[CTRL] The Real McCarthy Record

[Mike Moxley]

 -Caveat Lector-

THAT FREEDOM SHALL NOT PERISH Vol. 12, No. 18 - September 2, 1996

The Real McCarthy Record by James J. Drummey

A longtime smear campaign has clouded the truth

James J. Drummey is a former senior editor of THE NEW AMERICAN. This
article appeared originally in the May 11, 1987 issue of this
magazine.

Nearly 40 years after the death of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,
twice-elected United States Senator from Wisconsin, the term
"McCarthyism" is still widely used as a convenient epithet for all
that is evil and despicable in the world of politics. Hardly a month
passes without some reference to "McCarthyism" in the print or
electronic media. Despite the frequency with which the term is
invoked, however, it is quite clear that not one critic of McCarthy in
a hundred has the slightest idea of what he said and did during that
controversial period from 1950 to 1954.

Whether Joe McCarthy was right or wrong, it is important that we know
the truth about him. If he was wrong, then we can learn some important
lessons for the future. If he was right, then we need to be vitally
concerned about the issues he raised because virtually nothing has
been done to deal effectively with those issues since the mid-1950s.

This article will attempt to answer many of the questions asked about
Joe McCarthy and the criticisms directed at him. The responses are
based on years of study of McCarthy's speeches and writings,
congressional hearings in which he was involved, and more than a score
of books about him, most of them highly critical and condemnatory.

I. The Years Before 1950

Q. Was Joseph McCarthy a lax and unethical judge?

A. Joe McCarthy was elected as a circuit judge in Wisconsin in 1939
and took over a district court that had a backlog of more than 200
cases. By eliminating a lot of legal red tape and working long hours
(his court remained open past midnight at least a dozen times), Judge
McCarthy cleared up the backlog quickly and, in the words of one local
newspaper, "administered justice promptly and with a combination of
legal knowledge and good sense."

Q. Did McCarthy exaggerate his military record in World War II?

A. Although his judgeship exempted him from military service, McCarthy
enlisted in the Marines and was sworn in as a first lieutenant in
August 1942. He served as an intelligence officer for a bomber
squadron stationed in the Solomon Islands, and also risked his life by
volunteering to fly in the tail-gunner's seat on many combat missions.
Those who quibble about the number of combat missions he flew miss the
point - he didn't have to fly any.

The enemies of McCarthy have seized on his good-natured remark about
shooting down coconut trees from his tail-gunner's spot (an ABC
television movie about McCarthy in the late 1970s was entitled Tail
Gunner Joe) to belittle his military accomplishments, but the official
record gives the true picture. Not only were McCarthy's achievements
during 30 months of active duty unanimously praised by his commanding
officers, but Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the
Pacific Fleet, issued the following citation regarding the service of
Captain McCarthy:

For meritorious and efficient performance of duty as an observer and
rear gunner of a dive bomber attached to a Marine scout bombing
squadron operating in the Solomon Islands area from September 1 to
December 31, 1943. He participated in a large number of combat
missions, and in addition to his regular duties, acted as aerial
photographer. He obtained excellent photographs of enemy gun
positions, despite intense anti-aircraft fire, thereby gaining
valuable information which contributed materially to the success of
subsequent strikes in the area. Although suffering from a severe leg
injury, he refused to be hospitalized and continued to carry out his
duties as Intelligence Officer in a highly efficient manner. His
courageous devotion to duty was in keeping with the highest traditions
of the naval service.

Q. Was McCarthy backed by the communists in his 1946 campaign for the
U.S. Senate?

A. In 1946, Joe McCarthy upset incumbent U.S. Senator Robert La
Follette by 5,378 votes in the Republican primary and went on to beat
Democrat Howard McMurray by 251,658 votes in the general election. The
Communist Party of Wisconsin had originally circulated petitions to
place its own candidate on the ballot as an independent in the general
election. When McCarthy scored his surprising victory over La
Follette, the communists did not file the petitions for their
candidate, but rallied instead behind McMurray. Thus, Joe McCarthy
defeated a Democratic-Communist Party coalition in 1946.

Q. Had Joseph McCarthy ever spoken out against communism prior to his
famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950?

A. Those who contend that McCarthy stumbled across communism while
searching for an issue to use in his 1952 re-election campaign will be
disappointed to know that the senator had been speaking out against
communism for years. He made communism an issue in his campaign
against Howard McMurray in 1946, charging that McMurray had received
the endorsement of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. In
April 1947, McCarthy told the Madison Capital Times that his top
priority was "to stop the spread of communism."

During a speech in Milwaukee in 1952, Senator McCarthy dated the
public phase of his fight against communists to May 22, 1949, the
night that former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was found dead
on the ground outside Bethesda Naval Hospital. "The communists hounded
Forrestal to his death," said McCarthy. "They killed him just as
definitely as if they had thrown him from that sixteenth-story window
in Bethesda Naval Hospital." McCarthy said that "while I am not a
sentimental man, I was touched deeply and left numb by the news of
Forrestal's murder. But I was affected much more deeply when I heard
of the communist celebration when they heard of Forrestal's murder. On
that night, I dedicated part of this fight to Jim Forrestal."

Thus, Joe McCarthy was receptive in the fall of 1949 when three men
brought to his office a 100-page FBI report alleging extensive
communist penetration of the State Department. The trio had asked
three other senators to awaken the American people to this dangerous
situation, but only McCarthy was willing to take on this volatile
project.

II. A Lone Senator (1950-1952)

Q. What was the security situation in the State Department at the time
of McCarthy's Wheeling speech in February 1950?

A. Communist infiltration of the State Department began in the 1930s.
On September 2, 1939, former communist Whittaker Chambers provided
Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle with the names and communist
connections of two dozen spies in the government, including Alger
Hiss. Berle took the information to President Roosevelt, but FDR
laughed it off. Hiss moved rapidly up the State Department ladder and
served as an adviser to Roosevelt at the disastrous 1945 Yalta
Conference that paved the way for the Soviet conquest of Central and
Eastern Europe. Hiss also functioned as secretary-general of the
founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, helped to
draft the UN Charter, and later filled dozens of positions at the UN
with American communists before he was publicly exposed as a Soviet
spy by Whittaker Chambers in 1948.

The security problem at the State Department had worsened considerably
in 1945 when a merger brought into State thousands of employees from
such war agencies as the Office of Strategic Services, the Office of
War Information, and the Foreign Economic Administration - all of
which were riddled with members of the communist underground. J.
Anthony Panuch, the State Department official charged with supervising
the 1945 merger, told a Senate committee in 1953 that "the biggest
single thing that contributed to the infiltration of the State
Department was the merger of 1945. The effects of that are still being
felt." In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall and Under Secretary
of State Dean Acheson engineered the firing of Panuch and the removal
of every key member of his security staff.

In June 1947, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee addressed a secret
memorandum to Marshall, calling to his attention

a condition that developed and still flourishes in the State
Department under the administration of Dean Acheson. It is evident
that there is a deliberate, calculated program being carried out not
only to protect communist personnel in high places but to reduce
security and intelligence protection to a nullity. On file in the
department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet
espionage activities in the United States which involves a large
number of State Department employees, some in high official positions.

The memorandum listed the names of nine of these State Department
officials and said that they were "only a few of the hundreds now
employed in varying capacities who are protected and allowed to remain
despite the fact that their presence is an obvious hazard to national
security." On June 24, 1947, Assistant Secretary of State John
Peurifoy notified the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that ten
persons had been dismissed from the department, five of whom had been
listed in the memorandum. But from June 1947 until McCarthy's Wheeling
speech in February 1950, the State Department did not fire one person
as a loyalty or security risk. In other branches of the government,
however, more than 300 persons were discharged for loyalty reasons
alone during the period from 1947 to 1951.

