McCarthyism: Waging the Cold War in America

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McCarthyism:
Waging the Cold War in America
By: M. Stanton Evans
5/30/1997 06:00 PM
From “Human Events”
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Forty years ago this month, the mortal remains of Joseph R. McCarthy
were laid to rest near Appleton, Wis., not far from the modest farm
where he was born. His death apparently closed a raucous,
controversial saga, one of the most bitter and brutal in our nation’s
history, with McCarthy typecast as the villain. Events of recent years,
however, suggest the final chapters of this astounding story have yet to
be recorded.
McCarthy was only 48 years old when he died, and had been a member of
the U.S. Senate for a decade, mostly as a minority backbencher. Yet during
the period 1950-54, he often dominated its proceedings, the headlines of the
nation’s press, and our debates in general. In that tumultuous four-year
stretch, he tangled with both Democratic and Republican administrations
and the whole of the “establishment”-meaning the complex of political-
media-academic bigwigs who shape opinion in our country and set the
course of national policy on key issues.
It is remarkable that, in so brief a span, this relatively junior member of the
Congress had the enormous impact that he did. More remarkable yet is that
his career and fate should still be matters of burning public interest, nearly
half a century after he first barged into the limelight. Most remarkable of all
is the degree to which his name became, and has remained, a synonym for
evil-routinely used in our political debates as a term implying cruel,
unfounded, and highly public charges.
Given the frequency of this usage, one might suppose that people who talk
about “McCarthyism” so glibly have some kind of factual basis for their
statements, but this seldom proves to be the case. It seems safe to say,
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indeed, that few people in our political-media-academic world (including
those who write supposedly learned books about the topic) know much
about McCarthy, the disputes in which he was embroiled, or the specifics of
his conduct. This article is an effort to fill in some of the blanks, though it
would take an essay many times this length to do the matter justice.
To grasp the meaning of McCarthy’s story, it is required to know a bit of
background. Above all, there can be no comprehension of the drama without
first recalling the deadly Cold War struggle of which it was a part. The latter
1940s and early ’50s were a time of tense, explosive conflict, in the world at
large and in the politics of our nation. Soviet expansionism in Europe, the
battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would
shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.
American policy dealing with this rapidly changing scene was, to put it
mildly, often confused, naive, slow to respond, and contradictory (reflecting
a lot of intramural combat). Correlative to all this were such domestic
scandals as the Amerasia case (see below), the first exposés of atomic
spying, the testimony of ex-Communists Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth
Bentley, and other such disclosures.
Against this already lurid backdrop, McCarthy launched a series of
interlocking, and incendiary, charges:
(1) That the Communist global apparatus had made a sustained
attempt to penetrate the U.S. government and subvert its foreign
policy decisions, most specifically toward China;
(2) that official defenses against such penetration, especially in the
State Department, ranged from weak to nonexistent;
(3) that the facts about all this had been concealed from the American
people-ignored, downplayed, or covered up by the authorities whose
job it was to guard against such dangers.
Officials Ignored FBI’s Repeated Warnings
Beginning with the Truman Administration and the Democratic majority in
the Senate, then spreading to myriad press accounts and a seemingly endless
chain of books, TV shows and movies, McCarthy’s charges on all these
fronts were systematically denied. In fact, it was averred, there had been no
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Communist penetration to speak of-or, if there had been, it was fairly limited
and swiftly dealt with. The State Department, in particular, was depicted as
alert and quick to move against such problems. Subversion of our policy
never happened. In short, McCarthy was either a lying scoundrel or a
madman, his charges smears of helpless people whose lives were thereby
ruined.
Which version was the truth? In the perspective of four decades, we are in
much better position to learn the answer to this question than was possible at
the time. While a lot was known back then (though usually not to the general
public), a great deal has come to light that was unavailable in the ’50s. We
now have, for instance, a pretty good picture of the Philby-Burgess-Blunt-
Maclean spy ring in England, as shocking as anything conjured by
McCarthy, and just as “unthinkable” to polite salon opinion. (And, as shall
be seen, with multiple links to the government-media combine that
McCarthy was battling here.)
Also, with the collapse of the Soviet regime, we have data from the
Communist archives, though not in the quantity we might like. More to the
point, we have access to material long in the possession of our own Federal
government, some of it astonishing in nature. Most notable in this regard are
the so-called Venona transcripts, which decode transmissions between the
spymasters in the Kremlin and their agents in America, plus wiretaps
conducted by the FBI, and other confidential data from the bureau-all dating
to the 1940s.
Putting all of this together, there can be no serious doubt today as to the
general picture. That there was a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our
government, steal its secrets, and subvert its counsels is about as clear as
evidence can make it. Equally clear is that U.S. defenses against such
machinations, especially in the State Department, were sadly lacking. Nor is
there much doubt that many U.S. officials whose job it was to guard against
subversion took a strangely casual view of their assignment. Consider:
As early as September 1939, nine years before his public revelations,
Whittaker Chambers gave data relating to Alger Hiss and others involved in
Communist infiltration to State Department official Adolph Berle. Though
Berle himself viewed such matters with concern, nothing much was done to
impede Hiss’ steady forward progress (together with several of his soul
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mates), up to and including playing an active role at the Yalta conference
and as secretary general of the founding conclave of the United Nations.
Likewise, in November 1945, J. Edgar Hoover informed the White House of
evidence that an extensive spy ring was at work inside the U.S. government-
naming Treasury official Harry Dexter White, former White House assistant
Lauchlin Currie, and nine others. (Hoover’s letter to this effect, based on
data supplied by Bentley, appears in the Venona papers; see page S1.) In
1946, Hoover tried once more to alert the White House to the danger posed
by White, who like Hiss was moving ever higher in official circles. Again,
so far as we can make out from the record, nothing was done to act on these
advices.
In 1948, when Chambers made his public charges against Hiss, the official
White House response was to dismiss the case as a “red herring.” Internally,
White House staffers went a good deal further, setting out to discredit
Chambers, rather than focusing on the mind-boggling peril implied by Hiss.
Once more, the Venona papers give us an intriguing glimpse behind the
scenes-including suggestions that Chambers, not Hiss, be tried for perjury,
and an effort to find out if Chambers had been in a mental institution.
As of the latter ’40s, the bizarre mindset suggested by these cases was
nowhere more pronounced than in the U.S. State Department-where it was,
for obvious reasons, also most harmful. This was to some degree ironic, as
the department had in prior years been known as a staid, conservative place
that took a tough-minded stance on issues of this type, as on most others. In
notable contrast were the laid-back security ways of war-time outfits such as
the Office of War Information (OWI) and Board of Economic Warfare
(BEW), where the “red herring” view of possible Communist infiltration
was in favor.
Beginning around 1944, however, a fierce internal struggle unfolded at
State, in which relatively hard-line anti-Communists such as Berle, Joseph
Grew and Eugene Dooman were attacked, sidetracked, or ousted. This
turnover of high-level personnel in essence was completed in the next two
years as Gen. George C. Marshall replaced James Byrnes at State, Dean
Acheson was ensconced as second in command, and “China hand” John
Carter Vincent assumed responsibility for Asia. Berle would give his own
particular view of this rolling coup d’etat as follows:
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“. . . [I]n the fall of 1944 there was a difference of opinion in the State
Department. I felt the Russians were not going to be sympathetic and
cooperative. . . . I was pressing for a pretty clean-cut showdown then
while our position was strongest. The opposite group. . . in the State
Department was largely. . . Mr. Acheson’s group, with Mr. Hiss his
principal assistant in the matter. . . . I got trimmed in that fight, and,
as a result, went to Brazil, and that ended my diplomatic career.”
The major effects of this volte-face were two, both later harped on by
McCarthy. First and foremost, there was a drastic change of front in our
policy toward China. Throughout the early stages of World War II, the anti-
Communist Chiang Kai-shek had been treated as a worthy ally. The
Marshall-Acheson-Vincent team took a different view, as did a group of
Vincent’s fellow “China hands” who lobbied for an American policy more
favorable to the Communist insurgents at Yenan. The high-water mark of
this campaign was the suspension of U.S. aid to Chiang for much of the
period 1946-48, in the midst of his death struggle with the Reds.
Though it gets us a bit ahead of the story, it should be added that the anti-
Chiang jihad was not limited to “China hands” at State, but reflected a wide-
ranging governmental effort that drew heavily on the forces named by
Hoover. As later inquiry would disclose, Lauchlin Currie from his strategic
eyrie at the White House was very much involved, as was the Treasury’s
Harry White. (Asked about her best agents for placing Communist
personnel throughout the government, Elizabeth Bentley answered:
“I would say our two best ones were Harry Dexter White and
Lauchlin Currie. They had an immense amount of influence and knew
people, and their word would be accepted when they recommended
someone.”)
Investigations conducted in the 1950s would show that White and such of
his Treasury aides as V. Frank Coe and Solomon Adler maneuvered to block
the transfer of $200 million in gold and other credits pledged to Chiang, and
that Adler as the Treasury’s man on the scene sent back a stream of anti-
Chiang reports from China. Like White himself, both Coe and Adler would
be identified by Bentley as members of the Communist governmental
network. Also, to round out this astounding picture, it developed that Adler
shared a house in China with Communist secret agent Chi Ch’ao ting and
“China hand” John Service. (As shall be seen, such highly integrated
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collaboration among seemingly disparate people was the essence of the
method.)
This was, however, by no means all. Coincident with the policy shift were
changes in departmental security practices as well. Along with the departure
of such as Grew and Berle, the old-line security team at State, headed by J.
Anthony Panuch, was also shown the door. In 1947, as a voluminous record
would reveal, the relatively tough posture favored by Panuch was replaced
by an extremely soft one. This changeover was roughly contemporaneous
with the influx of several thousand unvetted personnel from porous agencies
such as OWI and BEW, now flooding into the department. Saying that this
massive post-war merger was the main source of State’s security woes,
Panuch would testify as follows:
“. . . . In the new program of 1947, they put in what I call an overt-act
test. They specified that in order to dismiss a man for disloyalty or to
make him ineligible on loyalty grounds, there had to be reasonable
grounds to show that there was present disloyalty. . . [This was]
absolutely ineffective. You can never get the evidence. . . [The security
situation] was deteriorating when I came in there because of this
transfer. We tried to do something about it but in 1947 they put us out
of business.”
The point of these reflections, as should by now be plain, is that intense
concern about security issues at State was by no means a wild invention of
McCarthy (hence the reverse-English charge of “stale, warmed over”
accusations). Throughout the latter ’40s, in fact, numerous members of
Congress expressed themselves about this subject in terms of great alarm
and angst. In June of ’47, for instance, members of the Senate
Appropriations Committee sent a confidential report to Marshall, in
which they bluntly stated:
“It is evident that there is a deliberate calculated program being
carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places,
but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. . . . On
file in the Department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on
Soviet espionage activities in the United States, which involves large
numbers of State Department employees. . . this report has been
challenged and ignored by those charged with the responsibility of
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administering the department with the apparent tacit approval of Mr.
Acheson.”
McCarthy Takes on Department of State
Such was the security-policy scene into which Joe McCarthy ambled in
February 1950. Relatively youthful, obviously a bit naive, but combative
and a quick study, McCarthy picked up on the concerns of others in the
Congress, frustrated counterintelligence types, and anti-Communist
researchers. Drawing on what his precursors had put together (but also
developing new data as he went), he took to the hustings and the Senate
floor with his version of the problem. That version would focus the white-
hot glare of public notice on security issues at the State Department like
nothing seen before, or since.
Beginning in Wheeling, W.Va., on February 9, McCarthy made a series of
Republican Lincoln Day orations in which he raised the cry of Communist
foul play, and these political talks would eventually spawn a cottage industry
of charge and counter-charge all by themselves.3 These topics are well
worth pursuing, but cannot detain us here, as we shall be hewing to the
official documented record. In this respect, the obvious place to start is the
marathon speech McCarthy made on the Senate floor on February 20, his
first such effort in that forum, and by all odds the most prodigious.
In this six-hour tour de force, subject to constant interruptions but
maintaining his composure, McCarthy discussed some four-score
individuals who had worked in the State Department, or agencies such as
OWI and BEW, and in his opinion had records suggesting they were
security-loyalty risks at best, outright Communist agents at the worst.
Despite such records, McCarthy claimed, these people had been routinely
“cleared” or never carefully looked into. Reading from what he said were
“State Department files” (or digests thereof), he laid out a chapter-and-verse
recitation of what appeared to be, on its face, a massive security breakdown
at the department.
After much wrangling about these matters and numerous sidebar exchanges
and digressions, it was decided to refer the question to a special
subcommittee chaired by Sen. Millard Tydings (D.-Md.). Accordingly, on
March 8, McCarthy appeared before the Tydings panel, and tried to present
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the evidence he had on a selected group of individuals (known as “the nine
public cases”).
Once more he was subjected to repeated interruptions, so that a coherent
presentation became all but impossible. Again there are collateral issues that
need discussing, but for space reasons have to be omitted (with one
exception; see box, “A Discourse on Method,” page S2.) We shall stay, not
only with the record, but with the central issue of alleged policy subversion.
In this respect, the core of McCarthy’s case was that security problems at the
State Department and the course of U.S. policy in Asia were indissolubly
connected. His chief exhibit-much cited in his early speeches and before the
Tydings panel-was the improbable tale of the small pro-Communist
journal, Amerasia. McCarthy capsuled the case on February 20, presented a
fat dossier on it to Tydings, then discussed it at even greater length on the
Senate floor on March 30. For McCarthy, this was the touchstone of pro-
Communist subversion in our country and of official complicity with it.
Amerasia had previously burst into public view-to disappear as quickly-in
June 1945. Agents of the FBI, after many weeks’ surveillance, had arrested
two editors of the journal and one of its frequent writers, along with three
U.S. government officials (Andrew Roth, Emmanuel Larsen, John Stewart
Service) accused of feeding them secret data. Coincident with the arrests, the
bureau reaped a harvest of roughly 1,000 government documents in the
possession of the defendants. These dealt much with Asian matters, and
many bore the label “secret,” “top secret,” or “confidential.”
As to the nature of Amerasia, as McCarthy said, there could be little doubt.
Its chief financial angel was Frederick V. Field, a notorious propagandist for
the Soviet Union, named by Elizabeth Bentley as the Communist Party’s
domestic commissar for Asian matters.
The principal editor was Philip Jaffe, a long-time Soviet apologist, friend of
Communist Party boss Earl Browder, and zealous fan of Bolsheviks in
China. Its staffers and writers included a veritable galaxy of identified
Communists, pro-Communists, and fellow travelers. (Indeed, among its
former employees, still hobnobbing with Jaffe, was one Joseph
Bernstein, known to the FBI as an active Soviet agent.)
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The biggest fish caught in the Amerasia net was State Department official
Service, one of Vincent’s “China hands” who like his Treasury Department
roommate had sent a steady stream of dispatches back from China attacking
Chiang and urging that we dump him (sample:
“We need not support Chiang in the belief that he represents pro-
American or democratic groups. . . we need feel no ties of gratitude to
Chiang.”) On returning to the United States in April 1945, Service
immediately took to hanging out with Jaffe (whom he supposedly had
just met), delivering copies of his reports, and commenting that “What
I said about the military plans is, of course, very secret” (recorded by
FBI surveillance).
Given all this, McCarthy said, J. Edgar Hoover believed he had an “airtight
case,” and Justice Department officials geared up for prosecution. Then, for
some mysterious reason, Justice decided to downplay the matter and treat it
as a minor indiscretion; Service got off scott-free and was restored to State
Department duties. Jaffe and Larsen escaped with fines, and all the others
walked. In essence, the whole thing was shoved under the official rug, to be
conveniently forgotten. It was, McCarthy charged, a security breach and
cover-up of immense proportions.
The Tydings Committee and the administration viewed it more benignly;
“an excess of journalistic zeal,” Jaffe’s attorney had called it, and the
prosecutors had agreed, so what was the big problem? Such was the anti-
McCarthy view that was handed down to legend.
We now know, however, that all of this was false, and that McCarthy was
right in what he said. The whole thing was fixed from the beginning,
engineered by Elizabeth Bentley’s agent Lauchlin Currie, operating from the
White House, and carried out by Washington wheeler-dealer Thomas
Corcoran. The truth of this emerged a decade ago when FBI wiretaps from
the ’40s came to the surface; these showed Currie, Corcoran, Service and
Justice officials conspiring to deep-six the case, and succeeding.
As I have treated this matter in some detail before, I shall not repeat all the
particulars here (See “The Amerasia Affair,” Human Events, July 12, 1996,
and “History’s Vindication of Joe McCarthy,” Human Events, May 16,
1987). Suffice it to note that the Amerasia case displayed, to the fullest,
every kind of security horror, and federal crime: Theft of documents, policy
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subversion, cover-up, perjury, and obstruction of justice-to name only the
most glaring. In short, everything McCarthy had said about the subject was
correct, while his opponents were not only wrong, but lying; the Tydings
“investigation,” for its part, was a sham-the cover-up of a cover-up, not an
investigation.
Though all of this is now nailed down beyond all question, it apparently
avails McCarthy nothing. When I made these points on a TV show a few
months back, one anti-McCarthy panelist replied that “a stopped clock is
right twice a day” and that McCarthy’s correctness on this front did not
excuse his constant lying about others. However, a survey of numerous other
cases routinely yields the same conclusion: Charges by McCarthy, followed
by much uproar and outrage; vehement denials by his foes, treated in the
liberal press as gospel; then, after the smoke has cleared, emergence of hard,
empirical data that prove McCarthy had been right from the beginning. Two
vignettes that draw on the recent revelations suggest the pattern:
One of McCarthy’s targets in his early speeches was T.A. Bisson, yet
another Amerasia stalwart, a former employee of the State Department and
of the BEW. It seems probable most Americans now, as in the ’50s, have
never heard of Bisson, except perhaps as one of McCarthy’s countless
“victims.” In fact, McCarthy went after this seemingly minor figure at least
half-a-dozen times for allegedly promoting the cause of the Chinese
Communists in his writings. So who was T.A. Bisson? Here is
what Venona tells us, in a transmission from Soviet agents in New York
back to Moscow Central:
“Marquis [Joseph Bernstein] has established friendly relations with T.A.
Bisson (hereafter Arthur). . . who has recently left BEW; he is now working
in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) and in the editorial offices of
Marquis’ periodical [Amerasia]. . . Arthur passed to Marquis . . . copies of
four documents:
(a) His own report for BEW with his views on working out a plan for
shipment of American troops to China;
(b) A report by the Chinese embassy in Washington to its government
in China. . . .
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(c) A brief BEW report of April 1943 on a general evaluation of the
forces of the sides on the Soviet-German front. . . .
(d) A report by the American consul in Vladivostok. . .”
The Joseph Bernstein to whom Bisson gave this material, be it noted, is the
selfsame Moscow agent with whom Philip Jaffe was also consorting in the
’40s. Thus Bisson not only touted the cause of the Chinese Communists, as
McCarthy had alleged, but passed confidential data to a henchman of the
KGB. McCarthy thought that Bisson was bad news, and cited evidence to
prove it. But he didn’t know for sure how bad, as reflected in these
transcripts. That secret would be locked up for 50 years, known only to the
Kremlin and the keepers of Venona.
As to the Cambridge spy ring, this had numerous links to U.S. security
issues and to McCarthy’s liberal-left opponents. Such now-notorious Soviet
agents as Philby, Burgess and Maclean were much involved in Anglo-
American security and diplomatic matters, including China, as was the
Canadian E. Herbert Norman. Even more enmeshed in U.S. affairs was
Cambridge alumnus Michael Greenberg, who made his way to the United
States and popped up, like Bisson, at IPR, then even more conveniently on
the staff of Currie. (As shall be seen, Greenberg would become one of the
supporting cast in McCarthy’s biggest single battle.)
There is, unhappily, even more. Yet another Cambridge alum was the
American Michael Straight, who came back to the United States in the latter
’30s, worked briefly at the White House and the State Department, then
became the editor of the liberal New Republic (long underwritten by his
family). This journal was a fierce opponent of McCarthy, featuring many
articles that deplored his alleged lies and evil methods, as well as anti-
Communist “witch hunts” of all types. A notable instance was a 1954 piece
by Straight, entitled “The Fanaticism of Joseph McCarthy” (later
incorporated into a full-length anti-McCarthy book).
In view of all this righteous fervor, it came as a shock to many in the 1980s
to learn that Michael Straight himself, according to his own admission, had
been a Soviet agent. He had been recruited by Communist spy king Anthony
Blunt at Cambridge, and sent back to America to do the Kremlin’s bidding.
He agonized about all this, Straight recalled, and broke with the Soviets in
the early ’40s. Yet for years he made no move to blow the whistle on his
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former comrades. As late as March 1951, at the height of the Korean war, he
ran into Guy Burgess in D.C., learned that he was in “Far Eastern affairs” at
the British embassy, and realized he was probably betraying Anglo-
American secrets to the Kremlin. Yet Straight did nothing. (No doubt too
busy drafting tough polemics on McCarthy.)
China and Institute of Pacific Relations
Such individual cases could be rehearsed at length, but this would wander
from our main story line concerning China, to which we must return. In this
regard, by far the major player, and main McCarthy target, was the once-
prestigious think tank called the IPR, already met with. IPR was linked in
many ways to Amerasia (sharing writers, offices, and general outlook), but
was a bit more guarded in its approach and seemingly respectable. It also
exhibited a high degree of interlock with the State Department in matters
pertaining to our strategy in Asia.
McCarthy repeatedly hammered IPR, mostly with regard to Ambassador
Philip Jessup, formerly one of its officials. Many Amerasia types, McCarthy
noted, were also active in IPR: Field, Bisson, Owen Lattimore and others,
and these worked closely with their official friends to tilt American China
policy in favor of the Reds. Both Vincent and Service, for example, had
links to IPR, as did Alger Hiss, John Paton Davies, and other diplomatic
worthies. Jessup bridged the gap, such as it was, all by himself, having
served for many years with IPR, then emerging in 1949 as principal editor of
the State Department “white paper” on China that washed our hands of
Chiang.
McCarthy’s statements on IPR, like all the others, were bitterly
contested. In Senate floor debate, Sen. Clinton Anderson (D.-N.M.)
indignantly demanded:
“Does the senator mean to convey the impression that the Institute of
Pacific Relations, in 1935 and 1936, was under Communist control?”
When Jessup appeared before the Tydings panel, its majority members fell
over themselves to proclaim his sterling virtues, and those of IPR. (His IPR
connections, they found, “do not in any way reflect unfavorably upon him
when the true character of the organization is revealed.”) Effusions of this
type are writ large in the conventional history of the era.
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Once more, however, when the smoke had cleared, the points McCarthy
made-or tried to-were borne out by the record, and in this case we didn’t
have to wait decades for the verdict. In 1952, the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the IPR, the kind of
investigation the Tydings committee should have undertaken but didn’t. This
showed, beyond all doubt, that the IPR was precisely what Sen. Anderson
suggested it was not-a vehicle for pro-Communist leverage on American
policy in China.
The Senate investigation of IPR might plausibly be looked on as the gold
standard of congressional hearings, exemplary in thoroughness and depth.
One reason for this unusual status is that the committee was able to corral
some 20,000 documents from the files of IPR, including numerous letters,
memoranda, minutes and reports that reflect a reality quite different from the
Institute’s facade. With these in hand, the committee could cross-check
many statements, grill witnesses in detail, and doggedly follow up
discrepancies, of which there was no shortage. The result was a picture of
the IPR, and its influence on Far Eastern policy, starkly different from that
produced by Tydings.
Readers interested in this subject could do no better than to get a copy
of The IPR Report produced by the committee-some 226 pages of closely
packed, sensational, and highly specific information. Even better, for those
who want to take the time, are the 5,000-plus pages of hearings and exhibits,
though it is doubtful many people would want to wade through all of these,
even if they could conveniently obtain them. Here I can but suggest the
tremendous quantity of data that the committee put together, and the main
conclusions it arrived at.
Small Pro-Red Clique in Charge
Among other things, the hearings revealed the intimate workings of IPR, and
showed that it had been effectively run by a small inner circle of officials-
chiefly such enduring mainstays as Edward Carter, Owen Lattimore,
Frederick Field, and a few others. These were in constant communication,
discussing lines of policy, materials to appear in newspapers, magazines and
books, or the agenda for some impending conference. Connected to this
inner cadre was a far-flung network of writers, researchers, speakers and
policy experts, including a substantial number who moved back and forth
among the IPR, the press corps, the academy, and the government.
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Also revealed by the investigation was the truly colossal number of
Communists and pro-Communists associated with IPR, though its officials
professed not to know this. These witnesses preferred to focus attention on
the prestigious non-Communist names that appeared on their letterhead as
trustees, but there wasn’t much evidence that this otherwise busy and
important group of people had much to do with shaping program. The
policymaking stuff, and the personnel who made it, were much more along
the lines of Amerasia.
To take a specific case in point, revealing the high degree of interlock that
prevailed in all these matters, the committee examined a list of possible
attendees at an IPR conference of 1942, as recommended by Philip Jessup.
Of this projected list of 30-plus invitees, almost a third were individuals who
had been identified under oath as members of the Communist apparatus (and
many of whom have also appeared in our discussion). Committee counsel
Robert Morris summarized the situation as follows:
“In reply to [a] question about the 10 people who have been identified
as part of the Communist organization on that . . . list recommended
by Mr. Jessup, I will point out that we have had testimony that
Benjamin Kizer was a member of the Communist Party, testimony
that Lauchlin Currie was associated with an espionage ring and gave
vital military secrets to the Russian espionage system, the military
secret being, in one case, the fact that the United States had broken
the Soviet code. . . .
“John Carter Vincent has been identified as a member; Harry Dexter
White as a member of an espionage ring; Owen Lattimore as a
member of the Communist organization; Len DeCaux as a member of
the Communist Party; Alger Hiss as a member of the Communist
Party; Joseph Barnes as a member of the Communist Party;
Frederick V. Field as a member of the Communist Party; and Frank
Coe as a member of the Communist Party.”
‘Specialized Political Flypaper’ for Reds
In its final report, the committee provided a further summary of the
amazing degree of Communist penetration at IPR, in unusually colorful
language for an official publication:
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“The IPR itself was like a specialized political flypaper in its
attractive power for Communists. . . . British Communists like
Michael Greenberg, Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley or Anthony Jenkinson;
Chinese Communists like Chi Chao-ting, Chen Han-seng, Chu Tong,
Y.Y. Hsu; German Communists like Hans Moeller (Asiaticus) or
Guenther Stein; Japanese Communists (and espionage agents) like
Saionji and Ozaki; United States Communists like James S. Allen,
Frederick V. Field, William M. Mandel, Harriet Moore, Lawrence
Rosinger, and Alger Hiss.
“Indeed, the difficulty with the IPR from the Communist point of view
was that it was too stuffed with Communists, too compromised by its
Communist connections. Elizabeth Bentley testified that her superior
in the Soviet espionage apparatus, Jacob Golos, warned her away
from the IPR because ‘it was as red as a rose, and you shouldn’t
touch it with a 10-foot pole.’ ”
The mention in this of espionage agents Saionji and Ozaki refers to the
Tokyo spy ring of the famous Richard Sorge, exposed to the American
public by Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, who served with Gen.
MacArthur in Japan. It might be added that, according to Willoughby’s
report (and Sorge himself), Guenther Stein was also a member of this ring,
as was the well-known Communist writer Agnes Smedley (also connected to
Amerasia). That these four members of the Sorge ring were all associated
with IPR didn’t seem to faze its leaders in the slightest.
Nor did it, for the matter, seem to faze many in the Acheson-Vincent-
Service State Department. On the contrary, stalwarts of IPR were frequently
called on to serve in official posts, take part in policy confabs, and otherwise
be dealt in on matters of importance. In the cases of such as Vincent and
Service and Jessup, the IPR and State Department points of view were so
totally fused as to be indistinguishable. It was mostly a matter of what hat
one happened to be wearing at the moment. As a result, the committee
found, IPR was most effective in pushing American policy in its desired
direction. Some of the report’s conclusions in this regard include:
“The IPR has been considered by the American Communist Party and
by Soviet officials as an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda
and military intelligence. The IPR disseminated and sought to
popularize false information including information originating from
15

