He said at the end: “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”
It would be difficult to exaggerate the courage Murrow displayed on this program, or the malice it aroused. Merely by saying at the end of it, “I want to associate myself with every word just spoken by Ed Murrow,” Don Hollenbeck, the network’s regular 11 P.M. newscaster, touched off a Hearst crusade against himself which ended in his suicide. CBS—which was administering loyalty oaths to its own employees and hiring ex-FBI agents to investigate them—was appalled. (Murrow, now a director of the network, described the reaction of his colleagues at their next meeting as, “Good show. Sorry you did it.”) McCarthy himself said scornfully that he hadn’t seen it: “I never listen to the extreme left-wing, bleeding heart elements of radio and TV.” He wouldn’t deign to reply on the air, so CBS gave the time to Vice President Nixon, who spent it begging McCarthy to follow the Republican party line.
If Murrow’s zeal as a cold-warrior was not fully appreciated then, it was only because it was shared by virtually everyone in the country, in public life and out. Like his countrymen he was an ardent advocate of NATO, the Truman Doctrine in Greece and Turkey, more spending on U.S. armaments, a stronger U.S. military presence in Europe, and the right of a President to send American troops abroad without congressional approval. He backed the Korean War—“We have drawn a line,” he said approvingly, “not across the peninsula but across the world”—and he predicted that “some form of intervention” in Vietnam “may prove inescapable.”
But he also shared the liberal vision of Wilsonian self-determination. After Pearl Harbor he had said that the State Department had “misjudged the nature of this war. It is a worldwide revolution, as well as a war.” That in itself was enough to recommend him to John Kennedy when the new President was looking for a United States Information Agency (USIA) director in 1960.
Murrow accepted, partly because he reciprocated Kennedy’s admiration but also because he was discouraged by what was happening to mass communications in the United States. With situation comedies, quiz shows, and mindless Westerns, television was grossing a billion dollars a year. Murrow spoke out bitterly against TV’s “decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live,” but the titans of the industry weren’t listening. Already CBS had killed See It Now as a weekly program and replaced it with occasional specials. Admen called the new broadcasts See It Now and Then.
His last years were sad. Uncomfortable as a bureaucrat, he saw USIA’s reputation for integrity fall, a casualty of the Johnson administration’s decision to use the agency for the dissemination of propaganda about the Vietnam War. One of the grimmest of his Doomsday predictions was coming true; demonstrations were being staged for TV, and cameramen, by their very presence, were encouraging urban rioting. The networks were becoming increasingly shameless in their pursuit of the advertising dollar. “Station breaks” were lengthened from 32 to 42 seconds, to cram in more commercials. CBS Reports, the last of Murrow’s great news programs, was replaced by a show about a talking horse. On the day he died in the spring of 1965, CBS announced his death—and followed the bulletin with a cigarette commercial.
His ashes were scattered over his farm in Pawling, New York. But that wasn’t the end of Ed Murrow. Buried six feet below the farm’s soil lay a new television cable. As long as it lies there, as long as the social function of communications retains its great potential, the spirit of the man will live.
That—was Murrow.
SEVENTEEN
Into the Abyss
Ill health had forced Mary Acheson Bundy to leave her small son with her parents and enter a sanatorium in Saranac, New York. There, in that month of the Hiss verdict, she received a letter from her father noting that soon:
…in a public speech I shall do my best to carry some sense of the problem in the Far East, the limitation of our power, the direction of our purpose. So much that is foolish, disloyal, and generally contemptible has been going on that it is good that we are—as I hope—free to go ahead on a clear and sensible course.
It was, in Acheson’s words, “a supercharged moment to be speaking on Asian matters.” The Chiang Kai-shek tragedy was now complete. He had been the generalissimo of a vast and superbly equipped army on V-J Day, and he had staggered from one setback to another until his forces melted away and he himself was a refugee on an island off the Chinese coast. Chiang’s ineptness had been evident to nearly everyone who had been watching the disintegration of his strength. Even Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune had told the Associated Press, “The Chiang Kai-shek government cannot put down an insurrection which is falsely called a Communist insurrection.” The colonel would soon change his mind, recognizing in the loss of China the most effective political issue since Roosevelt had wrested control of the White House from Hoover.
As Acheson posted the letter to his daughter, the Red Chinese regime was in its fourth month. Mao Tse-tung was in Moscow negotiating a Sino-Soviet friendship treaty with Joseph Stalin. Having just exploded his first atomic bomb, the Russian dictator had become a very useful friend to have. The American people knew that, and they were in no mood for gradations in guilt. Republicans on the attack encouraged the confusion in which Chiang, Fuchs, Hiss, Mao, the Rosenbergs, Yalta, and Acheson were all being wrapped up in one scarlet bundle. Senator Taft was being widely quoted as charging in the Senate that the State Department had “been guided by a left-wing group who obviously have wanted to get rid of Chiang and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose.”