It was also during the mid-to-late 1940s that communist sympathizers
in the State Department played a key role in the subjugation of
mainland China by the Reds. "It is my judgment, and I was in the State
Department at the time," said former Ambassador William D. Pawley,
"that this whole fiasco, the loss of China and the subsequent
difficulties with which the United States has been faced, was the
result of mistaken policy of Dean Acheson, Phil Jessup, [Owen]
Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, John Service, John Davies, [O.E.]
Clubb, and others." Asked if he thought the mistaken policy was the
result of "sincere mistakes of judgment," Pawley replied: "No, I
don't."

Q. Was Joseph McCarthy the only member of Congress critical of those
whose policies had put 400 million Chinese into communist slavery?

A. No, there were others who were equally disturbed. For instance, on
January 30, 1949, one year before McCarthy's Wheeling speech, a young
congressman from Massachusetts deplored "the disasters befalling China
and the United States," and declared that "it is of the utmost
importance that we search out and spotlight those who must bear the
responsibility for our present predicament." The congressman placed a
major part of the blame on "a sick Roosevelt," General George
Marshall, and "our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and
the Fairbanks," and he concluded: "This is the tragic story of China
whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men had
saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away." The
congressman's name was John F. Kennedy.

Q. What did McCarthy actually say in his Wheeling speech?

A. Addressing the Ohio County Women's Republican Club on February 9,
1950, Senator McCarthy first quoted from Marx, Lenin, and Stalin their
stated goal of world conquest and said that "today we are engaged in a
final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity."
He blamed the fall of China and other countries to the communists in
the previous six years on "the traitorous actions" of the State
Department's "bright young men," and he mentioned specifically John S.
Service, Gustavo Duran, Mary Jane Keeney, Julian Wadleigh, Dr. Harlow
Shapley, Alger Hiss, and Dean Acheson. The part of the speech that
catapulted McCarthy from relative obscurity into the national
spotlight contained these words:

I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be
either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist
Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign
policy.

Q. Wasn't it reported that McCarthy used the number 205 in his
Wheeling speech, lowered it to 57 later, and then raised it again to
81?

A. Yes, this was reported, and here is the explanation: In the
Wheeling speech, McCarthy referred to a letter that Secretary of State
James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph Sabath in 1946. In that
letter, Byrnes said that State Department security investigators had
declared 284 persons unfit to hold jobs in the department because of
communist connections and other reasons, but that only 79 had been
discharged, leaving 205 still on the State Department's payroll.
McCarthy told his Wheeling audience that while he did not have the
names of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter, he did have the names
of 57 who were either members of or loyal to the Communist Party. On
February 20, 1950, McCarthy gave the Senate information about 81
individuals - the 57 referred to at Wheeling and 24 others of less
importance and about whom the evidence was less conclusive.

The enemies of McCarthy have juggled these numbers around to make the
senator appear to be erratic and to distract attention from the
paramount question: Were there still persons in the State Department
betraying this nation? McCarthy was not being inconsistent in his use
of the numbers; the 57 and 81 were part of the 205 mentioned in the
Byrnes letter.

Q. Was it fair for McCarthy to make all those names public and ruin
reputations?

A. That is precisely why McCarthy did not make the names public. Four
times during McCarthy's February 20th speech, Senator Scott Lucas
demanded that McCarthy make the 81 names public, but McCarthy refused
to do so, responding that "if I were to give all the names involved,
it might leave a wrong impression. If we should label one man a
communist when he is not a communist, I think it would be too bad."
What McCarthy did was to identify the individuals only by case
numbers, not by their names.

By the way, it took McCarthy some six hours to make that February 20th
speech because of harassment by hostile senators, four of whom - Scott
Lucas, Brien McMahon, Garrett Withers, and Herbert Lehman -
interrupted him a total of 123 times. It should also be noted that
McCarthy was not indicting the entire State Department. He said that
"the vast majority of the employees of the State Department are loyal"
and that he was only after the ones who had demonstrated a loyalty to
the Soviet Union or to the Communist Party.

Further, McCarthy admitted that "some of these individuals whose cases
I am giving the Senate are no longer in the State Department. A
sizable number of them are not. Some of them have transferred to other
government work, work allied with the State Department. Others have
been transferred to the United Nations."

Q. What was the purpose of the Tydings Committee?

A. The Tydings Committee was a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee that was set up in February 1950 to conduct "a
full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who
are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the
Department of State." The chairman of the subcommittee, Senator
Millard Tydings, a Democrat, set the tone for the hearings on the
first day when he told McCarthy: "You are in the position of being the
man who occasioned this hearing, and so far as I am concerned in this
committee you are going to get one of the most complete investigations
ever given in the history of this Republic, so far as my abilities
will permit."

After 31 days of hearings, during which McCarthy presented public
evidence on nine persons (Dorothy Kenyon, Haldore Hanson, Philip
Jessup, Esther Brunauer, Frederick Schuman, Harlow Shapley, Gustavo
Duran, John Stewart Service, and Owen Lattimore), the Tydings
Committee labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud" and a "hoax," said that
the individuals on his list were neither communist nor pro-communist,
and concluded that the State Department had an effective security
program.

Q. Did the Tydings Committee carry out its mandate?

A. Not by a long shot. The Tydings Committee never investigated State
Department security at all and did not come close to conducting the
"full and complete study and investigation" it was supposed to
conduct. Tydings and his Democratic colleagues, Brien McMahon and
Theodore Green, subjected McCarthy to considerable interruptions and
heckling, prompting Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to protest that McCarthy
"never gets a fair shake" in trying to present his evidence in an
orderly fashion. So persistent were the interruptions and statements
of the Democratic trio during the first two days of the hearings that
McCarthy was allowed only a total of 17 and one-half minutes of direct
testimony.

While the Democrats were hostile to McCarthy and to any witnesses who
could confirm his charges, they fawned over the six individuals who
appeared before the committee to deny McCarthy's accusations. Tydings,
McMahon, and Green not only treated Philip Jessup like a hero, for one
example, but refused to let McCarthy present his full case against
Jessup or to cross-examine him. Furthermore, the committee majority
declined to call more than 20 witnesses whom Senator Bourke
Hickenlooper thought were important to the investigation.

And when Senator Lodge read into the record 19 questions that he
thought should be answered before the committee exonerated the State
Department's security system, not only did the Democrats ignore the
questions, but some member of the committee or the staff deleted from
the official transcript of the hearings the 19 questions, as well as
other testimony that made the committee look bad. The deleted material
amounted to 35 typewritten pages.

It is clear then that the Tydings Committee did not carry out its
mandate and that the words "fraud" and "hoax" more accurately describe
the Tydings Report than they do McCarthy's charges.

Q. So was McCarthy right or wrong about the State Department?

A. He was right. Of the 110 names that McCarthy gave the Tydings
Committee to be investigated, 62 of them were employed by the State
Department at the time of the hearings. The committee cleared everyone
on McCarthy's list, but within a year the State Department started
proceedings against 49 of the 62. By the end of 1954, 81 of those on
McCarthy's list had left the government either by dismissal or
resignation.

Q. Can you cite some particular examples?

A. Sure. Let's take three of McCarthy's nine public cases - those of
John Stewart Service, Philip Jessup, and Owen Lattimore.* Five years
before McCarthy mentioned the name of John Stewart Service, Service
was arrested for giving classified documents to the editors of
Amerasia, a communist magazine. The Truman Administration, however,
managed to cover up the espionage scandal and Service was never
punished for his crime. McCarthy also produced considerable evidence
that Service had been "part of the pro-Soviet group" that wanted to
bring communism to China, but the Tydings Committee said that Service
was "not disloyal, pro-communist, or a security risk." Over the next
18 months, the State Department's Loyalty Security Board cleared
Service four more times, but finally, in December 1951, the Civil
Service Commission Loyalty Review Board found that there was
"reasonable doubt" as to his loyalty and ousted him from the State
Department.

