When Senator McCarthy launched his anti-Communist crusade in 1950, Soviet espionage was in the doldrums and the American Communist Party was crippled by the measures taken under the Truman administration. McCarthy arrived on the battlefield after the battle was over to finish off the wounded. His main target was the State Department, whose three major Soviet spies were gone: Lawrence Duggan committed suicide on December 20, 1948; Noel Field was behind the Iron Curtain; and Alger Hiss was a convicted perjurer. There had been more important spies in the Treasury Department, but Harry Dexter White died of a heart attack in 1948, and the members of the Silvermaster and Perlo groups were out of government service. Plenty of Soviet spies had infiltrated the U.S. government, but most of them were gone, and McCarthy was left with marginal cases, which he tried to inflate.
The collapse of the wartime networks, due largely to Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, left the KGB men in America empty-handed. Two experienced agents, Pravdin and Gromov, were replaced in 1946 by Grigory Dolbin, who was under diplomatic cover. He spoke no English and controlled no agents. By the summer of 1947 he was able to read the Washington papers without a dictionary, and reported “a bitter anti-Soviet campaign in the country.”1 In December, he was replaced by Alexander Panyushkin, the Soviet ambassador. Just as Joe began beating the drum, Panyushkin presided over a nonexistent agent network. In a 1950 analysis of the Washington station, the KGB said: “Since the middle of 1949, it practically stopped work on finding recruiters and new agents. It followed the line of least resistance, either drawing to our work people largely known by their connection with the U.S. Communist Party, or trying to use as agents officials from Eastern European countries.”2 A March 1950 memo from KGB boss Sergei Savchenko said: “Bentley gave away more than 40 most valuable agents to American authorities…[who] worked in key posts in leading state institutions, the State Department, the Treasury Department, etc.”3 These agents were impossible to replace. Panyushkin griped in October 1950 that he could not recruit any agents given the “current fascist atmosphere in the U.S…. We work here in an atmosphere…of almost 50 agents exposed long before us.”4 The number of dedicated radicals willing to spy for the Soviet Union now that it was no longer a wartime ally had shrunk dramatically. Moscow complained that espionage was at a standstill, but to no avail. One illegal, Rudolph Abel, arrived in New York in 1948, but in the eight years before his arrest, he never recruited anyone.
The decline of the agent networks went in tandem with the collapse of the American Communist Party, beginning with the ouster of Browder from the leadership. Once he was gone, so was the principal liaison between the KGB and the American party.5
A memo from Stephen Spingarn in May 1950 to President Truman outlined how the administration had been able “to counter and neutralize Communist activities in this country.” Spingarn, the White House aide in charge of internal security, said that the FBI “had placed ever-increasing emphasis upon the activities of Communists in our midst.” This had led to prosecution in the courts in cases such as Judith Coplon, Alger Hiss, Harry Bridges, Gerhardt Eisler, and the Hollywood Ten.
The government “has dealt a most forceful blow to the Communist conspiracy,” Spingarn asserted, “by vigorously prosecuting all of the important leaders of the party” under the Smith Act. Spingarn reported that the government “has under very active investigation the cases of over 1,000 citizens with a view to revocation of citizenship and deportation on grounds of subversive activity.”
As a result, Spingarn noted, FBI figures showed a decline in party membership from 74,000 in January 1947 to 53,000 in May 1950. (This was before the Supreme Court upheld the first Smith Act convictions in 1951, at which time the party went underground and the open membership dwindled to sixteen thousand.) The FBI cited “a drop-off in every aspect of the party’s campaign within the labor movement,” and “financial duress” due to legal costs.
To Spingarn, the FBI figures had “a tremendous wallop.” He wanted Truman to use them “for a major address…and not just a whistle-stop occasion. These figures are the best proof that the Communist movement in this country is on the wane…due to the vigorous action which the administration had taken.”6
In adopting the anti-Communist cause, McCarthy was a latecomer playing on a paradox—that as the party declined, alarm about it mounted. Truman had seen this in January 1949, when he told Clark Clifford that “the hysteria-mongering branch of the Republican party is the brains of this [anti-Red] movement.” He named Karl Mundt and Richard Nixon in the House and Homer Ferguson in the Senate.7 Spingarn saw it too, writing in a memo on January 31, 1950, of “a crusade or holy war entirely devoted to attacking Communism…. The holy war type of fight tends to make the single policy of anti-Communism the test of American patriotism. This would qualify some very curious people as our friends,” such as those who say that “Franco is the leading European anti-Communist.”8
This anti-Communist “holy war” was partly partisan politics, a rallying cry for the Republicans, out of office since 1933. It was fueled by frustration. But there was also a feeling in the population at large that the government was awash in treachery, which it had been, though it no longer was. This lag in perception made McCarthyism possible. The revelations in the Venona transcripts, had they been made public, would have made McCarthy’s charges irrelevant. But given the paucity of information, the espionage issue was ripe for exploitation.
McCarthy had many estimable qualities and followed a well-trod American path, that of the farm boy who succeeds in politics thanks to midnight oil and pluck, with more than a pinch of unscrupulousness thrown in. So far, a standard Horatio Alger story. As a judge, he went beyond the call of duty to help some of those he had sentenced to jail, and looked out for the children of divorce. He was a generous man, who donated fairly large sums to a seminary in Burma. But he was also careless about money, and a liar of pathological proportions. As he rose in politics, he abandoned whatever scruples he may have had and gave in to expediency. He was like a character in a medieval morality play, fought over by an angel and a devil. Once elected to the Senate, the impulse for power and gain took over. He used his office to collect money in underhanded ways. By failing to abide by the Senate’s code of conduct, he alienated influential senators. His first three years in the Senate were undistinguished, and in 1950 he was a man in need of an issue, with a problematic election coming up in 1952. As it happened, his timing could not have been better, and he quickly became one of the leading figures of his party. But although he gave his name to an ism, his rise and fall took a mere five years, from the Wheeling speech in February 1950 to his censure in December 1954. Three years later he was dead, not yet fifty.
When McCarthy embarked on a crusade against Communists in the State Department, he was following a well-trod path. In the summer and fall of 1945, a number of wartime agencies were disbanded, and those employees who did not move back into the private sector were transferred to the State Department. In August 1945, the State Department had 13,372 employees on its rolls. The wartime agencies added another 12,797: 7,482 from the Office of War Information; 1,013 from the Office of Strategic Services; 1,273 from the Foreign Economic Administration; 1,797 from the Surplus Property Administration; and 1,232 from the Office of Inter-American Affairs.9
Jimmy Byrnes, then Secretary of State, recalled in his memoirs that the number of State Department employees “was almost doubled by the transfer to it of all or part of the war agencies. The transfer of these agencies did not make me very happy. The job of acting as ‘undertaker’ for war agencies necessarily is a bad one. The most capable people are impelled to leave…. Morale sags and the problems multiply.” The State Department, however, felt that the recruitment policies of the interim agencies did not meet its standards, and by March 1947, all but four thousand of the hand-me-downs had been screened out.10
General William J. Donovan’s OSS posed a particular problem, in that he had hired a number of Soviet agents. Liz Bentley had identified half a dozen, among them Duncan Lee and Maurice Halperin. J. Edgar Hoover knew of others, and wrote in a memo in October 1946: “The OSS was a breeding ground for Commies.”11
When the OSS was disbanded on September 20, 1945, the Research and Intelligence Branch went to the State Department, and the Counterintelligence Branch went to the War Department, where it was renamed the Strategic Services Unit. The SSU chief, Colonel William Quinn, knew he had inherited some Communists, as well as lock pickers and counterfeiters. In October, he asked J. Edgar Hoover to vet the 2,500 OSS newcomers, whom he cut down to nine hundred.12
In the State Department, half of the thousand OSS transfers were kept after screening. They were placed under the command of Colonel Alfred McCormack, who was named special assistant in charge of research and intelligence. McCormack, a partner in the distinguished law firm of Cravath, Henderson & de Gersdorff, had served in Military Intelligence (G-2) during the war.
In his memoirs, Dean Acheson, then undersecretary of state, wrote that the Research and Intelligence section “died almost at once as the result of gross stupidity.” In plain English, this meant that when the OSS was abolished, Acheson saw a window of opportunity for State to take the lead as the department in charge of intelligence; that opportunity was lost when the CIA was formed on September 18, 1947. Acheson thought the State Department had muffed its chance, but there was more to it than that.13
Ostensibly, there were two camps inside the State Department, one of which, led by Acheson and McCormack, wanted to build up a centralized intelligence unit. The other camp, led by the officers in charge of the geographical divisions, fought to maintain their existing intelligence capacities. But what was presented as a jurisdictional dispute had a strong security component.
Byrnes had named, as his assistant secretary in charge of administration, his law partner and South Carolina crony, Donald Russell. With his direct line to Byrnes, Russell had precedence over Acheson. J. Anthony Panuch, an anti-Communist hard-liner, was Russell’s assistant in charge of security. Panuch worked closely with Raymond E. Murphy, who ran a mysterious State Department Office called EUR/X, devoted to the study of worldwide Communist subversion. This Wizard of Oz–like character, known only to a handful inside State, performed such tasks as debriefing Soviet defectors.
Murphy warned Panuch that prior to the demise of the wartime agencies, the Communist-controlled United Public Workers of America had only one member inside the State Department. After the transfer, the membership rose to between one hundred and two hundred. The chairman of the UPWA local, Peveril Meigs, advocated striking against the federal government. “This means that the Department now has a first-class headache,” Murphy wrote Panuch, since Congress was placing riders on all appropriations bills, stating that no part of the funds could be used to pay the salaries of employees who sanctioned the right to strike against the federal government.14
Panuch went on the offensive, fearing that a centralized intelligence agency inside State, made up of retreads from the OSS, would present serious security problems. On November 14, 1945, he passed on to Don Russell a memo from one of Colonel McCormack’s fellow officers in Military Intelligence, which said that he had been “a vigorous leader of a pro-Communist group within G-2, [who] permitted officers with known Communist leanings (as reported by the FBI), to sit in positions where they could influence the trend of intelligence.”15
Panuch’s memo on McCormack was leaked to the House Military Affairs Committee. On March 14, 1946, Andrew Jackson May, the committee chairman, charged that employees with “strong Soviet leanings,” who had been forced out of the War Department were now at State. May added that he had complained strongly to Byrnes. “We named the names of the personnel involved and there are many of them,” he said. Others on the committee said there were about fifteen, one of whom was McCormack.16 On March 20, in a letter to May, McCormack called the allegations “a tissue of lies, created by irresponsible and evil men with evil purposes.” It was clear, he said, that the committee had been listening to a former Army officer who was out to get him.17 Acheson in his memoirs called May’s remarks “the first pre-McCarthy attack.”
The upshot of the McCormack fracas was the scuttling of the Acheson plan for a centralized intelligence agency. On April 22, 1946, Byrnes decided against it and Colonel McCormack resigned. Then, when General George Marshall replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State in January 1947, keeping Acheson as undersecretary, the first thing Acheson did was fire Panuch. John Peurifoy, one of Acheson’s protégés, took his place.18
Once awakened, concern in Congress over Communists in the State Department did not let up, particularly at appropriations time. In June 1947, the Senate Appropriations Committee questioned Secretary of State Marshall. The committee report 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.”19
In the House, John Taber, a Republican from upstate New York, first elected in 1922, was chairman of the Appropriations Committee. “I saw a cartoon the other day called ‘the Sabre Dance,’ ” Truman once said, “in which they showed a big man with a sabre cutting off the heads of all the appropriations…. Well, I named it the ‘Taber Dance.’ ”20 Taber was now just as concerned with Communists in government as he was about budget cuts. He named a subcommittee to hold hearings in January 1948 on appropriations for the departments of State, Justice, Commerce, and the federal judiciary.
The chairman of this subcommittee was Karl Stefan, a Nebraska Republican born on a farm near Zebrakov, Bohemia, whose parents had settled in Omaha when he was one year old. Educated at the YMCA night school, he had worked as a telegrapher, newspaper editor, and radio commentator. A congenial, hearty fellow, whose standard joke was that he could make you an admiral in the Nebraska Navy, he was elected to the House in 1934.
The 1948 hearings on the State Department, which was asking for $214,918,000, had to do with such matters as representational allowances and the bearing of climatic conditions on post rotations. The committee sent a team over to State under the direction of its chief investigator, Robert E. Lee, to collect data on the value of services performed as compared to the cost in tax dollars. In the course of their work, they stumbled on the loyalty files. Lee and his men spent four months poring over the files and came up with 108 suspect cases, which they summarized for the Stefan subcommittee hearings. These cases were by no means exhaustive, “just dipping in here and there,” as Lee put it. Lee sneaked in as the curtain was dropping, for on March 13, 1948, Truman directed all federal departments to withhold personnel security and loyalty files from members of Congress.21
On January 26, Stefan questioned Hamilton Robinson, the head of the Office of Controls. With 782 employees, Controls was a grab bag of six unconnected divisions including munitions, visas and passports, and security. Robinson had the right background for State—the Taft School, Princeton, and Yale Law School. From 1942 to 1946, he had worked with John Foster Dulles at Sullivan & Cromwell. In less than four years in the Army, from 1942 to 1946, he had risen from first lieutenant to lieutenant colonel. He had glowing recommendations as an administrator.
Stefan had summaries of the 108 loyalty cases unearthed by Lee in front of him and began throwing random cases at Robinson, using numbers instead of names. Here was no. 102, who was involved in the Amerasia case. He had taken the side of the Chinese Communists in a roundtable discussion at Northwestern University and was a great admirer of Russia. His investigation was pending.
Robinson: “It is a tough determination…. To damn a man’s career for the rest of his life.”
Stefan: “I suppose it would be a bar to employment if they were interested in maintaining the American way of life.”
Robinson: “That is a sort of a funny question.”
Taber (who was sitting in on the hearings): “I do not think it is funny.”
Stefan continued to list the cases. One was an associate of suspected spies, but had been cleared by the State Department loyalty board. Another boasted that he was a Communist. One had written an article on Russia called “Toward a Classless Society.”
“I am just a man from the prairies of Nebraska,” Stefan said, “asking why these people are on the payroll.”