That was politics. Military strategy was something else. In 1947 the Joint Chiefs of Staff had unanimously agreed that South Korea was not worth fighting for, and on March 1, 1949, General MacArthur had told a New York Times correspondent in Tokyo:
Our defensive dispositions against Asiatic aggression used to be based on the west coast of the American continent. The Pacific was looked upon as the avenue of possible enemy approach. Now the Pacific has become an Anglo-Saxon lake, and our line of defense runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which starts in its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska.1
A glance at that bend on a map shows that strategically, at least, MacArthur felt that he could live with hostile forces controlling Formosa or the Korean peninsula. But the general was a better politician than the Secretary of State. By the end of 1949 he was beginning to realize that American public opinion, shocked by the red star rising over mainland China, would interpret any further expansion by Communist arms as a stinging U.S. defeat. Acheson, for his part, remained resigned to a Maoist Taiwan. On December 18, 1949, he advised U.S. Asian missions that the importance of Formosa should be minimized since “its fall is widely anticipated.” Two weeks later MacArthur leaked his copy of that memorandum to the press. In the general uproar Taft and Herbert Hoover demanded a naval defense of Formosa, but Truman vetoed it, and it was against this background that Acheson delivered the speech, first mentioned in the letter to his daughter, before the National Press Club on January 12, 1950.
Clearly it was no time for a Secretary of State to speak extemporaneously. His staff had therefore given him a thick folder of marked-up drafts. “But in the end,” he writes in his memoirs, without further explanation, “I put the drafts aside and made the speech from a page or two of notes.” For his audience he retraced the same defensive perimeter MacArthur had drawn ten months earlier, before the fall of China had altered the political picture in Washington: from the Aleutians to Japan, to the Ryukyus, to the Philippines. “So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned,” he added—and here he obviously had Formos
a and South Korea in mind—“it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack. Should such an attack occur,” he declared, “the initial resistance” must come from “the people attacked.” If they proved to be resolute fighters, he vaguely concluded, they were entitled to an appeal under the charter of the United Nations.
To the end of his life Acheson would bitterly deny that he had given the green light for aggression in South Korea by excluding it from the defensive perimeter. But when he told the Press Club that the United States was waiting “for the dust to settle” in China and added that America’s line of resistance ran “along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus,” the Communists could only conclude, as they did, that the United States was leaving people northwest of the Korea Strait to fend for themselves.
It was not like Acheson to misinterpret American policy, and in fact he had not done so. Like MacArthur the previous March, he had ruled out U.S. participation in an Asian land war. American intentions change, however. Hitler had failed to appreciate that, and as a consequence he had been destroyed. Now Stalin was repeating the error. The Soviet leader was dictating North Korean war plans (at this point Mao wasn’t even advised of them) and he took Acheson at his word. The day after the secretary’s Press Club speech Jacob Malik, the Russian representative at the United Nations, walked out on the Security Council because it had refused to reject the Chinese Nationalists and welcome emissaries from the new mainland regime. Stalin was putting the Americans on notice. From his point of view, the timing was perfect. The United States was drafting a Japanese peace treaty without consulting Moscow. Since V-J Day the Russians had been hoping that Washington would give them a free hand in Korea. In George Kennan’s opinion, “When they saw it wasn’t going to work out that way, they concluded: ‘If this is all we are going to get out of a Japanese settlement, we had better get our hands on Korea fast before the Americans let the Japanese back in there.’”
Meanwhile Truman’s global strategy had begun to pivot. In April the President, presiding over a meeting of the National Security Council, abandoned defense perimeters and moved toward a new strategy under which the country could meet any threat to non-Communist governments. It was at that session that the council adopted NSC 68, the paper which, among other things, determined that 20 percent of the country’s future income would be set aside for military use. Wise or not, the decision should never have been kept secret. Stalin, unaware of it, assumed that South Korea was as ripe for plucking as Czechoslovakia had been in 1938. Later, congressional critics taxed Acheson for calling poor signals, though they were in no position to throw stones. A week after the secretary’s Press Club speech the economy-minded lower house defeated 193 to 192 a small appropriation which would have provided five hundred U.S. Army officers to supervise the equipping of South Korean troops. That night Acheson wrote Mary:
This has been a tough day, not so much by way of work, but by way of troubles. We took a defeat in the House on Korea, which seems to me to have been our own fault. One should not lose by one vote. We were complaisant and inactive. We have now a long road back.
The first intersection on that road lay dead ahead.
In January 1950 Joseph R. McCarthy was forty-one years old, and in more ways than one he was a man on the skids. Elected four years earlier in the Republican sweep of 1946, he was in a fair way to becoming a disgrace to the United States Senate—a cheap politician who had sunk to taking $10,000 from the Lustron Corporation, a manufacturer of prefabricated housing, and an unsecured $20,000 from the Washington lobbyist for Pepsi-Cola. He had spent it recklessly in speculation in soybean futures and long phone conversations with bookies. A few men on the Hill knew that McCarthy’s battered tan briefcase always carried a bottle of whiskey. He was in fact a borderline alcoholic, boastful among friends of his ability to “belt a fifth” every day. But at the rate he was going, he had six, maybe seven years left.