Was the career of Service ruined by this decision? Not on your life.
The Supreme Court reinstated him in 1956 and Service was the American
consul in Liverpool, England until his retirement in 1962. He then
joined the faculty of the University of California-Berkeley and
visited Red China in the fall of 1971 at the invitation of communist
tyrant Chou En-lai. Following his return from the country he helped to
communize, Service wrote four articles for the New York Times and was
the subject of a laudatory cover interview in Parade magazine.

As for Philip Jessup, all that Joe McCarthy said was that he had an
"unusual affinity for communist causes." The record shows that Jessup
belonged to at least five communist-controlled fronts, that he
associated closely with communists, and that he was an influential
member of the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR), which the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) described in 1952 as "a vehicle
used by Communists to orientate American Far Eastern policy toward
Communist objectives." The SISS also reported that 46 persons
connected with the IPR while Jessup was a leading light there had been
named under oath as members of the Communist Party.

The Senate apparently felt that McCarthy was closer to the truth than
the Tydings Committee because in 1951 it rejected Jessup's nomination
as a delegate to the United Nations. After the Senate adjourned,
however, President Truman appointed him anyway. In 1960, President
Eisenhower named Jessup to represent the United States on the
International Court of Justice, and Jessup served on the World Court
until 1969. He died in 1986.

Owen Lattimore was one of the principal architects of the State
Department's pro-communist foreign policy in the Far East. In a closed
session of the Tydings Committee, Senator McCarthy called Lattimore
the "top Russian spy" in the department. (That charge, by the way, was
leaked to the public not by McCarthy but by columnist Drew Pearson.)
McCarthy later modified his statement on Lattimore, saying that "I may
have perhaps placed too much stress on the question of whether or not
he has been an espionage agent," and went on to say that "13 different
witnesses have testified under oath to Lattimore's Communist
membership or party-line activities." Although the Tydings Committee
cleared Lattimore of all charges, another Senate committee, the SISS,
vindicated Joe McCarthy when it declared in 1952 that "Owen Lattimore
was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate
instrument of the Soviet conspiracy."

Was Lattimore hurt by this or by his subsequent indictment for
perjury? Of course not. He continued on the faculty of Johns Hopkins
University, went to Communist Outer Mongolia for the Kennedy State
Department in 1961, became head of a new Chinese studies department at
Leeds University in England in 1963, and returned to the United States
in the 1970s for speeches and lectures.

Q. Even if McCarthy was right about Service, Jessup, and Lattimore,
weren't there hundreds of others who were publicly smeared by him?

A. This is one of the most enduring myths about McCarthy, and it is
completely false. It is a fact, wrote William F. Buckley and Brent
Bozell in McCarthy and His Enemies, that from February 9, 1950 until
January 1, 1953, Joe McCarthy publicly questioned the loyalty or
reliability of a grand total of 46 persons, and particularly
dramatized the cases of only 24 of the 46. We have discussed three of
the senator's major targets, and Buckley and Bozell pointed out that
McCarthy "never said anything more damaging about Lauchlin Currie,
Gustavo Duran, Theodore Geiger, Mary Jane Keeney, Edward Posniak,
Haldore Hanson, and John Carter Vincent, than that they are known to
one or more responsible persons as having been members of the
Communist Party, which is in each of these instances true."

While McCarthy may have exaggerated the significance of the evidence
against some other individuals, his record on the whole is extremely
good. (This is also true of the 1953-54 period when he was chairman of
a Senate committee and publicly exposed 114 persons, most of whom
refused to answer questions about communist or espionage activities on
the ground that their answers might tend to incriminate them.) There
were no innocent victims of McCarthyism. Those whom McCarthy accused
had indeed collaborated in varying degrees with communists, had shown
no remorse for their actions, and thoroughly deserved whatever scorn
was directed at them.

Q. What about McCarthy's attack on General George Marshall? Wasn't
that a smear of a great man?

A. This is a reference to the 60,000-word speech McCarthy delivered on
the Senate floor on June 14, 1951 (later published as a book entitled
America's Retreat From Victory). One interesting thing about the
speech is that McCarthy drew almost entirely from sources friendly to
Marshall in discussing nearly a score of Marshall's actions and
policies that had helped the communists in the USSR, Europe, China,
and Korea. "I do not propose to go into his motives," said McCarthy.
"Unless one has all the tangled and often complicated circumstances
contributing to a man's decisions, an inquiry into his motives is
often fruitless. I do not pretend to understand General Marshall's
nature and character, and I shall leave that subject to subtler
analysts of human personality."

One may agree or disagree with McCarthy's statement that America's
steady retreat from victory "must be the product of a great
conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any
previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so
black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be
forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men." That
statement was very controversial in 1951, but after no-win wars in
Korea and Vietnam, decades of Soviet expansionism throughout the
world, the weakening of America's military, and its increasing
subservience to United Nations authority, it doesn't seem so
controversial anymore.

Q. Can it be true that State Department policy toward the communists
didn't change very much even after McCarthy helped get many
pro-communists out of the department?

A. Unfortunately, it is true. McCarthy, you see, only scratched the
surface. He did prompt a tightening of security procedures for a
while, and the State Department and other sensitive federal agencies
dismissed nearly 4,000 employees in 1953 and 1954, although many of
them shifted to nonsensitive departments. Some of these security risks
returned to their old agencies when security was virtually scrapped
during the Kennedy Administration.

During the mid-1950s, State Department security specialist Otto Otepka
reviewed the files of all department personnel and found some kind of
derogatory information on 1,943 persons, almost 20 percent of the
total payroll. He told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee years
later that of the 1,943 employees, 722 "left the department for
various reasons, but mostly by transfer to other agencies, before a
final security determination was made." Otepka trimmed the remaining
number on the list to 858 and in December 1955 sent their names to his
boss, Scott McLeod, as persons to be watched because of communist
associations, homosexuality, habitual drunkenness, or mental illness.

McLeod's staff reviewed the Otepka list and narrowed it down to 258
persons who were judged to be "serious" security risks. "Approximately
150 were in high-level posts where they could in one way or another
influence the formulation of United States foreign policy," said
William J. Gill, author of The Ordeal of Otto Otepka. "And fully half
of these 258 serious cases were officials in either crucial
intelligence assignments or serving on top-secret committees reaching
all the way up and into the National Security Council." As many as 175
of the 258 were still in important policy posts as of the mid-1960s.

Bear in mind that communist penetration of the U.S. government was not
confined to the State Department. On July 30, 1953, the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Senator William Jenner,
released its report, Interlocking Subversion in Government
Departments. Among its conclusions:

1. The Soviet international organization has carried on a successful
and important penetration of the United States Government and this
penetration has not been fully exposed.

2. This penetration has extended from the lower ranks to top level
policy and operating positions in our government.

3. The agents of this penetration have operated in accordance with a
distinct design fashioned by their Soviet superiors.

4. Members of this conspiracy helped to get each other into
government, helped each other to rise in government, and protected
each other from exposure.

Summarizing the 1952 testimony of former Soviet courier Elizabeth
Bentley, who had identified 37 Soviet agents within the U.S.
government, the subcommittee also said that "to her knowledge there
were four Soviet espionage rings operating within our government and
that only two of these have been exposed." In October 1953, a Soviet
defector named Colonel Ismail Ege estimated that a minimum of 20 spy
networks were operating within the United States in 1941-42, when he
was chief of the Fourth Section of Soviet General Staff Intelligence.

