Profiles in Self-Preservation

Faced with the figure of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who delighted in attacking his colleagues with gusto, and who in the 1950 election had helped to defeat senators in and outside his own party, they hedged, bit their tongues, tried to equivocate, and often said nothing. As Richard H. Rovere writes in his book on the subject, “Paul Douglas of Illinois . . . the most cultivated mind in the Senate, and a man whose courage and integrity would compare favorably with any other American’s, went through the last Truman years and the first Eisenhower years without ever addressing himself to the problem.” Senator Kennedy, author of a book on political courage, did likewise, as did his state’s other senator, Leverett Saltonstall, his Republican colleague and friend. “Maurice Tobin, Truman’s Secretary of Labor, once went to a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention with an anti-McCarthy speech in his pocket,” but sensing an unfriendly political climate, did not pull it out.

Much the same thing happened to former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight David Eisenhower in October 1952, in the homestretch of his own run for president, when he decided to use a campaign stop in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin to defend his old friend, General of the Army and former Secretary of State George C. Marshall, whom McCarthy had savaged. Local politicians told Eisenhower, then weeks away from his own election, that attacking McCarthy on his home turf was too dangerous, both for himself and their local contenders. Ike almost choked, said one biographer, and several aides became apoplectic, but caution carried the day. The man who accepted the Nazis’ surrender backed down.

Eisenhower’s successor, himself a war hero, would turn out to do the same thing. A combat veteran who was chronically ill, John Kennedy faced war, pain, and illness with nary a whimper, but political survival would be a whole other story, and there also were family ties. His famous father had made statements promoting McCarthy. His brother Bobby had worked for McCarthy. He himself might not have been elected as senator had McCarthy not, as a favor to his father, agreed to stay out of the state. Worse still, though far from Wisconsin, Massachusetts was a hotbed of McCarthyite fervor, as its huge bloc of Irish Catholic voters, mostly in Kennedy’s base of South Boston, formed a rock solid core of support. “It would be certainly futile to expect to expect any candidate running for Massachusetts statewide political office with any chance of winning to criticize . . . McCarthy,” said one local paper. “Adherents of both parties are apparently scared to death.” Among them were Saltonstall and Foster Fucolo, Saltonstall’s Democratic opponent, who managed to get through their campaign without one word about the Wisconsin senator, not to mention Kennedy himself, who was planning to run in 1960 for president and needed a near landslide in the 1958 midterms to launch himself on the national scene.

Increasingly caught in crosswinds between his South Boston base and the liberal wing of his national party, Kennedy may have been relieved to enter Boston Hospital on October 10 for an operation he was given no more than even chances to survive. He slipped into a coma on the 21st, from which he would only slowly recover, and by December 2, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, he was still weak, but lucid enough to not call his office and cast a vote. In July, when a censure vote had seemed imminent, he had drafted a speech that criticized McCarthy, though he aimed his fire more at McCarthy’s aide, Roy Cohn, with whom his brother Bobby had feuded, and had it come to the floor at that time, would have likely voted against him. By December, McCarthy was no longer ascendant, and voting against him would have been much less risky. But, as his biographer Robert Dallek informs us, “Kennedy’s gut told him that his constituents would punish him,” and the risk of a diminished vote in 1958 or 1960 was, in view of the out he was given, one that he chose not to take. It was not true, as some people said, that he planned the operation to avoid voting on censure, but the timing was surely fortuitous. About to leave on a stretcher to be flown down to his father’s estate where he would spend much of the next year recovering, he told friends that if reporters asked questions regarding McCarthy, he would pull the sheets over his head, reach for his back, and yell “Ow!”

If the 34th and 35th presidents shied from direct confrontation, the 36th also sought cover, at least until it was safe to emerge. As Senate whip in 1950, and minority leader from 1953 on, Lyndon Johnson had more power over the fate of McCarthy than Eisenhower or Kennedy, but it was power he chose to withhold. “Johnson, it seems . . . wanted to strike at McCarthy—but not until McCarthy could be brought down,” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported. “He knew how dangerous McCarthy was.” He was a threat to Johnson by being popular in Texas, and especially with the oil barons who backed Johnson and would have pulled support from him if he attacked McCarthy too hard. Johnson also feared that if the liberals attacked him before the right wing was ready, McCarthy would eat them alive. As a result, he planned to let resistance arise and then guide and enforce rather than nurse it along. The case for this is that when it arrived it was by a more or less unified country, and thus had more power, while the case against it, made by Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro, is that it took much too long. “Superb though Johnson’s timing may have been, it was also slow,” Caro tells us. “Although he became Democratic Leader in January, 1953, he neither spoke against McCarthy nor raised the matter . . . until July, 1954,” during which time “scores of men and women were destroyed . . . thousands of government workers would be fired under federal loyalty decrees and hundreds of others lost their jobs.” “If he had moved against McCarthy too early, he might have lost,” Caro admitted. “If he had moved before a substantial number of Republicans had become disillusioned . . . the issue might have become a partisan one. . . . Johnson didn’t move against McCarthy until the time had come when it wouldn’t hurt him.” Like his predecessors as president, Johnson despised McCarthy and wished him ill, but along with them, his was a profile in self-preservation. There was a cost: Eisenhower worked against McCarthy behind the scenes but was criticized for never directly attacking the senator, as was Kennedy for being more profile than courage, and, in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, for admiring courage, “but not having the independence to have it.” All avoided the sort of commitment in public that could have hurt their careers.

