The Family (24 page)

Carlson spread the rumor that he and a shadow cabinet of more senior senators led by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts were pushing Ike for the White House without Ike’s permission. Eisenhower privately wondered, meanwhile, whether it would be legal to win the nominations of both political parties. It wasn’t that Eisenhower transcended ideology—history has revealed him to be one of the most masterful politicians of the postwar era—but rather that he believed that he could best achieve his goals by pretending not to have any.

Eisenhower was the great literate of midcentury politics, the man who knew how to parse a moment, to respond to the masses as if they were all individuals, each unique in his sameness. Eisenhower was a PR man; he had learned on the battlefield the secrets of
psyops
, of psychological warfare. “Don’t be afraid of that term,” he advised the voters. He was a bridge player; he knew how to bluff and win. He bluffed the Republicans, in whose traditional ranks he did not properly belong, and the Democrats, who, having lost their chance to nominate him, dismissed him as an amateur. Eisenhower knew what Americans were looking for and he let them see it in him, a hero both grand and ordinary. “The sort of prince who could be ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalogue,” as Saul Bellow described him.

In 1952, Carlson and a small group of like-minded Republicans put in their order, and Ike delivered. The ringleader was ostensibly Senator Lodge, but Carlson ran Ike’s Washington campaign headquarters, and his sidekick and former senatorial substitute, Henry Darby, ran the nominal HQ on the second floor of the Jayhawk Hotel back in Topeka. Carlson’s abandoned patron Alf Landon briefly tried to swing his state to Taft, but Carlson effectively smeared Taft—and Landon, his more moderate former mentor—as reactionaries nonetheless too soft for “total cold war.” Carlson had laid the groundwork for his new middle-ground reputation the year before. And he did it with the help of Abram.

In April 1951, Abram enlisted ICL president Ed Cabaniss, a wealthy manufacturer, to round up some businessmen interested in the Idea who could help create an advisory prayer cell for every governor who wanted one, to be organized by Carlson. Cabaniss, a holdover from the pre–1950s Fellowship, was an Old Guard conservative. He had a V-shaped head, a tiny jaw, and a giant brow; he looked like a praying mantis, and his affect was that of one as well, slow and chilly. For his latest undertaking, Abram wanted more dynamic men. He specifically requested that two of the most effective red hunters in his circle be included: Howard Coonley, the former president of the National Association of Manufacturers who’d helped win him access to big business during the 1940s, and Merwin K. Hart, a wealthy member of his board of directors who recruited businessmen for the Fellowship through his pet project, the National Economic Council.

The council was little more than letterhead, a desk in the Empire State Building, and Hart himself, a goggle-eyed, tuxedoed blue blood with a fringe of hair around his narrow skull and more than a hint of fascism around his politics. “If you find any organization containing the word ‘democracy,’” Hart declared, “it is probably directly or indirectly affiliated with the Communist Party.” Hart wasn’t kidding; effective in his deregulation crusades, he was never able to achieve one of his fondest ambitions, the disenfranchisement of the poor, whom he considered spiritually unfit for voting.

The war had made Hart toxic for a spell, since unlike Lindbergh, who’d abandoned his own fascist inclinations to fly for the United States, Hart never repented for his prewar fascist position. But the Cold War changed everything, Cabaniss wrote Abram. “It seems to me there is a growing proportion of the public, particularly in the political world, who are coming to a realization that Merwin Hart is not so far ‘off the beam’ in his thinking.” The business world was coming around, too; Hart counted among the supporters of his National Economic Council’s program of God and laissez-faire capitalism top men from Standard Oil, DuPont, and General Motors.

This theology of the dollar was not quite as cynical as it sounds. Abram was expanding his European operation into Greece’s upper crust, an experience that was teaching him to refine the stealth evangelism he’d learned in Germany. First came capitalism; then came Christ. Capitalism, preached his friend Norman Grubb, was the wedge. “ICL,” he commented to Abram, “is a bold attempt to reach a certain unreachable class with Christ, and is therefore not primarily concerned with presenting itself as sound in a ‘fundamental’ doctrinal basis; it is after fish who might refuse the bait if this fundamental doctrinal basis was flaunted in front of them.”
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Hart, Coonley, and Cabaniss were to line up financial backers for the group (who, as it turned out, agreed to raise $100,000 for the project); Abram would explain the Idea; and the public face of the initiative would be two former governors who’d made the leap to the big leagues, Carlson and Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma. Kerr was a Democrat, thus blunting the growing concern within the Fellowship that it appeared to be simply a subsidiary of the Republican Party, and he was Carlson’s kind of Democrat—“the chief of the wheelers-and-dealers,” according to the journalist Milton Viorst, “a self-made millionaire who freely and publicly expressed the conviction that any man in the Senate who didn’t use his position to make money was a sucker.”

