The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

by James Cross Giblin

  Except for Appleton and a few small towns like Shawano, the 10th Judicial District was largely farm country. Joe planned to campaign throughout the district in his new car. He would introduce himself to the farmers and their families, chat with them about their concerns, and get their names and addresses so he could follow up his visits with "personal" notes composed, typed, and signed by his secretary.

  What about his views on the issues? some of his friends asked. Wouldn't voters want to know about them? Not necessarily, McCarthy replied. In his opinion, voters didn't care all that much about political issues. How they voted depended more on their feelings about a candidate. A handshake, a smile, a personal note on a postcard letting them know the candidate remembered them—those were much more important.

  Joe didn't rely on the personal touch alone to win the election. From his earlier campaign for district attorney, he'd learned how effective a strong attack could be. Now he thought he'd found the perfect weapon with which to confront Judge Werner. The judge was sixty-six years old and appeared to be in good physical and mental health. But he'd lied about his age in the past. When he first ran for judge back in 1916, he told voters he'd been born in 1866 instead of the actual year, 1872. Werner apparently believed people would be more likely to choose an older, and presumably wiser, man to fill the role of judge. Judge Werner had never corrected his erroneous birth date, which Joe discovered in a 1938 directory of Wisconsin attorneys.

  Even though he knew the date was inaccurate, Joe decided to risk making it public. Early in 1939, he informed the press that Werner was in his seventy-third year and, if reelected, would be eighty by the time his term ended. Joe hoped that with this information in hand, voters would decide Werner was too old for the job.

  The judge reacted angrily to the story when it appeared in the local newspapers. He told reporters his real age and demanded that Joe retract his statement. Joe responded cagily with a letter that implied it was Werner who wasn't telling the truth, and went on to make further use of the judge's advanced age. "Even though a sense of loyalty to the office makes him willing to sacrifice himself and his health," Joe wrote, "perhaps as a kindness to him and in fairness to the public, he should not be burdened with another six-year term."

  This was Joe the poker player, gambling that voters would put more stock in his original disclosure than in the judge's rebuttal. And they did. When the election results were tallied on April 5, 1939, Joe had defeated Judge Werner, 15,160 to 11,154. A third candidate in the race trailed with 9,071 votes. The Appleton Post-Crescent said it was "one of the most astonishing upsets in the history of the Tenth Judicial District."

  Joe, at thirty, was the youngest man ever to be elected a circuit judge in Wisconsin. When he was interviewed about his victory, he adopted a modest tone: "The campaign was a big job, but I have a bigger one ahead of me. The only thing that will overcome the handicap of my youth is unremitting hard work." He would have to repay more than $7000 he had borrowed to keep his campaign going. His annual salary as a judge was $8000, but he wouldn't start to collect it until he took office on January 1, 1940. Until then, he would have only his income as a lawyer, and he would need that to live on.

  Joe didn't seem to be worried, though. Ever the optimist, he arranged to take out an additional loan to start paying off his campaign debts. Since he had no assets to guarantee the loan, he agreed to sign over his future judge's salary to the bank. It would deduct the repayments on the new loan and pass along what was left to Joe.

  Meanwhile, Judge Werner, his friends, and his family found it almost impossible to accept Joe's victory. How could this young upstart, in one blow, have destroyed the reputation of a man so respected and honored in his community? Werner and his supporters demanded that the authorities investigate the campaign, and especially Joe's tactics. A lengthy inquiry followed, but in the end no reason was found to file criminal charges. Joe might have employed questionable methods, but he had done nothing illegal. During the summer of 1939, Joe stayed in Shawano and tried to bring some business into the Eberlein-McCarthy law office.

  A cloud of unwelcome tension hung over much of the Western world that summer. After annexing Austria in 1937 and Czechoslovakia in 1938, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany now seemed poised to invade Poland. England and France had protested the German dictator's earlier aggression but had done nothing to stop him. As British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had stated, his country and France were pursuing a policy of compromise with Hitler, seeking "peace in our time." But Poland was different. Both England and France had promised to help defend Poland if it was attacked—and that would inevitably mean war with Germany.

  If war did come, many Americans believed strongly that the United States should stay out of it: "It's a European problem; let the Europeans solve it." Joe reflected that isolationist view in a speech he gave at a Fourth of July celebration in Appleton. He deplored "the damnable flow of war propaganda" that filled the media, and feared that it would lead to "another futile slaughter" like World War I. "We would like to see all the peoples of the world enjoying the liberty and freedom that we have," Joe said. "But it is written in history that when an autocracy [like the Nazi government of Germany] is removed by powers other than the people themselves, that autocracy will be replaced by an autocracy even more vicious. Democracy has never been bestowed upon a people by an outside paternal hand."

  According to newspaper accounts, the speech was well received, as Joe expected it would be. From personal contacts, he knew that a majority of his audience supported an isolationist stance. Still, the speech offers a rare glimpse into Joe's thinking on U.S. foreign policy. And by the time he was sworn in as a judge in January, the war was a frightening reality. Poland had fallen to the Nazis in September 1939, England and France had declared war on Germany, and the world waited anxiously to see what would happen next.