On February 5, 1987, the New York Times reported that an 18-month
investigation by the House Intelligence Committee "had uncovered
'dangerous laxity' and serious 'security failures' in the government's
system of catching spies. Even though 27 Americans have been charged
with espionage in the last two years, and all but one of those brought
to trial have been found guilty, the committee said in a report that
it still found 'a puzzling, almost nonchalant attitude toward recent
espionage cases on the part of some senior U.S. intelligence
officials.'" According to the Times, "the investigation found 'faulty
hiring practices, poor management of probationary employees,
thoughtless firing practices, lax security practices, inadequate
interagency cooperation - even bungled surveillance of a prime
espionage suspect.'"

The same "nonchalant attitude" toward communist spies that Joe
McCarthy denounced in the early 1950s still exists today. Only there
is no Joe McCarthy in the Senate urging that something be done to
correct this dangerous situation. Nor are there any congressional
committees investigating communist subversion in government. The
destruction of Joe McCarthy not only removed him from the fight, but
it also sent a powerful message to anyone else who might be
contemplating a similar battle: Try to ferret communists and
pro-communists out of the government and you will be harassed,
smeared, and ultimately destroyed.

Q. But why do we need congressional committees? Can't the FBI do the
job?

A. The function of the FBI is to gather information and pass it along
to the agency or department where the security problem exists. If the
FBI report is ignored, or if the department does take action and is
overruled by a review board, only a congressional committee can expose
and remedy this situation. For example, in December 1945, the FBI sent
President Truman a report showing that his Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury, Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet spy. Truman ignored the
warning and, early in 1946, promoted White to executive director of
the U.S. Mission to the International Monetary Fund. The FBI sent
Truman a second report, but again he did nothing. White resigned from
the government in 1947, and his communist ties were exposed by
Elizabeth Bentley when she appeared before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities in 1948.

The FBI warned the State Department in the mid-1940s of extensive
communist penetration of the department, but the warning was
disregarded for the most part. It was not until Joseph McCarthy turned
the spotlight on the situation that dozens of security risks were
removed. The FBI had also sent some 40 confidential reports about the
communist activities of Edward Rothschild, an employee of the
Government Printing Office, but Rothschild wasn't removed from his
sensitive position until his background was exposed by the McCarthy
Committee in 1953.

III. Committee Chairman (1953-54)

Q. Granted that congressional investigating committees can serve an
important purpose, weren't McCarthy's methods terrible and didn't he
subject witnesses to awful harassment?

A. Now we're into an entirely different phase of McCarthy's career.
For three years, he had been one lone senator crying in the
wilderness. With the Republicans taking control of the Senate in
January 1953, however, Joe McCarthy became chairman of the Senate
Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. No longer did he have to rely
solely upon public speeches to inform the American people of the
communist threat to America. He was now chairman of a Senate committee
with a mandate to search out graft, incompetence, and disloyalty
inside the vast reaches of the American government.

McCarthy's methods were no different from those of other senators who
were generally applauded for vigorous cross-examination of organized
crime figures, for instance. The question of methods seemed to come up
only when subversives or spies were on the witness stand. And those
who most loudly deplored McCarthy's methods often resorted to the
foulest methods themselves, including the use of lies, half-truths,
and innuendos designed to stir up hysteria against him. What some
people seemingly do not understand is that communists are evildoers
and that those who give aid and comfort to communists - whether they
are called dupes, fellow travelers, liberals, or progressives - are
complicit in the evil and should be exposed and removed from positions
of influence.

Traitors and spies in high places are not easy to identify. They do
not wear sweatshirts with the hammer and sickle emblazoned on the
front. Only painstaking investigation and exhaustive questioning can
reveal them as enemies. So why all the condemnation for those who
expose spies and none for the spies themselves? Why didn't McCarthy's
critics expose a traitor now and then and show everyone how much
better they could do it? No, it was much easier to hound out of public
life such determined enemies of the Reds as Martin Dies, Parnell
Thomas, and Joe McCarthy than to muster the courage to face the
howling communist wolfpack themselves.

Q. So McCarthy's treatment of persons appearing before his committee
was not as bad as has been reported?

A. Exactly. Let's look at the record. During 1953 and the first three
months of 1954 (McCarthy was immobilized for the remainder of 1954 by
two investigations of him), McCarthy's committee held 199 days of
hearings and examined 653 witnesses. These individuals first appeared
in executive session and were told of the evidence against them. If
they were able to offer satisfactory explanations - and most of them
were - they were dismissed and nobody ever knew they had been
summoned. Those who appeared in public sessions were either hardened
Fifth Amendment pleaders or persons about whom there was a strong
presumption of guilt. But even those witnesses who were brazen,
insulting, and defiant were afforded their rights to confer with their
counsel before answering a question, to confront their accusers or at
least have them identified and have questions submitted to them by
their counsel, and to invoke the First and Fifth Amendments rather
than answer questions about their alleged communist associations.

Of the 653 persons called by the McCarthy Committee during that
15-month period, 83 refused to answer questions about communist or
espionage activities on constitutional grounds and their names were
made public. Nine additional witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment in
executive session, but their names were not made public. Some of the
83 were working or had worked for the Army, the Navy, the Government
Printing Office, the Treasury Department, the Office of War
Information, the Office of Strategic Services, the Veterans
Administration, and the United Nations. Others were or had been
employed at the Federal Telecommunications Laboratories in New Jersey,
the secret radar laboratories of the Army Signal Corps in New Jersey,
and General Electric defense plants in Massachusetts and New York.
Nineteen of the 83, including such well-known communist propagandists
as James S. Allen, Herbert Aptheker, and Earl Browder, were summoned
because their writings were being carried in U.S. Information Service
libraries around the world.

Charles E. Ford, an attorney for Edward Rothschild in the Government
Printing Office hearings, was so impressed with McCarthy's fairness
toward his client that he declared: "I think the committee session at
this day and in this place is most admirable and most American." Peter
Gragis, who appeared before the McCarthy Committee on March 10, 1954,
said that he had come to the hearing terrified because the press "had
pointed out that you were very abusive, that you were crucifying
people.... My experience has been quite the contrary. I have, I think,
been very understandingly treated. I have been, I think, highly
respected despite the fact that for some 20 years I had been more or
less an active communist."

Q. Weren't McCarthy and some members of his staff guilty of
"bookburning" and causing a ruckus in Europe in 1953?

A. This accusation was made in reference to the committee's inquiry
into communist influences in State Department libraries overseas. In
his book McCarthy, Roy Cohn, the committee's chief counsel, conceded
that he and committee staffer David Schine "unwittingly handed Joe
McCarthy's enemies a perfect opportunity to spread the tale that a
couple of young, inexperienced clowns were bustling about Europe,
ordering State Department officials around, burning books, creating
chaos wherever they went, and disrupting foreign relations." In point
of fact, however, the trip and subsequent hearings by the committee
provided information that led to the removal of more than 30,000
communist and pro-communist books from U.S. Information Service
libraries in foreign countries. The presence of such books was in
obvious conflict with the stated purpose of those libraries "to
promote better understanding of America abroad" and "to combat and
expose Soviet communistic propaganda."

Q. But didn't McCarthy summon to those hearings a man whose major sin
was having written a book on college football 21 years earlier?

A. In March 1953, the McCarthy Committee heard testimony from Reed
Harris, deputy head of the State Department's International
Information Administration and author of King Football. Harris' book,
however, was not confined to football. The author also advocated that
communists and socialists be allowed to teach in colleges and said
that hungry people in America, after "watching gangsters and corrupt
politicians gulp joyously from the horn of plenty," just might "decide
that even the horrors of those days of fighting which inaugurated the
era of communism in Russia would be preferable to the present state of
affairs" in the United States.

The following colloquy between Harris and Senator John McClellan is
never quoted by McCarthy's critics:

McClellan. Here is what I am concerned about. In the first place, I
will ask you this: If it should be established that a person
entertained the views and philosophies that you expressed in that
book, would you consider that person suitable or fit to hold a
position in the Voice of America which you now hold?

Harris. I would not.