He was a rogue, and he looked the part. His eyes were shifty. When he laughed, he snickered. His voice was a high-pitched taunt. On the Senate floor he could be quickly identified by his heavy beard. He was in fact a prime specimen of what has been called the Black Irish: the thickset, bull-shouldered, beetle-browed type found on Boston’s Pier Eight and in the tenements of South Chicago. He lacked the genius of Huey Long and the faith in himself. What he had going for him was a phenomenal ability to lie and an intuitive grasp of the American communications industry. That and ruthlessness. If he had a creed it was nihilism, a belief in nothing, or next to nothing. He enjoyed reading his name in the newspapers, and he wanted to remain a senator.
Sometime after the Colony dinner, which had not been particularly helpful to him, McCarthy telephoned the Republican National Committee to say that he would be available on the Lincoln’s birthday weekend, five weeks hence, for speeches about Communists in the government. If the committee staff was elated, they concealed it. Certainly they weren’t surprised. This, after all, was the party line. Richard Nixon, the anti-Communist hero of the hour, was warning that the Hiss case was just “a small part of the shocking story of Communist espionage in the United States.” Nixon was much in demand, but to the best of the Republican National Committee’s knowledge, McCarthy knew nothing about Communism. The only Lincoln Day booking the staff could find for him was a spot before the Ohio County Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, followed by dates in Salt Lake City and Reno. En route to Wheeling, the dutiful airline hostess, observing a U.S. Senator on her passenger list, said, “Good afternoon, Senator McCarthy.” He looked startled. “Why, good afternoon,” he said. “I’m glad somebody recognizes me.”
Before enplaning he had done a little—a very little—homework. It would be too much to call it research. For the most part his “rough draft,” as he later described it to reporters, was a scissors-and-paste job made up of passages from other Republican addresses, only slightly altered. According to the Wheeling Intelligencer, he had hacked out a paragraph from a speech Nixon had delivered in the House of Representatives on January 26:
NIXON IN CONGRESS The great lesson which should be learned from the Hiss case is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get 30 pieces of silver to obtain the blueprint of a new weapon… but this is a far more sinister type of activity, because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.
MCCARTHY IN WHEELING One thing to remember in discussing the Communists is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprint of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.
So far as is known, his own investigation of subversion was limited to a single telephone call. He phoned Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune Washington staff and told him he needed help for his speech. From Edwards he learned of two inquiries, both brief and largely forgotten, into the loyalty of State Department workers. The first could be found in files of the Congressional Record. On July 26, 1946, James F. Byrnes, then Secretary of State, had written Congressman Adolph J. Sabath of Illinois explaining that during a preliminary screening of some 3,000 employees who had been transferred to the State Department from wartime agencies, the screeners had recommended against the permanent employment of 284. Of these, 79 had been discharged. By subtracting 79 from 284, McCarthy acquired the magical figure of 205—205 people whose dismissal had been suggested but who had still been on the rolls at the time of Byrnes’s letter.2 The senator’s other source was known to anti-Communist vigilantes as “the Lee list.” Robert E. Lee was the investigator for a House appropriations subcommittee who had been permitted to examine 108 State Department personnel files in connection with the Amerasia case. In 1948 the department had sent the committee a statistical summary reporting that of the 108, those still in departmental employ numbered 57—the “Heinz Varieties figure,” as Richard H. Rovere would soon call it in the New Yorker.
Thus Senator McCarthy had two nu
mbers, 205 and 57. But that was all he had. To grasp the dimensions of his fraud, one must remember that at this point he had no dossiers, no raw data, and no specifications, however vague. He knew of the two outdated lists, but he had neither. If pressed, he was incapable of producing a single name, and was embarking on a speaking tour which would take him to West Virginia, to Utah after a change of planes in Colorado, and then to Reno, Nevada. On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that he anticipated a challenge. He expected to deliver a few time-honored homilies before small audiences of Republican women and return to find that Wisconsin papers had carried accounts of his trip, reminding Republican functionaries and contributors back home of his existence. Of course, he would make two or three wild charges, but they would be no wilder than those of other GOP speakers that weekend. Later he realized that he had stumbled upon a brilliant demagogic technique. Others deplored treachery. McCarthy would speak of traitors.
***
Wheeling’s radio station WWVA recorded his remarks there and put them on the air that night. Unfortunately for history, the tape was erased immediately after the broadcast. All that survives, beyond the recollections of others present, are the notes of a Wheeling Intelligencer reporter named Frank Desmond. According to Desmond, the famous passage was:
While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 78