The Army Problem (PJW)

"The Army Problem" is an excerpt from Frontier Spirit: An Unauthorized History of the Wayne Administration written by an anonymous White House insider.

The Army Problem
The Wayne administration was still chugging along quite fine as the calendars changed to 1954. The only major problems we faced in 1953 were the trial of the two spies and accusations of Eisenhower casting a shadow over Wayne, which in hindsight, weren't that major compared to what would happen down the line in Wayne's presidency.

At the time, Senator McCarthy and his rats Cohn and Schine were whipping up a scathing report of our army, indicating that it had been the victim of a mass infiltration by the reds. Was there proof? That never mattered to those three, who had somehow produced a list of 156 supposed communist operatives in the army. Given that Schine was working closely with the president, Wayne no doubt discovered McCarthy's scheming, and realized how it could go wrong.

"The army is the backbone of America," the president told me. "Anticommunism and the army should go hand in hand. Both should be highly regarded, but if you pit the two against each other, one of them is going to tumble, and we can't afford to lose either of them."

Schine was called into Wayne's office one day, as I sat in the corner and took notes. Wayne always had me taking notes. The conversation wasn't exactly notable; the gist of it was Wayne demanded Schine hand over the list of the supposed 156 operatives, and he himself would handle it. Schine protested at first, stating that McCarthy was doing a bang up job of it himself and needed no help, but Wayne wouldn't hear it. "The media is already pushing back against anticommunism. I have a plan for that, but its in the early stages. If you keep trying to mess with the bull of the army, you'll get its horns. Hand over the list."

And just like that, Wayne won out. Schine handed over the list and that was the end of McCarthy's investigation into the army for now. The president pressured Secretary of Defense Wilson into handling the 156, which Wilson dragged his feet into doing, with only around 13 of them being found with any credibly evidence of operating under enemy influence.

I suppose the most notable impact of this was that anticommunism, which could've been strangled by the media, continued to grow in the United States. And despite how important it was to Wayne and his defense of domestic America, it wasn't necessarily a good thing.