Robinson said he had to be sure “that somebody is not getting a dirty deal.”22
Stefan then turned to no. 52, a high State Department official. This was John Carter Vincent, who as chief of division of Chinese affairs was influential in guiding postwar China policy. According to his State Department loyalty file, Vincent had been observed on October 25, 1947, contacting a man in Washington. The man then went to the Soviet embassy. At this time, a telegram from Truman to Chiang Kai-shek was picked up by Moscow before it was sent from Washington. The inference was that Vincent had passed Truman’s wire to a Soviet agent. In another incident, Vincent’s raincoat was found by guards in a State Department men’s room. In a pocket were some papers in Russian. Vincent later explained that he had gone out to lunch on a rainy day, and, not having brought his own raincoat, he grabbed one he saw in the outer office, which had been hanging there for weeks. But if that was the case, why didn’t he put it back where he found it?23
To the committee, John Carter Vincent’s explanation sounded fishy. John Taber observed: “I have not been as much disturbed for a long time.”
“We are continually told,” Stefan said, “that there are people with disloyal leanings in various branches of the government.” How many in the State Department, he asked Robinson, had been terminated since the loyalty program had gone into effect?
Robinson said that in 1947 his office had opened 255 cases, of which 136 were closed. Of the 136 closed cases, 33 had resigned, 15 were dismissed, and 88 stayed on the job. All those dismissed were from wartime agencies. The dilemma, he said, was that employees had rights, “and you cannot lean over too far one way because you are a witch hunt or too far the other way because you are harboring Communists. So you are caught in a squeeze.”
Despite its detection of laxity, the redoubtable House Appropriations Committee cut only $17 million from the State Department budget, or about 7 percent. In his report on February 27, 1948, Stefan concluded that “the committee does not feel the department has been as diligent as it might have been in the selection of its personnel.”24 This was an understatement, for both Taber and Stefan were incensed over State Department practices, which they assailed on the floor of the House.
There was enough concern in Congress to launch yet another hearing on State Department security practices. On February 2, 1948, J. Edgar Chenoweth of Colorado, the chairman of the House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department, decided to hold hearings on the State Department’s Office of Controls.
When those hearings opened on March 10, 1948, the first witness was Hamilton Robinson’s boss, John Peurifoy, the undersecretary for administration. “I have been shocked,” he said, “deeply, by the revelations of the Canadian white paper [on Gouzenko]…. But I cannot believe that the only alternative is to be swept off our feet by the gossip mongering and character assassination which so often accompanies personal investigations. I am also disturbed by the present tendency to extend the highly questionable theory of ‘guilt by association’ to lengths that amount to a travesty of traditional American justice.”25
At the Stefan subcommittee hearings in January, Hamilton Robinson had revealed that sixty-four of the 108 suspects on the Lee list were still employed by the State Department. Peurifoy on March 10 stated that the number was down to fifty-seven. This was one of the numbers that McCarthy would brandish in his speeches in February 1950.
Peurifoy then explained how he had come to hire Hamilton Robinson to head the Office of Controls and what an exemplary manager he was. The only thing his FBI screening under the Truman loyalty program had turned up was that he had a second cousin who had been investigated for Communist activities and who had been in the State Department from 1944 to December 1946.
This second cousin, Robert Talbot Miller III, was no. 12 on the Lee list, where he was described as “in all probability the greatest security risk the Department has had.”
When Hamilton Robinson testified before the Chenoweth Committee on March 10, he was asked about his association with Robert Miller. He said that Miller had been the best man at his wedding, but “since I have been in Washington, I have seen very little of him. He calls up once or twice a year for lunch. Since I accepted this job as Director of Controls, I have had absolutely nothing to do with him.”26
The committee did not know it, but Miller was a Soviet agent of some importance, identified by Elizabeth Bentley to the FBI. After graduating from the Kent School and Princeton, Miller became a freelance newspaper correspondent in Europe. In 1934, he was the Moscow stringer for the Chattanooga News. There he met and married Jenny Levy, an American girl who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News. In 1937, they left Russia and Miller worked as a press agent for the Spanish Republicans.
Two years later, Miller teamed up with two American veterans of the International Brigades, Jack Fahy and Joseph Gregg, to found Hemispheric News, which supplied American newspapers with copy from Latin America. As it turned out, all three were Soviet agents. Fahy is mentioned in Venona as an operative for Naval GRU.27 Liz Bentley told the FBI in 1945 that Jacob Golos had recruited Robert Miller and Joseph Gregg via the American Communist Party. She had handled them as separate agents: neither knew the other was KGB. In 1941, Hemispheric News was absorbed by a wartime agency, the Office of Inter-American Affairs. When it was disbanded in 1945, Miller and Gregg transferred to the State Department. Miller rose to the position of assistant chief of research and publication. In July 1946, J. Anthony Panuch, the diligent security chief later fired on the recommendation of Dean Acheson, urged Miller’s dismissal, based on FBI reports. Upon being questioned, Miller said he had met Bentley socially as Helen, but did not know her last name. With the FBI closing in, Miller resigned in December 1946.28
The Chenoweth Committee hearings concluded on March 12, having barely scratched the surface. In closing, Chenoweth said: “I will tell you very frankly there is a feeling of suspicion in this country that somewhere in the State Department Communists exercise influence…. Do you think that we would be able to round up enough people…whose loyalty is unquestioned to work there, without having this constant criticism and complaint?”29
Fred Busbey, an Illinois Republican on the Chenoweth Committee, felt that the hearings had been concluded prematurely. There were a few things he wanted to get off his chest, and one of them was that Hamilton Robinson was incompetent and should not be running the Office of Controls. On March 25, 1948, he gave a speech entitled “What’s Wrong with the State Department” on the floor of the House.
It was highly improbable, Busbey said, that Robinson did not know about his cousin’s activities. He had in fact told some members of Congress off the record that after taking over the Office of Controls he had lunch with Miller at least a dozen times and that in his opinion Miller was probably a Communist and perhaps a Soviet agent.
In October 1946, when Miller was looking around for another job, he applied to the Central Intelligence Group (precursor to the CIA) for a position. The CIG wrote to Robinson, asking for a reference. Instead of warning the CIG about his cousin’s Communist connections, Busbey said, Robinson gave this sarcastic reply: “According to the telephone book, his phone number is Ordway 1420.”
Did this kind of behavior, Busbey asked, qualify a man for passing on the security and loyalty of twenty thousand State Department employees? Busbey wasn’t saying that he was disloyal, but that he was unqualified for the job. “The State Department as an outpost in foreign policy should be inviolable,” Busbey concluded. “It should be like Caesar’s wife, and it is utter nonsense to be confronted with case after case of reasonable doubt only to find Mr. Robinson clearing him or waiting for proof of an overt act.”30
In 1948, with a presidential election coming up, the furor over Communists in the State Department receded. One of Truman’s campaign planks was “the do-nothing 80th Congress.” On his whistle-stop tour in October, he went after individual congressmen. In Auburn, he had John Taber in his sights for using “a butcher knife…on appropriations that have been in the public interest.” With Truman’s victory, the Democrats gained solid majorities in both houses of Congress—54 to 42 in the Senate and 263 to 177 in the House.31
When McCarthy revived the Reds issue in February 1950, he relied heavily on the work done by the two House committees in 1948. Since Truman had roped off loyalty files from the Congress, his basic text became the Lee list.
It was the practice of Republican congressmen to fan out across the country in February and give Lincoln Day speeches. As a junior senator without any important committee assignment, McCarthy drew a less than alluring five-city tour, starting with the West Virginia Republican Women’s Club on February 9 at Wheeling. Forced on tour, he decided to turn it into a tour de force, focusing on the issue that he hoped would revive his reputation.32
McCarthy needed some research help with his Lincoln Day talks. He knew a reporter at the Washington Times-Herald, Jim Waters, who put him on to the paper’s Capitol Hill man, Ed Nellor. Having covered the Hiss case in 1948, Nellor was familiar with the issue. In addition, he had exactly what Joe needed, a copy of the Lee list, with fifty-seven cases pending as of March 1948.
Following the 1945 transfer of the wartime agencies, statements had been made on the floor of the House that “hundreds if not thousands of employees have been eliminated from the State Department by the screening committee because of Communist leanings or activities of membership.” Responding to these statements on August 1, 1946, Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes wrote Representative Adolph Sabath of Illinois that they were incorrect. Byrnes explained that of the roughly four thousand employees kept by the State Department, three thousand had been screened. In 284 cases, a recommendation against permanent employment was made. Of the 284, 79 had been terminated. That left 205, as of August 1946. Byrnes did not give their names. Nor did McCarthy know how many of these 205 were still in the State Department more than three years later or how many had been cleared.33
Joe set out on his five-city tour with a lot of undigested information. It was all new to him, and he got a little confused. He had a valid case to make, documented by two House committees in 1948, that security risks were allowed to remain in the State Department. But he spoiled his case by overstating it and jumbling the numbers in the Mixmaster of his mind.
At 5:00 P.M. on February 9, 1950, Paul J. Miller, the program director of station WWVA in Wheeling, received a copy of Joe’s speech. “I have in my hand,” it read, in a line soon to become notorious, “a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” That evening, when McCarthy spoke in the Colonnade Room of the McLure Hotel before an audience of 275, WWVA taped the speech and broadcast it later, from 10:00 to 10:30 P.M. The tape was later erased to be reused on the Wendy Warren show. The next day Frank Desmond of the Wheeling Intelligencer reported on the speech, using the 205 figure.34
The rest of his speech had been cobbled together from old newspaper clips about the spread of world Communism, the loss of China, and the treachery of Alger Hiss. He gave a few, rather stale names, such as Gustavo Duran, who had left the State Department and found a job at the United Nations, and Julian Wadleigh, who had also left the State Department and had recently written a series in the New York Post called “Why I Spied for the Soviet Union.”
Though his facts were often wrong, McCarthy’s timing could not have been better. Mao Tse-tung had recently taken power in China, with Chiang Kai-shek fleeing to Formosa. Hiss had been found guilty of perjury in January 1950 and sentenced to five years in prison. Klaus Fuchs had been arrested in England and had confessed shortly before the speech. The notion of a fifth column, which had given the Russians the secret of the bomb, was on American minds. McCarthy was tapping a well of resentment, and in a way, he was right by analogy, for the secrets of the bomb had been stolen. His remarks were picked up by the Associated Press and ran in roughly thirty papers. Continuing westward on his five-city tour, he was in Salt Lake City on February 10, where he changed the number of State Department Communists to fifty-seven, the number of cases still pending on the Lee list in 1948, when John Peurifoy disclosed it in his testimony before the Chenoweth Committee that March. On February 11 in Reno, at the Mapes Hotel before four hundred Republicans, he stuck to fifty-seven. The Reno State Journal reported on February 20, that “Senator McCarthy, who had first typed a total of 205 employees of the State Department…scratched out that number and mentioned only 57 card-carrying members.”35
After the Reno speech, McCarthy sent a wire to President Truman, charging that a State Department spokesman had denied his claim that State was harboring fifty-seven Communists. He instructed Truman to “pick up your phone and ask Mr. Acheson how many…he failed to discharge…after lengthy consultation with Alger Hiss.” Joe wanted Truman to “demand that Acheson give you…a complete report on all those who were placed in the department by Alger Hiss…. Failure on your part will label the Democratic party of being the bed-fellow of international Communism.”36 On the basis of an outdated list, Joe was making outlandish charges with bad grammar.
Infuriated by McCarthy’s eight-hundred-pound-gorilla tactics, Truman wrote but did not send this reply: “This is the first time in my experience, and I was ten years in the Senate, that I ever heard of a Senator trying to discredit his own government before the world. You know that isn’t done by honest public officials. Your telegram is not only not true and an insolent approach to a situation that should have been worked out between man and man, but it shows conclusively that you are not even fit to have a hand in the operation of the government of the United States.”37 The battle was joined between the pugnacious President and the boorish senator, which could only help the one with the lesser position.
In Las Vegas on February 13, the figure remained fifty-seven, as it did on the 15th in Huron, South Dakota. On his home turf in Milwaukee on February 16, McCarthy was told that Truman had said at a press conference that Joe had not spoken a word of truth. This was balm in Gilead, for every denial required a response, every headline led to another headline, like a game of Ping-Pong, and Joe finally mentioned the Byrnes letter and the list of 205.
Elated by the media attention on his five-city tour, McCarthy decided to press his charges on the floor of the Senate. Again, he relied on the Lee list. But by now, he had become a magnet for people with tales to tell. So he had some new cases, which were not on the Lee list, probably provided by J. Anthony Panuch, whom he mentioned flatteringly in his speech, or by Robert L. Bannerman, another State Department security man no longer in office.38
McCarthy did not want to admit that his cases came from a House committee report dating back to 1948. He jumbled the numbers on the Lee list and interspersed them with his other cases. At this point he declined to give any names. His eighty-one cases, mostly from the Lee list, were a tangle of valid security threats, garden-variety liberals, and persons with tenuous connections to the State Department. He found it impossible to separate the quest for improved security from the temptation to discredit the Truman administration. McCarthy was pulling the loyalty issue back into the spotlight at a time when it might loom large in the 1950 elections. Thus, his speech turned into a partisan dogfight that lasted six hours.
When he arrived on the Senate floor in the late afternoon on February 20 with his bulging briefcase, only a sprinkling of senators were present. If he had been allowed to present his eighty-one cases without interruption the proceedings would have taken about an hour. But the interruptions came fast and furious, with cries of “will the senator yield.” This was one of the reasons for his messy recitation, for the delays and arguments made him lose his continuity; some numbers he skipped while others he repeated.
One of the senators present was the Senate Majority Leader, Scott Lucas of Illinois. “If I had said the nasty things that McCarthy said about the State Department,” he had recently stated in Chicago, “I would be ashamed all my life.” McCarthy reprimanded him for his remark, calling him the “alleged Democratic Leader.” All he wanted to do, Joe said, was “to root out the fifth column in the State Department.”39
Lucas demanded that McCarthy name the 205 card-carrying Communists he had spoken of at Wheeling. Joe trumpeted: “I will not say on the Senate floor anything I will not say off the floor.” This was a remark he would come to regret.