Soviet and Communist sources. . . . Members of the small core of
officials and staff members who controlled IPR were either
Communist or pro-Communist. . . . Over a period of years, John
Carter Vincent was the principal fulcrum of IPR pressure and
influence in the State Department. . . . The IPR was a vehicle used by
the Communists to orientate American far eastern policies toward
Communist objectives. . .”
McCarthy’s Showdown With Prof. Lattimore
All of which, it will be recalled, was precisely what McCarthy had been
saying-though he didn’t at the time have the investigative apparatus of a
committee at his disposal, and most of all didn’t have the files of IPR. Thus
far, on the main issues that he raised, another vindication. There remains,
however, one related case to be considered, this one the biggest of them all.
This was McCarthy’s showdown with Prof. Lattimore, of Johns Hopkins
University, a long-time official of IPR, and noted authority on Far Eastern
questions. Of all the internal security battles that McCarthy fought, this was
by far the most explosive.
McCarthy himself had put the matter just this way-raising the stakes up to
the limit. The Lattimore case, he said, was the most important of the lot, the
one on which he would “stand or fall.” Lattimore, according to McCarthy,
was “one of the principal architects of our Far Eastern policy,” and his
influence had been exerted in favor of the Communists. Concerning this
significant figure, McCarthy told his colleagues, “I intend to give the Senate
some documentation to show that he is a Soviet agent and that he is, or at
least has been a member of the Communist Party.” Despite the fact that he
was not a State Department official, McCarthy said, Lattimore had exerted
tremendous leverage on policy, and even had a desk in the Department.
(McCarthy even went so far as to say, in executive session, that Lattimore
was an espionage agent-though he later backed off from this assertion.)
The Tydings Committee conducted its inquiry into the matter, heard from
Lattimore at length, and found him innocent on all counts-the victim of
“promiscuous and specious attacks on private citizens and their views.”
Lattimore denied everything across the board (as did the State Department).
He was not a Communist or pro-Communist, and was, if anything, anti-
Soviet. As for influence, “the Department has never followed my advice or
opinions,” and he had no desk in the Department. He was simply a teacher
16