Like Eisenhower, Kennedy was ashamed of himself, and in Profiles in Courage, the book he produced in 1955 during his prolonged convalescence, made the point that politics was the single profession in which practitioners were routinely expected to sacrifice themselves and their career prospects for some amorphous national good. “In no other occupation but politics is it expected that a man will sacrifice honors, prestige, and chosen career on a single issue,” he chided us (sort of) while emphasizing the permanent downside of taking a stand on conscience: If the brave stand led to repudiation, you would lose all your power to take stands, brave or otherwise, on anything ever again. What he did not mention is the possibility that you could take a brave stand on conscience and have it change nothing at all. Early attacks on McCarthy by Senator Margaret Chase Smith and other prominent people had done nothing at all to arrest his momentum, and it was doubtless the sight of Harry Truman assailing McCarthy from the White House itself to no effect whatsoever that made Eisenhower decide to adopt his “hidden hand” strategy of working against him in an indirect manner, while refusing to mention his name. It was the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 (which Eisenhower’s influence helped to get televised) that finally started to turn the public against him, not angry speeches from public figures. And it is unlikely that a denunciation by any establishment Senator would have had an effect on McCarthy’s supporters. Kennedy and Saltonstall were Harvard grads from well-to-do families, and if they had attacked McCarthy, it might only have angered his base. Certainly, the attacks on Donald Trump made early and often by Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and other Republican candidates did the front-runner no discernible damage at all. And while silence may have helped Jack in saving his bacon in Boston, it did him no good at all five years later in running for president, when he had to fend off criticism from the liberal wing of his party that he had lacked courage. When Kennedy complained about this to Arthur M. Schlesinger, the historian said it was his fault for publishing a book on the subject, to which Jack replied that he did not write about himself in it. This was partly unfair—he had courage, and had the medals to prove it—but it does illustrate an odd thing about politics. In running for office, of course, one is forced to take risks, often big ones, but once safely in office the taste for risk dissipates. Politics, or rather the holding of office, can do strange things to people who used to be risk-takers, and make them the most timid of men.

Quite frequently, and at the highest of levels, inertia appears to grip people, even with icebergs in sight. Elizabeth Drew’s day-by-day account of the events leading up to the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, shows a Congress filled with lawmakers eager for Nixon to go, but who were unable to move without group reinforcement, and unwilling to make the first move. “Being statesmanlike is synonymous with being inactive,” a Senate aide told her in November 1973. “Everyone who is looking at the Congress for leadership is misdirecting his attention. . . . Congress is on dead center. There is no movement. These guys have no capacity for movement. Nothing that has happened is the result of action by the Congress—only in the ineptitude of the cover-up by the executive branch.” For many months in 2015-2016, Democrats and Republicans watched in trepidation as Trump and Clinton moved toward nomination, and no one stepped up to take the wheel from them. Everyone waited for some other person to do it. And so, of course, nobody did.

A timorous paralysis seems to take over, even with the most valiant of men. Eisenhower, who had written a note taking personal responsibly for a failure on D-Day in case one should happen, did not defend a friend while appeasing a demagogue. John McCain stood up to five years of torture by his Communist captors, but not Donald Trump and his enraged base of voters. Kennedy lied his way into the Navy, sought dangerous duty, and swam miles into the ocean at night to try to get help for his fellow survivors—and made his call not to censure McCarthy while recovering from an operation he knew could have killed him—leading Dallek to marvel that he often took risks with his very existence that he refused to take with his future in politics. Strange as it seems, Eisenhower seemed to fear McCarthy more than the German armed forces, McCain feared Trump (and a primary challenge) more than he feared torture, and Kennedy feared McCarthy, and his voters in Boston, more than he feared death itself.

Any why is this so? Possibly because a loss in politics has an aspect of shame and defeat that does not apply when one dies in battle, which is frequently seen a kind of a victory. People of the Ike/Kennedy/McCain type tend to think of their careers as assets not just to themselves but to the country, as they do the right thing as they perceive it, and would like to keep doing it. The rationalization they tell to themselves is that the good they will do by staying in office will outweigh the harm they might have done by an excess of caution in a singular moment. Eisenhower and Kennedy were pretty good presidents, who helped to create and defend the post-war world order, and behaved as they should in the civil rights crisis. Johnson passed the civil rights act, itself no small matter. Today’s anxious trimmers can hope to do big things when and if re-elected, and they may in the end be proved right.

So with this in mind, it might be right to offer to cut some slack to our beleaguered cohort of officeholders, taking note of the fact that some of the highest-profile anti-Trump voices—Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse—are not up for reelection in this cycle, and that the Democrats who make such a thing of their absence of courage would do exactly the same thing in their shoes. Respectable people have done it before them. And others will do it again.