Like Carlson, Kerr was an oilman. Or, more precisely, oil’s man. He knew a good investment when he saw one; he sent Abram a check for $500. Other senators fell in line: Robertson of Virginia contributed a fund-raising letter, Republican Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont gave $200 and the use of his name, and Pat McCarran of Nevada, McCarthy’s Democratic mirror, wrote asking what would be most helpful—money or contacts (or both). That fall, the president of the ultraright William Volker Fund chipped in $500 from his own pocket. The Volker Fund had helped Friedrich von Hayek, until then an obscure Austrian economist, become a national celebrity in America by subsidizing editions of his
Road to Serfdom
. First published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press, the book appeared in shortened versions produced by
Reader’s Digest
and
Look
magazine, which illustrated Hayek’s argument that any attempt at “central planning” (including FDR-style government regulation of big business) would send a society down a “road to serfdom”—and mass murder along the lines of Hitler and Stalin—from which there was no return. Hayek’s economic ideas were considerably more complex than the uses to which they were put, but as understood by the American public—and by Abram, who recoiled from
serfdom
even as he embraced what he happily termed
slavery
to God and his markets—they seemed to lend a scientific imprimatur to the Manichaean worldview of the country’s most rabid red hunters. A decade later, the Volker Fund would hire Rousas John Rushdoony, a theologian who was to the far right of fundamentalism what Hayek was to economic conservatism; it was Rushdoony who helped marry the two with extensive writings on
theonomy,
a jargony term for what Abram’s descendants would come to call
biblical capitalism.

Both theonomy and biblical capitalism suggest an equal yoke between scripture and currency, but there can be little doubt about which was the driving force behind this new plan to surround governors with prayer warriors vetted by Abram and his friends in corporate America. And yet it was Carlson, who disliked even acknowledging the existence of dollars, who quietly climbed Abram’s chain of command. The following spring, he took time off from Eisenhower’s still-unofficial campaign to travel to The Hague, where Holland’s Queen Wilhelmina anointed him as the new chair of International Council for Christian Leadership, the overseas division of Abram’s ICL composed at that point mainly of Germans who didn’t want to talk about their pasts and French businessmen just as eager to smooth over history in the service of profits. Three fellow GOP congressmen, all Abram disciples, accompanied Carlson. They flew on the public tab, and the trip occasioned sharp questions from the press. Why had the secretary of defense given the four use of a U.S. military plane for private travel? The ICLer’s mission, said a spokesman for the secretary, was in “direct relationship to the national interest.”
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At The Hague, Queen Wilhelmina, a strong monarch famous for bypassing Holland’s parliamentary system,
¹⁴
presided over this American interest, and the inner circle of the Fellowship’s trans-Atlantic organization elected Carlson their new chairman. Carlson looked like a stand-in, though, for the general running the Allied command in Paris. That seemed to be as Carlson wanted it; he was in Holland to recruit allies for an American campaign. Besides Abram, there were industrialists who’d line up behind Eisenhower, including the automobile titan Paul G. Hoffman, who’d become one of Ike’s economic advisers; a pair of ultraright congressmen to shore up Ike’s conservative flank; and, in addition to GOP heavies such as Senators Wiley and Flanders, a delegation of “Dixiecrats,” Southern Democrats to the right of most Republicans. That summer, Carlson declared that Eisenhower would contest the traditionally solid-Democratic South, a quixotic quest that anticipated Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” by more than a decade.

Far more troublesome to Eisenhower than the Democratic South, though, was a singular midwestern Republican, the de facto party boss, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. To the uninitiated, Taft did not appear be a formidable obstacle. He was a dull speaker, unmemorable in appearance, indifferent to the public. But no politician could claim a more perfect pedigree: grandson of a secretary of war, son of a president, first in his class at Yale and Harvard Law. “The best mind in Washington,” went a popular Democratic jab, “until he makes it up.” And yet he played the part of a common man. Not like Roosevelt, who’d disingenuously claimed to be a farmer, but rather, in the name of an ill-defined middle class—in reality, the managerial class, small businessmen and second bananas who dreamed one day of being bosses themselves—that would become a template for conservative “populism” long after Taft’s name was forgotten.