and a writer trying to pursue his scholarly interests. McCarthy was a lying
blackguard who had subjected the incensed professor to “ordeal by slander”
(the title of Lattimore’s book about the subject).
Thus the face-off between McCarthy and-to that point-his biggest single
target. As this was in essence Armageddon, the reader is forewarned that we
shall be devoting more attention to the Lattimore case than to the other
individuals herein discussed all put together. As it is, even an extensive
treatment can only scratch the surface, as the amount of material now
available on Prof. Lattimore is immense: Some 3,000 or so pages of
testimony by and about him, before the Tydings and IPR committees; 5,000
pages of files available from the FBI; Lattimore’s own writings, and
analyses of his activities and opinions provided by many writers on the
battles of the ‘50s. What follows is a selection from this trove of data.
Whether Lattimore was or was not an “architect” of policy, he was far from
a reclusive scholar. Throughout the 1940s, he held an almost continuous
series of government appointments, and had an amazing knack for showing
up where there was important action: Roosevelt’s appointee as adviser to
Chiang Kai-shek in 1941; director of Pacific operations for OWI, 1942-44;
companion to Vice President Wallace (along with Vincent) on a fateful trek
to China in 1944; advisor to the U.S. government concerning post-war
policies in Japan, 1945-46; counselor to the State Department in its
deliberations concerning China, South Korea and the rest of Asia, as of the
latter ’40s.
And, oh yes, that famous “desk in the State Department,” which McCarthy
said he had, and Lattimore swore he didn’t. In the files of the IPR, the
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee found a letter Lattimore wrote
in 1942, in which he said:
“I am in Washington about 4 days a week, and when there can be
reached at Lauchlin Currie’s office, room 228, State Department
Building.”
Add to all of this the fact that Lattimore was one of the moving spirits of
IPR, editor of its magazine Pacific Affairs, had been on the editorial board
of Amerasia, and was a prolific author and book reviewer, and it’s apparent
that he was a major figure indeed in the fairly compact and limited world of
“experts” who knew anything much about Far Eastern matters.
17

These many Lattimore assignments and connections become the more
intriguing when we note the line of thought that he consistently promoted
about the Soviet Union and the Communists in general, usually couched in
neutral-sounding prose just setting forth the “facts.” His specialty was the
peculiar “power of attraction” the Soviets supposedly exerted on
neighboring countries, tribes and people. Here is a sample:
“To all of these peoples (along the Russian frontier from Korea and
Manchuria past Mongolia, Sinkiang and Afghanistan and Iran, all the
way to Turkey), the Russians and the Soviet Union have a greater
power of attraction. In their eyes . . . the Soviet Union stands for
strategic security, economic prosperity, technological progress,
miraculous medicine, free education, equality of opportunity, and
democracy, a powerful combination.”
And, to make the matter even more specific:
“In Asia the most important example of the Soviet power of attraction
beyond Soviet frontiers is in Outer Mongolia. It is here that we should
look for evidence of the kind of attraction that Russia might offer to
Korea in the future. Outer Mongolia might be called a satellite of
Russia in the good sense. That is to say, the Mongols have gravitated
into the Russian orbit of their own accord. . . . Soviet policy in Outer
Mongolia cannot be fairly called Red imperialism.”4
Lattimore further explained the Soviets’ power of attraction this way:
“The fact that the Soviet Union stands for democracy is not to be
overlooked. It stands for democracy because it stands for all the other
things. . . . The fact is that for most of the people of the world today,
what constitutes democracy in theory is more or less irrelevant. What
moves people to act, to try to line up with one party or country and
not with another, is the difference between what is more democratic
and less democratic in practice.”
This uncanny power of attraction seemed to exert its fascination on
Lattimore himself-up to and including bland extenuations of Stalin’s purge
trials of the ’30s. While many liberal intellectuals (e.g., John Dewey) were
horrified by these, Lattimore took them well in stride.
18

“Habitual rectification,” as he smoothly described this series of
murders, “can hardly do anything but give the ordinary citizen more
courage to protest, loudly, whenever in the future he finds himself
being victimized by ‘someone in the party’ or ‘someone in the
government.’ That sounds to me like democracy.”
Lattimore turned an equally complacent gaze on the Communists of
Asia. In a newspaper piece of 1946, for example, he opined:
“Japanese Communist tactics are reminiscent of the Chinese
Communists who, as Randall Gould points out in his excellent new
book, China in the Sun, often appear to be extremists only because
they actually set out to practice reforms which the Kuomintang has
approved of and talked about for many years, but has never done
much about. In fact, we may be entering a period in which, for most
of the world, the Russian Communists will represent power and
toughness, while the Chinese and Japanese Communists will
represent reasonableness and moderation.”
Lattimore’s other stock-in-trade was “realism,” which translated into
recognizing not only the Communists’ “power of attraction,” but their
power in general. After the United States pulled the plug on Chiang in 1949,
Lattimore was a key figure at a State Department conference to decide what
should be done next (Marshall and Jessup were both in attendance). For this
conclave he laid out a whole scenario of “realistic” actions in the East,
extending to Korea, Japan, and Indochina. Among his suggestions:
“The type of policy expressed by support for Chiang Kai-shek has
done more harm than good to the United States. . . . [Red] China
cannot be economically coerced by such measures as cutting off
trade. . . . It is not possible to make Japan an instrument of American
policy. . . . Under the second alternative Japan can keep herself alive
by coming to terms economically and politically with her neighbors in
Asia, principally China. . . . South Korea is more of a liability than an
asset to the interests and policy of the United States.”
19

Lattimore would explain this policy paper-and expand further on his
thesis-in his testimony the following year before the Tydings panel,
saying:
“I warned that we cannot expect to succeed with little Chiang Kai-
sheks where we failed with the big Chiang Kai-shek. But we are still
supporting a little Chiang Kai-shek in South Korea and we have since
taken on another one in Indochina.”
Small wonder Joe McCarthy and others who watched the debacle of our
policy in China saw Lattimore as a big part of the problem. There was more
reason for concern, however, than the professor’s odd opinions. As it
happened, there were witnesses who came over from the Communist side
reporting that Lattimore had been made known to them as a member of the
apparatus.
Among these was Louis Budenz, formerly of the Daily Worker, who said his
superiors told him Lattimore was a Communist agent and should be given
appropriate editorial treatment. Not surprisingly, Lattimore devoted much of
his time on the witness stand to attacking Budenz as either a venal or a
psychotic liar.
But it wasn’t just Budenz. Soviet defector Alexander Barmine gave similar
statements to the FBI, and later to the Senate. Barmine said the chief of
Soviet military intelligence had told him “Owen Lattimore and Joseph
Barnes” should be considered as “our men.” Barmine added that he had
discussed Barnes and Lattimore with Walter Krivitzky, another former
Soviet official, and that Krivitzky had confirmed this.
Yet another defector, Igor Bogolepov, said Soviet foreign minister Maxim
Litvinov had discussed the question of how best to market the Soviets’ Outer
Mongolian puppet to the world as “independent”: “. . . as far as concerns the
United States Litvinov’s own suggestion was to put on this business Mr.
Owen Lattimore . . . it was said so short and in such a categorical form that
there was no slightest doubt left to me that Mr. Lattimore was the right man
who was to take this assignment.”
20

Other Witnesses Confirm Budenz
It would thus appear that, if Budenz had simply invented his story as part of
an insane conspiracy to destroy Lattimore, he had somehow inveigled
Barmine and Bogolepov into sharing his psychosis. Similar problems would
arise concerning still other witnesses and pieces of information that have
come to view down through the years. (E.g., in their recent book
on Amerasia, Klehr and Radosh note that Communist propagandist Louis
Gibarti said party officials in the ’30s had sent him to Lattimore for
assistance.)
As the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee would learn when it got into
the files of IPR, Lattimore had in fact met directly with the Soviets in
Moscow. Minutes recorded by the IPR show Lattimore taking a most abject
position toward his hosts, pledging to develop an editorial policy to their
liking. The Soviets had complained, for instance, about William Henry
Chamberlin, who had written a piece in Pacific Affairs adverse to Stalin.
The minutes show Lattimore replying
“that he had not realized Chamberlin’s position, but as soon as he
learned of the Soviet opinion of Chamberlin he canceled an article on
the Soviet press which he had asked from Chamberlin.”
Lattimore also asked the Soviets to contribute articles of their own
to Pacific Affairs, as this would help the magazine develop a definite
“line.” He said that
“if the Soviet group would show in their articles a general line-a
struggle for peace-the other articles would naturally gravitate to that
line.” He added that “he was willing to have P.A. reflect such a line,
but these positive articles must be started positively.” And again: “He
would like to meet the Soviet suggestions as far as possible, as to
having a more definite line expressed in P.A.”
Also emerging from the hearings, and other revelations since, are many
details concerning Lattimore’s choice of editors and writers.
21

His tastes in this regard-and in editorial style-were reflected in this
message to IPR official Edward Carter:
“. . . I think that you are pretty cagey in turning over so much of the
China section of the inquiry to Asiaticus, Han-seng and Chi [all
identified Communists]. They will bring out the absolutely essential
radical aspects, but can be depended on to do it with the right touch. .
. . For China, my hunch is that it will pay to keep behind the official
Chinese Communist position-far enough not to be covered by the
same label-but enough ahead of the active Chinese liberals to be
noticeable. . . . For the USSR-back their international policy in
general, but without using their slogans and above all without giving
them or anybody else an impression of subservience. . .”
As seen, this was the ostensibly objective style that Lattimore himself
adopted. The subservience to Moscow tended to show up more plainly in his
direct communication with the Kremlin and, it would appear, his hiring of
personnel. In a new study of U.S. policy in China, for instance, historian
Maochun Yu discusses the IPR employment of the Chinese Communist
Chen Han-Seng, as follows:
“Chen, a Comintern intelligence agent associated with Richard
Sorge’s spy ring in Shanghai and Tokyo, was dispatched by Moscow
to New York to aid Owen Lattimore in editing the journal Pacific
Affairs from 1936 to 1939.”
This disclosure, taken from Chen’s memoirs published a decade ago in
China, tracks closely with the many references to him in The IPR Report, as
in the list appearing on page S5. It also tracks the testimony of Budenz,
who told the Tydings panel that Lattimore’s name had been singled out
for praise by Communist bosses Field and Browder, for this specific
reason:
“In 1937, at a meeting called by Earl Browder. . . Field was present
and made a report at which he commended Mr. Lattimore’s zeal in
seeing that Communists were placed as writers at Pacific Affairs, and
this had been particularly noted during this last year, 1936 and
1937.” (The committee, as we have seen, dismissed such testimony
out of hand, as it did other witnesses brought forward by
McCarthy.)
22

Lattimore engaged in other actions of this sort,5 which makes it easier to
comprehend how one might think he was involved in spying. It turns out the
FBI compiled an enormous file on Lattimore, based precisely on this
suspicion. Like McCarthy, the bureau keyed in on the testimony of Barmine,
and thereafter on Lattimore’s links to Amerasia. The professor had been on
the journal’s board of editors, had a long-standing relationship with Jaffe,
and entertained Service and Roth in his home a few days before they were
arrested. The bureau accordingly put together a thick dossier on Lattimore
(see inset, page S6) well before McCarthy made his first appearance.
Lattimore’s Close Ties With Currie
Noteworthy in this context, as McCarthy pointed out, is that Lattimore had
made a trek to Yenan in 1937 to meet with Mao Tse-tung-along with Jaffe
and T.A. Bisson, both thereafter to be revealed as trafficking in U.S. official
documents and dealing with Soviet agent Bernstein. Also in Yenan with
Lattimore and Co. was Agnes Smedley, another identified member of the
Sorge spy ring. The FBI files make frequent mention of Lattimore’s
contacts, back in the states, with Jaffe, as well as with such known
Communist operatives as Field.
However, the most important reason for thinking Lattimore might have been
engaged in spying was his close tie-in with Currie. This still shadowy figure
has never received the full attention he deserves. It was Currie who provided
Lattimore with his “desk in the State Department.” It was Currie who got
Lattimore appointed as FDR’s emissary to Chiang (wiring around the State
Department to do so) and helped arrange the naming of Lattimore and
Vincent as travelling mentors in China for a gullible Henry Wallace.
(In May of 1941, during the Hitler-Stalin pact, the FBI had issued a notice
that Lattimore as a suspected Communist should be considered for custodial
detention in the event of a national emergency, as shown in the graphic
appearing on page S6. However, after Currie secured Lattimore’s prestigious
appointment as Roosevelt’s envoy to Chiang, this notice was rescinded.)
Most of all, of course, it was Currie who according to Bentley was a
collaborator with her spy ring, helped in obtaining posts for secret Reds, and
informed the Washington, D.C., cadre that America had broken the Soviets’
code (thus ending the Venona intercepts). As already seen, he launched the
23

cover-up of Amerasia. He also pulled off such amazing feats as arranging a
personal interview in the State Department for Earl Browder with Under
Secretary Sumner Welles, and went to bat for Nathan Gregory Silvermaster,
when this identified Soviet spy was in danger of being ousted.
Accordingly, Lattimore’s on-going links with Currie must have raised a lot
of eyebrows, especially as the duo so often worked together in placing
favored people. We have noted the smooth transition of Michael Greenberg
from Lattimore’s shop at IPR to Currie’s in the White House; thereafter,
when Greenberg was targeted for firing, Lattimore came to his defense.
Likewise, according to The IPR Report, Lattimore-Currie tried in 1942 to get
a commission in military intelligence for Frederick Field, at that time
perhaps the most notorious pro-Soviet operative in the country.
Each of these incredible escapades, and many others in which Lattimore was
involved, would merit in-depth discussion on its own. E.g., the fact that
Lattimore discussed his 1941 appointment as emissary to Chiang with Soviet
ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This at a period when the Hitler-Stalin
pact was still in bloom, and Moscow had a nonaggression treaty with Japan-
timing that Lattimore tried to conceal in testifying to the Senate. (It was also,
apparently, before he had discussed the matter with the representatives of
Chiang.)
From all of which, it is perhaps understandable that McCarthy could have
been led to think that Lattimore was some kind of espionage kingpin-but
also that this view was probably mistaken. The reasons for this conclusion
are at least two:
First, Lattimore’s role in shaping policy on a global scale was far
more important than simply filching papers, to which in any event he
did not have constant access. And second, the espionage role could be
far more effectively performed by his alter ego, Currie-which,
according to Elizabeth Bentley, is precisely what occurred. All things
considered, a rather neat division of labor.
So, on Lattimore, did McCarthy stand, or fall? The Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee put its conclusions this way:
“Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a
conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.” And:
24

“Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent were influential in
bringing about a change in United States policy in 1945 favorable to
the Chinese Communists.”
The data that have emerged in recent years do little or nothing to belie this
judgment on the professor, and much to reinforce it.
McCarthy’s Efforts Changed History
There is of course a great deal more to the McCarthy story, but readers who
have come this far may well feel that they have had, at least for now,
enough. Many particulars of the battles from this early era have been passed
over, and of course we haven’t discussed at all the climactic struggle in 1954
between McCarthy and the Army (some of which was touched on in my
McCarthy piece of 1987). Full treatment of these matters will have to wait
until another day. However, a provisional verdict about McCarthy’s doings,
and what he probably accomplished, may be offered here by way of wrap-
up.
In the voting of 1950 and 1952, judging by the candidates who were elected
and defeated, there was evidence that McCarthy’s campaign, despite the
forces ranged against him, had a fair amount of public impact. There is also
some considerable reason to believe that, thanks to these elections and the
general pressure he exerted, McCarthy had a lot to do with tightening up
security procedures at the State Department. As should be apparent from
what is said above, this was a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Beyond this, however, are larger questions, concerning the course of the
Cold War struggle, and of American policy in dealing with this challenge.
For instance, in the State Department conference of 1949 discussing what
kind of strategy to follow in the Far East, the “prevailing view” was said to
be that the United States should recognize Communist China as soon as
possible and make ready to abandon the remaining anti-Communist forces
on Formosa. There was also the Lattimore proposal, often stated, that
the United States should abandon South Korea as we had abandoned
Chiang:
“to let South Korea fall but not to let it looked as though we pushed it”
(a tactic that he imputed to “Washington opinion”).
25

At the time, the momentum behind these policy views seemed to be quite
strong, and growing. In late December 1949, the State Department
circularized a memo that basically envisioned giving up Formosa. Three
weeks thereafter, Dean Acheson made a famous speech before the National
Press Club, in which he appeared to exclude South Korea and Formosa from
the perimeter of our defenses. Thus, as of early January 1950, when Acheson
made this speech, the Lattimore plan for shaping American strategy in the
Pacific appeared to be on track, with little to deter it. One month later, Joe
McCarthy stepped to the podium in Wheeling.
_____________________________________________________________
McCarthyism:
Forty questions and answers
about Senator Joseph McCarthy
by James J. Drummey
www.thenewamerican.com
_____________________________________________________________
Thirty years after the death of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, twice-
elected United States Senator from Wisconsin, the term
"McCarthyism" is still widely used as a convenient and easily
understood epithet for all that is evil and despicable in the world of
politics. Hardly a month passes without some reference to
"McCarthyism" in the print or electronic media. Despite the frequency
with which the term is invoked, however, it is quite clear that not one
critic of McCarthy in a hundred has the slightest idea of what he said
and did during that controversial period from 1950 to 1954.
Whether Joe McCarthy was right or wrong, it is important that we know the
truth about him. If he was wrong, then we can learn some important lessons
for the future. If he was right, then we need to be vitally concerned about the
26

issues he raised because virtually nothing has been done to deal effectively
with those issues since the mid-1950s.
A brief biographical sketch of the Senator's life appears elsewhere in this
magazine (page 58), along with some assessments of him by his
contemporaries (page 59). This article will attempt to answer many of the
questions asked about Joe McCarthy and the criticisms directed at him. The
responses are based on years of study of McCarthy's speeches and writings,
congressional hearings in which he was involved, and more than a score of
books about him, most of them highly critical and condemnatory.
I. The Years Before 1950
Q. Was Joe McCarthy a lax and unethical judge?
A. Joe McCarthy was elected as a circuit judge in Wisconsin in 1939 and
took over a district court that had a backlog of more than 200 cases. By
eliminating a lot of legal red tape and working long hours (his court
remained open past midnight at least a dozen times), Judge McCarthy
cleared up the backlog quickly and, in the words of one local newspaper,
"administered justice promptly and with a combination of legal knowledge
and good sense." On October 28, 1940, the Milwaukee Journal editorialized:
"Breaking with the 'horse-and-buggy' tradition that has tied up the calendars
of most Wisconsin circuit courts, young Judge Joseph R. McCarthy of
Appleton has streamlined his tenth district ... and has made a hit with
lawyers and litigants alike."
Q. Did McCarthy exaggerate his military record in World War II?
A. Although his judgeship exempted him from military service, McCarthy
enlisted in the Marines and was sworn in as a first lieutenant in August
1942. He served as an intelligence officer for a bomber squadron stationed in
the Solomon Islands and had the responsibility of briefing and debriefing
pilots before and after their missions. McCarthy also risked his life by
volunteering to fly in the tail-gunner's seat on many combat missions. Those
who quibble about the number of combat missions he flew miss the point --
he didn't have to fly any.
The enemies of McCarthy have seized on his good-natured remark about
shooting down coconut trees from his tail-gunner's spot (ABC's three-hour
27

movie about McCarthy in 1977 was entitled Tail Gunner Joe) to belittle his
military accomplishments, but the official record gives the true picture. Not
only were McCarthy's achievements during 30 months of active duty
unanimously praised by his commanding officers, but Admiral Chester
Nimitz, commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, issued the following
citation regarding the service of Captain McCarthy:
For meritorious and efficient performance of duty as an observer and rear
gunner of a dive bomber attached to a Marine scout bombing squadron
operating in the Solomon Islands area from September 1 to December 31,
1943. He participated in a large number of combat missions, and in addition
to his regular duties, acted as aerial photographer. He obtained excellent
photographs of enemy gun positions, despite intense anti-aircraft fire,
thereby gaining valuable information which contributed materially to the
success of subsequent strikes in the area. Although suffering from a severe
leg injury, he refused to be hospitalized and continued to carry out his duties
as Intelligence Officer in a highly efficient manner. His courageous devotion
to duty was in keeping with the highest traditions of the naval service.
Q. Was McCarthy backed by the Communists in his 1946 campaign for
the U.S. Senate?
A. In 1946, Joe McCarthy upset incumbent U.S. Senator Robert La Follette
by 5,378 votes in the Republican primary and went on to beat Democrat
Howard McMurray by 251,658 votes in the general election. The
Communist Party of Wisconsin had originally circulated petitions to place
its own candidate on the ballot as an Independent in the general election.
When McCarthy scored his surprising victory over La Follette, the
Communists did not file the petitions for their candidate, but rallied instead
behind McMurray. Thus, Joe McCarthy defeated a Democratic-Communist
coalition in 1946.
Q. Had Joe McCarthy ever spoken out against Communism prior to his
famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950?
A. Those who contend that McCarthy stumbled across Communism while
searching for an issue to use in his 1952 reelection campaign will be
disappointed to know that the Senator had been speaking out against
Communism for years. He made Communism an issue in his campaign
against Howard McMurray in 1946, charging that McMurray had received
28

the endorsement of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. In
April 1947, McCarthy told the Madison Capital Times that his top priority
was "to stop the spread of Communism." On the Meet the Press radio show
in July of that year, the Wisconsin Senator said: "We've been at war with
Russia for some time now, and Russia has been winning this war at a faster
rate than we were, during the last stages of the last war. Everyone is
painfully aware of the fact that we are at war -- and that we're losing it."
During a speech in Milwaukee in 1952, Senator McCarthy dated the public
phase of his fight against Communists to May 22, 1949, the night that
former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was found dead on the ground
outside Bethesda Naval Hospital. "The Communists hounded Forrestal to his
death," said McCarthy. "They killed him just as definitely as if they had
thrown him from that sixteenth-story window in Bethesda Naval Hospital."
He said that "while I am not a sentimental man, I was touched deeply and
left numb by the news of Forrestal's murder. But I was affected much more
deeply when I heard of the Communist celebration when they heard of
Forrestal's murder. On that night, I dedicated part of this fight to Jim
Forrestal."
Thus, Joe McCarthy was receptive in the fall of 1949 when three men
brought to his office a 100-page FBI report alleging extensive Communist
penetration of the State Department. The trio had asked three other Senators
to awaken the American people to this dangerous situation, but only
McCarthy was willing to take on this volatile project.
II. A Lone Senator (1950-1952)
Q. What was the security situation in the State Department at the time
of McCarthy's Wheeling speech in February 1950?
A. Communist infiltration of the State Department began in the 1930s. On
September 2, 1939, former Communist Whittaker Chambers provided
Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle with the names and Communist
connections of two dozen spies in the government, including Alger Hiss.
Berle took the information to President Roosevelt, but FDR laughed it off.
Hiss moved rapidly up the State Department ladder and served as an advisor
to Roosevelt at the disastrous Yalta Conference in 1945 that paved the way
for the Soviet conquest of Central and Eastern Europe. Hiss also functioned
as the secretary general of the founding meeting of the United Nations in
29

San Francisco, helped to draft the UN Charter, and later filled dozens of
positions at the UN with American Communists before he was publicly
exposed as a Soviet spy by Whittaker Chambers in 1948.
The security problem at the State Department had worsened considerably in
1945 when a merger brought into State thousands of employees from such
war agencies as the Office of Strategic Services, the Office of War
Information, and the Foreign Economic Administration -- all of which were
riddled with members of the Communist underground. J. Anthony Panuch,
the State Department official charged with supervising the 1945 merger, told
a Senate committee in 1953 that "the biggest single thing that contributed to
the infiltration of the State Department was the merger of 1945. The effects
of that are still being felt." In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall and
Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson engineered the firing of Panuch and
the removal of every key member of his security staff.
In June 1947, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee addressed a secret
memorandum to Secretary Marshall, calling to his attention a condition that
developed and still flourishes in the State Department under the
administration of Dean Acheson. It is evident that there is a deliberate,
calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist
personnel in high places but to reduce security and intelligence protection to
a nullity. On file in the department is a copy of a preliminary report of the
FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States which involves a
large number of State Department employees, some in high official
positions.
The memorandum listed the names of nine of these State Department
officials and said that they were "only a few of the hundreds now employed
in varying capacities who are protected and allowed to remain despite the
fact that their presence is an obvious hazard to national security. There is
also the extensive employment in highly classified positions of admitted
homosexuals, who are historically known to be security risks." On June 24,
1947, Assistant Secretary of State John Peurifoy notified the chairman of the
Senate subcommittee that ten persons had been dismissed from the
department, five of whom had been listed in the memorandum. But from
June 1947 until McCarthy's speech in February 1950, the State Department
did not fire one person as a loyalty or security risk. In other branches of the
government, however, more than 300 persons were discharged for loyalty
reasons alone during the period from 1947 to 1951.
30

It was also during the mid-to-late Forties that Communist sympathizers in
the State Department played a key role in the subjugation of mainland China
by the Reds. "It is my judgment, and I was in the State Department at the
time," said former Ambassador William D. Pawley, "that this whole fiasco,
the loss of China and the subsequent difficulties with which the United
States has been faced, was the result of mistaken policy of Dean Acheson,
Phil Jessup, [Owen] Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, John Service, John
Davies, [O.E.] Clubb, and others." Asked if he thought the mistaken policy
was the result of "sincere mistakes of judgment," Pawley replied: "No, I
don't."
Q. Was Joe McCarthy the only member of Congress critical of those
whose policies had put 400 million Chinese into Communist slavery?
A. No, there were others who were equally disturbed. For instance, on
January 30, 1949, one year before McCarthy's Wheeling speech, a young
Congressman from Massachusetts deplored "the disasters befalling China
and the United States" and declared that "it is of the utmost importance that
we search out and spotlight those who must bear the responsibility for our
present predicament." The Congressman placed a major part of the blame on
"a sick Roosevelt," General George Marshall, and "our diplomats and their
advisors, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks," and he concluded: "This is the
tragic story of China whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our
young men had saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away."
The Congressman's name was John F. Kennedy.
Q. What did McCarthy actually say in his Wheeling speech?
A. Addressing the Ohio County Women's Republican Club on February 9,
1950, Senator McCarthy first quoted from Marx, Lenin, and Stalin their
stated goal of world conquest and said that "today we are engaged in a final,
all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity." He blamed the
fall of China and other countries to the Communists in the previous six years
on "the traitorous actions" of the State Department's "bright young men,"
and he mentioned specifically John S. Service, Gustavo Duran, Mary Jane
Kenny (it should have been Keeney), Julian Wadleigh, Dr. Harlow Shapley,
Alger Hiss, and Dean Acheson. The part of the speech that catapulted
McCarthy from relative obscurity into the national spotlight contained these
words:
31

I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either
card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who
nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.
Q. Wasn't it reported that McCarthy used the number 205 in his
Wheeling speech, lowered it to 57 later, and then raised it again to 81?
A. Yes, this was reported, and here is the explanation: In the Wheeling
speech, McCarthy referred to a letter that Secretary of State James Byrnes
sent to Congressman Adolph Sabath in 1946. In that letter, Byrnes said that
State Department security investigators had declared 284 persons unfit to
hold jobs in the department because of Communist connections and other
reasons, but that only 79 had been discharged, leaving 205 still on the State
Department's payroll. McCarthy told his Wheeling audience that while he
did not have the names of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter, he did
have the names of 57 who were either members of or loyal to the
Communist Party. On February 20, 1950, McCarthy gave the Senate
information about 81 individuals -- the 57 referred to at Wheeling and 24
others of less importance and about whom the evidence was less conclusive.
The enemies of McCarthy have juggled these numbers around to make the
Senator appear to be erratic and to distract attention from the paramount
question: Were there still Alger Hisses in the State Department betraying
this nation? McCarthy was not being inconsistent in his use of the numbers;
the 57 and 81 were part of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter.
Q. Was it fair for McCarthy to make all those names public and ruin
reputations?
A. That is precisely why McCarthy did not make the names public. Four
times during the February 20th speech, Senator Scott Lucas demanded that
McCarthy make the 81 names public, but McCarthy refused to do so,
responding that "if I were to give all the names involved, it might leave a
wrong impression. If we should label one man a Communist when he is not
a Communist, I think it would be too bad." What McCarthy did was to
identify the individuals only by case numbers, not by their names.
By the way, it took McCarthy some six hours to make that February 20th
speech because of harassment by hostile Senators, four of whom -- Scott
Lucas, Brien McMahon, Garrett Withers, and Herbert Lehman -- interrupted
him a total of 123 times. It should also be noted that McCarthy was not
32

indicting the entire State Department. He said that "the vast majority of the
employees of the State Department are loyal" and that he was only after the
ones who had demonstrated a loyalty to the Soviet Union or to the
Communist Party.
Further, McCarthy admitted that "some of these individuals whose cases I
am giving the Senate are no longer in the State Department. A sizable
number of them are not. Some of them have transferred to other government
work, work allied with the State Department. Others have been transferred to
the United Nations." Senator Karl Mundt supported McCarthy on this point
by noting that "one of the great difficulties we confront in trying to get
Communists out of government is that apparently once they have been
removed from one department there is no alert given to the other
departments, so they simply drift from one department to another."
Q. What was the purpose of the Tydings Committee?
A. The Tydings Committee was a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee that was set up in February 1950 to conduct "a full and
complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to
the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State."
The chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat,
set the tone for the hearings on the first day when he told McCarthy: "You
are in the position of being the man who occasioned this hearing, and so far
as I am concerned in this committee you are going to get one of the most
complete investigations ever given in the history of this Republic, so far as
my abilities will permit."
After 31 days of hearings, during which McCarthy presented public
evidence on nine persons (Dorothy Kenyon, Haldore Hanson, Philip Jessup,
Esther Brunauer, Frederick Schuman, Harlow Shapley, Gustavo Duran, John
Stewart Service, and Owen Lattimore), the Tydings Committee labeled
McCarthy's charges a "fraud" and a "hoax," said that the individuals on his
list were neither Communist nor pro-Communist, and concluded that the
State Department had an effective security program.
Q. Did the Tydings Committee carry out its mandate?
A. Not by a long shot. The Tydings Committee never investigated State
Department security at all and did not come close to conducting the "full and
complete study and investigation" it was supposed to conduct. Tydings and
33

