The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

by James Cross Giblin

  If Joe was disappointed by the outcome, he didn't express it. Besides, another, bigger news story was about to dominate the media. This was the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation into Communist activities in Hollywood.

  9. Charges of Torture

  MANY COMMENTATORS LINK Joe McCarthy with the House Un-American Activities Committee, but there was no official connection. The Committee—commonly known by its acronym, HUAC—was an arm of the House of Representatives, whereas Joe's committee work was confined exclusively to the Senate.

  In 1938, with the threat of war looming in Europe, Congress established HUAC to investigate the "disloyal" activities of Fascists and Communists in the United States. By 1947, the war had been over for two years, suspicion of the Soviet Union was mounting, and the committee had shifted its attention almost entirely to the doings of American Communists and their sympathizers.

  HUAC's chairman in 1947 was Representative J. Parnell Thomas, an ultraconservative Republican from New Jersey, and one of the committee members was Representative Richard M. Nixon of California, who had been elected to the House in 1946, the same year Joe was elected to the Senate. In the fall of 1947, Chairman Thomas launched an investigation into "the extent of Communist penetration in the Hollywood motion picture industry."

  A group of ten accused Hollywood Communists—seven screenwriters, two directors, and a producer—was brought before the committee. One of the ten, director Edward Dmytryk, had actually left the party in 1945; another, screenwriter Alvah Bessie, had fought against the Fascist rebel forces in the Spanish Civil War.

  The "Hollywood Ten," as the press dubbed them, were considered unfriendly witnesses because they refused to cooperate with the committee's investigation. When asked, "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" most of the Ten refused to answer, invoking their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Along with others who were summoned to testify before Congressional committees, they disputed the members' right to question them about their associations in the first place, regardless of whether or not they actually belonged to the suspect organizations. One of the Ten who did respond to the question in his own way was Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., who said, "I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning." On November 24, 1947, the Hollywood Ten were cited for contempt of Congress, and each was sentenced to no more than one year in federal prison.

  J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (right), and Robert E. Stripling, a committee investigator, closely examine a Hollywood movie suspected of promoting Communist ideas and beliefs. The Library of Congress

  Chairman J. Parnell Thomas (second from left) in front of his home with visiting members of his House Un-American Activities Committee, including Representative Richard M. Nixon (far right). The Library of Congress

  Fifty top Hollywood executives, worried about the negative effect the investigation might have on the movie business, met to discuss how the industry should respond. They decided that the Ten would be suspended without pay until their cases went through the appeals courts. The executives also stated firmly that thereafter no Communists or other subversives would knowingly be employed in Hollywood. This policy soon led to the compilation of so-called blacklists that listed the names of entertainment-industry personnel who were suspected of being disloyal. The blacklists affected hundreds if not thousands of men and women, not just in the movies but also in the fledgling television industry and to a lesser extent in the Broadway theater. These actors, writers, directors, and technical people soon lost their jobs.

  Joe was no doubt aware of the impact the House investigation had made in the press and among the general public. For now, though, he had to be content with spearheading a Senate inquiry into the postwar housing problem. The country faced a severe housing shortage, because there had been very little new construction in the Depression years and virtually none during the war, when building materials such as lumber and metal were needed for the war effort. President Truman, expressing the Democratic view, proposed that Congress enact a federal housing program that would include sizable sums for slum clearance in the cities and the construction of more than 500,000 units of affordable public housing.

  Most Republicans, including Joe, were suspicious of public housing, thinking it just another example of big-government bureaucracy and waste—or worse. After visiting one troubled project in Queens, New York, Joe called it "a deliberately created slum area" and a "breeding ground for Communism." Senator Robert Taft took a different position. While Taft believed housing should remain largely in the hands of private developers, he also saw a place for public housing. However, he felt it should be modest in scope and available only to those in genuine need, and should not be allowed to infringe upon the private housing industry.

  This difference would lead to clashes between Taft and Joe when the latter took charge of a joint Senate-House committee established to study the entire housing field. In early February 1948, the committee issued its final report, and two weeks later Joe introduced the draft of a comprehensive housing bill in the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. It included tax exemptions for builders of low-rent housing, assistance to cities for slum clearance, and the extension of federal mortgage insurance. There was no provision for the construction of any public housing units.

  Senator Robert Taft. The National Archives

  Sen. Taft was not pleased. He announced that he would introduce a public-housing amendment to the bill when it reached the full Senate for discussion. The dispute went back and forth, with neither Taft nor McCarthy backing down, and was still not resolved when the 1947–48 Congressional session came to an end. As a consequence, and to Joe's regret, no major housing legislation would be possible until after the election that fall.

  One positive development in Joe's life occurred as he was struggling to pass the comprehensive housing bill. In July 1948, he hired a recent journalism graduate of Northwestern University, Jean Kerr, as a research assistant. Miss Kerr—known as Jeannie to her friends—was a tall, beautiful, intelligent, and highly ambitious young woman. At Northwestern, she was named the prettiest girl in her journalism class. She also won an award for writing the best essay on the topic "The Promotion of Peace Among the Nations of the World."