The Democrats present acted like objection-raising defense lawyers: Where did he get his cases? Why did he not name names? Why did his numbers keep changing?
McCarthy replied that his cases came from sources inside the State Department. “If there were not some good, honest, loyal men,” he said, “men who are willing to risk their positions, I would not be able to give this report tonight.” As for the names, he said somewhat disingenuously that since they had not been charged with anything, it would be unfair to name them. This led to accusations that he did not have them.
Commenting on the small number of senators present, Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia said: “The wet season is driving the pintails north.” By 7:30 P.M. only fourteen cases had been read. The Republicans demanded a quorum and senators trooped in from dinner, one of them in white tie and tails. The Senate went into a night session as McCarthy battled to list his cases, and by the time he was done it was close to midnight.40
Without the names, McCarthy’s list was unverifiable, particularly since he often distorted or exaggerated the information in his summaries. Now that we know the names, it can be divided into four categories: those who were no longer or had never been in the State Department; liberal Democrats; suspected loyalty cases; and Soviet spies. But Joe was incapable of making distinctions. His level of vehemence was the same for all categories.
After McCarthy’s speech, Carlisle H. Humelsine, the assistant secretary of state for administration (who had replaced John Peurifoy), stated that of the eighty-one cases, only forty were still employed in the State Department. Seven on the list had never been employed there. Among these were Harlow Shapley, a Harvard astronomer and ardent fellow traveler, who had been named in 1947 to the National Committee for UNESCO, for which he was paid $10 a day plus transportation expenses; Frederick L. Schuman, a prolific pro-Soviet author and professor at Williams, who had once lectured at the State Department; and Dorothy Kenyon, a municipal court judge in New York City, who had been named in 1947 to serve as American delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Her three-year tenure was up before Joe made his speech. McCarthy called this humanitarian assignment “a high State Department position,” insinuating that she was a policymaker with access to classified information.
McCarthy said that Kenyon belonged to twenty-eight Communist fronts. She had indeed belonged to twelve, some without her permission, some from which by her own admission “I got out as fast as I could,” and others where “I did not like the company I was keeping.” She was one of the many liberals who were gulled into joining fronts during the Spanish Civil War. She was on record for denouncing the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, and clashing with the Soviet delegate on the U.N. commission. But in McCarthy’s version of events, she was guilty of deep-rooted Communist activities.41
Among the more murky cases of reasonable suspicion was Joe’s case no. 2, John Carter Vincent, who had been observed contacting an apparent Soviet agent. McCarthy claimed in his summary that the major portion of his loyalty file had been removed. Vincent, one of the architects of the State Department’s Asian policy, was accused of favoring the Chinese Communists. Cleared five times by the State Department loyalty board, he was removed from the Asian desk and sent to Bern, Switzerland, and Tangier, Morocco. In 1953, when John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State, he was forced to resign.
Peveril Meigs, no. 3 on Joe’s list, joined the State Department in September 1945 and was assigned to the Joint Intelligence Study Publishing Board. He was the head of a United Public Workers local that advocated striking against the government and followed the Soviet line. The State Department allowed him to resign in 1948 because it did not want to court problems with the union. He joined the Department of the Army and was suspended by the Army loyalty board and discharged the same year.42
As for Soviet agents, there were at least two. One was Robert T. Miller, case no. 16, and Hamilton Robinson’s second cousin, whom Liz Bentley had identified as one of her “singletons.” “This individual’s file is perhaps the largest physically of the State Department loyalty files,” McCarthy said. “The file reflects that this individual furnished material to known Soviet espionage agents and that he had contacts with a long list of Communists and suspected Soviet agents.” Miller had resigned in December 1946.
The second Soviet agent was Mary Jane Keeney, who had transferred to State from the Federal Economic Administration. Her downfall came about because she kept a diary. She and her husband, Philip, became known as “the librarian spies.” In 1937, they were fired from the University of Montana Library for radical activities. They moved to Berkeley, where according to Mary Jane’s diary, they were members of the Marin County Communist cell. During the war, Philip was a librarian for the OSS, while Mary Jane worked for the Board of Economic Warfare and the Federal Economic Administration. According to Venona, they were recruited by the GRU in 1940. In 1945, however, they were transferred to the KGB. In a black bag job, the FBI copied her diary, which described their KGB control, Sergey Kurnakov, whom she called “Colonel Thomas.” When Kurnakov went back to Russia in December 1945, Philip Keeney’s comment was recorded in a diary entry: “It is wonderful for him that he is returning. It makes me green with envy.” Philip went to Tokyo to help reconstruct the Japanese library system. Facing a loyalty investigation in 1948, Mary Jane Keeney left the State Department for the United Nations, from which she was soon fired after U.S. protests. She and her husband opened an art film club. They were never prosecuted for their espionage, which had been uncovered thanks to Venona and the FBI break-in.43
There was another “category” on Joe’s list, the one that defied simple explanation. Esther Caukin Brunauer, case no. 47, had joined the State Department in 1944. The following year, she was assigned to the United Nations founding conference in San Francisco as assistant to New York Congressman Sol Bloom. McCarthy charged that she had been “the first assistant to Alger Hiss,” which she had not. He said, “This is one of the most fantastic cases I know of,” and in some ways it was.
Esther’s husband, Stephen, was a chemist in the Explosive Research Division of the U.S. Navy, where he headed a large staff of scientists conducting secret work. Stephen Brunauer admitted to having joined the Young Workers’ League in 1927, describing it as “a glorified social club with dances and picnics and infrequent participation in picket lines and strikes.” He soon left. In a letter of support, Senator Joseph Ball of Minnesota described him as “perhaps the most violently anti-Communist person I know.”
Stephen Brunauer was Hungarian-born, and had a brother still living there. In 1946, the Navy asked him to go to Budapest on a secret mission. He was instrumental in arranging the escape of a number of scientists to the United States, where they did outstanding work for the Navy.
Esther, meanwhile, had been assigned to the State Department Division of Internal Security, even though she had Communist associations. In 1946, according to a loyalty board report, she was named head of a State Department delegation that was supposed to observe the A-bomb tests on the Pacific atoll of Bikini. For this she needed a special red security pass from the Navy, which would give her access to classified data. But the officer in charge told her she could not have one. She persisted, to no avail. So she told a WAVE in her office to go pick up the pass for her, which aroused the suspicion of the security division. She ended up not going to Bikini.44
In 1948, Esther Brunauer was brought before the State Department loyalty board on charges of being “in sympathetic association with the Communist Party, to have supported its policies, and to have been a member of the American Friends of the Soviet Union.” At the hearing, when she was asked whether she knew about the red passes, she said: “I did not, no sir. If I did, I don’t remember it now, sir.”
She was then told: “The situation concerning the issuing of the red pass apparently reached a point where it was pushed upstairs so that Vice Admiral Blandy and Admiral Hussey talked about it. They ruled that you were not going to be cleared for the Bikini tests…. That conflicts directly with what you have testified today.”
Brunauer: “I have no recollection…. I was a terrifically busy person, heading up the bureau group for the Bikini tests. So I cannot recall what sort of passes were needed…. What you see at Bikini is nothing, you see a big blow. What is important is the record, the reports.”45
Esther Brunauer was cleared, but transferred to the State Department liaison staff with UNESCO. She was in the UNESCO job at the time McCarthy listed her in his February 20 speech. His information came from the Lee list, culled from the State Department loyalty board files. “A reliable informant,” said her Lee list dossier, had reported both Brunauers to be Communists. In addition, Esther had “recently contacted a subject of a Soviet espionage case.”
In April 1951, her husband, Stephen, was suspended by the Navy. Carlisle Humelsine, the assistant secretary in charge of administration, privately told Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland: “I understand he is a drunk, and that three times lately they’ve found him laid up with other women. He’s a bad security risk, though there’s no hint of disloyalty.”46 Stephen Brunauer resigned rather than go before the Navy’s loyalty board.
Following her husband’s suspension, Esther was suspended by the State Department. In September, new charges were brought against her: that she was active in party organizations in the twenties and thirties, and that she had been affiliated with nine front groups in 1935 and 1936. Esther Brunauer was dismissed on June 16, 1952.
The matter of the red pass loomed large in Esther’s file. She had clearly lied to the loyalty board. As for Stephen, why had he resigned instead of defending himself at a hearing? If drinking and adultery were the criteria, there would have been dozens of cases. Here was a man who had attained a high position in the U.S. Navy and made vital contributions to national security. The loyalty boards worked in mysterious ways. He found a job in private industry in the Midwest.
Though there were no important spies left in the State Department in February 1950, there was a need to tighten up security. Was it not possible to find applicants without Communist backgrounds and connections to work in the department that conducted our foreign policy? This had been the heartfelt cry of the two House committees who had done the spadework in 1948 that McCarthy was now riding to national recognition. Had he culled his list, had he come out with the names, had he studied the files more carefully, he would have made a more forceful case. Instead, he concealed his sources and sought to overwhelm his Senate colleagues with the bogus momentousness of his findings.
Only one of Joe’s eighty-one cases, no. 54, resulted in the indictment of a State Department employee. This was Val Lorwin, who served in the labor section. “This individual,” McCarthy said, “has been connected with a number of Communist front organizations and was active in attempting to secure the issuance of a non-immigration visa to a French Communist leader.”
At the time, Lorwin was a labor economist in Paris, and he granted visas recommended by the American ambassador, so that French labor leaders could attend an international conference. In the thirties, Lorwin had been a Norman Thomas Socialist, but he was soon fed up with the party’s “wornout phraseology” and quit when he began to work for New Deal agencies such as the Labor Department and the War Production Board. In 1935, while still a member, he had a friend from Cornell, Harold Metz, staying in his house in Washington. Fifteen years later, after Lorwin had been named by McCarthy, Metz came forward and filed an affidavit on July 10, 1950, stating that Lorwin had been a Communist in 1935 and had shown him his party card. Metz said he had seen some “strange-looking people” in Lorwin’s house.47
Lorwin testified at a State Department Loyalty Board hearing on December 20, that the “strange-looking people” were members of the Socialist Southern Tenant Farmers Union. He said that he had shown Metz his Socialist Party card, which was red, and that Metz had mistaken it for a Communist card, which at the time was a black-bound booklet. In February 1951, Lorwin was suspended as a security risk, but his case was reopened as colleagues told of his fine work in the OSS and the State Department. On March 28, 1952, Lorwin was cleared by the loyalty board, but since he had long been under suspension with no salary, he had resigned and taken a teaching job at the University of Chicago.48
In the meantime, Metz’s statement came to the attention of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, whose head, James M. McInerney, asked for a further investigation. The case was assigned to James Gallagher, who argued that there were grounds for an indictment. Others in the department doubted his wisdom in pursuing an insufficiently developed case, but on January 7, 1953, Gallagher’s request to present the case to a grand jury was approved by Attorney General James McGranery, who had been criticized by Republican senators for not being a vigorous prosecutor.49
Gallagher appeared for one hour before a grand jury in Washington on December 2, 1953, and an indictment was returned on December 4, charging Lorwin with perjury before the State Department loyalty board in December 1950. The case presented serious difficulties in that it was Lorwin’s word against Metz’s. Gallagher had hoped that two FBI informants would testify at the trial, but the FBI told him that one had relied on hearsay and the other had been misquoted.50
Concerned over the weakness of the case, William A. Paisley, chief of the Trial Section at the Justice Department, examined the grand jury minutes and was shocked to find that Gallagher had lied to the jurors, telling them that he had corroboration from two FBI informants, each of whom would identify Lorwin as a Communist. In addition, Gallagher had not called Lorwin before the grand jury, saying that his whereabouts were unknown, and that it was pointless in any case, since he would only take the Fifth like other Communists. Gallagher knew at the time that Lorwin had denied under oath that he was a Communist. The only person called before the grand jury was Metz, who repeated a conversation that went back eighteen years.51
Paisley recommended that the indictment be dismissed. The trial, which was about to begin, was postponed until June 7, 1954. Confronted with his misrepresentations, Gallagher said he was hoping at the time that the FBI would make some witnesses available. He said it was better to indict on slight evidence than to appear before a Senate committee to explain why he had not obtained an indictment.
On May 24, 1954, Gallagher was suspended and placed on annual leave, a mirror image of the suspended Lorwin. On May 25, Assistant Attorney General Warren Olney III moved to dismiss the indictment. On May 27, Olney fired Gallagher.52
In an explanatory letter to Senator William Langer, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Herbert Brownell said that Metz might have been confused about whether the card he had been shown was Socialist or Communist. “Both were anathema to Mr. Metz,” Brownell said, though “there is some evidence that Mr. Lorwin…was active in the Socialist Party in opposing the plans of the Communists…. The description of the card…given by Mr. Metz is more consistent with membership in the Socialist Party rather than the Communist Party…. It is because of this extraordinarily delicate balance that at least some corroboration for Mr. Metz’ recollection is considered necessary.”
Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee offered to introduce a bill to pay for the cost of Lorwin’s defense. Lorwin said he did not want that, although there was no way of “restoring several years of my own and my wife’s life, or the unblemished reputation which even the government’s admission of error can never make quite clear.” To a friend, Lorwin wrote, “I was thankful that we have no children.”53
The lesson of the Lorwin case was that McCarthy was beginning to have imitators. Gallagher had wanted to chalk up a case, and make his name as a Red-hunter, and was willing to lie to a grand jury to do it. This match of the unscrupulous and the self-seeker was McCarthy’s greatest legacy.
Such was the fallout from McCarthy’s speech on February 20, 1950, to which Truman responded in a press conference three days later that he was the one who had eliminated subversives in government. But many newspapers, from Honolulu to Washington, simply echoed Joe’s charges that there was a spy ring in Washington.
McCarthyism was catching fire. By March 1950, the donations and the mails were heavy: “Why don’t you get the rats out of the State Department?” Drew Pearson noted in his diary for March 21: “Sentiment for McCarthy seems to be building…. Sen. Taft amazed me by admitting that he was egging McCarthy on.” Senator Wayne Morse told a newsman: “Taft and McCarthy are practically sleeping together.”