his Democratic colleagues, Brien McMahon and Theodore Green, subjected
McCarthy to considerable interruptions and heckling, prompting Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge to protest that McCarthy "never gets a fair shake" in
trying to present his evidence in an orderly fashion. So persistent were the
interruptions and statements of the Democratic trio during the first two days
of the hearings that McCarthy was allowed only a total of 17½ minutes of
direct testimony.
While the Democrats were hostile to McCarthy and to any witnesses that
could confirm his charges, they fawned all over the six individuals who
appeared before the committee to deny McCarthy's accusations. Tydings,
McMahon, and Green not only treated Philip Jessup like a hero, for one
example, but refused to let McCarthy present his full case against Jessup or
to cross-examine him. Furthermore, the committee majority declined to call
more than 20 witnesses whom Senator Bourke Hickenlooper thought were
important to the investigation. And when Senator Lodge read into the record
19 questions that he thought should be answered before the committee
exonerated the State Department's security system, not only did the
Democrats ignore the questions, but some member of the committee or the
staff deleted from the official transcript of the hearings the 19 questions as
well as other testimony that made the committee look bad. The deleted
material amounted to 35 typewritten pages.
It is clear then that the Tydings Committee did not carry out its mandate and
that the words "fraud" and "hoax" more accurately describe the Tydings
Report than they do McCarthy's charges.
There is one other dirty trick played on McCarthy by Senator Tydings that
should be mentioned because it shows how dishonest McCarthy's enemies
were. McCarthy wanted to present his information in closed sessions, but
Tydings insisted on public sessions. So when McCarthy arrived at the first
hearing, he gave reporters a press release about Dorothy Kenyon, his first
case. Tydings then told McCarthy publicly that he could give his evidence in
executive session if he wished and gave him two minutes to make up his
mind. Since the committee had already rejected his request for closed
sessions, and since he had already given the press material about his first
case, McCarthy told Tydings that "we will have to proceed with this one in
open session."
34

As deceitful as Tydings was in trying to make McCarthy appear to be
responsible for public hearings, the reporters who were present were just as
bad. They knew what Tydings was trying to do, and yet they joined in
spreading this malicious falsehood about McCarthy.
Q. So, was McCarthy right or wrong about the State Department?
A. He was right. Of the 110 names that McCarthy gave to the Tydings
Committee to be investigated, 62 of them were employed by the State
Department at the time of the hearings. The committee cleared everyone on
McCarthy's list, but within a year the State Department started proceedings
against 49 of the 62. By the end of 1954, 81 of those on McCarthy's list had
left the government either by dismissal or resignation.
Q. Can you cite some particular examples?
A. Sure. Let's take three of McCarthy's nine public cases -- those of John
Stewart Service, Philip Jessup, and Owen Lattimore.* Five years before
McCarthy mentioned the name of John Stewart Service, Service was
arrested for giving classified documents to the editors of Amerasia, a
Communist magazine. The Truman Administration, however, managed to
cover up the espionage scandal and Service was never punished for his
crime. McCarthy also produced considerable evidence that Service had been
"part of the pro-Soviet group" that wanted to bring Communism to China,
but the Tydings Committee said that Service was "not disloyal, pro-
Communist, or a security risk." Over the next 18 months, the State
Department's Loyalty Security Board cleared Service four more times, but
finally, in December 1951, the Civil Service Commission Loyalty Review
Board found that there was "reasonable doubt" as to his loyalty and ousted
him from the State Department.
Was the career of Mr. Service ruined by this decision? Not on your life. The
Supreme Court reinstated him in 1956 and Service was the American consul
in Liverpool, England, until his retirement in 1962. He then joined the
faculty of the University of California at Berkeley and visited Red China in
the fall of 1971 at the invitation of Communist tyrant Chou En-lai.
Following his return from the country he helped to communize, Service
wrote four articles for the New York Times and was the subject of a
laudatory cover interview in Parade magazine.
35

All that Joe McCarthy said about Philip Jessup was that he had an "unusual
affinity for Communist causes." The record shows that Jessup belonged to at
least five Communist-controlled fronts, that he associated closely with
Communists, and that he was an influential member of the Institute of
Pacific Relations (IPR), which the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
(SISS) described in 1952 as "a vehicle used by Communists to orientate
American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives." The SISS also
reported that 46 persons connected with the IPR while Jessup was a leading
light there had been named under oath as members of the Communist Party.
The Senate apparently felt that McCarthy was closer to the truth than the
Tydings Committee because in 1951 it rejected Jessup's nomination as a
delegate to the United Nations. After the Senate adjourned, however,
President Truman appointed him anyway. In 1960, President Eisenhower
named Jessup to represent the United States on the International Court of
Justice, and Jessup served on the World Court until 1969. He died in 1986.
Owen Lattimore was one of the principal architects of the State
Department's pro-Communist foreign policy in the Far East. In a closed
session of the Tydings Committee, Senator McCarthy called Lattimore "the
top Russian spy" in the department. (That charge, by the way, was leaked to
the public not by McCarthy but by columnist Drew Pearson.) McCarthy later
modified his statement on Lattimore, saying that "I may have perhaps placed
too much stress on the question of whether or not he has been an espionage
agent," and went on to say that "thirteen different witnesses have testified
under oath to Lattimore's Communist membership or party-line activities."
Although the Tydings Committee cleared Lattimore of all charges, another
Senate committee, the Internal Security Subcommittee, vindicated Joe
McCarthy when it declared in 1952 that "Owen Lattimore was, from some
time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet
conspiracy."
Was Lattimore hurt by this or by his subsequent indictment for perjury? Of
course not. He continued on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, went
to Communist Outer Mongolia for the Kennedy State Department in 1961,
became head of a new Chinese studies department at Leeds University in
England in 1963, and returned to the United States in the Seventies for
speeches and lectures. On January 28th of this year, Lattimore told the
Associated Press from his home in Rhode Island that the Reagan
36

Administration's decision to establish diplomatic ties with Communist
Mongolia was "long overdue."
Q. Even if McCarthy was right about Service, Jessup, and Lattimore,
weren't there hundreds of others who were publicly smeared by him?
A. This is one of the most enduring myths about McCarthy, and it is
completely false. It is a fact, said Buckley and Bozell in McCarthy and His
Enemies, which from February 9, 1950, until January 1, 1953, Joe McCarthy
publicly questioned the loyalty or reliability of a grand total of 46 persons,
and particularly dramatized the cases of only 24 of the 46. We have just
talked about three of the Senator's major targets, and Buckley and Bozell
pointed out that McCarthy "never said anything more damaging about
Lauchlin Currie, Gustavo Duran, Theodore Geiger, Mary Jane Keeney,
Edward Posniak, Haldore Hanson, and John Carter Vincent, than that they
are known to one or more responsible persons as having been members of
the Communist Party, which is in each of these instances true."
While McCarthy may have exaggerated the significance of the evidence
against some other individuals, his record on the whole is extremely good.
(This is also true of the 1953-54 period when he was chairman of a Senate
committee and publicly exposed 114 persons, most of whom refused to
answer questions about Communist or espionage activities on the ground
that their answers might tend to incriminate them.) There were no innocent
victims of McCarthyism. Those whom McCarthy accused had indeed
collaborated in varying degrees with Communism and Communists, had
shown no remorse for their actions, and thoroughly deserved whatever scorn
was directed at them.
Q. What about McCarthy's attack on General George Marshall?
Wasn't that a smear of a great man?
A. This is a reference to the 60,000-word speech he delivered on the Senate
floor on June 14, 1951 (later published as a book entitled America's Retreat
From Victory). One interesting thing about the speech is that McCarthy drew
almost entirely from sources friendly to Marshall in discussing nearly a
score of his actions and policies that had helped the Communists in the
USSR, Europe, China, and Korea. "I do not propose to go into his motives,"
said McCarthy. "Unless one has all the tangled and often complicated
circumstances contributing to a man's decisions, an inquiry into his motives
37

is often fruitless. I do not pretend to understand General Marshall's nature
and character, and I shall leave that subject to subtler analysts of human
personality."
One may agree or disagree with McCarthy's statement that America's steady
retreat from victory "must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy
on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history
of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its
principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men."
That statement was very controversial in 1951, but after 36 years of no-win
wars in Korea and Vietnam, along with Soviet expansionism throughout the
world, aided and abetted in large measure by U.S. policymakers, it doesn't
seem so controversial anymore. In any case, before judging McCarthy on
what he is supposed to have said about Marshall, we recommend reading the
book to find out what he actually said and to see how extensive was his
documentation.
Q. Can it be true that State Department policy toward the Communists
didn't change very much even after McCarthy helped get many pro-
Communists out of the department?
A. Unfortunately, it is true. McCarthy, you see, only scratched the surface.
He did prompt a tightening of security procedures for a while, and the State
Department and other sensitive federal agencies dismissed nearly 4,000
employees in 1953 and 1954, although many of them shifted to nonsensitive
departments. Some of these security risks returned to their old agencies
when security was virtually scrapped during the Kennedy Administration.
During the mid-1950s, a State Department security specialist named Otto
Otepka reviewed the files of all department personnel and found some kind
of derogatory information on 1,943 persons, almost 20 percent of the total
payroll. He told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee years later that
of the 1,943 employees, 722 "left the department for various reasons, but
mostly by transfer to other agencies, before a final security determination
was made." Otepka trimmed the remaining number on the list to 858 and in
December 1955 sent their names to his boss, Scott McLeod, as persons to be
watched because of Communist associations, homosexuality, habitual
drunkenness, or mental illness.
38

McLeod's staff reviewed the Otepka list and narrowed it down to 258
persons who were judged to be "serious" security risks. "Approximately 150
were in high-level posts where they could in one way or another influence
the formulation of United States foreign policy," said William J. Gill, author
of The Ordeal of Otto Otepka. "And fully half of these 258 serious cases
were officials in either crucial Intelligence assignments or serving on top-
secret committees reaching all the way up and into the National Security
Council." As many as 175 of the 258 were still in important policy posts as
of the mid-1960s, but Otto Otepka had been ousted from the State
Department by that time and we are not aware of anyone like Otepka
keeping track of security risks since then -- and that was more than 20 years
ago.
Considering the State Department's virtually unbroken record over the past
30 years of undermining anti-Communist governments and backing
Communist regimes, of putting Soviet desires ahead of American interests,
of allowing 200 Soviet nationals to work and spy for years in our embassy in
Moscow, and of bitterly opposing Reagan Administration efforts in 1986 to
reduce the massive Soviet espionage presence at the United Nations by one-
third, it is not unreasonable to wonder how many heirs of Alger Hiss are still
making policy there.
Bear in mind, too, that Communist penetration of the U.S. government was
not confined to the State Department. On July 30, 1953, the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Senator William Jenner,
released its report on Interlocking Subversion in Government
Departments. Among its conclusions:
1. The Soviet international organization has carried on a successful
and important penetration of the United States Government and this
penetration has not been fully exposed.
2. This penetration has extended from the lower ranks to top-level
policy and operating positions in our government.
3. The agents of this penetration have operated in accordance with a
distinct design fashioned by their Soviet superiors.
4. Members of this conspiracy helped to get each other into
government, helped each other to rise in government, and protected
each other from exposure.
39

Summarizing the 1952 testimony of former Soviet courier Elizabeth
Bentley, who had identified 37 Soviet agents within the U.S. government,
the subcommittee also said that "to her knowledge there were four Soviet
espionage rings operating within our government and that only two of these
have been exposed." In October 1953, a Soviet defector named Colonel
Ismail Ege estimated that a minimum of 20 spy networks were operating
within the United States in 1941-1942, when he was chief of the Fourth
Section of Soviet General Staff Intelligence. Thirty-four years after Ege's
testimony, these espionage rings and networks still have not been publicly
exposed.
On February 5, 1987, the New York Times reported that an 18-month
investigation by the House Intelligence Committee "had uncovered
'dangerous laxity' and serious 'security failures' in the government's system
of catching spies. Even though 27 Americans have been charged with
espionage in the last two years, and all but one of those brought to trial have
been found guilty, the committee said in a report that it still found 'a
puzzling, almost nonchalant attitude toward recent espionage cases on the
part of some senior U.S. intelligence officials.'" According to the Times, "the
investigation found 'faulty hiring practices, poor management of
probationary employees, thoughtless firing practices, lax security practices,
inadequate interagency cooperation -- even bungled surveillance of a prime
espionage suspect.'"
The same "nonchalant attitude" toward Communist spies that Joe McCarthy
denounced in the early 1950s still exists today. Only there is no Joe
McCarthy in the Senate urging that something be done to correct this
dangerous situation. Nor are there any congressional committees
investigating Communist subversion in government. The destruction of Joe
McCarthy not only removed him from the fight, it also sent a powerful
message to anyone else who might be contemplating a similar battle: Try to
ferret Communists and pro-Communists out of the government and you will
be harassed, smeared, and ultimately destroyed.
Q. But why do we need congressional committees? Can't the FBI do the
job?
A. The function of the FBI is to gather information and pass it along to the
agency or department where the security problem exists. If the FBI report is
ignored, or if the department does take action and is overruled by a review
40

board, only a congressional committee can expose and remedy this situation.
Some examples: In December 1945, the FBI sent President Truman a report
showing that his Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Harry Dexter White,
was a Soviet spy. Truman ignored the warning and, early in 1946, promoted
White to executive director of the U.S. Mission to the International
Monetary Fund. The FBI sent Truman a second report, but again he did
nothing. White resigned from the government in 1947, and his Communist
ties were exposed by Elizabeth Bentley when she appeared before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948.
The FBI warned the State Department in the mid-1940s of extensive
Communist penetration of the department, but the warning was disregarded
for the most part. It was not until Joe McCarthy turned the spotlight on the
situation that dozens of security risks were removed. The FBI had also sent
some 40 confidential reports about the Communist activities of Edward
Rothschild, an employee of the Government Printing Office, but Rothschild
wasn't removed from his sensitive position until his background was
exposed by the McCarthy Committee in 1953.
III. Committee Chairman (1953-54)
Q. Granted that congressional investigating committees can serve an
important purpose, weren't McCarthy's methods terrible and didn't he
subject witnesses to awful harassment?
A. Now we're into an entirely different phase of McCarthy's career. For three
years, he had been one lone Senator crying in the wilderness. With the
Republicans taking control of the Senate in January 1953, however, Joe
McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigations
Subcommittee. No longer did he have to rely solely upon public speeches to
inform the American people of the Communist threat to America. He was
now chairman of a Senate committee with a mandate to search out graft,
incompetence, and disloyalty inside the vast reaches of the American
government.
As for McCarthy's methods, they were no different from those of other
Senators who were generally applauded for vigorous cross-examination of
organized crime figures, for instance. The question of methods seems to
come up only when subversives or spies are on the witness stand. And those
who most loudly deplored McCarthy's methods often resorted to the foulest
41