  Miss Kerr had first stopped by Joe's office in the late spring of 1947 to visit his secretary, who was an old friend. Jean hoped to find a summer job in Washington between her junior and senior years at the university. Joe glimpsed her as she left his office and told his secretary, "Whoever that girl is, hire her." Jean declined the offer, having found another job in the meantime with a Senate special investigation committee. Joe kept in touch with her, though, and a year later she joined his staff.

  The presidential election of 1948 did not go as expected. Republicans thought their candidate, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, would be a shoo-in, and many political commentators and much of the press agreed. On election night, the Chicago Tribune rushed out a special edition with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman!" But he didn't. When the final votes were counted, Truman emerged the victor by a comfortable margin.

  The Republicans suffered another major defeat in the 1948 election: They lost control of the Senate. This directly affected Joe's hopes of making an impression on the Banking and Currency Committee. The newly appointed Democratic chairman of that committee, Senator Burnet R. Maybank of South Carolina, refused to accept the position if McCarthy remained a member. Maybank, who had served on the committee as minority leader, had no use for Joe's brashness and his disregard of Senate rules and traditions.

  McCarthy makes a point in one of his many speeches. Wisconsin Historical Society

  Joe appealed to Sen. Taft for help in retaining his membership, but Taft chose not to intervene. He was still smarting from Joe's refusal to defer to him on the question of public housing. This meant that Joe was left with only
his membership on the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, considered the Senate's least prestigious.

  Joe wasn't ready to let his Senate career sink into obscurity. Although he was no longer directly involved, he maintained a keen interest in housing legislation. In January 1949, President Truman, still savoring his election victory, introduced a greatly expanded housing bill in the Senate. Among other things, it called for the construction of 1,500,000 public housing units over the next seven years, and a five-year slum clearance and urban redevelopment program costing 1.5 billion dollars.

  Realizing that some sort of housing legislation was bound to pass, the Republican minority in the Senate, led by Sen. Taft, sought to moderate the president's figures. Joe entered into the discussion, and a compromise was eventually reached, reducing the number of public housing units to 810,000, to be constructed over a six-year period. This was still a much larger figure than the one proposed in 1948, when the Republicans were in control. The compromise measure passed in the Senate, 57–13, with Joe among those voting in favor. Despite intense efforts by the real estate lobby to defeat it, a similar bill was passed in the House, 227–186.

  President Truman happily signed the measure into law, saying he knew his satisfaction was shared by members of Congress from both political parties "and by the many private groups and individuals who have supported this legislation over the past four years against ill-founded opposition."

  Meanwhile, Joe had made some money from his involvement with the housing problem. In February 1949, he called a press conference to announce the publication of a paperback book, How to Own Your Own Home, which he said he had edited, and to which he had contributed a thirty-seven-page article titled "Wanted: A Dollar's Worth of Housing for Every Dollar Spent." The publisher was the Lustron Corporation, a manufacturer of prefabricated housing that could be assembled quickly and economically. Joe said the ninety-six-page book was designed to inform readers of federal aid available to both war veterans and nonveterans who wanted to build or buy their own homes.

  What Joe didn't say was that it was Jean Kerr who had actually edited the book, including Joe's contribution, as one of her first staff assignments. Nor did he mention that the Lustron Corporation had paid him $10,000—a much larger sum then than now in terms of buying power—for his work on the project. His fee was only revealed in 1950, when Lustron was in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings. At that time, the federal receiver in charge commented, "I'll bet he [Joe] wouldn't have gotten it [the $10,000] if he hadn't been a United States senator."

  The housing problem wasn't the only thing that concerned Joe in 1949. Early in the year, he heard of a case he found hard to believe at first. It arose from a charge by German prisoners of war that American Army personnel had tortured them while they were in captivity. According to the Germans, the Americans had kept them in solitary confinement for six months at near-starvation rations, had driven burning matches under their fingernails, and had given them beatings that resulted in broken jaws and permanently damaged testicles. The charges were made public by the National Council for Prevention of War, a Quaker organization dedicated to "bringing food and hope" to the war-torn countries of Europe, including Germany.

  A firestorm of outrage followed the revelation of the charges. Everyone knew the Nazis had practiced torture, but could American soldiers have committed such atrocities? Individuals and organizations across the country called for a federal investigation into the matter. This was the point at which Joe got involved. He may have become interested in the case initially for political reasons, thinking his involvement would be hailed by Wisconsin's large German American population. Close friends were convinced he took up the case because he believed the charges, thought they put the United States in a terrible light, and wanted to see justice done.

