Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [27]
The Hiss case gave a new level of legitimacy to the concerns about Soviet espionage expressed by many conservatives. That cause was taken up by Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin. The tension between McCarthy’s aggressive tactics and others in the government came to a head during the famous Army-McCarthy hearings, as a Senate committee looked at potential Communist infiltration into the armed forces. Once again I was riveted.
A lawyer for the Army named Joseph Welch called McCarthy to account after the Senator verbally attacked one of Welch’s young associates during a hearing. Welch then famously asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” It was a good question—or, more accurately, a statement of fact. For the first time I observed the ugly sight of members of Congress unfairly browbeating a witness to advance their political interests.
The events had particular interest for me, because I was studying politics and government. In hindsight, I wish I had majored in history. A few members of the faculty in the political science department were far to the left. I was struck by the way one professor in particular seemed to disdain the private sector as rife with corruption and unethical behavior. The business world was an abstraction to him. He seemed to have little concept of what hardworking, ethical people like my father did every day.
Students at Princeton were required to write a senior thesis for graduation. I chose as my subject President Truman’s seizure of the steel industry two years earlier, during the Korean War. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, Sawyer being Truman’s secretary of commerce, the Supreme Court ruled that Truman’s wartime seizure of the industry had been unconstitutional. I argued in my thesis that the Court’s decision was “timely and reassuring.”13 It hadn’t provoked much discussion outside legal circles at the time, but the 1952 case would become an important decision about the limits of executive power in wartime.
As we prepared for our graduation in March 1954, I attended our senior class banquet. The speaker was a Princeton alumnus and the former governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson. He was best known for being the unfortunate Democrat to run for the presidency against the popular Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower, two years earlier. Stevenson was frequently considered an aloof intellectual—an “egghead” in the parlance of the 1950s. “Egg-heads of the world, unite,” Stevenson once replied in a play on Karl Marx’s famous quote, “You have nothing to lose but your yolks!” I couldn’t help but admire his good humor and perspective.
Stevenson’s speech that evening had more influence on me than any I had heard before. I knew I would next be serving in the Navy, but I was not certain whether I would stay in it and if not, what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It might seem strange considering my later career that the one who so strongly sparked the idea of public service for me was a liberal Democrat and self-proclaimed egghead. But his comments came to me at a formative time in my life and a turning point for the country. With an armistice reached in Korea in 1953, America had just ended its involvement in a second war in a decade. Mounting concerns about communism, nuclear exchanges, and the possibility of more armed conflict were intensified by the first test of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs of World War II.
Stevenson put the future into an important and new context for me. He talked about the responsibility of citizenship in whatever path we might choose, and the stark consequences awaiting us all if we failed in our responsibilities.