methods themselves, including the use of lies, half-truths, and innuendos
designed to stir up hysteria against him. What some people seemingly do not
understand is that Communists are evildoers and that those who give aid and
comfort to Communists -- whether they are called dupes, fellow travelers,
liberals, or progressives -- are also evildoers who should be exposed and
removed from positions of influence.
Traitors and spies in high places are not easy to identify. They do not wear
sweatshirts with the hammer and sickle emblazoned on the front. Only
painstaking investigation and exhaustive questioning can reveal them as
enemies. So why all the condemnation for those who expose spies and none
for the spies themselves? Why didn't McCarthy's critics expose a traitor now
and then and show everyone how much better they could do it? No, it was
much easier to hound out of public life such determined enemies of the Reds
as Martin Dies, Parnell Thomas, and Joe McCarthy than to muster the
courage to face up to the howling Communist wolfpack themselves.
Q. So, McCarthy's treatment of persons appearing before his committee
was not as bad as has been reported?
A. Exactly. Let's look at the record. During 1953 and the first three months
of 1954 (McCarthy was immobilized for the remainder of 1954 by two
investigations of him), McCarthy's committee held 199 days of hearings and
examined 653 witnesses. These individuals first appeared in executive
session and were told of the evidence against them. If they were able to offer
satisfactory explanations -- and most of them were -- they were dismissed
and nobody ever knew they had been summoned.
Those who appeared in public sessions were either hardened Fifth
Amendment pleaders or persons about whom there was a reasonably strong
presumption of guilt. But even those witnesses who were brazen, insulting,
and defiant were afforded their constitutional rights to confer with their
counsel before answering a question (something they would not be allowed
to do in a courtroom), to confront their accusers or at least have them
identified and have questions submitted to them by their counsel, and to
invoke the First and Fifth Amendments rather than answer questions about
their alleged Communist associations.
Of the 653 persons called by the McCarthy Committee during that 15-month
period, 83 refused to answer questions about Communist or espionage
42

activities on constitutional grounds and their names were made public. Nine
additional witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment in executive session, but
their names were not made public. Some of the 83 were working or had
worked for the Army, the Navy, the Government Printing Office, the
Treasury Department, the Office of War Information, the Office of Strategic
Services, the Veterans Administration, and the United Nations. Others were
or had been employed at the Federal Telecommunications Laboratories in
New Jersey, the secret radar laboratories of the Army Signal Corps in New
Jersey, and General Electric defense plants in Massachusetts and New York.
Nineteen of the 83, including such well-known Communist propagandists as
James S. Allen, Herbert Aptheker, and Earl Browder, were summoned
because their writings were being carried in U.S. Information Service
libraries around the world.
Charles E. Ford, an attorney for Edward Rothschild in the Government
Printing Office hearings, was so impressed with McCarthy's fairness toward
his client that he declared: "I think the committee session at this day and in
this place is most admirable and most American." Peter Gragis, who
appeared before the McCarthy Committee on March 10, 1954, said that he
had come to the hearing terrified because the press "had pointed out that you
were very abusive, that you were crucifying people .... My experience has
been quite the contrary. I have, I think, been very understandingly treated. I
have been, I think, highly respected despite the fact that for some 20 years I
had been more or less an active Communist."
Q. Weren't McCarthy and some members of his staff guilty of "book-
burning" and causing a ruckus in Europe in 1953?
A. This accusation was made in reference to the committee's inquiry into
Communist influences in State Department libraries overseas. In his
book McCarthy, Roy Cohn, the committee's chief counsel, conceded that he
and committee staffer David Schine "unwittingly handed Joe McCarthy's
enemies a perfect opportunity to spread the tale that a couple of young,
inexperienced clowns were bustling about Europe, ordering State
Department officials around, burning books, creating chaos wherever they
went, and disrupting foreign relations." In point of fact, however, the trip
and subsequent hearings by the committee provided information that led to
the removal of more than 30,000 Communist and pro-Communist books
from U.S. Information Service libraries in foreign countries. The presence of
such books was in obvious conflict with the stated purpose of those libraries:
43

"to promote better understanding of America abroad" and "to combat and
expose Soviet communistic propaganda."
Q. But didn't McCarthy summon to those hearings a man whose major
sin was having written a book on college football 21 years before?
A. In March 1953, the McCarthy Committee did hear testimony from Reed
Harris, deputy head of the State Department's International Information
Administration and author of King Football. Harris' book, however, was not
confined to football. The author also advocated that Communists and
Socialists be allowed to teach in colleges and said that hungry people in
America, after "watching gangsters and corrupt politicians gulp joyously
from the horn of plenty," just might "decide that even the horrors of those
days of fighting which inaugurated the era of communism in Russia would
be preferable to the present state of affairs" in the United States.
The following colloquy between Harris and Senator John McClellan is
never quoted by McCarthy's critics:
McClellan. Here is what I am concerned about. In the first place, I will ask
you this: If it should be established that a person entertained the views and
philosophies that you expressed in that book, would you consider that person
suitable or fit to hold a position in the Voice of America which you now
hold?
Harris. I would not.
McClellan. You would not employ such a person, would you?
Harris. I would not, Senator.
McClellan. Now we find you in that position.
Harris. That is correct.
Before shedding any tears for Mr. Harris, who resigned his post in April
1953, be advised that when anti-McCarthy hysteric Edward R. Murrow took
over the U.S. Information Agency in 1961, he hired Reed Harris as his
deputy, proving once again that the only true victim of McCarthyism was
Joe McCarthy himself.
44

Q. But what about that poor old black woman that McCarthy falsely
accused of being a Communist?
A. That woman was Annie Lee Moss, who lost her job working with
classified messages at the Pentagon after an FBI undercover operative
testified that she was a member of the Communist Party. When she appeared
before the McCarthy Committee early in 1954, Mrs. Moss, who lived at 72
R Street, S.W., Washington, D.C., denied she was a Communist. Her
defenders accused McCarthy of confusing Mrs. Moss with another woman
with a similar name at a different address. Edward R. Murrow made the
woman a heroine on his television program and the anti-McCarthy press
trumpeted this episode as typical of McCarthy's abominations.
And so things stood until September 1958 when the Subversive Activities
Control Board reported that copies of the Communist Party's own records
showed that "one Annie Lee Moss, 72 R Street, S.W., Washington, D.C.,
was a party member in the mid-1940s." Mrs. Moss got her Pentagon job
back in 1954 and was still working for the Army in December 1958.
Q. Mrs. Moss might have gotten her job back, but what about all those
individuals who lost their jobs in defense plants?
A. During its probe of 13 defense plants whose contracts with the
government ran into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, the McCarthy
Committee heard 101 witnesses, two of whom -- William H. Teto and
Herman E. Thomas -- provided the committee with information about the
Red spy network and the efforts of the Communists to set up cells in the
plants. The committee's exposures led to the dismissal of 32 persons and the
tightening of security regulations at the plants. The president of General
Electric, for example, issued a policy statement expressing concern about
"the possible danger to the safety and security of company property and
personnel whenever a General Electric employee admits he is a Communist
or when he asserts before a competent investigating government body that
he might incriminate himself by giving truthful answers concerning his
Communist affiliations or his possible espionage or sabotage activities."
At the time McCarthy's investigations were halted early in 1954, his probers
had accumulated evidence involving an additional 155 defense workers, but
he was never able to question those individuals under oath. On January 12,
1959, Congressman Gordon Scherer, a member of the House Committee on
45

Un-American Activities, said that he knew of a minimum of 2,000 "potential
espionage agents and saboteurs" working in the nation's defense plants. But
there have been no congressional investigations in this vital area since
Senator McCarthy was stymied in 1954.
Q. What were the Fort Monmouth hearings all about? Weren't all of
those fired eventually given back their jobs?
A. The Army Signal Corps installation at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, was
one of the nation's most vital security posts since the three research centers
housed there were engaged in developing defensive devices designed to
protect America from an atomic attack. Julius Rosenberg, who was executed
in 1953 for selling U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, worked as an
inspector at Fort Monmouth from 1940 to 1945 and maintained his Signal
Corps contacts for at least another two years after that. From 1949 to 1953,
the FBI had been warning the Army about security risks at Fort Monmouth,
but the Army paid little or no attention to the reports of subversion until the
McCarthy investigation began in 1953.
During 1953 and 1954, the McCarthy Committee, acting on reports of
Communist infiltration from civilian employees, Army officers, and enlisted
personnel, heard 71 witnesses at executive sessions and 41 at open hearings.
The Army responded by suspending or discharging 35 persons as security
risks, but when these cases reached the Army Loyalty and Screening Board
at the Pentagon, all but two of the suspected security risks were reinstated
and given back pay. McCarthy demanded the names of the 20 civilians on
the review board and, when he threatened to subpoena them, the Eisenhower
Administration, at a meeting in Attorney General Herbert Brownell's office
on January 21, 1954, began plotting to stop McCarthy's investigations once
and for all.
Yes, virtually all of those suspended were eventually restored to duty at Fort
Monmouth and anti-McCarthyites have cited this as proof that McCarthy
had failed once again to substantiate his allegations. But vindication of
McCarthy came later, when the Army's top-secret operations at Fort
Monmouth were quietly moved to Arizona. In his 1979 book With No
Apologies, Senator Barry Goldwater explained the reason for the move:
Carl Hayden, who in January 1955 became chairman of the powerful
Appropriations Committee of the United States Senate, told me privately
46

Monmouth had been moved because he and other members of the majority
Democratic Party were convinced security at Monmouth had been
penetrated. They didn't want to admit that McCarthy was right in his
accusations. Their only alternative was to move the installation from New
Jersey to a new location in Arizona.
Q. Speaking of the Army, what was the name of that dentist that
McCarthy said was a Communist?
A. His name was Irving Peress and here is some background information. In
December 1953, an Army general alerted Senator McCarthy to the
incredible story of this New York dentist who was drafted into the Army as
a captain in October 1952; who refused a month later to answer questions on
a Defense Department form about membership in subversive organizations;
who was recommended for dismissal by the Surgeon General of the Army in
April 1953; but who requested and received a promotion to major the
following October. Roy Cohn gave the facts on Peress to Army Counsel
John G. Adams in December 1953, and Adams promised to do something
about it.
When still no action had been taken on Peress a month later, McCarthy
subpoenaed him before the committee on January 30, 1954. Peress took the
Fifth Amendment 20 times when asked about his membership in the
Communist Party, his attendance at a Communist training school, and his
efforts to recruit military personnel into the party. Two days later, McCarthy
sent a letter to Army Secretary Robert Stevens by special messenger,
reviewing the testimony of Peress and requesting that he be court martialed
and that the Army find out who promoted Peress, knowing that he was a
Communist. On that same day, February 1st, Peress asked for an honorable
separation from the Army, which he promptly received the next day from his
commanding officer at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, Brigadier General Ralph
W. Zwicker.
McCarthy took the next logical step and summoned General Zwicker to a
closed session of the committee on February 18th. There was no reason at
that time for McCarthy to suppose that Zwicker would be anything but a
frank and cooperative witness. In separate conversations with two McCarthy
staff members, on January 22nd and February 13th, Zwicker had said that he
was familiar with Peress' Communist connections and that he was opposed
47

to giving him an honorable discharge, but that he was ordered to do so by
someone at the Pentagon.
When he appeared before McCarthy, however, Zwicker was evasive, hostile,
and uncooperative. He changed his story three times when asked if he had
known at the time he signed the discharge that Peress had refused to answer
questions before the McCarthy Committee. McCarthy became increasingly
exasperated and, when Zwicker, in response to a hypothetical question, said
that he would not remove from the military a general who originated the
order for the honorable discharge of a Communist major, knowing that he
was a Communist, McCarthy told Zwicker that he was not fit to wear the
uniform of a general.
Q. So McCarthy really did "abuse" Zwicker and impugn his patriotism
as the critics have charged?
A. Let's jump ahead three years and get Zwicker's own assessment of his
testimony on February 18, 1954. At a hearing before the Senate Armed
Services Committee on March 21, 1957, the General stated: "I think there
are some circumstances ... that would certainly tend to give a person the idea
that perhaps I was recalcitrant, perhaps I was holding back, and perhaps I
wasn't too cooperative .... I am afraid I was perhaps overcautious and
perhaps on the defensive, and that this feeling ... may have inclined me to be
not as forthright, perhaps, in answering the questions put to me as I might
have been otherwise."
That wasn't the only time that General Zwicker was less than forthright. In
testimony before the McClellan Committee (formerly the McCarthy
Committee) on March 23, 1955, Zwicker denied giving McCarthy staffer
George Anastos derogatory information about Irving Peress in their
telephone conversation of January 22, 1954. When Anastos and the secretary
who had monitored the conversation both testified under oath and
contradicted Zwicker, the McClellan Committee forwarded the transcript of
the hearing to the Justice Department for possible prosecution of Zwicker for
perjury. After sitting on the matter for 19 months, the Justice Department
finally, in December 1956, declined to undertake criminal prosecution of
Zwicker for "technical" reasons.
On April 1, 1957, the Senate approved a promotion for Zwicker by a vote of
70 to 2, with Senators McCarthy and George Malone opposed. All the
48

members of the Senate had gotten a phone call from the Pentagon or the
White House urging them to vote for Zwicker. The recalcitrant General
served three more years in the Army before retiring.
Q. Does anyone know who did promote Peress and who told Zwicker to
sign the Communist major's honorable discharge?
A. After studying the 1955 McClellan hearings on the Peress case, Lionel
Lokos, in his book Who Promoted Peress, concluded that Colonel H.W.
Glattly signed the letter to the Adjutant General, recommending the
promotion of Irving Peress; and Major James E. Harris, in the name of the
Adjutant General, signed Peress' letter of appointment to major. As for
Peress' discharge, Army Counsel John Adams and Lieutenant General
Walter L. Weible ordered General Zwicker to sign the honorable separation
from the Army. The McClellan Committee sharply rebuked Adams for his
action, saying that he "showed disrespect for this subcommittee when he
chose to disregard Senator McCarthy's letter of February 1, 1954, and
allowed Peress to be honorably discharged on February 2, 1954."
In its report on the Peress case, the McClellan Committee said that "some 48
errors of more than minor importance were committed by the Army in
connection with the commissioning, transfer, promotion, and honorable
discharge of Irving Peress." As a result, the Army made some sweeping
changes in its security program, including a policy statement that said "the
taking of the Fifth Amendment by an individual queried about his
Communist affiliations is sufficient to warrant the issuance of a general
discharge rather than an honorable discharge." That these reforms came
about at all was due to the persistence of one Senator, Joe McCarthy, who
displayed the courage to expose Peress against the wishes of the Army, the
White House, and many of his fellow Republicans.
"No one will ever know," said Lionel Lokos, "what it cost Senator McCarthy
to take the stand he did in the Peress case -- what it cost him in terms of
popularity and his political future. We only know that the price of asking
'Who Promoted Peress' came high and that Senator McCarthy didn't hesitate
to pay that price."
IV. Army-McCarthy Hearings
Q. What was the gist of the Army-McCarthy Hearings?
49

