are facts that seem to me to be above contention.”
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THE CASE OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
was nearly as difficult as the Rosenberg affair. Oppenheimer, the brilliant scientist who had been a central figure in the Manhattan Project, was chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1949 he had opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb on what were essentially political grounds—he thought it much too dangerous and a great mistake to create such a weapon—but had been overruled by President Truman. In 1953, Ike put him at the head of an advisory group to report to the President on what could be done about the arms race. Oppenheimer's attitude was that it would be madness to continue developing ever-bigger bombs and nuclear arsenals. In a memorable phrase, he compared the United States and the Soviet Union to “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”
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Oppenheimer was tremendously popular with scientists and young intellectuals generally. On college campuses all across the country, students—especially those majoring in physics, in those years
the
hot subject—could be seen wearing the porkpie hats he favored, smoking pipes as he did. His stance on the hydrogen bomb elicited a strongly pro-Oppenheimer response.

Oppenheimer advised Ike that his first step in bringing the arms race under some kind of control should be candor about the horrors of nuclear war, starting with a report on the size of the American nuclear arsenal and a description of the amount of devastation it could cause. The recommendation set off an intense debate in Eisenhower's administration. Oppenheimer's leading opponent was Admiral Lewis Strauss, a Wall Street investment banker with close ties to the Republican right wing, and also the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. Despite their political differences, Strauss and Oppenheimer were old friends, frequently staying in each other's homes as houseguests. In 1946 it was Strauss who got Oppenheimer the post of Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

But on the issue of Operation Candor, as it came to be called, Strauss was fiercely opposed to Oppenheimer. Strauss took the view that such candor “would not have advantaged the American public but certainly would have relieved the Soviets of trouble in their espionage activities.”
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Ike was between Oppenheimer and Strauss in his thinking, “encouraging both without offending either.” He viewed the so-called “Bang! Bang! papers,” with their descriptions of atomic horrors leaving “everybody dead on both sides, with no hope anywhere,” as too frightening to serve any useful purpose. “We don't want to scare the country to death,” he said, fearing it would set off a congressional demand for outlandish and largely ineffective defense spending. Eventually, he tried—unsuccessfully—to find a way out of the arms race with his famous Atoms for Peace proposal to the UN.
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It was not Operation Candor that got Oppenheimer into trouble, however, although later it was charged that Oppenheimer's fight with Strauss, plus the general atmosphere of McCarthyism, was responsible for what happened.

The incident began on December 3, 1954, when Ike held a meeting in the Oval Office, with Strauss, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and a few other high-ranking officials in attendance.
Allegations had been made against Oppenheimer's loyalty.

J. Edgar Hoover had a letter from the former director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, William Borden, charging that it was “more likely than not that J. Robert Oppenheimer is a Communist spy.” Senator McCarthy had become aware of the charges. It was thus potentially both a hot political issue and a dangerous security challenge, as Oppenheimer knew as much about atomic weapons as any man living, and McCarthy was locked in a struggle with the Administration (the Army-McCarthy Hearings were then going on).

Ike was furious. He first of all wanted to know how on earth Strauss could have cleared Oppenheimer for the
AEC
back in 1947, and why the man had been cleared for work on the Manhattan Project during the war, and why there had been no investigation of him since the Republicans took office. Strauss muttered some replies, the main point being that they could not have built the bomb without Oppenheimer. Ike then said that while he “wished to make it plain that he was not in any way prejudging the matter,” he wanted a “blank wall” placed between Oppenheimer and any further access to top-secret information until such time as a hearing had been completed.
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The next morning, Ike wrote in his diary, “I directed a memorandum to the Attorney General instructing him to procure from the Director of the
FBI
an entire file in the case of Dr. Oppenheimer and to make of it a thorough study.… It is reported to me that this same information [the charges against Oppenheimer], or at least the vast bulk of it, has been constantly reviewed and re-examined over a number of years, and that the overall conclusion has always been that there is no evidence that implies disloyalty on the part of Dr. Oppenheimer. However, this does not mean that he might not be a security risk.”
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Eisenhower set up a three-man committee to conduct the hearing. The committee discovered that Oppenheimer had a continuing friendship with a former French professor and Communist intellectual, Haakon Chevalier. In the 1930s Oppenheimer had been a frequent contributor to West Coast leftist organizations. He admitted that he had been a “fellow traveler” from 1937 to 1942. His fiancée, Dr. Jean Tatlock, was a member of the Communist Party in San Francisco. His former wife had been married to a Communist
who was killed in 1937 fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His brother and sister-in-law had been Communists. Perhaps worst of all, Oppenheimer admitted that he had lied, under oath, about these associations.
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By a vote of two to one, the committee held that Oppenheimer, while not disloyal, had “fundamental defects of character” and therefore recommended that his security clearance be taken away. By a vote of five to one, with Strauss leading the way, the
AEC
then upheld that decision. Ike in turn concurred in the recommendation and refused to reinstate Oppenheimer's clearance.

The decision split the American scientific community into two bitter factions. Critics charged that refusing Oppenheimer access to top-secret material was like telling him he was not allowed to think. The ugly charge of anti-Semitism was hurled about. Many of Oppenheimer's supporters said Ike had done it only to appease McCarthy. Strauss came in for some particularly hostile remarks. The bitterness was such that some time later the Senate refused to confirm Strauss' nomination as Secretary of Commerce.

Ike's attitude, as always, was to try to find some compromise, some common ground on which all the contestants could stand, some way of leaving everyone happy and no one angry. At the height of the controversy, he sent a note to Strauss saying, “Why do we not get Dr. Oppenheimer interested in desalting sea water? I can think of no scientific success of all time that would equal this in its boon to mankind—provided the solution could do the job on a massive scale and cheaply.”
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Oppenheimer, who had been publicly humiliated, never worked for the government again.

Whether or not a terrible mistake had been made and an injustice done cannot be settled here. In 1963, LBJ awarded Oppenheimer the
AEC'S
highest honor, the Fermi Award—this act was generally taken to be a vindication. It should be noted that Oppenheimer was not “punished” in any direct way, merely denied the opportunity to continue working for the government on atomic matters on the grounds that such employment was not “clearly consistent with the interests of the national security.” Strauss personally continued to support Oppenheimer; as a member of the board of directors, Strauss offered the motion to reelect Oppenheimer as Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies. And in his memoirs Ike insisted that the McCarthy aspect of the case had no bearing on
his decision. It just seemed to him that a man who had such long and close association with Communists, and who had lied about it for years, had to be considered a security risk. As he put it in his first State of the Union address, “Only a combination of both loyalty and reliability promises genuine security.”
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IF IKE'S DECISION
in the Rosenberg and Oppenheimer cases demonstrated how seriously he regarded the threat to the United States posed by the Soviet espionage network, his acceptance of the Doolittle Report showed how far he was willing to go to counter that threat.

Early in Eisenhower's presidency, Senator Mike Mansfield introduced a resolution for a “Joint Congressional Oversight Committee for the American Clandestine Service.” Eisenhower strongly opposed any such interference with executive control of the
CIA
. Stuyvesant Wainwright II, a freshman congressman from Long Island, and Peter Frelinghuysen, another Republican (from New Jersey), supported Mansfield in the House. Ike exploded. Wainwright later recalled that “he told both Peter and me that this kind of a bill would be passed over his dead body.” One reason was “he felt that any Congressional Committee would end up being dominated by Senator McCarthy … and he was damned if he was going to let McCarthy have any other area wherein he might get a foothold.”