When Joe’s old antagonist William T. Evjue, the editor of the Madison Capital Times, visited Washington that spring, he was amazed to see how Joe was lording it over everyone. Someone told Evjue: “The only way to bring Joe McCarthy to his knees is to roll out a set of bones.”54
Not everyone, however, was jumping on the McCarthy bandwagon. Even in the Senate, that citadel of tolerance, there were rumblings of discontent. The first senator to speak out on the Senate floor against Joe, although obliquely, was also the most junior senator of the ninety-six, having arrived in Washington that January to fill out the term of the departed senator Raymond Baldwin of Malmédy fame. He was William Benton, Rhodes scholar, vice president of the University of Chicago, millionaire advertising man in the firm of Benton & Bowles, and chairman of the board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. After the war, he had served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs.
Benton was biding his time, feeling at first that he should leave Joe to the elders. But after the February speech, he began to think it was absurd to charge the Truman White House with being soft on Reds when it had done so much to bring down Communism. He felt that he had a duty to speak out in support of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whose department was being splattered with mud. On March 22, 1950, Benton delivered his maiden speech before rows of empty seats. Only a handful of supportive Democrats were there to hear him say that “harrying and tormenting Dean Acheson until he quits his great post is not the cure to the problems of the Department. You don’t cure a man’s headache by cutting off his head.” Benton was the first senator to attack McCarthy on the floor of the Senate, calling him a “hit and run propagandist on the Kremlin model.”55
The other insurgent who dared to buck the trend was the only woman in the Senate, Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine. She had come to the Senate in 1949 after serving eight years in the House and was on the Executive Expenditures Committee with Joe, who flattered her and told her she was his candidate for Vice President in 1952. But as time went by, she saw the Senate floor become a forum for slander. She believed in senatorial courtesy, which McCarthy constantly flouted. She was a hardworking legislator, who attended roll calls and was prepared for hearings, whereas McCarthy was sloppy and shot from the hip. She lived by the rules, guarding seniority, whereas McCarthy had no respect for rules. She liked facts and clarity, whereas McCarthy was a great obscurer and twister of facts. She thought his February 20 speech was character assassination.56
Senator Smith decided to make a “Declaration of Conscience” on the floor of the Senate, and rounded up six other moderate Republicans to sign it with her—George Aiken of Vermont, Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, Oregon’s Wayne Morse, Irving Ives of New York, Edward J. Thye of Minnesota, and Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey. On June 1, 1950, she rose and read her declaration. “Certain elements of the Republican Party have materially added to this confusion in the hopes of riding the Republican Party to victory through the selfish exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance,” she said. Smith and the other six called for an end to “totalitarian techniques.” Only one other Republican senator, H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, expressed support for Smith’s declaration, but she got a lot of ink and was on the cover of Newsweek. Joe promptly labeled the eight senators “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”57
The most concerted attack on McCarthy, however, came in the form of a Senate hearing. One of the more relevant remarks during Joe’s marathon speech on February 20 was made by the Republican senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, who said that he would “make a motion to have a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee take up every single one of the accusations which the senator from Wisconsin makes.”
“I was hoping the senator would,” Joe said.58
On February 22, Resolution 231 was adopted by the Senate, calling for a full investigation of whether persons disloyal to the United States were or had been employed by the Department of State. On March 8, 1950, a subcommittee of five opened hearings in the marble-columned Senate Caucus Room. The chairman was the Maryland senator Millard Tydings, a conservative Democrat whom FDR had called “a betrayer of the New Deal,” but who was now in the position of helping Truman discredit McCarthy. The other Democrats were eighty-two-year-old Theodore F. Green, a wealthy Wilsonian from Rhode Island, and Brien McMahon of Connecticut, one of the chorus of hecklers on February 20. The two Republicans were Lodge and the conservative, pro-McCarthy senator from Iowa, Bourke Hickenlooper. The subcommittee sat until July 7 and called thirty-five witnesses to determine whether the State Department had retained disloyal employees.
It became clear on the first day of the hearings that Tydings intended to put McCarthy on trial and dismiss his evidence. In this, he had the full support and cooperation of President Truman. Tydings wagged his finger at Joe and said: “You are in the position of being the man who occasioned this hearing, and so far as I am concerned you are going to get one of the most complete investigations in the history of the Republic.” Lodge complained that the hearings reminded him of a “kangaroo court.”59
McCarthy provided Tydings with 112 names, including thirty-seven that were not on the Lee list, obtained from his sources at the FBI and in the State Department. But instead of conducting a full investigation, Tydings dealt only with nine cases whose names Joe had made public. They included the two fellow travelers who were not in the State Department, Harlow Shapley and Frederick L. Schuman, the liberal judge Dorothy Kenyon, and Esther Brunauer. All nine were given the opportunity to refute McCarthy’s charges.
Esther Brunauer testified on March 27 that since McCarthy had named her, she and her family had been getting threatening calls, such as “Get out of this neighborhood, you Communists, or you will be carried out in a box.” She also testified that she and her husband had been friends of the Soviet agent Noel Field since 1928.
Senator Hickenlooper asked about the Brunauers’ connection to a Hungarian diplomat, Ferenczi. Esther said she had met him at a UNESCO conference in 1947 in Mexico City. On his way back to Hungary Ferenczi dropped in on Stephen Brunauer in Washington and asked him if the Rockefeller Foundation could help Hungary’s scientific institutions. According to Esther, her husband replied that since Hungary was a Communist regime, there was little likelihood of help. Having been given the brush-off, Ferenczi then discussed with other members of the Hungarian legation in Washington whether to reveal Stephen Brunauer’s past Communist affiliations, but decided against it. The Tydings Committee did not pursue the issue further although it could well have asked how Esther Brunauer knew about these discussions concerning her husband.60
The high point of the hearings came when McCarthy named Owen Lattimore, the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University and an expert on Mongolia, a field he had almost to himself. Lattimore had so little to do with the State Department that Dean Acheson recalled in his memoirs: “Dr. Lattimore had never been connected with the Department and I did not know him.” He was an academic, sometimes tapped for government service. In 1941, FDR had sent him to China on the recommendation of Lattimore’s good friend, the Soviet agent Lauchlin Currie, to advise Chiang Kai-shek. In 1942, he was named head of the Pacific Bureau of the Office of War Information, with a staff of five hundred, and in 1944 he accompanied Henry Wallace on his trip to Siberia.61
That was good enough for McCarthy, who on March 13 called him a “pro-Communist” and “one of the principal architects of our Far Eastern policy.” Four days later, Tydings declared that McCarthy had not provided the committee with the name of a single Communist. Piqued, Joe responded by naming Lattimore as “the man whom I consider the top Russian espionage agent in this country,” and Alger Hiss’s onetime boss “in the espionage ring in this country.” Both of these accusations were preposterous, but Joe, as usual, was going for headlines. On March 21 in executive session he told the committee that Lattimore “will be the biggest espionage case in the history of this country…the top Russian spy.” He told reporters, “I am willing to stand or fall on this one.” Senator Taft, sensing a promising issue in the upcoming congressional elections, said: “The greatest Kremlin asset in our history has been the pro-Communist group in the State Department.”62
McCarthy followed up on March 30 with another marathon speech on the floor of the Senate, where he was protected from libel suits. This one lasted four hours, and was largely devoted to Lattimore, whom he called “one of the top Communist agents in this country.” He was now prepared to give the Senate material proving that Lattimore was a Soviet agent and a Communist Party member. “I realize that this is an extremely shocking statement,” he said, explaining that he was getting his information from “certain loyal and disturbed government employees.” He said he was swamped with letters from “thousands of disturbed Americans, urging that this house-cleaning—perhaps I should say rodent-destroying—task be continued.”63
By overstating his case, McCarthy spoiled it, although Lattimore had much to answer for, not as a spy but as part of a network of Asian experts who followed the Soviet line. Born in 1900, he was raised in China, where his father was a teacher. In the twenties, he traveled extensively through China and into Mongolia, a vast landlocked highland country wedged between China and Russia. After more than two centuries of Chinese colonization, Mongolia became a People’s Republic in 1921, with the help and guidance of the Soviet Union. This sparsely populated land of nomadic herdsmen advanced directly from feudalism to Socialism, bypassing capitalism. In 1921, there were two doctors in the entire country, and a 2 percent literacy rate. The Soviets built hospitals and schools. The Mongols adopted Soviet laws, Soviet courts, Soviet Five Year Plans, and the Soviet one-party system. Nomads for a time were allowed to keep ownership of their herds, while collective farms and state-owned industries were introduced. Mongolia, in effect, became a satellite of the Soviet Union.
In his books, Lattimore took the position that Mongolia was an independent state free from Russian domination. Mongolia was “set free by the non-exploitation policy of the Soviet Union,” he wrote in Inner Asian Frontiers of China, “the granting of loans without interest, economic aid, technical help, and the creation of an army trained and equipped by the Soviet Union.” For Lattimore, the Mongols were a distinct people saved from extinction by a benevolent Soviet intervention.64
Other scholars saw Lattimore’s claims as special pleading. After 1926, the Soviets did not allow foreigners into Mongolia. A Soviet visa, which had to be approved by Soviet Military Intelligence, was needed to go there. This ban on visitors was hardly consonant with the thesis that Mongolia was independent. Nicholas N. Poppe, the China-born professor of Oriental languages at the University of Leningrad from 1925 to 1941, and the head of Mongolian studies in Russia, met Lattimore in the thirties. Lattimore was by then the editor of Pacific Affairs, the journal of the Institute of Pacific Relations, an influential think tank with foreign branches, including one in the Soviet Union. Lattimore came regularly to Russia to confer with the IPR members, some of whom were Soviet intelligence officers who used the IPR to collect information.
In order to enhance his chance for a visa, Poppe said, Lattimore lobbied the well-connected IPR member V. E. Motylev, who was in charge of the much awaited Soviet World Atlas, commissioned by Lenin in the early twenties. It finally appeared in 1937. Poppe said it was “a Marxist-Leninist cartographic picture of the world,” divided into Socialist and Imperialist camps. “One map shows Mongolia completely absorbed and integrated in the Soviet economic and political system. It is a Soviet satellite.” Lattimore reviewed the Atlas in the September 1938 issue of Pacific Affairs and said it “commands full intellectual respect.” But even with Motylev’s help, Poppe said, Mongolia remained closed to Lattimore. Poppe himself was not allowed to go there.
By 1949, Poppe had moved to America and taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. He told a congressional committee that Lattimore “wrote of Mongolia as a democratic country which has made magnificent progress and so on…but this is not the end of the story. The deportation of Mongolian Buddhists, Lamaseries, the destruction and annihilation of the Mongolian government, the execution of the Mongolian ministers, the forced collectivism, the deportation of many to the Soviet Union, are rather negative phenomena…. I cannot call such a system a democratic one. In 1932 the entire population revolted against the Soviets. Many members of the Mongolian People’s Army took the side of the revolters and this rebellion was suppressed by the Russian Red Army. Tanks and aircraft were rushed from Russia to Mongolia.” Lattimore gave “a greatly distorted picture,” Poppe said. Since he could not tour Mongolia in the thirties, he got the material for his book “in Soviet papers.”65
Igor Bogolepov, who was assistant chief of the League of Nations Division in the Soviet Foreign Office, recalled meeting Lattimore at the Moscow IPR headquarters in 1936. Maxim Litvinov, the Foreign Office Commissar, had told Bogolepov that Stalin wanted to get Mongolia into the League of Nations (which the Soviet Union had joined in 1934), but the situation was still not ripe. They had to mobilize foreign writers and journalists. Then, as if to himself, Litvinov asked, “Lattimore, perhaps?”66
Lattimore went to see the American ambassador, William Bullitt. “An inspiring thing has happened,” he told Bullitt, “the Mongols have achieved full independence.” “Was there no Soviet control or Red Army there?” Bullitt asked. None whatsoever, Lattimore replied. He asked Bullitt to write FDR at once and make the case for recognizing the People’s Republic of Mongolia, which would help to get it into the League of Nations. Bullitt thought that was an amazing request, for having Mongolia in the League would only give the Soviets an additional vote.
Bullitt knew more about Mongolia than Lattimore realized, for he was a longtime friend of Lev Karakhan, the deputy commissar for foreign affairs. In 1934, Karakhan was sent to Mongolia to put down another uprising. Upon his return, he went to the American embassy and told Bullitt in confidence that it had been a small matter, since the Soviets ran the army and the police with OGPU agents. “All I had to do,” he said, “was oversee the purge. In a country of nomads, there are only 300 or 400 people who count. All I did on a given night was to have about 400 seized by our OGPU men, and I had them shot before dawn and installed the people that the Soviet government wanted, and Mongolia is now completely ruled by the OGPU.” After having hundreds shot, Karakhan found himself at the wrong end of a firing squad during Stalin’s purges.67
In his self-appointed role as defender of the Soviet faith, Lattimore offered a tortuous absolution of the purges in an editorial in Pacific Affairs in September 1938. “Verbatim records of the trials are entirely credible,” he wrote. “A great many abuses have been discovered and rectified…. Habitual rectification can hardly do anything but give the ordinary citizen more courage to protest, loudly, whenever he finds himself victimized by ‘someone in the party,’ or ‘someone in the government.’ That sounds to me like democracy.” Nicholas Poppe had a slight correction. “The Soviet Union,” he said, “is a democracy with concentration camps.”68
It was on the trip with Henry Wallace that Lattimore outdid himself as a one-man pro-Soviet claque. On May 22, 1944, they crossed the Bering Strait from Alaska to Siberia in a C-54 transport. On May 24 they reached the port city of Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk, in deepest Siberia, where forty below was considered mild. A city of forty thousand, Magadan was the capital of the Kolyma district and the headquarters of the Dalstroi, or Far Northern Construction Trust, which Wallace described as “a combination TVA and Hudson’s Bay Company.” The trust operated one hundred mines, most of them gold, over a four-hundred-mile-long area, with a work force of 300,000. Wallace and his entourage, which included John Carter Vincent as his State Department adviser, visited a hog farm and heard the Red Army Choir sing at the Magadan House of Culture. Wallace found the people he met “not unlike our farming people in the United States.”69
On May 26, he visited two Kolyma gold mines, where the men dug up piles of gold-bearing rocks. They were on a three-year contract, Wallace was told, and were paid two thousand rubles a month. After seeing the mines, the Dalstroi director, Ivan Nikishov, took Wallace for a walk in the taiga. “He gamboled around like a calf enjoying the wonderful air immensely,” Wallace wrote in his diary.70
After Siberia, the Wallace caravan moved to China. They were back in Washington on July 10, having covered 27,000 miles in fifty-one days. In the December 1944 issue of National Geographic, Lattimore published a glowing account of Siberia entitled “New Road to Asia.” In the gold mines of the Kolyma valley, he found “instead of sin, gin and brawling of the old-time gold rush, extensive greenhouses growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and even melons, to make sure that the hardy miners get enough vitamins!” The miners in the photographs he took did indeed look strong and healthy. Nikishov and his wife, Lattimore said, “have a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civil responsibility.”