A. On March 11, 1954, the Army accused McCarthy and his staff of using
improper means in seeking preferential treatment for G. David Schine, a
consultant to McCarthy's committee, prior to and after Schine was drafted
into the Army in November 1953. Senator McCarthy countercharged that
these allegations were made in bad faith and were designed to prevent his
committee from continuing its probe of Communist subversion at Fort
Monmouth and from issuing subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty
and Screening Board. A special committee, under the chairmanship of
Senator Karl Mundt, was appointed to adjudicate these conflicting charges,
and the hearings opened on April 22, 1954.
The televised hearings lasted for 36 days and were viewed by an estimated
20 million people. After hearing 32 witnesses and two million words of
testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy himself had not
exercised any improper influence in behalf of David Schine, but that Roy
Cohn, McCarthy's chief counsel, had engaged in some "unduly persistent or
aggressive efforts" in behalf of Schine. The committee also concluded that
Army Secretary Robert Stevens and Army Counsel John Adams "made
efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort
Monmouth," and that Adams "made vigorous and diligent efforts" to block
subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board "by
means of personal appeal to certain members of the [McCarthy] committee."
In a separate statement that concurred with the special committee report,
Senator Everett Dirksen demonstrated the weakness of the Army case by
noting that the Army did not make its charges public until eight months after
the first allegedly improper effort was made in behalf of Schine (July 1953),
and then not until after Senator McCarthy had made it known (January
1954) that he would subpoena members of the Army Loyalty and Screening
Board. Dirksen also called attention to a telephone conversation between
Secretary Stevens and Senator Stuart Symington on March 8, 1954, three
days before the Army allegations were made public. In that conversation,
Stevens said that any charges of improper influence by McCarthy's staff
"would prove to be very much exaggerated .... I am the Secretary and I have
had some talks with the [McCarthy] committee and the chairman, and so on,
and by and large as far as the treatment of me is concerned, I have no
personal complaint."
In his 1984 book Who Killed Joe McCarthy?, former Eisenhower White
House aide William Bragg Ewald Jr., who had access to many unpublished
50

papers and memos from persons involved in the Army-McCarthy clash,
confirms the good relations that existed between McCarthy and Stevens and
the lack of pressure from McCarthy in behalf of Schine. In a phone
conversation November 7, 1953, the Senator told the Secretary not to give
Schine any special treatment, such as putting him in the service and
assigning him back to the committee. McCarthy even said that Roy Cohn
had been "completely unreasonable" about Schine, that "he thinks Dave
should be a general and work from the penthouse of the Waldorf."
Ewald also reported a phone conversation between Stevens and Assistant
Secretary of Defense Fred Seaton on January 8, 1954, in which Stevens
admitted that Schine might not have been drafted if he hadn't worked for the
McCarthy Committee. "Of course, the kid was taken at the very last minute
before he would have been ineligible for age," said Stevens. "He is 26, you
know. My guess would be that if he hadn't been working for McCarthy, he
probably never would have been drafted."
Another thing confirmed by Ewald was the secret meeting at the Justice
Department on January 21, 1954, when a group of anti-McCarthyites came
up with a plan to stop McCarthy either by asking the Republican members
of his committee to talk him out of subpoenaing members of the Army
Loyalty and Screening Board or, if that didn't work, by drawing up a list of
alleged efforts in behalf of David Schine and threatening to make the list
public unless McCarthy backed off.
Those at the January 21st meeting were Attorney General Herbert Brownell,
Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge, Deputy Attorney General
William Rogers, White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, White House
aide Gerald Morgan, and John Adams. When John Adams inadvertently
mentioned this meeting during the Army-McCarthy Hearings, and McCarthy
wanted to find out more about it, President Eisenhower, on May 17, 1954,
issued an executive order forbidding any employee of the Defense
Department "to testify to any such conversations or communications or to
produce any such documents or reproductions."
Q. Did the Army-McCarthy Hearings serve any good purpose?
A. Yes. Despite the inordinate focus on trivia and the clever distractions
introduced by counsel for the Army Joseph Welch, the hearings alerted the
American people as never before to the dangers of Communism. McCarthy's
51

popularity in opinion polls had declined from 50 percent approval in January
1954 to 35 percent in May, but tens of millions still supported him. You
would never know this from reading summaries of the hearings or from
watching Point of Order, a 97-minute "documentary" (taken from 188 hours
of television footage) that omitted virtually every incident favorable to
McCarthy -- and there were many of them -- and included only those
segments where McCarthy did not come across well. By showing McCarthy
mainly when he was irritated or expressing his many "points of order," the
film presents a distorted view of him.
Q. How about some examples of clever distractions?
A. Let's consider three tricks pulled by Joe Welch to divert people's
attention away from the central issue of Communist subversion:
(1) The "Cropped" Photograph. On April 26th, a photo was
introduced showing Secretary Stevens posing willingly for a smiling
photograph with Private Schine at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on
November 17, 1953, a time when Stevens was supposed to be mad at
Schine for seeking special treatment from the Army. Welch produced
another photo the next day showing the base commander in the
picture with Stevens and Schine and said that the first one was "a
shamefully cut-down version." But the innocent deletion of the base
commander from the · photograph did not change its basic meaning --
that Stevens was not angry with Schine at a time that the Army said he
was.
(2) The "Purloined" Document. On May 4th, Senator McCarthy
produced a 2¼-page document with the names of 34 subversives at
Fort Monmouth, half of whom were still there. The document, which
had been given to McCarthy by an intelligence officer in 1953, was a
summary of a 15-page report that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had
sent on January 26, 1951, to Major General A. R. Bolling, chief of
Army Intelligence. Instead of being concerned that the Army had not
acted on the FBI report and had not tried to root out the subversives at
Fort Monmouth, Welch kept harping on how McCarthy got the
summary and where it came from. McCarthy refused to tell him.
Welch ascertained that Hoover had not written the 2¼-page document
in McCarthy's possession and termed it "a carbon copy of precisely
nothing." In point of fact, however, the document was an accurate
52

summary of Hoover's original report, but Welch made it appear that
McCarthy was presenting phony evidence.
(3) The Fred Fisher Episode. On June 9th, the 30th day of the
hearings, Welch was engaged in baiting Roy Cohn, challenging him to
get 130 Communists or subversives out of defense plants "before the
sun goes down." The treatment of Cohn angered McCarthy and he
said that if Welch were so concerned about persons aiding the
Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office
named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers
Guild, which Attorney General Brownell had called "the legal
mouthpiece of the Communist Party." Welch then delivered the most
famous lines from the Army-McCarthy Hearings, accusing McCarthy
of "reckless cruelty" and concluding: "Let us not assassinate this lad
further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency,
sir, at long last?"
The fact of the matter was that Fred Fisher's connection with the National
Lawyers Guild had been widely publicized two months earlier. Page 12 of
the April 16thNew York Times had carried a picture of Fisher and a story
about his removal from Welch's team because of his past association with
the NLG. If Mr. Welch was so worried that McCarthy's remarks might
inflict a lifelong "scar" on Fisher's reputation, why did he dramatize the
incident in such histrionic fashion? The reason, of course, was that
McCarthy had fallen into a trap in raising the Fisher issue, and Welch,
superb showman that he was, played the scene for all it was worth. Was Fred
Fisher hurt by the incident? Not at all. He became a partner in Welch's
Boston law firm, Hale & Dorr, and was elected president of the
Massachusetts Bar Association in the mid-1970s.
V. The Watkins Committee
Q. So the Senate finally censured Joe McCarthy for his conduct during
the Army-McCarthy Hearings, right?
A. Wrong. McCarthy was not censured for his conduct in the Army-
McCarthy Hearings or for anything he had ever said or done in any hearings
in which he had participated. Here are the facts: After McCarthy emerged
unscathed from his bout with the Army, the Left launched a new campaign
to discredit and destroy him. The campaign began on July 30, 1954, when
53

Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of
conduct "unbecoming a member of the United States Senate." Flanders, who
two months earlier had told the Senate that McCarthy's "anti-Communism so
completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of
any defenseless minority," had gotten his list of charges against McCarthy
from a leftwing group called the National Committee for an Effective
Congress.
McCarthy's enemies ultimately accused him of 46 different counts of
allegedly improper conduct and another special committee was set up, under
the chairmanship of Senator Arthur Watkins, to study and evaluate the
charges. Thus began the fifth investigation of Joe McCarthy in five years!
After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee
recommended that McCarthy be censured on only two of the 46 counts. So
when a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954,
these were the two charges to be debated and voted on:
(1) That Senator McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the
Senate Subcommitee on Privileges and Elections that was looking
into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with
a resolution for his expulsion from the Senate; and
(2) That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had
"intemperately abused" General Ralph Zwicker.
Many Senators were uneasy about the Zwicker count, particularly
since the Army had shown contempt for committee chairman
McCarthy by disregarding his letter of February 1, 1954, and
honorably discharging Irving Peress the next day. For this reason,
these Senators felt that McCarthy's conduct toward Zwicker on
February 18th was at least partially justified. So the Zwicker count
was dropped at the last minute and in its place was this substitute
charge:
(3) That Senator McCarthy, by characterizing the Watkins Committee
as the "unwitting handmaiden" of the Communist Party and by
describing the special Senate session as a "lynch party" and a "lynch
bee," had "acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the
Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional
processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity."
54

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" Senator Joseph
McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22, with the Democrats
unanimously in favor of condemnation and the Republicans split evenly.
Q. Was the Senate justified in condemning McCarthy on these counts?
A. No, it was not. Regarding the first count, failure to cooperate with the
Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, the subcommittee never
subpoenaed McCarthy but only "invited" him to testify; one Senator and two
staff members resigned from the subcommittee because of its dishonesty
towards McCarthy; and the subcommittee, in its final report, dated January
2, 1953, said that the matters under consideration "have become moot by
reason of the 1952 election." No Senator had ever been punished for
something that had happened in a previous Congress or for declining an
"invitation" to testify. By the way, the Justice Department and the Bureau of
Internal Revenue investigated McCarthy's finances and taxes for the period
1946 to 1952 and found no violations of the law. On April 19, 1955, the
Internal Revenue awarded him a refund of $1,046.75 for overpayment of
taxes.
As for the second count, criticism of the Watkins Committee and the special
Senate session, McCarthy was condemned for opinions he had
expressed outside the Senate. As David Lawrence pointed out in an editorial
in the June 7, 1957 issue of U.S. News & World Report, other Senators had
accused McCarthy of lying under oath, accepting influence money, engaging
in election fraud, making libelous and false statements, practicing blackmail,
doing the work of the Communists for them, and engaging in a questionable
"personal relationship" with Roy Cohn and David Schine, but they were not
censured for acting "contrary to senatorial ethics" or for impairing the
"dignity" of the Senate.
The chief beneficiary of the Senate destruction of Joe McCarthy was the
Communist conspiracy (the Communist Party newspaper the Daily
Worker had called the recommendations of the Watkins Committee "good
news for America"). Former Communist Louis Budenz, who knew the inner
workings of that conspiracy as well as anyone, said that the condemnation of
McCarthy leaves the way open "to intimidate any person of consequence
who moves against the conspiracy. The Communists made him their chief
target because they wanted to make him a symbol to remind political leaders
55

in America not to harm the conspiracy or its world conquest designs." The
history of the past 30 years confirms the tragic truth of Budenz's statement.
Q. Who were the 22 Republican Senators who voted against the
condemnation of Joe McCarthy?
A. More than a dozen Senators told McCarthy that they did not want to vote
against him but had to because of the tremendous pressure being put on
them by the White House and by leaders of both political parties. The 22
men who did put principle above politics were Senators Frank Barrett
(Wyoming), Styles Bridges (New Hampshire), Ernest Brown (Nevada), John
Marshall Butler (Maryland), Guy Cordon (Oregon), Everett Dirksen
(Illinois), Henry Dworshak (Idaho), Barry Goldwater (Arizona), Bourke
Hickenlooper (Iowa), Roman Hruska (Nebraska), William Jenner (Indiana),
William Knowland (California), Thomas Kuchel (California), William
Langer (North Dakota), George Malone (Nevada), Edward Martin
(Pennsylvania), Eugene Millikin (Colorado), Karl Mundt (South Dakota),
William Purtell (Connecticut), Andrew Schoeppel (Kansas), Herman Welker
(Idaho), and Milton Young (North Dakota).
VI. The Years 1955-1957
Q. Did Joe McCarthy become a recluse in the 29 months between his
condemnation and his death?
A. No, he did not. He worked hard at his senatorial duties. "To insist, as
some have, that McCarthy was a shattered man after the censure is sheer
nonsense," said Brent Bozell, one of his aides at the time. "His intellect was
as sharp as ever. When he addressed himself to a problem, he was perfectly
capable of dealing with it."
A member of the minority party in the Senate again, Joe McCarthy had to
rely on public speeches to alert the American people to the menace of
Communism. This he did in a number of important addresses during those
two and a half years. He warned against attendance at summit conferences
with the Reds, saying that "you cannot offer friendship to tyrants and
murderers ... without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder." He
declared that "coexistence with Communists is neither possible nor
56

honorable nor desirable. Our long term objective must be the eradication of
Communism from the face of the earth."
Senator McCarthy was alone in calling for the use of force to defend the
brave Hungarian people against Soviet aggression in 1956. He was virtually
alone in warning that the Soviet Union was winning the missile race
"because well-concealed Communists in the United States government are
putting the brakes on our own guided-missile program." He was prophetic in
urging the Eisenhower Administration to let "the free Asiatic peoples" fight
to free their countrymen from Communist slavery in Red China, North
Korea, and North Vietnam. "In justice to them, and in justice to the millions
of American boys who will otherwise be called upon to sacrifice their lives
in a total war against Communism," said McCarthy, "we must permit our
fighting allies, with our material and technical assistance, to carry the fight
to the enemy." This was not permitted and, a decade later, more than half a
million American servicemen were fighting in South Vietnam.
Q. Did Joe McCarthy drink himself to death?
A. His enemies would like to have you think that. If McCarthy drank as
much as his foes allege, for as many years as they allege, he would have had
to be carried from speech to speech and from hearing to hearing, and he
would have been unable to string two coherent sentences together. Did
McCarthy look or act like a drunk during the 36 days of televised Army-
McCarthy Hearings? No alcoholic could have accomplished all that
McCarthy did, especially in so few years. Sure, Joe McCarthy drank, and he
probably drank too much sometimes, but he did not drink during working
hours, and any drinking he did do did not detract one iota from the
seriousness of his fight against Communism or from the accuracy of his
charges.
In the last two years of his life, McCarthy was greatly disappointed over the
terrible injustice his Senate colleagues had done to him, and he certainly had
his times of depression. Who wouldn't after what he had been through? But
he also had his times of elation, as when he and his wife adopted a baby girl
in January 1957. The picture in Roy Cohn's book of a smiling Joe McCarthy
holding his new daughter is not the picture of a man drowning in alcohol.
William Rusher was counsel to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
during 1956 and 1957 and met McCarthy repeatedly on social occasions.
"He had at one time been a heavy drinker," said Rusher of the Senator, "but
57

in his last years was cautiously moderate; he died of a severe attack of
hepatitis. He kept right on with a Senator's usual chores up almost until the
end."
The end came on May 2, 1957 in Bethesda Naval Hospital. Thousands of
people viewed the body in Washington, and McCarthy was the first Senator
in 17 years to have funeral services in the Senate chamber. More than 30,000
Wisconsinites filed through St. Mary's Church in the Senator's hometown of
Appleton to pay their last respects to him. Three Senators -- George Malone,
William Jenner, and Herman Welker -- had flown from Washington to
Appleton on the plane carrying McCarthy's casket. "They had gone this far
with Joe McCarthy," said William Rusher. "They would go the rest of the
way."
VII. Some Final Questions
Q. Did McCarthy conduct a "reign of terror" in the 1950s?
A. This is one of two or three big lies that the Left continues to spread about
McCarthy. The average American did not fear McCarthy; in fact the Gallup
Poll reported in 1954 that the Senator was fourth on its list of most admired
men. The only people terrorized by McCarthy were those who had
something subversive to hide in their past and were afraid that they might
eventually be exposed.
Oh, there was a "reign of terror" in the early Fifties, but it was
conducted against Joe McCarthy, not by him. Those who were not afraid to
denounce McCarthy week in and week out included the New York Times,
the Washington Post, Time, Life, Walter Lippmann, the Alsop brothers,
Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson, the cartoonist Herblock, Edward R. Murrow,
Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and liberals from all walks of life.
Reign of terror? During one 18-month period, the University of Wisconsin
invited Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Cousins, Owen Lattimore, and James
Carey -- all bitter anti-McCarthyites -- to warn the students of McCarthy's
reign of terror.
James Burnham, author of The Web of Subversion, a classic study of
Communist penetration into the highest levels of the U.S. government,
once reviewed the statistics of the so-called McCarthy terror:
58