McClellan. You would not employ such a person, would you?

Harris. I would not, senator.

McClellan. Now we find you in that position.

Harris. That is correct.

Before shedding any tears for Mr. Harris, who resigned his post in
April 1953, be advised that when anti-McCarthy hysteric Edward R.
Murrow took over the U.S. Information Agency in 1961, he hired Reed
Harris as his deputy.

Q. What about that poor old black woman that McCarthy falsely accused
of being a communist?

A. That woman was Annie Lee Moss, who lost her job working with
classified messages at the Pentagon after an FBI undercover operative
testified that she was a member of the Communist Party. When she
appeared before the McCarthy Committee early in 1954, Mrs. Moss, who
lived at 72 R Street, SW, Washington, DC, denied she was a communist.
Her defenders accused McCarthy of confusing Mrs. Moss with another
woman with a similar name at a different address. Edward R. Murrow
made the woman a heroine on his television program and the
anti-McCarthy press trumpeted this episode as typical of McCarthy's
abominations. And so things stood until September 1958, when the
Subversive Activities Control Board reported that copies of the
Communist Party's own records showed that "one Annie Lee Moss, 72 R
Street, S.W., Washington, D.C., was a party member in the mid-1940s."
Mrs. Moss got her Pentagon job back in 1954 and was still working for
the Army in December 1958.

Q. Mrs. Moss might have gotten her job back, but what about all those
individuals who lost their jobs in defense plants?

A. During its probe of 13 defense plants whose contracts with the
government ran into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, the
McCarthy Committee heard 101 witnesses, two of whom - William H. Teto
and Herman E. Thomas - provided the committee with information about
the Red spy network and the efforts of the communists to set up cells
in the plants. The committee's exposures led to the dismissal of 32
persons and the tightening of security regulations at the plants. The
president of General Electric, for example, issued a policy statement
expressing concern about "the possible danger to the safety and
security of company property and personnel whenever a General Electric
employee admits he is a Communist or when he asserts before a
competent investigating government body that he might incriminate
himself by giving truthful answers concerning his Communist
affiliations or his possible espionage or sabotage activities."

At the time McCarthy's investigations were halted early in 1954, his
probers had accumulated evidence involving an additional 155 defense
workers, but he was never able to question those individuals under
oath. On January 12, 1959, Congressman Gordon Scherer, a member of the
House Committee on Un-American Activities, said that he knew of a
minimum of 2,000 "potential espionage agents and saboteurs" working in
the nation's defense plants. But there were no congressional
investigations in this vital area after Senator McCarthy was stymied
in 1954.

Q. What were the Fort Monmouth hearings all about? Weren't all of
those fired eventually given back their jobs?

A. The Army Signal Corps installation at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey was
one of the nation's most vital security posts, since the three
research centers housed there were engaged in developing defensive
devices designed to protect America from an atomic attack. Julius
Rosenberg, who was executed in 1953 for selling U.S. atomic secrets to
the Soviet Union, worked as an inspector at Fort Monmouth from 1940 to
1945 and maintained his Signal Corps contacts for at least another two
years after that. From 1949 to 1953, the FBI had been warning the Army
about security risks at Fort Monmouth, but the Army paid little
attention to the reports of subversion until the McCarthy
investigation began in 1953.

During 1953 and 1954, the McCarthy Committee, acting on reports of
communist infiltration from civilian employees, Army officers, and
enlisted personnel, heard 71 witnesses at executive sessions and 41 at
open hearings. The Army responded by suspending or discharging 35
persons as security risks, but when these cases reached the Army
Loyalty and Screening Board at the Pentagon, all but two of the
suspected security risks were reinstated and given back pay. McCarthy
demanded the names of the 20 civilians on the review board and, when
he threatened to subpoena them, the Eisenhower Administration, at a
meeting in Attorney General Herbert Brownell's office on January 21,
1954, began plotting to stop McCarthy's investigations once and for
all.

Virtually all of those suspended were eventually restored to duty at
Fort Monmouth and anti-McCarthyites have cited this as proof that
McCarthy had failed once again to substantiate his allegations. But
vindication of McCarthy came later, when the Army's top-secret
operations at Fort Monmouth were quietly moved to Arizona. In his 1979
book With No Apologies, Senator Barry Goldwater explained the reason
for the move:

Carl Hayden, who in January 1955 became chairman of the powerful
Appropriations Committee of the United States Senate, told me
privately Monmouth had been moved because he and other members of the
majority Democratic Party were convinced security at Monmouth had been
penetrated. They didn't want to admit that McCarthy was right in his
accusations. Their only alternative was to move the installation from
New Jersey to a new location in Arizona.

Q. Speaking of the Army, who was the dentist that McCarthy said was a
communist?

A. His name was Irving Peress and here is some background information.
In December 1953, an Army general alerted Senator McCarthy to the
incredible story of this New York dentist who was drafted into the
Army as a captain in October 1952; who refused a month later to answer
questions on a Defense Department form about membership in subversive
organizations; who was recommended for dismissal by the Surgeon
General of the Army in April 1953; but who requested and received a
promotion to major the following October. Roy Cohn gave the facts on
Peress to Army Counsel John G. Adams in December 1953, and Adams
promised to do something about it.

When still no action had been taken on Peress a month later, McCarthy
subpoenaed him before the committee on January 30, 1954. Peress took
the Fifth Amendment 20 times when asked about his membership in the
Communist Party, his attendance at a Communist training school, and
his efforts to recruit military personnel into the party. Two days
later, McCarthy sent a letter to Army Secretary Robert Stevens by
special messenger, reviewing the testimony of Peress and requesting
that he be court-martialed and that the Army find out who promoted
Peress, knowing that he was a communist. On that same day, February
1st, Peress asked for an honorable separation from the Army, which he
promptly received the next day from Brigadier General Ralph W.
Zwicker, his commanding officer at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.

McCarthy took the next logical step and summoned General Zwicker to a
closed session of the committee on February 18th. There was no reason
at that time for McCarthy to suppose that Zwicker would be anything
but a frank and cooperative witness. In separate conversations with
two McCarthy staff members, on January 22nd and February 13th, Zwicker
had said that he was familiar with Peress' communist connections and
that he was opposed to giving him an honorable discharge, but that he
was ordered to do so by someone at the Pentagon.

When he appeared before McCarthy, however, Zwicker was evasive,
hostile, and uncooperative. He changed his story three times when
asked if he had known at the time he signed the discharge that Peress
had refused to answer questions before the McCarthy Committee.
McCarthy became increasingly exasperated and, when Zwicker, in
response to a hypothetical question, said that he would not remove
from the military a general who originated the order for the honorable
discharge of a communist major, knowing that he was a communist,
McCarthy told Zwicker that he was not fit to wear the uniform of a
general.

Q. So McCarthy really did "abuse" Zwicker and impugn his patriotism as
the critics have charged?

A. Let's jump ahead three years and get Zwicker's own assessment of
his testimony on February 18, 1954. At a hearing before the Senate
Armed Services Committee on March 21, 1957, Zwicker stated: "I think
there are some circumstances � that would certainly tend to give a
person the idea that perhaps I was recalcitrant, perhaps I was holding
back, and perhaps I wasn't too cooperative.... I am afraid I was
perhaps overcautious and perhaps on the defensive, and that this
feeling � may have inclined me to be not as forthright, perhaps, in
answering the questions put to me as I might have been otherwise."

That wasn't the only time that General Zwicker was less than
forthright. In testimony before the McClellan Committee (formerly the
McCarthy Committee) on March 23, 1955, Zwicker denied giving McCarthy
staffer George Anastos derogatory information about Irving Peress in
their telephone conversation of January 22, 1954. When Anastos and the
secretary who had monitored the conversation both testified under oath
and contradicted Zwicker, the McClellan Committee forwarded the
transcript of the hearing to the Justice Department for possible
prosecution of Zwicker for perjury. After sitting on the matter for 19
months, the Justice Department finally, in December 1956, declined to
undertake criminal prosecution of Zwicker for "technical" reasons.