Wallace said that Siberia reminded him of the American Far West, with its pioneers. He did not realize that the tens of thousands of “settlers” in the Kolyma valley were not there voluntarily. Kolyma was part of Stalin’s vast system of gulags, which exposed, better than any other feature, the criminal underpinnings of the Soviet state. The vast penal complex of Kolyma went back to the thirties, when Stalin made gold mining a priority to pay for the purchase of Western machinery. The city of Magadan had been built by prisoners, as had the roads linking it with the camps. In 1939, the 140,000 Kolyma convicts extracted 35 percent of all the Soviet gold produced that year. Hours were long, rations were short, and conditions were harsh. The death toll was estimated at one third of the prisoners per year.71
In June 1951, an article appeared in the Reader’s Digest entitled “Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps.” It was written by Elinor Lipper, who had been an inmate in the Kolyma gulag at the time of the Wallace visit. “No other visit,” she wrote, “ever aroused so much excitement as Henry Wallace’s visit to Kolyma during the war. The NKVD carried off its job with flying colors. Mr. Wallace saw nothing of this frozen hell with its hundreds of thousands of the damned…the wooden watchtowers were razed in a single night…the prisoners had three successive holidays, for during his stay, not a single prisoner was allowed to leave the camp.” Wallace had admired the 350-mile road that ran from Magadan northward over the mountains. “Tens of thousands of prisoners had given their lives in building it,” wrote Lipper. Wallace had described Nikishov as “gamboling about.” “It is too bad,” she continued, “that Wallace never saw him ‘gamboling about’ in one of his drunk rages, raining filthy, savage language upon the heads of exhausted, starving prisoners.” The entire population of Kolyma “is made up of victims of political oppression.” The smiling miners that Lattimore had snapped were NKVD gulag guards. The fruit and the vegetables he had seen in the greenhouses were for the staff.
When a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the Institute of Pacific Relations in 1951, Wallace testified on October 17 and acknowledged that he had been duped on his visit to Magadan. “I was not going out of my way to find slave labor,” he said. “The Russians were going all out to impress me.”72
As for Lattimore, after the war he turned against Chiang Kai-shek as China teetered on the edge of civil war. He called the Kuomintang “the war party,” as if the Chinese Communists were the party of peace. When Mao Tse-tung ousted Chiang in 1949, Lattimore became a target for the “Who lost China?” camp in Congress.73
At the time of the Tydings hearings in March 1950, when McCarthy made his charges, Lattimore was in Afghanistan on a mission for the United Nations. He returned to testify before the committee on April 6, taking an hour and forty minutes to read a ten-thousand-word statement in which he gave as good as he got. He called McCarthy “a willing tool” of the China lobby, “the simple dupe of fanatical persons.” He detailed his brief assignments for the State Department: a speech as part of a lecture series; in October 1944, a two-day panel discussion on China; in 1945, three months on a reparations mission to Japan. That was it. He denied all of McCarthy’s charges.
Joe was in need of reinforcements, and on April 20, 1950, the cavalry came to the rescue in the form of Louis Budenz. The fifty-eight-year-old Budenz had left the party in 1945 and become a professional witness. He made a living and a reputation by naming those he had known in the party, and sometimes, those he had not known.74
On April 20, 1950, Budenz testified before the Tydings Committee that Lattimore had been part of a Communist cell in the Institute of Pacific Relations. This was quite a surprise, since less than a month before, Budenz had testified at another hearing that he knew four hundred concealed Communists, of whom he named quite a few, but not Lattimore. He also admitted that he had never met Lattimore or told the FBI about Lattimore. Apparently, Lattimore was a recent discovery. On April 21, J. Edgar Hoover pointed out in a memo to Attorney General J. Howard McGrath that Budenz had never previously mentioned Lattimore, though he had been grilled about Amerasia. But the FBI did not inform the Tydings Committee of its doubts.75
Another ex-Communist, James Glassner, who had been managing editor of the Daily Worker when Budenz was labor editor, told the FBI that Budenz was “fabricating smears against Lattimore” and that his remarks should be discounted as “emanating from a psychopathic liar.” As Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico put it: “I do not think he knows the truth from falsehood any more.”76
As the Tydings hearings proceeded, McCarthy seemed to be stealing the show. His strategy of throwing out charges daily was harvesting headlines such as “McCarthy Names Reds,” “McCarthy Calls State Department Envoy Red,” and “Has McCarthy Struck Red Gold?” Intended as an investigation of McCarthy’s accusations on the floor of the Senate, the hearings were turning into Joe’s pulpit. In the Christian Science Monitor, Richard L. Strout described the Tydings Committee as “close to the breaking point” as McCarthy admonished, lectured, and reproved it. “If he can only make it stick it will be a major blow to the Truman administration.”77
Tydings, whose effort to chastise McCarthy had the President’s blessing, asked Truman for help “to hold the line and prevent public smear sessions.” Truman had said on February 24 that he would not comply with committee requests to subpoena loyalty files. But Tydings desperately needed to see the files that McCarthy kept ranting about in order to discredit him. On March 16, White House aide Donald Dawson told Truman that Tydings wanted the files turned over “as soon as possible.” That way, instead of relying on “one-sided extracts” revealed by McCarthy, committee members would be able to inspect the full files and decide whether or not his charges were trumped up.78
On March 30, 1950, at the Little White House in Key West, Truman was still mulling over what to do, at a time when the polls showed that 50 percent of the people held a “favorable opinion” of Joe. Sitting in a wicker chair with reporters around him in a circle, he angrily called McCarthy “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has.”
Joe’s attacks were partisan politics as usual, Truman believed, for “the Republican party has endorsed the antics of Mr. McCarthy.”
Tydings saw Truman at Blair House on April 28, and explained why his committee needed to see the files that McCarthy had obtained from the Lee list. The next day, Truman told his assistant press secretary, Eben Ayers, that Tydings “has in mind to finish the discrediting of McCarthy.” An investigator named Lee, Truman continued, who was a Republican, had “abstracted or stolen” some loyalty files and furnished them to McCarthy. Tydings was hoping to bring these facts out, which “may go so far as to result in the Senate acting to throw out McCarthy.”79
Tydings was calling the White House half a dozen times a day. Truman was with Ayers when he took one of his calls on April 29. Ayers recalled that “after he hung up the president commented that Tydings was the most nervous individual he ever saw.”
In its May 15 issue, Newsweek reported a secret meeting in Tydings’s apartment to plot a strategy to destroy McCarthy. Among those present were the committee counsel, Edward P. Morgan, and John Peurifoy, now deputy undersecretary of state, who agreed with the President’s decision to release the files. The object of the meeting, said the article, was “the total and eternal destruction” of McCarthy. The strategy was to show that “his sensational accusations stemmed from a two-year-old trial of State Department ‘suspects’ already examined by four congressional committees which remained unimpressed.”80
Truman made the files available on May 4. On May 10, several committee members, including Henry Cabot Lodge, trooped down to a White House office where the files were piled on a big table under guard. Reading them was a laborious process. These were raw files with sometimes as many as thirty FBI interviews in a single case. It took Tydings two days to get through a dozen files. Lodge found that “the files alone did not furnish a basis for reaching firm conclusions of any kind…. The files which I read were in such an unfinished state” that to go through them “would be a waste of time.”81
Tydings realized that his plan to confront McCarthy with material from the files was not feasible. He called the White House daily to explain that the files were more than they had bargained for. He was looking for a way out. At a staff meeting on May 25, Truman said: “He got himself into it, now it is up to him to get out of it.” On June 8, Truman said that “Tydings has given every indication of being in a state of panic and of lacking any backbone or courage in dealing with the situation.” Tydings wanted Truman to give him an escape hatch by announcing that the committee should complete its study of the files by June 21. Truman said he would do no such thing, for it would only result in charges that the President was trying to bottle the files up.82
Thus it was that, unable to confront McCarthy over the Lee files, the committee drifted into an investigation of the Amerasia case. Once again, McCarthy made wild charges that turned the hearings into a carnival. A terminal weariness set in and on June 25 the invasion of South Korea provided a new and far graver crisis. On June 28, in a closed session, Tydings said: “I think our work is pretty well concluded, if you want my opinion.”
Bourke Hickenlooper, one of the two Republicans on the committee, begged to differ. “I don’t think it was ever started, Mr. Chairman,” he said. The other Republican, Henry Cabot Lodge, said there were too many unanswered questions, any of which, such as the hiring of “sexual perverts” by the State Department, “would be good for six, seven, or eight months.” On this partisan note, the hearings ended.83
The 313-page Tydings report, released on July 20, was signed by the three Democrats on the committee, but not by the two Republicans. The report was an indictment of McCarthy’s charges and methods. It described his selection of cases from the Lee list as “twisted, colored and perverted.” There were three cases of mistaken identity. The charges were “a fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the Senate of the United States…the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruths in the history of the Republic.”
The report denounced the Republican members of the committee, Hickenlooper and Lodge, for failing to examine the files made available by the President. Lodge had looked at a dozen and Hickenlooper only at nine. Nonetheless, the report concluded that the review of the loyalty files had failed to turn up a single Communist. The idea of a “spy ring” at the State Department was “preposterous,” it said. The charges against the China hand John Carter Vincent were called “absurd.” Regarding Lattimore, McCarthy was accused of a “distortion of the facts on such a magnitude as to be truly alarming.” In the case of John Stewart Service, who had handed over classified documents to Philip Jaffe in the Amerasia case, the report said: “We must conclude that Service was extremely indiscreet,” but this was insufficient “to brand him…as disloyal, pro-Communist, or a security risk.”84
The report concluded that McCarthy “has stooped to a new low in his cavalier disregard of the facts.” It was itself cavalier, however, for it included some serious misstatements. It said that all McCarthy’s names came from the Lee list, whereas thirty-four did not. It said: “The sub-committee of the House Appropriations Committee…which considered the 108 memoranda, did not regard them as of sufficient significance even to submit a report concerning them or the loyalty of the State Department personnel generally.”
But the Stefan subcommittee had issued a report on February 27, 1948. Far from clearing the State Department, it had repeatedly expressed its alarm at the laxity of its security procedures. When the Appropriations Committee chairman, John Taber, presented the findings of the Stefan subcommittee to the House in March, he said they “indicated a very large number of Communists on the rolls of the State Department.”
The Tydings report said that the Chenoweth Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department had also “indicated their satisfaction” with the loyalty situation. This was the committee that had grilled Hamilton Robinson, whom one of its members, Fred Busbey, called incompetent on the floor of the House. Clearly, the committees cited by Tydings had reported the opposite of what he had them saying.85
On July 20, when the full Senate debated the Tydings report, the air was electric with partisan energy. When Tydings strode in, wrote the reporter for The New Republic, the Democrats were “positively growling for revenge…. You could hear a hoarse, angry mutter.” For two hours Tydings thundered against McCarthy, calling him a charlatan guilty of exploiting his office. When William Jenner of Indiana denounced Tydings for “the most scandalous and brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history,” Tydings responded: “You will find out who has been whitewashing—with mud and slime, with filth…at the expense of the people’s love for their country.”86
In the full Senate, the Tydings report was adopted with a vote along party lines. Facing reelection in Ohio that fall, Taft kept his troops in line. Joe knew he could count on the Taft Republicans, for he had become the standard-bearer for his party.
With the assistance of President Truman, the Tydings investigation developed into a Democratic scheme to discredit McCarthy. Joe greatly assisted the scheme with a number of unfounded accusations, but the Tydings Committee failed to consider the genuine problem of State Department laxity and falsified its report.
Lattimore’s troubles were not over. In 1952, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee opened hearings on the Institute of Pacific Relations. Lattimore was at the heart of those hearings and testified for twelve days. His sarcasm and arrogance did not endear him to the committee. At the outset, he qualified the committee’s output as “a nightmare of outrageous lies, shaky hearsay, and undisguised personal spite.” Genuinely surprised, committee member Arthur V. Watkins asked: “Why do you start out abusing us?”
J. G. Sourwine, the committee counsel, asked: “Does your ego compel you to the conclusion that the committee is after you?” “Not my ego,” Lattimore replied, “my epidermis.”
Later on, Lattimore corrected Sourwine on his grammar. Sourwine asked: “Do you want to make a distinction here between being unbiased and being unable fairly to appraise the facts?”
“I will rejoin the split infinitive,” Lattimore replied. “Unable to appraise the facts fairly.” In fact, “unable fairly to appraise” was not a split infinitive.
Lattimore managed to antagonize every senator on the committee. He called William Knowland, an admirer of Chiang Kai-shek, “the senator from Formosa.”
When Democratic Senator Willis Smith of North Carolina asked him a question about McCarthy, Lattimore asked: “Is your argument, senator, a post hoc, ergo propter hoc?”
Smith: “I am asking you in plain language.”
Lattimore: “I should say that Senator McCarthy is a graduate witch-burner.”
Smith: “I am going to retain my composure…regardless of his truculence and his petulance or his arrogance.”87
Lattimore’s testimony led to an indictment for perjury on such trivial counts as his failure to remember the date of a lunch with the Soviet ambassador, Constantine Oumansky. On May 3, 1953, a federal judge threw out four of the seven counts. The Court of Appeals sustained the dismissal on July 8, 1954. The Justice Department obtained a new indictment on October 7, 1954. On January 18, 1955, the same judge, Luther W. Youngdahl, threw out the indictment again, and the Justice Department dropped the prosecution. A more pertinent but unstated charge would have been: boorishness before a Senate subcommittee.88
On June 24, 1950, President Truman was spending a quiet weekend at home in Independence. After an early dinner and small talk on the screened porch with his wife and daughter, he went to bed at nine. Acheson called Truman at 9:30 P.M. Missouri time: “Mr. President, I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”
Acheson summoned the United Nations Security Council for an emergency meeting on Sunday, June 25. The Security Council passed a resolution 9 to 0, calling the invasion “an act of aggression” and demanding the withdrawal of North Korean forces to the 38th parallel. There was no Soviet veto because the Soviet delegate was boycotting meetings to protest the denial of U.N. membership to the People’s Republic of China.