  The background to the case was complicated. It had its beginnings in December 1944, when the German army, driven by the advancing Allied forces into Belgium, had launched a desperate counterattack. During the course of the fighting, known as the Battle of the Bulge, a German regiment overpowered and captured an American troop convoy near the village of Malmédy. The Germans herded the disarmed Americans into an open field and fired into the group with eight machine guns. Moments later, eighty-three American fighting men lay dead in what came to be called "the Malmédy Massacre."

  After the war, in December 1945, American Army personnel transported four hundred members of the German regiment in question to a prison near the city of Stuttgart, Germany, for intensive questioning. It was during this interrogation that the incidents of torture allegedly occurred. When the questioning ended in May 1946, seventy-four of the soldiers most closely involved in the massacre were brought to trial. At the end of the eight-week proceeding, all the accused but one were found guilty and forty-three were sentenced to death.

  General Lucius D. Clay, the American military commissioner for Germany, reduced thirty-one of the forty-three death sentences to life imprisonment, reflecting a sharp change in the political atmosphere. The desire for revenge on Germany, so heated immediately after the war, had dwindled as fear of the Soviet Union's long-range intentions mounted. When the charges of torture emerged in late 1948, the accusations that American soldiers were responsible for the atrocities reverberated throughout America and in newspaper headlines around the world.

  Whatever Joe's motivation for becoming involved, he took immediate action. He began by persuading the Special Investigations Subcommittee of the Executive Expenditures Committee to launch an investigation into the matter. Before work could begin, however, the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, claimed jurisdiction over the case. Without telling Joe, Tydings appointed a subcommittee of his own, headed by Senator Raymond E. Baldwin of Connecticut, to be in charge of the investigation.

  Joe was justifiably angry and told reporters the Armed Services Committee was planning a "whitewash" of the soldiers' actions. To mollify him and keep peace with the Executive Expenditures Committee, Sen. Baldwin invited McCarthy to attend the hearings as an observer. He also agreed to share with Joe all information and documentation regarding the case. Joe accepted Baldwin's offer, and told associates he did not intend to be a silent observer.

  And he wasn't. Almost from the moment they began, he dominated the proceedings, frequently drowning out Chairman Baldwin. "We have been accusing the Russians of using force, physical violence, and have accused them of using mock trials in [prison] cells in the dark of night," McCarthy said, "and now we have an Army report that says we have done all the things the Russians were accused of doing. But they are all right because it created the right psychological effect to get the necessary confessions." Joe delivered the last sentence with withering sarcasm, so listeners understood that he meant the opposite.

  In his questioning of witnesses, McCarthy displayed none of the humor he had often shown when conducting hearings as a judge. Instead, he badgered and belittled the witnesses without mercy. He mocked Lieutenant Colonel Burton F. Ellis, who had been the chief prosecutor at the Malmédy trial and who testified that none of the accused German soldiers had been tortured. "I have been a judge so long," McCarthy said at one point, "that it makes me rather sick inside to hear you testify what you think is proper or improper [in the way the prisoners were treated]."

  In another exchange, Joe asked Ellis loaded questions and then wouldn't let him answer. "If you won't talk when I am talking," McCarthy muttered, "then I won't talk when you are talking." In many ways, Joe's bullying tactics anticipated those he would employ a few years later in his anti-Communist hearings.

  As the investigation continued, the Army's evidence gradually refuted most of the German charges. McCarthy refused to concede that the charges might be false, however. He had made up his mind about what had happened at Malmédy, and nothing anyone said could get him to change it. Instead, he tried to bluff his way through, as he often had when playing poker. His tricky moves failed t
o prevent the subcommittee, in its final report, from dismissing almost all the German claims of torture.

  Joe was still trying to get a word in edgewise as Chairman Baldwin delivered the report in mid-October 1949. At last Baldwin had had enough. He put the report aside for the moment and addressed McCarthy in the formal language often used in Senate debates. "Let me say to my distinguished friend [meaning Joe] that I am not going to let him incorporate misstatements of fact in this case, because sometimes, in his exuberance, he is a little reckless in his statements."

  This was not the first—nor would it be the last—time Joe was criticized for misstating facts. But as before, he seemed to shrug it off, and he continued to accuse the Baldwin subcommittee of a "whitewash" even after its final report was accepted by the Armed Services Committee. The committee responded by passing a resolution expressing its "full confidence" in Senator Raymond Baldwin.

  Joe emerged from the Malmédy investigation bruised but not crushed. He may have failed in the effort to present himself as a fighter for justice to German American voters back home in Wisconsin, and he certainly had made some new enemies in Washington, notably Sen. Baldwin. He got his name in a few newspaper headlines, however, and for Joe that sort of attention often seemed to be what counted most.

  The media spotlight didn't linger long on the Malmédy investigation. Two other events stunned the world and dominated the news in the late summer and early fall of 1949. The first happened on August 29, when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, called by Russian scientists "First Lightning." It was widely known that the Russians had been trying to develop a nuclear bomb, but no one expected they would achieve success so soon. In seeking an explanation, many people in the United States jumped to the conclusion that spies must have passed America's atomic secrets to the Soviets.