On April 1, 1957, the Senate approved a promotion for Zwicker by a
vote of 70 to 2, with Senators McCarthy and George Malone opposed. All
the members of the Senate had gotten a phone call from the Pentagon or
the White House urging them to vote for Zwicker. The recalcitrant
General served three more years in the Army before retiring.

Q. Does anyone know who promoted Peress and told Zwicker to sign the
communist major's honorable discharge?

A. After studying the 1955 McClellan hearings on the Peress case,
Lionel Lokos, in his book Who Promoted Peress, concluded that Colonel
H.W. Glattly signed the letter to the Adjutant General, recommending
the promotion of Irving Peress; and Major James E. Harris, in the name
of the Adjutant General, signed Peress' letter of appointment to
major.

As for Peress' discharge, Army Counsel John Adams and Lieutenant
General Walter L. Weible ordered General Zwicker to sign the honorable
separation from the Army. The McClellan Committee sharply rebuked
Adams for his action, saying that he "showed disrespect for this
subcommittee when he chose to disregard Senator McCarthy's letter of
February 1, 1954, and allowed Peress to be honorably discharged on
February 2, 1954."

In its report on the Peress case, the McClellan Committee said that
"some 48 errors of more than minor importance were committed by the
Army in connection with the commissioning, transfer, promotion, and
honorable discharge of Irving Peress." As a result, the Army made some
sweeping changes in its security program, including a policy statement
that said "the taking of the Fifth Amendment by an individual queried
about his Communist affiliations is sufficient to warrant the issuance
of a general discharge rather than an honorable discharge." That these
reforms came about at all was due to the persistence of Senator Joseph
McCarthy, who displayed the courage to expose Peress against the
wishes of the Army, the White House, and many of his fellow
Republicans. "No one will ever know," wrote Lionel Lokos, "what it
cost Senator McCarthy to take the stand he did in the Peress case -
what it cost him in terms of popularity and his political future. We
only know that the price of asking 'Who Promoted Peress' came high and
that Senator McCarthy didn't hesitate to pay that price."

IV. Army-McCarthy Hearings

Q. What was the gist of the Army-McCarthy Hearings?

A. On March 11, 1954, the Army accused Senator McCarthy and his staff
of using improper means in seeking preferential treatment for G. David
Schine, a consultant to McCarthy's committee, prior to and after
Schine was drafted into the Army in November 1953. McCarthy
countercharged that these allegations were made in bad faith and were
designed to prevent his committee from continuing its probe of
communist subversion at Fort Monmouth and from issuing subpoenas for
members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board. A special committee,
under the chairmanship of Senator Karl Mundt, was appointed to
adjudicate these conflicting charges, and the hearings opened on April
22, 1954.

The televised hearings lasted for 36 days and were viewed by an
estimated 20 million people. After hearing 32 witnesses and two
million words of testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy
himself had not exercised any improper influence in behalf of David
Schine, but that Roy Cohn, McCarthy's chief counsel, had engaged in
some "unduly persistent or aggressive efforts" in behalf of Schine.
The committee also concluded that Army Secretary Robert Stevens and
Army Counsel John Adams "made efforts to terminate or influence the
investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth," and that Adams "made
vigorous and diligent efforts" to block subpoenas for members of the
Army Loyalty and Screening Board "by means of personal appeal to
certain members of the [McCarthy] committee."

In a separate statement that concurred with the special committee
report, Senator Everett Dirksen demonstrated the weakness of the Army
case by noting that the Army did not make its charges public until
eight months after the first allegedly improper effort was made in
behalf of Schine (July 1953), and then not until after Senator
McCarthy had made it known (January 1954) that he would subpoena
members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board. Dirksen also called
attention to a telephone conversation between Secretary Stevens and
Senator Stuart Symington on March 8, 1954, three days before the Army
allegations were made public. In that conversation, Stevens said that
any charges of improper influence by McCarthy's staff "would prove to
be very much exaggerated.... I am the Secretary and I have had some
talks with the [McCarthy] committee and the chairman, and so on, and
by and large as far as the treatment of me is concerned, I have no
personal complaint."

In his 1984 book Who Killed Joe McCarthy?, former Eisenhower White
House aide William Bragg Ewald Jr., who had access to many unpublished
papers and memos from persons involved in the Army-McCarthy clash,
confirms the good relations that existed between McCarthy and Stevens
and the lack of pressure from McCarthy in behalf of Schine. In a phone
conversation on November 7, 1953, McCarthy told Stevens not to give
Schine any special treatment, such as putting him in the service and
assigning him back to the committee. McCarthy even said that Roy Cohn
had been "completely unreasonable" about Schine, that "he thinks Dave
should be a general and work from the penthouse of the Waldorf."

Ewald also reported a phone conversation between Stevens and Assistant
Secretary of Defense Fred Seaton on January 8, 1954, in which Stevens
admitted that Schine might not have been drafted if he hadn't worked
for the McCarthy Committee. "Of course, the kid was taken at the very
last minute before he would have been ineligible for age," said
Stevens. "He is 26, you know. My guess would be that if he hadn't been
working for McCarthy, he probably never would have been drafted."

Another thing confirmed by Ewald was the secret meeting at the Justice
Department on January 21, 1954, when a group of anti-McCarthyites came
up with a plan to stop McCarthy either by asking the Republican
members of his committee to talk him out of subpoenaing members of the
Army Loyalty and Screening Board or, if that didn't work, by drawing
up a list of alleged efforts on behalf of David Schine and threatening
to make the list public unless McCarthy backed off.

Those at the January 21st meeting were Attorney General Herbert
Brownell, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge, Deputy Attorney
General William Rogers, White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams,
White House aide Gerald Morgan, and John Adams. After John Adams
inadvertently mentioned this meeting during the Army-McCarthy
Hearings, and McCarthy wanted to find out more about it, President
Eisenhower issued an executive order on May 17, 1954 forbidding any
employee of the Defense Department "to testify to any such
conversations or communications or to produce any such documents or
reproductions."

Q. Did the Army-McCarthy Hearings serve any good purpose?

A. Yes. Despite the inordinate focus on trivia and the clever
distractions introduced by Joseph Welch, counsel for the Army, the
hearings alerted the American people as never before to the dangers of
communism.

Q. How about some examples of clever distractions?

A. Let's consider three tricks pulled by Joe Welch to divert people's
attention away from the central issue of communist subversion:

The "Cropped" Photograph. On April 26th, a photo was introduced
showing Secretary Stevens posing willingly for a smiling photograph
with Private Schine at Fort Dix, New Jersey on November 17, 1953, a
time when Stevens was supposed to be mad at Schine for seeking special
treatment from the Army. Welch produced another photo the next day
showing the base commander in the picture with Stevens and Schine and
said that the first one was "a shamefully cut-down version." But the
innocent deletion of the base commander from the photograph did not
change its meaning - that Stevens was not angry with Schine at a time
that the Army said he was.

The "Purloined" Document. On May 4th, Senator McCarthy produced a two
and one-quarter-page document with the names of 34 subversives at Fort
Monmouth, half of whom were still there. The document, which had been
given to McCarthy by an intelligence officer in 1953, was a summary of
a 15-page report that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had sent on January
26, 1951 to Major General A.R. Bolling, chief of Army Intelligence.
Instead of being concerned that the Army had not acted on the FBI
report and had not tried to root out the subversives at Fort Monmouth,
Welch kept harping on how McCarthy got the summary and where it came
from. McCarthy refused to tell him. Welch ascertained that Hoover had
not written the two and one-quarter-page document in McCarthy's
possession and termed it "a carbon copy of precisely nothing." In
point of fact, however, the document was an accurate summary of
Hoover's original report, but Welch made it appear that McCarthy was
presenting phony evidence.