On June 30, with the fall of Seoul and the South Korean army in tatters, Truman ordered U.S. ground forces in Japan to Korea, under the command of General MacArthur and under the U.N. umbrella. With these decisive actions, Truman saved South Korea and started a war that lasted three years and left 33,629 Americans dead.
The Korean War instantly validated and magnified McCarthy’s appeal. He could go on distorting the truth in speech after speech, but a growing number of Americans were prepared to believe him when he linked the war with the State Department whitewash. On July 2, 1950, he said that “American boys are dying in Korea” because “a group of untouchables in the State Department sabotaged the aid program” for Asia.89
On July 12, Joe gave vent to his bile in a letter to President Truman: “Today American boys lie dead in the mud of Korean valleys. Some have their hands tied behind their backs, their faces shot away by Communist machine guns…. They are dead because the program adopted by this Congress [to arm Korea] to avoid such a war…was sabotaged.”90
Joe was on a roll. In Madison, the Republican boss Tom Coleman saw him as the hope of the GOP. He did not think McCarthy’s charges were overdrawn, and praised him for his tenacity and determination. Joe wrote Coleman that he thought Communism in government would be a major campaign issue in the fall. “Had we won a quick, speedy victory in Korea without many casualties, the administration might have been bailed out,” he said. The implication was that for a Republican triumph in the fall of 1950, it was better to have a long war with a high number of American casualties.91
During the campaigns that fall, Joe was in demand all over the map. He gave more than thirty speeches in fifteen states, although not up for reelection himself until 1952. This gave him plenty of time to go after his enemies in the Senate, such as Scott Lucas in Illinois, Brien McMahon in Connecticut, and Millard Tydings in Maryland. McCarthy attacked them by name, saying at a Republican rally in Hyattsville, Maryland: “Lucas provided the whitewash when I charged there were Communists in high places. McMahon brought the bucket; Tydings the brush.”92 It was amazing how an accusation repeated often enough became embedded in people’s minds, for Joe had not found any Communists in high places, he had only made it sound as if there were some. In November 1950 McCarthy reached the apogee of his cometlike trajectory; he seemed bathed in an aura of political invincibility.
The result for the Democrats was a loss of five seats in the Senate, among them Scott Lucas and Millard Tydings. But they still held the Senate by two votes. In the House they lost twenty-eight seats, but kept a comfortable majority. It was not a disaster, but it hurt. The true importance of the campaign was the adoption by Republicans of the scare tactics pioneered by McCarthy.
Egregious misconduct in the Maryland campaign came under the scrutiny of the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, which held hearings from February 20 to April 11, 1951. This would be the second year in a row that McCarthy was investigated by his colleagues. The members were Guy M. Gillette of Iowa (chairman), Thomas Hennings Jr. of Missouri, Mike Monroney of Oklahoma, Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey, and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine.
Facing Tydings in Maryland, John Marshall Butler, a Baltimore lawyer who had never run for office, was happy to have Joe and his staff plan his campaign. Also on board was Ruth McCormick “Bazy” Miller, niece of the colonel and editor of the Washington Times Herald. She brought in Jon Jonkel, a public relations man from Chicago, as campaign manager. Running against a well-known incumbent cost money, and Joe helped raise it, getting $10,000 from Texas oilman Clint Murchison alone.
As Jonkel put it at the hearing: “We took advantage of every leak in Tydings’ canoe.” Maryland was a Democratic state, but in 1950 the party was split. “That was the biggest stripe on the barber pole,” Jonkel said. They started out with one-inch ads that said “Be for Butler,” to give him name recognition. Then they ran some radio spots with the sound of brakes squealing and the message “stop wasting government money,” to put Tydings on the defensive.93
Roscoe Simmons, a black evangelist from Illinois who wrote articles in the Chicago Tribune, was imported for six weeks to get out Maryland’s large black vote. Tydings was unpopular with blacks, for he opposed civil rights measures. As the Baptist preacher James T. Boddie put it at the hearing: “We didn’t receive any of the crumbs, much less a slice.” “I spoke in saloons,” Simmons said, “I spoke in churches, I spoke under trees and on street corners, I spoke in the fields.” His slogan was “Back to Good Old Dixie.”94
The crowning achievement of the McCarthy-assisted campaign was a four-page tabloid called From the Record, ostensibly put out by “Young Democrats for Butler,” a shell group formed in mid-October. Half a million copies of the tabloid inundated the state a few days before the election, run off by the Times Herald printer at a modest cost of $1,440.
A front-page headline said “Tydings Group Held Up Arms.” “One of the fundamental reasons for our early failure in the Korean war,” said the story, “is being charged to the Senate Armed Forces Committee headed by Tydings…. Congress appropriated $87,300,000 to arm the South Koreans…. Only $200 of this money was spent before the North Koreans attacked. It was spent for baling wire.” This was one of Joe’s familiar and disproven refrains. On page 3, another article was headlined “Tydings Committee Blamed for High Korean Casualties.” The article noted 343 casualties from Maryland alone.
On page 4, there was a composite photograph of Browder and Tydings, captioned: “Communist leader Earl Browder, shown at left, in this composite picture, was a star witness at the Tydings Committee hearings and was cajoled into saying that Owen Lattimore and others were not Communists. Tydings answered, ‘Oh thank you sir.’ ” The picture of Tydings had been taken in 1938, that of Browder in 1950.
Frank Smith, the chief editorial writer for the Times Herald, testified that it was Bazy Miller “who came up with the composite idea. We got out pictures showing Browder talking and Tydings listening…. It was not a fake…. It was not a fraud. It was not proposed to deceive anyone. It was plainly marked composite…. A white line down the middle clearly indicated it was two pictures.” But most people who saw it thought it was one picture.
Garvin Tankersley, the Times Herald photo editor (soon to marry Bazy Miller), said: “We wanted to show that Mr. Tydings did treat Mr. Browder with kid gloves…. No secret on that.”95 Those responsible for the tabloid seemed proud of their accomplishment. There was not a hint of apology in their testimony.
McCarthy told Tom Coleman, who called the composite picture “inexcusable and needless,” that he had nothing to do with it. He was generally credited with the Butler victory, though there were signs that Tydings had worn out his welcome in the disaffection of the labor vote, the Catholic vote, and the black vote.
The subcommittee report, released on August 2, 1951, said that “the Maryland campaign was not just another campaign. It brought into sharp focus campaign tactics and practices that can best be characterized as destructive of fundamental American principles.” The tabloid “ignored simple decency and common honesty.” The composite picture was a “shocking abuse of the spirit and intent of the First Amendment.”
Joe ended the year with two more mishaps, one a flirtation with the lunatic right, the other a brawl at a black-tie affair with a famous columnist. On November 9, 1950, Secretary of Defense George Marshall offered the job of assistant secretary for manpower to a woman, a small but stylish woman who wore jangling bracelets and high heels, and who had also held a dozen government jobs in the fields of labor and manpower—Anna M. Rosenberg, born in Hungary in 1901. Marshall needed someone capable of handling the manpower problems resulting from the Korean War.
Almost at once, the extreme right wing launched an anti-Anna campaign. On November 10, the right-wing commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. said on the radio that Anna in her youth had belonged to a John Reed Club. He had it from J. B. Matthews, the former Dies Committee researcher, who was now in private practice with his files and had distributed a nine-page sheet listing Rosenberg’s alleged front affiliations. Benjamin H. Freedman, a Jewish right-winger in New York, printed 25,000 copies of Matthews’s charges. There was some hesitation as to whether they had the right Anna Rosenberg, but on November 27, a memo from Matthews said: “There is not the slightest doubt that this is the Anna Rosenberg” cited in the Dies hearings. On November 29, the Armed Services Committee met to consider the nomination. Rosenberg testified that she was not the person cited. There were forty-six Anna Rosenbergs in New York, she said, which was why she always used her middle initial, M. After a session that lasted an hour and ten minutes, all thirteen senators voted to confirm.96
But her foes did not give up. Freedman flew to Washington to see the anti-Semitic Mississippi Congressman John E. Rankin, who denounced Anna M. on the floor of the House. The anti-Semitic demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith, who was organizing his own campaign, teamed up with Freedman, who by this time had gotten on to Ralph De Sola. We last met De Sola as a witness before the Dies Committee, testifying about Communists in the Writers’ Project. He then launched a career as a professional witness, and boasted that he had met with the FBI 125 times. But he was spread so thin in his eagerness to provide leads that he began mixing people up. He claimed to have met Anna Rosenberg at Communist front meetings. Freedman flew to Washington on December 4 with a signed statement from De Sola, which he presented to Georgia Senator Richard Russell, who had replaced Tydings as chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Freedman asked that the confirmation hearings be reopened.
In the meantime, the Reverend Wesley Smith, still another anti-Semite, who refused to concede that Christ was a Jew, passed on to Joe some anti-Anna evidence. Joe saw not only a promising “Communist in government” issue, but a way of attacking Marshall, whom he considered responsible for the loss of China because of his ill-fated mission there in 1945.97
Joe sent an investigator, the ex-FBI man Don Surine, to New York to check out De Sola, who identified a 1936 photograph of Anna M. Rosenberg as the woman he had known.98
On December 5, 1950, the Armed Services Committee reopened the hearings, which lasted through December 14. The face-off at the hearing between De Sola and Anna Rosenberg took place on December 8. Senator William Knowland of California asked De Sola how he could definitely identify someone he had seen fifteen years before, but De Sola was positive. He had seen Anna at a meeting “in the late summer and fall of 1934 and 1935.”
Rosenberg: “And I spoke to you?”
De Sola: “Yes, you spoke about what an excellent device the John Reed Club had been for a sounding board for Communist propaganda and as a recruiting ground.”
Rosenberg: “Mr. De Sola, I don’t believe that any human being wants to do what you are doing purposely. You came into the room and you said, ‘this is the woman.’ You never looked at me. Do you know what you are doing to me?”
De Sola: “I am looking at you and I am looking at you now…. We stood up when we talked. Would you mind standing up?”
Rosenberg: “I will stand up. Now tell me, am I the woman in the John Reed Club?”
De Sola: “Yes, ma’am you are; I am sorry to say so…. I am sorry to see that we have a Secretary of Defense who had to be assisted by a Communist. I am sorry for our country.”
Rosenberg: “…I have never seen this man in my life…. I have no recollection of ever seeing his face.”
With the appearance of other witnesses, De Sola’s credibility unraveled. De Sola had claimed that James McGraw, a project supervisor on the Writers’ Project and a Communist, had told him that Anna Rosenberg had recruited other Communists for the project. But when McGraw testified, he affirmed under oath that he had never been a Communist. He had been the superior of De Sola, whom he judged to be “a person of extreme dishonesty who would stop at nothing for bits of notoriety in which he could stand out.” De Sola had mentioned the former FBI agent George J. Starr as someone who could corroborate his testimony. When Starr testified, he seemed well disposed toward De Sola, but had to admit that they had never discussed Anna Rosenberg or the John Reed Club.
De Sola saw himself as a heroic figure, another Whittaker Chambers, and he said in his defense that “the very brilliance of Mrs. Rosenberg, her record of achievement, as fine if not finer than that of Alger Hiss, is in itself a threat.” He succumbed to the built-in flaws of the professional witness trade. When you started out, you had an inventory of names, but when your inventory ran out, and you were still in demand, you got careless because you didn’t want to disappoint. When the FBI was unable to track down any of those whom he claimed would corroborate his testimony, they stopped using him.99
The Armed Services Committee quickly confirmed Anna M. Rosenberg. When the confirmation came before the full Senate, even McCarthy voted for her. The by-products of the confirmation were that De Sola was finished as a paid informant and that McCarthy was linked to right-wing crackpots. As Hoover wrote Senator Mike Monroney on April 3, 1951: “Edward K. Nellor, leg man for Fulton Lewis, planned and executed the Anna Rosenberg smear for Lewis and Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.” After the hearing, the FBI found the Anna Rosenberg cited by the Dies Committee in California, where she had moved years before Ralph De Sola said he had met her.100
On December 12, 1950, Louise Tinsley Steinman, the well-connected daughter of an Ohio newspaper publisher, held a dinner dance in the ballroom of Washington’s Sulgrave Club in honor of Senator James H. Duff of Pennsylvania. Whether she did it to be provocative or without thinking, she invited both Drew Pearson and McCarthy and sat them at the same table. More than any other newspaperman, Pearson was an almost chronic pain in Joe’s epiderm.
The most influential of the syndicated columnists, Pearson was also the first to take on McCarthy, right after the Wheeling speech, when he wrote that “every man on the McCarthy list has already been scrutinized” by other committees. “Sen. McCarthy is way off-base.” After that, the muckraking Pearson never let up, in his column “Washington Merry-Go-Round” or in his weekly radio program. During the Tydings hearings, Pearson discredited McCarthy’s main witness, the ex-Communist Louis Budenz, by revealing that “Budenz was married to two women at the same time” and had “three children born out of wedlock.” By June 1950, Pearson had devoted more than forty columns in full or in part to the disparagement of McCarthy, dredging up such matters as the Lustron payment and Joe’s tax problems.101 At that time Joe approached Pearson’s leg man, Jack Anderson, and told him, “I’m going to have to go after your boss. I mean no holds barred.”102
As Pearson sat down with his wife at Louise Steinman’s dinner, he was dismayed to see McCarthy on the other side of the table. “I’m going to tear you limb from limb” was Joe’s greeting, referring to a speech he planned to make on the Senate floor.