Number of persons killed -- zero.
Number of persons wounded or injured -- zero.
Number of persons tortured -- zero.
Number of persons arrested without warrant -- zero.
Number of persons held or imprisoned without trial -- zero.
Number of persons evicted, exiled, or deported -- zero.
Number of persons deprived of due process -- zero.
Q. Most of the books written about McCarthy say that he smeared
thousands of innocent people. Is that true?
A. This is impossible since McCarthy never even mentioned thousands of
people. At the most, he publicly exposed about 160 persons, all of whom
had significant records of collaboration with or support for Communists
and/or Communist causes. Detractors of McCarthy, said Roy Cohn, "have to
fall back on picayune things about whether he drank and had a liver
condition, usually with a total distortion of the facts. They talk about the
innocent people he destroyed. I have yet to have them give me one name. I
have a standard answer -- 'name one.' They usually come up with someone
who came before some other committee, or Hollywood, or something which
was never a focus of a McCarthy investigation."
Here is one of literally dozens of examples of misinformation about
McCarthy that could be cited: An article about Lillian Hellman
in Newsweek for July 9, 1984, said that perhaps her most famous lines "were
those she wrote in a statement to the House Committee on Un-American
Activities in 1952. 'I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's
fashions,' she wrote, refusing to testify against her friends at the McCarthy
hearings." Miss Hellman could hardly have testified "at the McCarthy
hearings" because there were no McCarthy hearings in 1952 and because Joe
McCarthy was a Senator and was never involved in any House Committee
hearings dealing with Communist infiltration of the Hollywood film
industry. And they accuse McCarthy of getting his facts wrong!
59

Q. These same books insist that Senator McCarthy never uncovered "a
single Communist" in his five-year fight. Is that true?
A. Joe McCarthy was hated and denounced not because he
smeared innocent people, but because he identified guilty people. Any list of
identified Communists uncovered by McCarthy would have to include
Lauchlin Currie, Gustavo Duran, Theodore Geiger, Mary Jane Keeney,
Edward Posniak, Haldore Hanson, John Carter Vincent, Owen Lattimore,
Edward Rothschild, Irving Peress, and Annie Lee Moss. But that's not the
whole story. McCarthy also exposed scores of others who may not have
been identified as Communists, but who certainly were causing harm to
national security from their posts in the State Department, the Pentagon, the
Army, key defense plants, and the Government Printing Office. At the latter
facility, which handled 250,000 pieces of secret and classified printing
matter annually, the McCarthy probe resulted in the removal or further
investigation by the FBI of 77 employees and a complete revamping of the
security system at the GPO.
Was it unreasonable of McCarthy to want government positions filled with
persons who were loyal to America, instead of those with Communist-
tainted backgrounds? "A government job is a privilege, not a right,"
McCarthy said on more than one occasion. "There is no reason why men
who chum with Communists, who refuse to turn their backs on traitors, and
who are consistently found at the time and place where disaster strikes
America and success comes to international Communism, should be given
positions of power in government." The motivation of these people really
doesn't matter. If the policies they advocate continually result in gains for
Communism and losses for the Free World, then they should be replaced by
persons with a more realistic understanding of the evil conspiracy that has
subjugated more than one-third of the world. That's not McCarthyism, that's
common sense.
Q. Most of the books in the libraries seem to be anti-McCarthy. Are
there any pro-McCarthy books?
A. There are indeed, but most of them are out of print or not usually
available in libraries. Here is a list: McCarthy and His Enemies by William
Buckley and Brent Bozell; McCarthy by Roy Cohn; The Assassination of
Joe McCarthy by Medford Evans; The Lattimore Story by John
Flynn; Who Promoted Peress? by Lionel Lokos; three books by McCarthy
60

himself -- Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy 1950-
1951, McCarthyism: The Fight for America, and America's Retreat From
Victory; and a collection of tributes to McCarthy entitled Memorial
Addresses Delivered in Congress.
Q. How then would you define McCarthyism?
A. McCarthyism was a serious attempt to remove from positions of
influence the advocates of Communism, the willing and unwilling
supporters of Communism and Communists, and persons who would
prevent the removal of those who give aid and comfort to the enemies of
America. Communist conspirators and their friends do not fear those who
denounce Communism in general terms; they do greatly fear those who
would expose their conspiratorial activities. That is why they hated and
fought Joe McCarthy more than any other public figure in this century. That
is why they have preserved his name as a club to hold over the head of
anyone who dares to expose Communism.
The events of the past 30 years have proved McCarthy right, and those who
want to halt the Communist juggernaut today had better know the true story
of McCarthyism. "The war against Communism cannot be won by wavering
apologists," said Mrs. J. B. Matthews back in 1961. "Victory begins with a
realization that no one who fights Communism -- not even a hypothetical
god-like perfect man -- can escape the liberaloid smear, and that smear
image bears no relation to reality."
Joe McCarthy was a brave and honest man. There was nothing cynical or
devious about him. He said and did things for only one reason -- he thought
they were the right things to say and do. He was not perfect; he sometimes
made errors of fact or judgment. But his record of accuracy and truthfulness
far outshines that of his detractors. His vindication in the eyes of all
Americans cannot come soon enough. Medford Evans put it well when he
said: "The restoration of McCarthy ... is a necessary part of the restoration of
America, for if we have not the national character to repent of the injustice
we did him, nor in high places the intelligence to see that he was right, then
it seems unlikely that we can or ought to survive."
* Evidence presented in the other six cases showed that two (Haldore Hanson and
Gustavo Duran) had been identified as members of the Communist Party, that three
61

(Dorothy Kenyon, Frederick Schuman, and Harlow Shapley) had extensive records of
joining Communist fronts and supporting Communist causes, and that one (Esther
Brunauer) had sufficient questionable associations to be dismissed from the State
Department as a security risk in June 1952. For further details, see Chapter VII
of McCarthy and His Enemies by William Buckley and Brent Bozell.
CONTINUE -
_____________________________________________________________
The Vindication of
Senator Joseph McCarthy
Today as relevant as in his day—
"How can we account for our present situation unless we believe
that men HIGH in our government are concentrating to DELIVER US TO
DISASTER?"
—Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
(1908-1957 RIP)
Nearly fifty years after his death, Senator Joseph McCarthy still is making
62

news—and still is hated by the Left, smeared by the controlled news media
and revered by Americans in the know.…
Pat Buchanan: Of 'Treason" and Tail gunner Joe "America's young should
ask themselves: If Joe McCarthy was such a monster, why did Joe Kennedy
back him, the Kennedy girls date him, Robert Kennedy work for him and JFK
defend him as a "great patriot" in his year of censure? And why was McCarthy
asked to be the godfather to Bobby Kennedy's firstborn? "McCarthy's
"witches" "Witch-hunt? The high-profile cases cited by McCarthy — Owen
Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and Philip C. Jessup — all ended with the
senator’s charges being validated." Revisionist critics misrepresent
McCarthy's legacy "Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on two defenseless
cities of a prostrate nation and sent 2 million Russian prisoners back to Stalin to
be murdered in Operation Keelhaul. Yet Truman remains a hero to those who
despise McCarthy with an undying hatred The hidden truth about Joseph
McCarthy "McCarthy’s enemies—supposed champions of civil liberties—
tapped his phone, intercepted his incoming personal mail, placed a paid spy in
his office, and illegally released his tax returns to the press (resulting in a large
refund!)
McCarthyism: Forty questions and answers about Senator Joseph
McCarthy
Q. So, was McCarthy right or wrong about the State Department?
A. He was right. Of the 110 names that McCarthy gave to the
Tydings Committee [see below] to be investigated, 62 of them were
employed by the State Department at the time of the hearings. The
committee cleared everyone on McCarthy's list, but within a year
the State Department started proceedings against 49 of the 62. By
the end of 1954, 81 of those on McCarthy's list had left the
63

government either by dismissal or resignation.
McCarthyism: no longer a dirty word "The deciphered Venona cables
confirm that the American Communist Party successfully established secret
caucuses in government agencies throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s. They
prove that 349 Americans had covert ties to Soviet intelligence – much as
McCarthy had charged. "Venona Project From the official National
Security Agency website. The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage
and America's Traitors Read excerpts from this book on the Communist
infiltration and subversion. Book reviews: Venona and The Haunted Wood "
Venona, the product of two American historians, and The Haunted Wood, a
collaboration of an American historian and a Russian KGB operative–turned–
journalist, provide crushingly authoritative answers to questions that have
lingered since the days when the charges and countercharges hurled by ex–
Communists and alleged Communists riveted the nation’s attention. How
prevalent was the treason committed by Americans on behalf of Stalinist
totalitarianism? How pervasive was Communist influence in American
government? Above all, who told the truth and who lied?" (Real News 24/7:
We obviously do not agree with the reviewer's conclusions and offer this
merely for information value. Indeed, the review largely disproves the
conclusions!) McCarthy and his colleagues "Joe McCarthy has made a real
and lasting contribution toward the preservation and perpetuation of the free
world in his fight against the menace of internal subversion. His death was as
much as that of a soldier fighting in the ranks for human liberty and eternal
truth as if it had occurred on the field of battle and been inflicted by bullet,
bayonet, or shell...."
Communists coined "McCarthyism" "Now to the Communist version of the
word 'McCarthyism,' which they had just coined.… The first time I actually
saw the word in print was in the Daily Worker newspaper. This was the
Communist Party newspaper published in New York City which carried orders
to American Communists from the Soviet Union." The real McCarthy
record Same author as the one who wrote 40 questions and answers above;
same format as above, but includes some different material.
America's Retreat From Victory "The general picture of our steady, constant
retreat from victory, with the same men always found at the time and place
where disaster strikes America and success comes to Soviet Russia, would
inevitably have caused me, or someone else deeply concerned with the history
of this time, to document the acts of those molding and shaping the history of
the world over the past decade." (The first four chapters of McCarthy's
64

important book outlining foreign policy betrayal during and immediately after
World War II.)
Joseph McCarthy speaks in 1954 to the Chicago Irish Fellowship Society
(Audio file) A brief (12 minutes) but powerful talk on the fight against treason.
The late, great senator in fine form.
"This fight is going to go on…!"
—Senator Joseph McCarthy
CONTINUE
Tydings Committee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
QUOTE
The Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department
Employees, more commonly referred to as the Tydings Committee, was a
subcommittee authorized by S. 231 in February 1950 to look into charges
by Joseph R. McCarthy that he had a list of individuals who were known by
the Secretary of State to be members of the Communist Party of the United
States of America (CPUSA) and who were still working in the State
Department.
The mandate of the committee was to conduct "a full and complete study and
investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or
have been, employed by the Department of State." The chairman of the
subcommittee was Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat from Maryland.
On February 20, 1950, McCarthy had delivered an 5-hour speech to the Senate
in which he presented the cases of 81 "loyalty risks" who he claimed were
working for the State Department. McCarthy declined requests that he disclose
the actual names of the people on his list, and instead referred to them by "case
numbers". It is widely accepted that most of McCarthy's cases were taken from
the so-called "Lee list"—a report that had been compiled three years earlier for
the House Appropriations Committee. Led by a former FBI agent named
Robert E. Lee, the House investigators had been allowed to review the security
clearance documents on State Department employees, and had determined that
there were "incidents of inefficiencies" in the security reviews of 108 past and
present employees.......
65

Throughout the hearings, McCarthy employed colorful rhetoric, but produced
little evidence to support his accusations.
From its beginning, the Tydings Committee was marked by partisan infighting.
Its final report, written by the Democratic majority, concluded that the
individuals on McCarthy's list were neither Communist nor pro-communist,
and said the State Department had an effective security program. Tydings
labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud and a hoax," and said that the result of
McCarthy's actions was to "confuse and divide the American people [...] to a
degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves."
Republicans responded in kind, with William Jenner stating that Tydings was
guilty of "the most brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history."
The full Senate voted three times on whether to accept the report, and each time
the voting was precisely divided along party lines.
UNQUOTE
It had nothing to do with honest investigation, everything to do with party
politics. Before believing this Wiki version of truth look at McCarthyism: Forty
questions and answers about Senator Joseph McCarthy then decide.
_______________________________________________________________
_
For those who would like to do more research. -Robert D. Gorgoglione Sr.
M. Stanton Evans is the author of "Blacklisted by History" -
YouTube
M. Stanton Evans is the author of "Blacklisted by History". Mr. Evans owns the FBI
files from the McCarthy Trials. The book ...
More videos for Black Listed By History by Evans »
Amazon.com: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of
Senator ...
Amazon.com: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His
Fight Against America's Enemies (9781400081059): M. Stanton Evans: ...
The Venona secrets: exposing Soviet ... - Herbert Romerstein,
Eric ...
Authors probe recently released Venona Files, intercepted communications between the
Soviet Union & American Communists – VINDICATES McCARTHY!!!!!
Open and research the whole book on line. Click on to “Preview this book”.
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McCarthyism: Waging the Cold War in America

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