If Taft was hardly just another Rotarian-on-the-make, he truly was in every sense a provincial man, and proud of that fact. A son of Ohio beholden to neither the New England aristocracy nor the solid South, wary of Wall Street, contemptuous of Europe and its wars, he was a conservative at the last time in American life when such views connoted a kind of pacifism. His enemies murmured of fascist sympathies because he did not want to fight Hitler, but it was war itself that he loathed. When World War II ended and the Cold War began, he opposed it even more strongly, opposed the draft and opposed military spending and opposed what he feared, correctly, was the coming age of American empire, an era in which the United States would wage the wars the old colonial powers could no longer afford.

In 1952, Taft was known as the champion of the “Old Right,” an anachronism in the day of the atom. He was the engineer of the New Deal’s deconstruction, the author of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act which spelled the end of labor’s brief reign as the definitive power in American life. Taft-Hartley reduced labor to an “interest group”—eliminated the vision of solidarity as a force that gave people meaning. Maybe Taft dreamed that with labor rebound, the nation’s economic life would return to its pre-Depression condition. But that world was as long gone as the fantasy of the United States as an island, immune from the troubles of other nations. A New Right, New Liberalism, New Middle were rising, shaped by the war and by Europe, by the hunger of an economy that had grown fat on weaponry, by the
idea
of totalitarianism. Total Cold War was coming. Ideology, technology, and—overlooked by the mandarin historians of the period—theology were converging.

Taft had the support of the old GOP local party operations, but he did not have God and he did not have Frank Carlson. He would not recruit public piety as a banner for his campaign. His lieutenants were not wily; they were hedgehogs, nudging Taft’s Old Right views along, decrying the possibility of a “garrison state” as if the Cold War hadn’t already led the United States to embrace a permanent military footing, spiritual warfare thinly secularized as “psyops” and arms races against a godless enemy. Such was the method of foxes. Carlson slinked from delegate to delegate behind the scenes, the “‘No Deal’ dealer” smiling and speaking of spiritual things, one nation under God, unity, a general (not a politician!), never speaking ill of old “Mr. Republican” but promising patronage to those who’d abandon him. “The Kansan is clearly the man to see if you want an ‘understanding,’” cooed an admiring reporter.
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At the Republican convention in Chicago, enough delegates “caressed by personal letters, wined & dined at party shindigs, promised a secure future by politicos,” reached such “understandings” with the general’s lieutenants and sold out their man to the new order.
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To the populist Right, the activists who’d sent delegates to Chicago to stop Ike from entangling America in more of Europe’s troubles, the convention took on “mythic proportions,” a stab in the back of conservatism by Ike and his internationalists.
¹⁷
Carlson, as conservative as Taft, understood that anger—and how to turn it to his man’s advantage. Jesus, Carlson believed, had been a “psyops” man like Ike, and Christ and the general both taught the same lesson: it was the spirit, not the material, that mattered. Emotions, not facts. Carlson and Eisenhower did not need to crush the anger in Taft’s supporters; they only had to redirect it toward international communism.

After Eisenhower routed Adlai Stevenson—the electoral vote was 442 to 89, with Ike poaching four states of the Old Confederacy—Carlson set about ensuring Taft’s loyalty to the new regime. His method, though, left some wondering about Eisenhower’s loyalty to the broad middle ground he’d staked out in his campaign. First, Carlson brokered a breakfast between his man and Taft, at which Taft agreed to stand aside while Eisenhower waged Cold War abroad if the general would commit to a war on the New Deal at home. Taft had decided that if he could not be president, he would like to be majority leader; after all, he and Ike shared a distaste for organized labor, indifference to civil rights, and a firm conviction that capitalism constituted a natural law more certain than the physics of nuclear fission. The next afternoon, Carlson met with Taft after church and cut a deal. His—and, implicitly, Ike’s—backing for Senate majority leader, a betrayal of promises already offered to Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire. “An amazing political feat,” the columnist Drew Pearson wrote of the Taft revival. “Carlson sold the idea.”
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