“How is your income tax case coming along? When are they going to put you in jail?” Pearson asked. Joe jumped up from his chair, went over to where Pearson was sitting, grabbed the back of his neck with his thumb and forefinger, and said “You take that back.” Pearson started to get up, but Mrs. William McCracken, the wife of a Washington lawyer, told him, “Don’t be a fool. Sit down. Can’t you see he’s been drinking? Don’t embarrass your hostess.” During the rest of the dinner and dancing, Pearson kept an eye on Joe, who always had a glass in his hand.103
When Pearson and his wife left the ballroom and went down to the cloakroom, Pearson gave his check to the attendant and reached into his pocket for change. Joe came up behind him, pinned his arms, wheeled him around, and kicked him in the groin, saying: “Keep your hands out of your pockets…. No guns,” as if he thought Pearson was armed. Then he said, “Take that back about my taxes.” Richard Nixon arrived and pulled them apart, saying, “Break it up like old New England Puritans.” Frank Waldrop of the Times Herald recalled getting a call late that night from a drunken Joe, bragging that he’d kicked Drew “in the nuts.” Again this interest in damaged testicles.104
On December 15, McCarthy gave a two-hour speech in the Senate, most of which was a compilation of the indignation expressed about Pearson by other congressmen and public officials. Protected by Senate immunity, he called Pearson a “Moscow-directed character assassin.” He told loyal Americans to notify the Communist’s radio sponsor, the Adam Hat Company, that “anyone who buys an Adam hat, any store that stocks an Adam hat, anyone who buys from a store that stocks an Adam hat, is unknowingly and innocently contributing at least something to the cause of international Communism.” Adam Hat caved in, but other sponsors stepped into the breach.105
Pearson filed a $5.1 million libel suit against McCarthy and asked for heavy damages for the unprovoked Sulgrave Club assault. Pearson’s lawyer was William A. Roberts, who had been present at the Sulgrave. When Roberts took a wide-ranging pretrial deposition from McCarthy on September 26, 1951, there was a tense moment when he asked about Thomas Korb having been in Joe’s office at the time of the Malmédy hearings. McCarthy said Korb was there to see that justice was done to the accused SS. “The Germans were given a mock trial,” said Joe, “fake convictions, a fake death sentence…. It was stuff to make you vomit.” Roberts replied: “What makes me vomit is what the Nazis did.”106
The libel case dragged on until combat fatigue set in, when it was dropped in 1956.
The year had been a busy one for Joe. He was now a national figure, at the cost of some credibility and considerable criticism from some of his fellow senators.
McCarthy’s apex in irresponsibility came with his attack on June 14, 1951, on George Marshall, in a sixty-thousand-word speech on the Senate floor. Why attack Marshall, the least self-serving of men, aide to General John Pershing in World War I, Army Chief of Staff in World War II, Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, and now Secretary of Defense? There was no rational reason to go after this American icon. Perhaps Joe the giant-killer wanted to cut down to size one of the few American statesmen held above reproach.
Joe did not write the three-hour diatribe, which showed enough knowledge of diplomatic and military history to twist it out of shape. Later, in his deposition before William Roberts, he would declare: “I can hardly say that I am the author of it.” The principal author was Forrest Davis, a deeply conservative onetime editorial writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer. McCarthy by himself would never have referred to “the great Swedish Chancellor Oxenstiern” or quoted Shakespeare.
It was an outrageous rant, in which Marshall was made the villain for everything from Pearl Harbor to backing a premature second front in 1942 to the loss of China and the Korean War. Marshall, “this grim and solitary man,” was behind every incident in American foreign policy since the war. It was the “single cause” explanation that mental health doctors attribute to paranoid minds.
McCarthy’s discussion of the Marshall Plan was particularly ludicrous. He had voted for the Marshall Plan, he said, but now saw that it had made the United States “the patsy of the modern world.” He wondered what had prompted Marshall and answered his own question—it was Earl Browder’s book on the Teheran conference, Our Path in War and Peace. Here was McCarthy recommending a book by the leader of the U.S. Communist Party because he found in it “the blueprint for…indiscriminate benevolence abroad comprehended in the Marshall Plan,” this “massive and unrewarding boondoggle.”107
Joe was not arguing facts, but “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy so black that…its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.” Quoting from Macbeth, he said of Marshall: “I am in blood steeped so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as going o’er.”108 A more pertinent Shakespearean phrase would have been: “This is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Marshall refused to comment. If he had to explain that he was not a traitor at this point in his life, he told friends, it was not worth the trouble. He retired that September at the age of seventy-one, perhaps disgusted with the political climate, as Senator Baldwin had been before him. His final task as Secretary of Defense, at the insistence of Anna Rosenberg, was to review a squad of servicewomen. In 1953, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.109
Following Joe’s tirade, a slight drop in temperature could be noticed among his Republican claque, a slight distancing to avoid contamination. On October 22, 1951, at a press conference in Des Moines, Senator Taft said bluntly: “I don’t think one who overstates his case helps his own case…. His extreme attack against General Marshall was one of the things on which I cannot agree with McCarthy.”110
While Joe, with his pit bull tactics, made many senators reluctant to tangle with him, there was one senator who was not afraid, because he was not a professional politician, and did not have his entire ego invested in reelection. This was Senator William Benton of Connecticut, who could act on his visceral dislikes without fear of retribution.
On August 3, 1951, the Gillette subcommittee report on the Maryland election was released. Reading the report at his home in Southport, Benton, who was a member of the parent Rules Committee, felt that something should be done about McCarthy or the momentum would be lost. There was a case to be made here, under a Senate resolution adopted on April 13, 1950, that any senator indulging in dishonest election practices was subject to expulsion. If he did not follow up, all would evaporate in the haze of Washington’s dog days.
Benton decided to take matters a step further, for the report charged McCarthy with being “a leading and potent force in the election,” and called his tactics “odious.” He would take the floor on Monday, August 6, and move for Joe’s expulsion. He knew that his motion would not pass. A resolution to expel an incumbent senator for unworthy conduct was unheard of. For one thing, senators did not like to take action against other senators—after all, it was a club. For another, expulsion required a two-thirds vote while censure needed only a majority. But Benton wanted to dramatize the issue and perhaps spark a debate.111
On the afternoon of August 6, 1951, Benton introduced a resolution asking the Rules Committee to conduct an investigation to determine “whether or not it should initiate action with a view toward the expulsion from the Senate of…Joseph McCarthy.” Benton suggested that “the Senator from Wisconsin should at once submit his resignation from this body…. If the Senator refuses to resign…then I suggest that at least he refrain from taking any further part in the activities and procedures of the United States Senate until my resolution has been received and reviewed by the Committee on Rules and Administration and until action has been taken upon it by the Committee and by the United States Senate itself.”
Fat chance! Joe countercharged on August 7 that “Benton has established himself as a hero of every Communist and crook in and out of government.” A number of senators had come up to Benton after his speech and told him they admired his courage, but could not back him openly. When the radio commentator Martin Agronsky praised Benton, he lost fifteen local sponsors.112
Benton’s resolution was referred to the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, the same one that had looked into the Maryland election. Benton now had to present an indictment and settled on ten cases where McCarthy had lied to the Senate. Senators, however, do not expel one of their own for lying. If they did, how many would be left? They only took action for offenses against the Senate itself. Since 1871, there had been eight cases of expulsion, but not one senator expelled.
When McCarthy spoke on August 9, offering up an encore of his old accusations, Benton’s challenge seemed to have put some backbone in a few of the other senators, for there was quite a fracas. Joe was still harping on his February 1950 names, and said that twenty-nine of them were pending before the loyalty board. He had written “The Red Dean” Acheson to take steps against them, but had received a reply from Deputy Undersecretary of State Carlisle Humelsine on July 25 saying that he was mistaken—the twenty-nine were in varying categories. Some were being processed by the loyalty board. “Your indiscriminate lumping together of names…is tantamount to holding hostage the reputation of these employees,” Humelsine wrote.
McCarthy then said he was about to be “damned from hell to breakfast…. I understand that one senator would like to see the Senator from Wisconsin expelled from the Senate because he exposed our friend Millard Tydings.”
Joe went on to attack Philip Jessup, ambassador-at-large for the State Department, and one of his nine public cases before the Tydings Committee, for testifying at Hiss’s second trial that his reputation for loyalty and veracity was “outstanding” and for “signing a petition to destroy our atom bombs.”
That was too much for Ernest McFarland of Arizona, the Senate Majority Leader, who rose to say: “I have sat on the floor of the Senate and heard men charged by innuendo and inference, with disloyalty and even with high crimes…without any substantial evidence…. I have heard one senator, by innuendo and insinuation, charge a high official of this government, a man who has served his country for a lifetime with distinction and honor, with being a traitor or near traitor…. To attempt to refute such charges merely dignifies the assertion…. It is beneath the dignity of members of the Senate to smear anybody. When the name of any member of the Senate becomes an adjective for mud-slinging…we have come to a time when a halt must be called.”
Herbert Lehman of New York sided with McFarland: “The process of making charges…under the protection of Congressional immunity is a form of character assassination which all of us must abhor and condemn.” Philip Jessup, Lehman added, “deserves much better of his fellow citizens than the shabby and dastardly treatment which is accorded him here.”
Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska told Lehman he was out of order under Senate Rule 19, that one senator could not impute improper motives to another. Lehman said he would substitute the word “cowardly” for “dastardly.”
McCarthy said he was sure the Majority Leader did not wish to label “a once great party as a party which stands for the protection of Communists and crooks in government.”
McFarland: “I am not going to be goaded into a colloquy with the junior Senator from Wisconsin.”
Joe said he was tired of those Democrats “who get up and scream to high heaven, ‘Joe McCarthy, you are smearing these poor innocent Communists.’ ” (Applause from the galleries.)113
Without mentioning McCarthy’s name, President Truman on August 14 called on the American people to put an end to hate-mongers “who are trying to divide and confuse us and tear up the Bill of Rights.”
At that time, in the Truman White House, a debate was simmering on the correct tactics to employ against McCarthy. At a meeting on August 24, 1951, the recently appointed press secretary, Joe Short, who had replaced Charlie Ross, took the line that the State Department habit of replying to each and every charge that McCarthy made was counterproductive, and he asked the President’s permission to “tell State to lay off.” George Elsey, the assistant to Truman’s special counsel, Charles Murphy, who had replaced Clark Clifford in 1950, thought he spoke for most of the White House staff in saying that “a forceful, direct rebuttal to McCarthy’s lies and reckless charges is necessary. The ‘be quiet and it will go away’ approach did not work.” In a memo to Murphy, Elsey wrote, “I do not think we should stand by and let Short put the lid on State without having a thorough airing of the situation.” The trouble was that the forceful rebuttal did not work either, for this was not a case of who was right, but of partisan politics, with a presidential election a little more than a year off.114
In the fall of 1951, the Gillette subcommittee was stuck with the Benton resolution. Guy Gillette hoped that it would quietly fade away, but Joe did not allow that to happen: he went on the attack. On September 18, he released a letter to Thomas Hennings of Missouri, questioning his qualifications to sit on the subcommittee. His law partner, John Raeburn Green, was the lawyer for a Smith Act defendant, John Gates, an editor of the Daily Worker “who was recently convicted of plotting to overthrow the government of the United States.” Hennings replied in a speech on the Senate floor on September 21 that Green had been assigned the case by the U.S. Supreme Court. He had taken the appeal without a fee, and the American Bar Association had praised his action as “advocacy…at its noblest.” (John Gates left the party in 1956, calling it “a corpse.”) Joe’s attack on Hennings strengthened the resolve of the subcommittee, which voted on September 24 to hear Benton and rejected McCarthy’s request to cross-examine.115
At this point, Margaret Chase Smith began to have second thoughts about serving on the subcommittee. She was tired of leading the charge with nobody following. Her “Declaration of Conscience” in 1950 had placed her on McCarthy’s hit list. He was the ranking Republican on the Senate Investigation Subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee and bumped her in January 1951. Smith was named to the Rules Committee and assigned to Privileges and Elections, where she helped conduct the investigation on the Maryland election. She had received no support from her party on her “Declaration of Conscience.” Even among the Democrats, few stood up to Joe. Why should she, a Republican, stand alone and see her record in the Senate distorted by his fulminations? On September 24, she wrote Carl Hayden, the chairman of the Rules Committee, that she no longer wished to serve on the subcommittee taking up the Benton resolution.116
On September 28, 1951, the hearings began, with Benton establishing McCarthy’s “pattern of conduct” and presenting his ten cases, from Lustron to Malmédy to Tydings and Marshall. Benton told the committee it was dealing “with a senator thought to be of unsound mind.” When Gillette asked McCarthy if he wanted to respond, he replied on October 4: “Frankly, Guy, I do not intend to read much less answer Benton’s smear attack. I am sure you realize that the Benton type of material can be found in the Daily Worker almost any day of the week.”117
Gillette, though a loyal Democrat, was of the timorous persuasion and did not want to offend anyone. Joe badgered him in a letter on December 6, saying that the subcommittee “spends thousands of taxpayer dollars for the sole purpose of dragging up campaign material against McCarthy” and was “guilty of stealing just as clearly as though the members engaged in picking the pockets of the taxpayers.”
The Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections began to unravel when Smith quit. She was sensitive to Joe’s charges that the subcommittee’s actions would hurt the Republican Party as well as himself. The New Jersey Republican Robert Hendrickson yearned to switch to the more placid Library of Congress Subcommittee, which had a vacancy. He probably would have bolted had McCarthy not approached him in the Senate cloakroom to tell him patronizingly, “You’re doing the right thing by resigning, Bob. It’s the only thing to do with your prejudices.” More than once, events would have gone Joe’s way if he’d kept his mouth shut. Hendrickson soldiered on, writing his brother on January 25, “I do not feel that I can run out in the ‘midst of a trial,’ so to speak, despite Joe McCarthy’s wishes to the contrary.”118
On April 10, the Senate voted 60 to 0 to allow the subcommittee to continue its work. McCarthy introduced a resolution to enlarge the scope to include Senator Benton, which was approved, so that he too was investigated. Then Joe dared Benton to make his charges off the Senate floor, which Benton did, and Joe sued him for $2 million (but dropped the suit in March 1954).119
In May 1952, the committee focused on the Lustron deal. Benton wrote a friend that he was doing “a dirty, unpleasant job, knowing that it was a lot easier for a group of people to corner a skunk and kill him than for one man to do it.” On May 7, Joe wrote Benton that he wanted the case advanced on the calendar. His reason was “that shortly before you appointed yourself to lead the fight to smear and discredit McCarthy, the Communist Party through its then secretary Gus Hall (who has since been jailed), proclaimed the need to rid our country of the fascist poison of McCarthyism…. That there is no question that the aim and objective of the Communist Party and Benton are the same insofar as McCarthy is concerned…the only question is whether it is knowingly or through stupidity.”120
McCarthy had adopted an ipso facto method of logic that branded anyone who criticized him a Communist. On July 30, he made his only appearance before the subcommittee, wheeling in a cart stacked with books and documents and offering “62 different exhibits” to prove that Benton was “paralleling the Communist Party line down to the last period.” In fact, he presented twenty-four exhibits, which proved nothing. One of them alleged that Benton had the Britannica printed in England to avoid union wage scales. Benton said in his rebuttal that Joe had just displayed the pattern of fraud and deception that should be grounds for his expulsion.121
On September 9, 1952, Herman Welker resigned from the subcommittee, calling it “a political vehicle for the Democratic party.” The next day, Gillette resigned, telling Benton that “McCarthy just threatened me. He says that if I continue to press the investigation, he’s going into Iowa and campaign against me and defeat me.” Although Gillette was not up for reelection until 1954, he saw himself as the next Millard Tydings. Mike Monroney went to Europe on a holiday, which left a subcommittee of two, Hennings and Hendrickson. Carl Hayden, the chairman of the parent Rules Committee, volunteered to make it a threesome.
But on November 12, when the hearings resumed, Hennings was nowhere to be found. He was known to go on benders, and on November 13 Benton located him in New York in room 1627 of the Plaza Hotel. He had been seen the night before at a popular nightclub, guzzling martinis.122 The problem now was to get Hendrickson, a Republican, to sign the report. He worried that the criticism of McCarthy would hurt the party. But once again, Joe helped him make up his mind.
In December, McCarthy called Hendrickson’s home in New Jersey. His twenty-one-year-old daughter answered and told Joe that her father was in Washington. He refused to believe her and started snarling that Bob had better come to the phone. Hendrickson told Benton that Joe “gave her a mean time.” Hendrickson’s doubts evaporated, and after a six-martini lunch with Hennings on January 1, 1953, he signed the report, which was released on January 2, the last day of the expiring 82nd Congress.123 Mike Monroney of Oklahoma, the subcommittee member who had left for Europe, had always said, “The way to get at Joe is where does he get his money?” The report focused on his finances, calling the Lustron fee for the booklet on housing “highly improper” and chiding him for using contributions for his anti-Communist crusade to buy soybean futures. But it sidestepped the issue of expulsion, saying that it should be taken up by the entire Senate. Thus Benton’s challenge ended with a pratfall. McCarthy was disruptive, but he was not yet intolerable. Hendrickson had managed to get some embarrassing material cut out of the report. McCarthy thanked him by saying he was “the only man who has lived so long without brains or guts.” At the start of the 83rd Congress, William Jenner became chairman of the Committee on Rules and Administration, and suppressed the report. But it became the basis for McCarthy’s later condemnation.
The farcical voyage aboard the leaky tub Privileges and Elections, from which one senator after another jumped ship, had lasted nearly a year and a half. At the Republican convention in Chicago on July 7, 1952, a bitter affair that dashed the hopes of Harold Stassen and Robert Taft (who died in 1953), Eisenhower was nominated on the first ballot and chose as his running mate Richard Nixon, who acknowledged that anti-Communism was his “road to the ticket.”
Later that month, the Democrats met in Chicago and nominated Adlai Stevenson, who did not espouse the anti-Communist crusade. He said he had no interest in “nervously looking for subversive enemies under the bed and behind the curtain.”124
In July 1952, McCarthy was operated on for a herniated diaphragm, which required the removal of a rib and a twenty-four-inch incision. He had a scar from his stomach to his shoulder blade. The operation gave him chronic pain, and his painkiller came in a bottle. He kept it in his briefcase and reporters saw him drinking whiskey before breakfast. His pal Urban Van Susteren, with whom he stayed in Appleton, saw that “his best friend was now the bottle.” He’d swallow a handful of baking soda to ward off a hangover. “He was like a one-man slum district,” Van Susteren recalled.125
Despite his weakened state, McCarthy traveled to ten states to campaign for his friends: To Arizona to stump for Barry Goldwater, who defeated Joe’s Senate foe Ernest McFarland. To Nevada, Washington, Wyoming, and Montana. To Michigan, Missouri, and Indiana. To West Virginia and Connecticut, where he made three anti-Benton speeches. In Bridgeport, he announced a repetition of the Maryland campaign. The entire Republican hierarchy was there to greet him. In Westbury, he told his audience that Benton “was worth a hundred million dollars to the Kremlin.” One state he avoided was Massachusetts, where Henry Cabot Lodge was fighting off John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Lodge repeatedly asked him to come, but Joe Kennedy told his friend McCarthy to stay away, which he did. Ike came to Boston to praise the incumbent Republican senator at a pre-election rally, but his coattails were not long enough to save Lodge.126
On August 22, Ike was in Denver on his whistle-stop campaign and said that he did not support “Un-Americanism” and “the unjust damaging of reputations.” When a reporter mentioned Marshall, he said, “I have no patience with anyone who can find in his record anything to criticize.” Joe’s attack on Marshall had included a blast at Ike for not taking Berlin in 1945. He accused Ike of stalling and letting the Russians capture the German capital. Ike proposed to his aides that they make the Wisconsin tour an occasion for a Marshall tribute. The aides were divided. Some said “don’t tangle with Joe,” while others suggested staying out of Indiana and Wisconsin, since going there would mean photo ops and podium stances for the two senators who had vilified Marshall, William Jenner and Joe McCarthy. Ike decided to go, and on September 8 he was in Indianapolis with Jenner, who had called Marshall “a front man for traitors.” When Jenner introduced him, he grabbed Ike’s hand and raised it. One of Ike’s speechwriters described him as “almost purple with rage.” “If he puts his hand on me once again, I’m going to knock him right off that platform,” Ike said.127
When Ike’s train chugged through Michigan, Tom Coleman came aboard and warned him not to offend Joe on his home turf. Ike nonetheless asked his speechwriter, Emmet John Hughes, to insert a defense of Marshall in his Milwaukee speech. On October 2, when the train was stopped for the night in Peoria, Wisconsin Governor Walter Kohler flew there with Joe. The next morning, Kohler took aside Ike’s aide, Sherman Adams, to warn him of the effect any jibe at McCarthy could have on the state ticket. Truman had carried Wisconsin in 1948. Adams asked Ike to drop the remarks defending Marshall, which he did. Kohler told Ike: “When you call on the Pope, you don’t tell him what a fine fellow Martin Luther is.” When Ike spoke in Green Bay, Joe was on the platform with him. Ike said, “I’m going to say that I disagree with you.” Joe replied, “If you say that you’ll be booed.” “I’ve been booed before and being booed doesn’t bother me,” Ike said. But he toned down his remarks. “I want to make one thing very clear,” he told his audience, “the purpose that he and I have of ridding this government of incompetents…and above all of subversives…are one and the same. Our differences apply not to the end result but to the methods.” Without endorsing McCarthy by name, Ike repeatedly called for the election of the entire Republican ticket. In Appleton, his hometown, Joe came bouncing out of the rear car to introduce Ike, who said the country needed “every single man…on the ticket here in Wisconsin from the governor himself through the Senate and the House.”128
Ike did not want to say anything that would split the party, and political necessity was part of the reason he backed down. But there was another reason, and to understand it we have to go back to October 1950, when General Walter Bedell Smith was named Director of the CIA. Smith had been Eisenhower’s chief of staff during the war and the two were close friends. As CIA chief, Smith wanted to improve relations with the FBI, and he often invited the FBI liaison, Sam Papich, in for private chats. On July 17, 1952, shortly after Ike’s nomination, Smith told Papich that “Ike has not fully found himself and will continue to be somewhat nervous and unsure of himself.” From one soldier to another, Ike had told Smith “that he was not going to be hoodwinked by politicians.”129 Smith had a way of putting his foot in his mouth. During a discussion with several other CIA men on the value of the polygraph test, Smith said that the FBI had given a lie detector test to a veteran agent with sixteen years’ service, only to find that the man was a lifelong homosexual. “When old Edgar heard about it, he almost dropped dead,” Smith said. The story got back to Hoover, who was not happy that malicious rumors about the bureau were spreading through Washington thanks to the CIA Director.130
Smith had been ambassador to Moscow after the war, and became friendly with William Benton, then in the State Department. When McCarthy sued Benton for libel, Smith was subpoenaed to give a deposition on September 29 and 30, 1952, to say what he thought of the Marshall Plan. Asked his opinion of Marshall, he said, “You are asking the molehill to comment on the mountain.” As for the Marshall Plan, Smith said, “one of my Western European colleagues stated to me that the Marshall Plan was a stroke of genius.” The deposition ranged over other topics, and Smith said at one point, speaking in a blunt and soldierly way: “I know there were Communists in the State Department…. I believe there are Communists in my own organization…. I believe that they are so adroit and adept that they have infiltrated practically every security organization of government.”131 This comment was picked up by the press, creating quite a flare-up. Here was the head of the intelligence department in the Truman administration appearing to corroborate McCarthy’s statement about Communists in government. In addition, he was a close friend of the Republican candidate. All Smith had meant was that vigilance was needed, but the media made it sound as if the CIA Director, whose job it was to gather intelligence, saw massive Communist subversion in the government.
On September 30, Smith called Eisenhower and Stevenson and said it would be deplorable if the CIA was used for political capital a month before the election. On October 2, 1952, he wrote Truman to tell him how distressed he was. He was afraid that Truman would now be charged with failing to take aggressive action against the Communists. One of his staff officers had spoken to Francis Walter of the House Un-American Activities Committee, who wanted Smith to testify, he told Truman. Walter said that the Democratic members of the committee felt that Smith’s deposition “was the result of disloyal connivance on my part to injure your position,” Smith went on. This feeling stemmed from his close association with Eisenhower. “I cannot stomach this implication of disloyalty,” Smith said. He repeated and underlined his loyalty to the President.132
On October 13, 1952, Smith appeared before HUAC and explained that he had not meant to imply that the State Department “was riddled with Communists.” He knew only of two.
Francis Walter said that his statement about Reds in the CIA “disturbed all of us.” Could he elaborate?
Smith said, “we have discovered one or two…but not in the United States…this thing has been exaggerated.” Smith explained that “it would be foolish and fatuous to assume that somewhere we do not have penetration.”133
An FBI memo on October 8, 1952, recounted that Smith had told Papich, the FBI liaison man, “that’s what happens when you talk too much.” He admitted that he’d placed himself in a jam, but Ike got him off the hook by instructing that Smith’s testimony not be used in any Republican speeches. The congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce had wanted to give Smith’s remarks some prominence in a radio talk on Truman and Communism, but was told to keep a lid on it. “On the occasion of Eisenhower’s recent talk in Wisconsin,” the FBI memo said, “Eisenhower had planned to make complimentary references to Gen. Marshall…but he refrained from doing so after McCarthy agreed not to make any references to Smith’s testimony in Washington…. Gen. Smith stated that despite the fact that Eisenhower and McCarthy have reached some form of working agreement, the relationship between the two men is far from being friendly.”134 Ike had generously saved his old friend’s hide by muzzling Joe, in exchange for which he cut out the Marshall paragraph in his Milwaukee speech on October 3. Ike actually sounded like McCarthy, warning about Communists in government and praising those who had “the sense and the stamina to take after the Communists themselves.”
After Ike was elected, he moved his old comrade-in-arms from the CIA to the State Department, as assistant secretary.
As for McCarthy, he won the Republican primary on September 9 against the little known Leonard F. Schmitt, a former district attorney, by 515,481 to 213,701, which reinforced his faith in his vote-getting powers. In the election he was running against Thomas Fairchild, who had been elected attorney general in 1948. But Joe didn’t bother to campaign in his own state. Instead, he toured other states, and garnered headlines by making scurrilous remarks about Adlai Stevenson. In a speech in Chicago on October 27 that was carried by 550 radio and 55 television stations, he said that Stevenson “would continue the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation.” He stressed Stevenson’s character reference to Hiss and called him “Alger—I mean Adlai.” On another occasion, he said that if he were put on Stevenson’s campaign train with a “slippery elm club,” he would beat some Americanism into the Democratic candidate. This was something new in campaign rhetoric—the threat of bodily harm.
On November 4, 1952, Ike won 55 percent of the vote, or 33 million popular and 442 electoral votes, carrying thirty-nine states. The Republican ticket also won slim majorities in Congress, 48 to 47 in the Senate and 221 to 213 in the House. One of the reelected Republican senators was Joseph R. McCarthy, who beat Fairchild by 870,444 to 731,402. In Wisconsin, however, Joe trailed the ticket, running 100,000 votes behind Ike and 139,000 votes behind the reelected Governor Kohler. James Doyle, the leader of the state’s Democratic Organizing Committee, released a statement that said:
“To President Eisenhower: Our full and fervent support in the task of building peace.
“To Senator McCarthy: War unto the death.”135
This statement turned out to be literally true, for Joe did not live to serve out his second term.
One of the casualties of the 1952 election was William Benton, who lost to his Republican opponent, William Purtell. Benton realized that he was known as “the fellow who’s against McCarthy,” but did not blame his defeat on Joe. It was Ike’s popularity. He took cold comfort in having lost by 89,000 votes, while Stevenson had lost Connecticut by 129,000. John Bailey, the Democratic chairman in Connecticut, said, “McCarthy obviously didn’t beat Bill Benton in Connecticut. Eisenhower beat Benton. The general was very, very strong in Connecticut. In 1950, McCarthy came into Connecticut three times to speak against Benton, who won.”136
After the 1952 election, the GOP controlled the federal government. Why should McCarthy continue his flawed crusade? Why attack a fort you occupied? Joe had his own reasons and announced in December that he had only scratched the surface, placing himself on a collision course with the President of his country and leader of his party.