The Fred Fisher Episode. On June 9th, the 30th day of the hearings,
Welch was engaged in baiting Roy Cohn, challenging him to get 130
communists or subversives out of defense plants "before the sun goes
down." The treatment of Cohn angered McCarthy and he said that if
Welch were so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he
should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who
had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which Attorney
General Brownell had called "the legal mouthpiece of the Communist
Party." Welch then delivered the most famous lines from the
Army-McCarthy Hearings, accusing McCarthy of "reckless cruelty" and
concluding: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've
done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

The fact of the matter was that Fred Fisher's connection with the
National Lawyers Guild had been widely publicized two months earlier.
Page 12 of the April 16th New York Times had carried a picture of
Fisher and a story about his removal from Welch's team because of his
past association with the NLG. If Mr. Welch was so worried that
McCarthy's remarks might inflict a lifelong "scar" on Fisher's
reputation, why did he dramatize the incident in such histrionic
fashion? The reason, of course, was that McCarthy had fallen into a
trap in raising the Fisher issue, and Welch, superb showman that he
was, played the scene for all it was worth. Was Fred Fisher hurt by
the incident? Not at all. He became a partner in Welch's Boston law
firm, Hale & Dorr, and was elected president of the Massachusetts Bar
Association in the mid-1970s.

V. The Watkins Committee

Q. Didn't the Senate finally censure McCarthy for his conduct during
the Army-McCarthy Hearings?

A. No! McCarthy was not censured for his conduct in the Army-McCarthy
Hearings or for anything he had ever said or done in any hearings in
which he had participated. Here are the facts: After McCarthy emerged
unscathed from his bout with the Army, the Left launched a new
campaign to discredit and destroy him. The campaign began on July 30,
1954, when Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing
McCarthy of conduct "unbecoming a member of the United States Senate."
Flanders, who two months earlier had told the Senate that McCarthy's
"anti-Communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to
strike fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority," had gotten
his list of charges against McCarthy from a left-wing group called the
National Committee for an Effective Congress.

McCarthy's enemies ultimately accused him of 46 different counts of
allegedly improper conduct and another special committee was set up,
under the chairmanship of Senator Arthur Watkins, to study and
evaluate the charges. Thus began the fifth investigation of Joe
McCarthy in five years! After two months of hearings and
deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be
censured on only two of the 46 counts.

So when a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954,
these were the two charges to be debated and voted on: 1) That Senator
McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the Senate Subcommitee
on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of
his private and political life in connection with a resolution for his
expulsion from the Senate; and 2) That in conducting a senatorial
inquiry, Senator McCarthy had "intemperately abused" General Ralph
Zwicker.

Many senators were uneasy about the Zwicker count, particularly since
the Army had shown contempt for committee chairman McCarthy by
disregarding his letter of February 1, 1954 and honorably discharging
Irving Peress the next day. For this reason, these senators felt that
McCarthy's conduct toward Zwicker on February 18th was at least
partially justified. So the Zwicker count was dropped at the last
minute and was replaced with this substitute charge: 2) That Senator
McCarthy, by characterizing the Watkins Committee as the "unwitting
handmaiden" of the Communist Party and by describing the special
Senate session as a "lynch party" and a "lynch bee," had "acted
contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into
dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of
the Senate, and to impair its dignity."

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" Senator Joseph
McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22, with the Democrats
unanimously in favor of condemnation and the Republicans split evenly.

Q. Was the Senate justified in condemning McCarthy on these counts?

A. No, it was not. Regarding the first count, failure to cooperate
with the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, the subcommittee
never subpoenaed McCarthy, but only "invited" him to testify. One
senator and two staff members resigned from the subcommittee because
of its dishonesty towards McCarthy, and the subcommittee, in its final
report, dated January 2, 1953, said that the matters under
consideration "have become moot by reason of the 1952 election." No
senator had ever been punished for something that had happened in a
previous Congress or for declining an "invitation" to testify.

As for the second count, criticism of the Watkins Committee and the
special Senate session, McCarthy was condemned for opinions he had
expressed outside the Senate. As David Lawrence pointed out in an
editorial in the June 7, 1957 issue of U.S. News & World Report, other
senators had accused McCarthy of lying under oath, accepting influence
money, engaging in election fraud, making libelous and false
statements, practicing blackmail, doing the work of the communists for
them, and engaging in a questionable "personal relationship" with Roy
Cohn and David Schine, but they were not censured for acting "contrary
to senatorial ethics" or for impairing the "dignity" of the Senate.

The chief beneficiary of the Senate destruction of Joe McCarthy was
the communist conspiracy. Former communist Louis Budenz, who knew the
inner workings of that conspiracy as well as anyone, said that the
condemnation of McCarthy left the way open "to intimidate any person
of consequence who moves against the conspiracy. The communists made
him their chief target because they wanted to make him a symbol to
remind political leaders in America not to harm the conspiracy or its
world conquest designs."

Q. Who were the 22 Republican senators who voted against the
condemnation of Joe McCarthy?

A. More than a dozen senators told McCarthy that they did not want to
vote against him but had to because of the tremendous pressure being
put on them by the White House and by leaders of both political
parties. The 22 men who did put principle above politics were Senators
Frank Barrett (Wyoming), Styles Bridges (New Hampshire), Ernest Brown
(Nevada), John Marshall Butler (Maryland), Guy Cordon (Oregon),
Everett Dirksen (Illinois), Henry Dworshak (Idaho), Barry Goldwater
(Arizona), Bourke Hickenlooper (Iowa), Roman Hruska (Nebraska),
William Jenner (Indiana), William Knowland (California), Thomas Kuchel
(California), William Langer (North Dakota), George Malone (Nevada),
Edward Martin (Pennsylvania), Eugene Millikin (Colorado), Karl Mundt
(South Dakota), William Purtell (Connecticut), Andrew Schoeppel
(Kansas), Herman Welker (Idaho), and Milton Young (North Dakota).

VI. The Years 1955-1957

Q. Did Joseph McCarthy become a recluse in the 29 months between his
condemnation and his death?

A. No, he did not. He worked hard at his senatorial duties. "To
insist, as some have, that McCarthy was a shattered man after the
censure is sheer nonsense," said Brent Bozell, one of his aides at the
time. "His intellect was as sharp as ever. When he addressed himself
to a problem, he was perfectly capable of dealing with it."

A member of the minority party in the Senate again, McCarthy had to
rely on public speeches to alert the American people to the menace of
communism. This he did in a number of important addresses during those
two and a half years. He warned against attendance at summit
conferences with the Reds, saying that "you cannot offer friendship to
tyrants and murderers � without advancing the cause of tyranny and
murder." He declared that "coexistence with communists is neither
possible nor honorable nor desirable. Our longterm objective must be
the eradication of communism from the face of the earth."

Senator McCarthy was virtually alone in warning that the Soviet Union
was winning the missile race "because well-concealed communists in the
United States government are putting the brakes on our own
guided-missile program." He was prophetic in urging the Eisenhower
Administration to let "the free Asiatic peoples" fight to free their
countrymen from communist slavery in Red China, North Korea, and North
Vietnam. "In justice to them, and in justice to the millions of
American boys who will otherwise be called upon to sacrifice their
lives in a total war against communism," said McCarthy, "we must
permit our fighting allies, with our material and technical
assistance, to carry the fight to the enemy." This was not permitted
and, a decade later, more than half a million American servicemen were
fighting in South Vietnam.