  Other European developments troubled American leftists who, earlier in the 1930s, had endorsed the policies of the Soviet Union. In 1937 and 1938 Joseph Stalin, a deeply suspicious man, decided that some of his associates in the Communist Party were plotting against him. These so-called traitors were given hasty trials in Soviet courts and sentenced to hard labor in the icy wastes of Siberia, where thousands of them died.

  Then, in the late summer of 1939, just before Germany invaded Poland, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis by which each party agreed it would not attack the other. Stalin had a good, if cynical, reason for doing so. He feared Hitler would not be satisfied with occupying Poland and would send his armies on into the Soviet Union.

  The Russian dictator's 180-degree change in policy badly shook the loyalties of his idealistic Western supporters. They had allied themselves with the Russians in the fight against the Fascists in Spain—a fight that had been lost earlier that year when the right-wing general, Franco, finally defeated his republican opponents. Now these Western leftists, including many Americans, were expected to shift gears and join the Soviet Union in shaking hands with the Nazis.

  Those most committed to their belief in Communism, including leaders of the Communist Party U.S.A. and the staff of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, remained faithful to the party's political line. But many other American leftists couldn't bring themselves to do so. Almost overnight, they changed from fervent supporters of the Soviet Union and its policies to equally fervent enemies. Later, many of them would play major roles as witnesses in Joe McCarthy's investigations of Communist influence in high places.

  In January 1940, Joe's focus was on his new duties as circuit judge. He put a down payment on a small house in Appleton and took possession of the judge's office at the courthouse. Immediately, he found himself confronted by a backlog of almost 250 cases. Judge Werner, it seemed, had worked at a slow, deliberate pace, often interrupting court proceedings to give lectures on the law to the opposing lawyers.

  Joe reversed all that. To move through the backlog, he often kept his courtroom open more than twelve hours a da
y and sometimes worked until midnight. The rapid pace he maintained wore out his court reporter, Pat Howlett. "Joe always drove himself," Howlett said. "Sometimes I couldn't keep up." Later, Joe would boast that he had once heard and judged forty complicated cases in just forty days.

  McCarthy serving as a circuit court judge in 1942. Marquette University Archives

  Few complained of the haste with which Judge McCarthy made his decisions. It was a welcome change after Judge Werner's long delays. Although Joe lacked a deep knowledge of the law, lawyers who tried cases in his court respected him as a judge. He displayed an ability to get quickly to the heart of a matter and a sincere concern for justice. The lawyers forgave him if he sometimes grilled witnesses harshly or held them up to ridicule. On the whole, they found him hard working and fair-minded.

  Joe established an informal atmosphere in his courtroom and often injected a note of humor into the proceedings. In a traffic accident case, he once told the attorney for the plaintiff, "Every time a doctor comes in here, he tells me his patient was seriously injured and his bill was reasonable. I'm waiting for the day when a doctor comes in and says, 'No, my patient wasn't hurt so bad, and my bill was way too high.'"

  Word of Joe's performance as a judge spread around the state. In a feature article, the Milwaukee Journal wrote: "Breaking with the 'horse-and-buggy' tradition that has tied up the calendars of most Wisconsin circuit courts, young Judge Joseph R. McCarthy of Appleton has streamlined his Tenth District ... and has made a hit with lawyers and litigants alike."

  Being a judge didn't change the way Joe went about his personal life. Unless he was trying to impress someone, he didn't pay much attention to material things. His house was sparsely furnished, and he often left his suits and other clothes scattered about his bedroom.

  He had a hard time organizing his judicial papers and was always losing or forgetting something. His speeches were cobbled together at the last minute, often containing muddled passages that revealed a lack of preparation. Friends like Urban Van Susteren overlooked his faults because they appreciated Joe's good qualities: his generosity, his loyalty, his spontaneity, and his sense of humor.

  Joe hadn't forgotten his family; he made frequent trips to Grand Chute to visit his parents. Nor had he abandoned his religion. He attended Sunday mass regularly, knelt for evening prayers whenever possible, and often recited the rosary while driving.

  And he still loved to gamble. He particularly enjoyed the card games that started at midnight at the Appleton Elks Club. Once he kept on playing until seven-fifteen A.M., took a quick shower at home, put on a different suit, and got to the courthouse before nine.

  Most of his friends thought Joe was satisfied with being a judge. Early in 1941, he surprised them all when he said he was thinking seriously of running for the U.S. Senate. His closest friends didn't reject the notion; after all, Joe had won his race for circuit judge against seemingly impossible odds. However, they did remind him of certain realities. He was known in only a relatively small area of Wisconsin; both of the incumbent senators, Robert M. La Follette, Jr., and Alexander Wiley, had good reputations; and besides, it was illegal for a sitting judge in Wisconsin to run for any other office.

  Joe brushed aside their objections, saying he wasn't sure just when he would run. He already had a plan for becoming better known around the state. He would seek opportunities to exchange positions with other circuit judges, and would accept invitations to speak anywhere and everywhere in Wisconsin. And wherever he went, he would gather names of people who might be helpful when he did make a run for the U.S. Senate. In the summer and fall of 1941, McCarthy raced from one Wisconsin city and small town to another, getting his name in the newspapers and impressing potential voters with his energy, his cheerfulness, and his firm handshake.

  All this groundwork came to an abrupt end on Sunday, December 7, 1941. That day everyone in the United States was stunned by the surprise Japanese air attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. In response, President Roosevelt declared war on Japan on December 8. Nazi Germany entered the fight on December 11 when it backed its close ally, Japan, by declaring war on the United States also. President Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress reacted in the only way they could, with a declaration of war against Germany. Within less than a week, the United States found itself involved in a war that was being fought in both Asia and Europe.

  Now it no longer mattered whether you were a right-winger or a left-winger, an isolationist or an internationalist. Almost every American male of military age, except for those who opposed war because of their religious beliefs, had a single purpose in mind: to help defend his country.

  As a judge, Joe was automatically deferred from military service, but he felt guilty about accepting the deferment. Besides, he sensed it would be a drawback to his future political ambitions if he stayed out of the fight. He decided to enlist in the Army, but Urban Van Susteren persuaded him to think again. Knowing Joe's love of the limelight, Van Susteren told him that if he wanted to be a hero, he should join the Marines.

  McCarthy took his friend's advice. On June 2, 1942, he applied for an officer's commission in the Marines and then arranged for a leave of absence from his duties as a judge. Later that week, he drove to Milwaukee and enlisted. In an interview, he told reporters he hoped to get into officers' training school but was enlisting without any guarantee of a commission. "At the moment," Joe said, "I'm much more interested in a gun than a commission."

  One reporter misinterpreted his words and wrote that Judge McCarthy had enlisted as a buck private. Joe didn't correct the error when the story appeared in print. Instead, he told anyone who asked that he had entered the Marines as a private, and only later earned a second lieutenant's commission. In fact, he received his commission as a first lieutenant on July 29, 1942, and was sworn in at that rank on August 4.

  Why would Joe promote a lie that could so easily be exposed—and eventually was, nine years later, in 1951? Probably because he thought it would enhance his image in future political campaigns: People would believe that Joe McCarthy's desire to serve his country was so great that he enlisted in the Marines as a buck private. And probably, too, because he thought he could get away with it.

  After being sworn in, Joe was ordered to report to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, for basic training. He was thirty-three years old. Joe had no idea where he would be sent after his training was completed; the war was being waged on two fronts and was not going well on either in the summer of 1942.

  Nazi Germany occupied much of western Europe, and German armies were advancing into the Soviet Union. Hitler had broken the 1939 nonaggression pact he had signed with Stalin and had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Now the Soviet armies were fighting on the side of Great Britain and the United States, and even some archfoes of Communism in the U.S. were making contributions to Russian war relief.

  In the Pacific, Japan had followed up its attack on Pearl Harbor by sweeping down on the Philippine Islands, and on what are now Malaysia and Indonesia. The Japanese already controlled the coastal areas of China, including the port cities of Shanghai and Canton, and still held Peking. General Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of free China, had been forced to move his capital to the inland city of Chungking.

  Japan had also seized many key islands in the western Pacific, from Guam to Wake. The United States had just begun to fight back, engaging a Japanese fleet at Midway Island and launching an invasion of the Solomon Islands. But the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and Marines faced a long, bloody struggle as they attempted to push the Japanese back across the Pacific, island by island.

  This was the overall military situation that confronted First Lieutenant Joseph R. McCarthy and hundreds of other Marine recruits when they reported for duty at Quantico in early August 1942.

  5. "Tail Gunner Joe"

  JOE SPENT THE REST of 1942 and the first months of 1943 in training. After Quantico, he was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolin
a and then at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Centro, California. Along the way, his rank was raised from first lieutenant to captain.

  At El Centro, Joe was named the intelligence officer for a dive-bomber squadron. His duties would include briefing the forty pilots in the squadron before their flights and—on their return—debriefing them about the success they'd had in hitting their targets, the enemy resistance they'd faced, and any problems they'd encountered while airborne. Then he'd write intelligence reports for officers higher up the chain of command. His responsibilities would not involve taking part in combat missions, at least not according to the job description.

  In March 1943, the squadron was sent to Pearl Harbor for two months of further training in Hawaii. In June, they embarked again, this time for the South Pacific, where U.S. Marines had recently taken Guadalcanal Island from the Japanese after months of fierce fighting.

  A Marine traveling on the same ship as Joe kept a diary of the voyage, excerpts from which appeared in the Milwaukee Journal. "We weren't long out of Pearl," the Marine wrote, "before I decided that McCarthy was the most interesting character aboard." Joe was popular with the officers because "he had found a way around the regulation banning liquor on board. He had three trunks marked 'office supplies—squadron 235' and all those supplies were liquid."

  The Marine diarist thought Joe was a terrific poker player—although a tricky one."He'd sit in a game and suddenly, for no reason at all, bet $101.15 or $97.90. Not only would the bet knock other players off balance, but they'd have the problem of counting out the exact sum. Most times, they'd let him have the pot just to get on to the next hand."