Q. Did Joe McCarthy drink himself to death?

A. His enemies would like to have you think that. If McCarthy drank as
much as his foes allege, for as many years as they allege, he would
have had to be carried from speech to speech and from hearing to
hearing, and he would have been unable to string two coherent
sentences together. Did McCarthy look or act like a drunk during the
36 days of televised Army-McCarthy Hearings? No alcoholic could have
accomplished all that McCarthy did, especially in so few years. Yes,
Joseph McCarthy drank, and he probably drank too much sometimes, but
he did not drink during working hours, and any drinking he did do did
not detract one iota from his fight against communism or from the
accuracy of his charges.

In the last two years of his life, McCarthy was greatly disappointed
over the terrible injustice his Senate colleagues had done to him, and
he certainly had his times of depression. Who wouldn't after what he
had been through? But he also had his times of elation, as when he and
his wife adopted a baby girl in January 1957. The picture in Roy
Cohn's book of a smiling Joe McCarthy holding his new daughter is not
the picture of a man drowning in alcohol. William Rusher was counsel
to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee during 1956 and 1957 and
met McCarthy repeatedly on social occasions. "He had at one time been
a heavy drinker," said Rusher of the senator, "but in his last years
was cautiously moderate; he died of a severe attack of hepatitis. He
kept right on with a senator's usual chores up almost until the end."

The end came on May 2, 1957 in Bethesda Naval Hospital. Thousands of
people viewed the body in Washington, and McCarthy was the first
senator in 17 years to have funeral services in the Senate chamber.
More than 30,000 Wisconsinites filed through St. Mary's Church in the
senator's hometown of Appleton to pay their last respects to him.
Three senators - George Malone, William Jenner, and Herman Welker -
had flown from Washington to Appleton on the plane carrying McCarthy's
casket. "They had gone this far with Joe McCarthy," said William
Rusher. "They would go the rest of the way."

VII. Some Final Questions

Q. Did McCarthy conduct a "reign of terror" in the 1950s?

A. This is one of the big lies the left continues to spread about
McCarthy. The average American did not fear McCarthy; in fact, the
Gallup Poll reported in 1954 that the senator was fourth on its list
of most admired men. The only people terrorized by McCarthy were those
who had something subversive to hide in their past and were afraid
that they might eventually be exposed.

Oh, there was a "reign of terror" in the early '50s, but it was
conducted against Joe McCarthy, not by him. Those who denounced
McCarthy week in and week out included the New York Times, the
Washington Post, Time, Life, Walter Lippmann, the Alsop brothers, Drew
Pearson, Jack Anderson, the cartoonist Herblock, Edward R. Murrow,
Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, and liberals from all walks of life.
Reign of terror? During one 18-month period, the University of
Wisconsin invited Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Cousins, Owen Lattimore,
and James Carey - all bitter anti-McCarthyites - to warn the students
of McCarthy's reign of terror.

Q. Most of the books written about McCarthy say that he smeared
thousands of innocent people. Is that true?

A. This is impossible since McCarthy never even mentioned thousands of
people. At the most, he publicly exposed about 160 persons, all of
whom had significant records of collaboration with or support for
communists and/or communist causes. Detractors of McCarthy, said Roy
Cohn, "have to fall back on picayune things about whether he drank and
had a liver condition, usually with a total distortion of the facts.
They talk about the innocent people he destroyed. I have yet to have
them give me one name. I have a standard answer - 'name one.' They
usually come up with someone who came before some other committee, or
Hollywood, or something which was never a focus of a McCarthy
investigation."

Here is one of literally dozens of examples of misinformation about
McCarthy that could be cited: An article about Lillian Hellman in
Newsweek for July 9, 1984 said that perhaps her most famous lines
"were those she wrote in a statement to the House Committee on
Un-American Activities in 1952. 'I cannot and will not cut my
conscience to fit this year's fashions,' she wrote, refusing to
testify against her friends at the McCarthy hearings." Miss Hellman
could hardly have testified "at the McCarthy hearings" because there
were no McCarthy hearings in 1952 and because Joe McCarthy was a
senator and was never involved in any House Committee hearings dealing
with communist infiltration of the Hollywood film industry.

Q. These same books insist that Senator McCarthy never uncovered "a
single communist" in his five-year fight. Is that true?

A. Joe McCarthy was hated and denounced not because he smeared
innocent people, but because he identified guilty people. Any list of
identified communists uncovered by McCarthy would have to include
Lauchlin Currie, Gustavo Duran, Theodore Geiger, Mary Jane Keeney,
Edward Posniak, Haldore Hanson, John Carter Vincent, Owen Lattimore,
Edward Rothschild, Irving Peress, and Annie Lee Moss. But that is not
the whole story. McCarthy also exposed scores of others who may not
have been identified as communists, but who certainly were causing
harm to national security from their posts in the State Department,
the Pentagon, the Army, key defense plants, and the Government
Printing Office. At the latter facility, which handled 250,000 pieces
of secret and classified printed matter annually, the McCarthy probe
resulted in the removal or further investigation by the FBI of 77
employees and a complete revamping of the security system at the GPO.

Was it unreasonable of McCarthy to want government positions filled
with persons who were loyal to America, instead of those with
communist-tainted backgrounds? "A government job is a privilege, not a
right," McCarthy said on more than one occasion. "There is no reason
why men who chum with communists, who refuse to turn their backs on
traitors, and who are consistently found at the time and place where
disaster strikes America and success comes to international communism,
should be given positions of power in government." The motivation of
these people really doesn't matter. If the policies they advocate
continually result in gains for communism and losses for the Free
World, then they should be replaced by persons with a more realistic
understanding of the evil conspiracy that has subjugated more than
one-third of the world. That's not McCarthyism, that's common sense.

Q. Most of the books in the libraries seem to be anti-McCarthy. Are
there any pro-McCarthy books?

A. There are indeed, but most of them are out of print or not usually
available in libraries. Here is a list: McCarthy and His Enemies, by
William Buckley and Brent Bozell; McCarthy, by Roy Cohn; The
Assassination of Joe McCarthy, by Medford Evans; The Lattimore Story,
by John Flynn; Who Promoted Peress?, by Lionel Lokos; three books by
McCarthy himself - Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy
1950-1951, McCarthyism: The Fight for America, and America's Retreat
>From Victory; and a collection of tributes to McCarthy entitled
Memorial Addresses Delivered in Congress.

Q. How then would you define McCarthyism?

A. McCarthyism was a serious attempt to remove from positions of
influence the advocates of communism, the willing and unwilling
supporters of communism and communists, and persons who would prevent
the removal of those who give aid and comfort to the enemies of
America. Communist conspirators and their friends do not fear those
who denounce communism in general terms. They do, however, greatly
fear those who would expose their conspiratorial activities. That is
why they hated and fought Joe McCarthy more than any other public
figure in this century. That is why they have preserved his name as a
club to hold over the head of anyone who dares to expose communism.

Joe McCarthy was a brave and honest man. There was nothing cynical or
devious about him. He said and did things for only one reason - he
thought they were the right things to say and do. He was not perfect;
he sometimes made errors of fact or judgment. But his record of
accuracy and truthfulness far outshines that of his detractors. His
vindication in the eyes of all Americans cannot come soon enough.
Medford Evans put it well when he said: "The restoration of McCarthy �
is a necessary part of the restoration of America, for if we have not
the national character to repent of the injustice we did him, nor in
high places the intelligence to see that he was right, then it seems
unlikely that we can or ought to survive."

* Evidence presented in the other six cases showed that two (Haldore
Hanson and Gustavo Duran) had been identified as members of the
Communist Party, that three (Dorothy Kenyon, Frederick Schuman, and
Harlow Shapley) had extensive records of joining communist fronts and
supporting communist causes, and that one (Esther Brunauer) had
sufficient questionable associations to be dismissed from the State
Department as a security risk in June 1952. For further details, see
chapter seven of McCarthy and His Enemies, by William Buckley and
Brent Bozell.

THE NEW AMERICAN - Copyright 1996, American Opinion Publishing,
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