The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

by James Cross Giblin

  The second shock occurred little more than a month later. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese Communist Party, declared victory over Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist army in the civil war that had wracked China for more than twenty years. Mao declared in a speech that "the Chinese people have stood up." Chiang, with his remaining troops and more than 2 million refugees associated with his regime, fled the Chinese mainland and settled on the large Chinese-owned island of Taiwan.

  A victorious Mao Zedong proclaims the founding of the People's Republic of China in Beijing on October 1, 1949.

  AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

  Like the Soviet atomic bomb test, the victory by the Chinese Communists was not entirely unexpected. After the Japanese defeat in World War II, President Truman had sent General George Marshall to China to try to arrange a truce between Mao's Communists and Chiang's Nationalists. Neither side was willing to compromise, however, and Marshall ultimately left China in 1947, his mission a failure.

  The Chinese civil war blazed more hotly than ever, and the United States, banking on a Nationalist victory, sent millions of dollars in military aid to bolster Chiang's forces. Many Chinese experts in the State Department, including John Stewart Service, and other Chinese scholars like Owen Lattimore warned that Chiang's government was riddled with corruption and lacked broad support among the Chinese people. They urged the United States to adopt a more neutral position in its relations with China.

  These experts were overshadowed by American supporters of Chiang, who composed what was known as the "China Lobby" because they constantly pressed for more U.S. aid to the Nationalists. Outspoken members of the lobby included Henry Luce, the powerful and influential publisher of Time and Life magazines; Lieutenant General Claire Chennault, who had flown supplies to Chiang's forces during the war; and Chennault's Chinese-born wife, Anna. They and their fellows argued that Chiang's government was a loyal ally of the United States in its fight against the spread of Communism, and should be backed unconditionally. They found a sympathetic ear in President Truman, who had vowed to resist the expansion of Communist rule whenever and wherever he could.

  And so, in 1949, after the Chinese Communists won control of a country of more than 600,000,000 people and Chiang's Nationalists experienced a humbling defeat, many Americans were perplexed and enraged. First the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb, and now China had been taken over by Communists. How could such a thing have happened? It wasn't long before the cry "Who lost China?" went up, and attention focused on the State Department experts who had advocated a more realistic policy toward the world's most populous nation.

  In this climate of fear and paranoia, Joe McCarthy found the perfect environment to launch the next stage of his political career. But first he had to deal with some unfinished business back home in Wisconsin.

  10. The Speech That Started It All

  THE MADISON CAPITAL TIMES, one of the leading newspapers in Wisconsin's capital, had been opposed to McCarthy since his campaign against Sen. La Follette. Joe's trickery and his down-the-line Republican position on the issues angered the Capital Times's liberal owner. Now, in 1949, the newspaper spurred the state tax department to audit, or investigate, McCarthy's income tax returns for the past five years.

  Joe anxiously awaited the results of the audit, because he knew his tax records were messy. He was elated when state tax officials not only gave him a "clean bill of health," as he put it, but also issued him a refund check for $1,100. Joe wasn't content to let the matter end there, however. As Urban Van Susteren recalled later, McCarthy loved to get revenge when he felt someone had treated him unjustly.

  His revenge this time took the form of a fiery attack on the Capital Times's city editor, Cedric Parker. Joe claimed that Parker had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, had joined many other subversive organizations in the 1930s and '40s, and, according to Joe, still held extreme left-wing views. Parker, he said, was a perfect example of the kind of journalist J. Edgar Hoover had warned against: those who were planted by the Communists in important positions on college town newspapers "so that the young people who will take over control of the nation someday will be getting daily doses of Communist party-line propaganda."

  McCarthy got more publicity in Wisconsin for questioning Parker's loyalty than for anything he had done so far in the Senate. Time magazine gave the story national attention, calling Joe's charges "blistering" and "well documented." Actually, the charges contained several unidentified quotations and many examples of guilt by association—accusing someone of being a Communist, for example, if the person had friends or colleagues who were members of the party. Once again, as Joe was quick to note, the response revealed that the media were more interested in accusations than in their accuracy.

  Joe reached another conclusion in the wake of the Cedric Parker affair: If charges of disloyalty and subversion could get so much attention, most of it favorable, why not make more of them? On November 11, 1949, in a speech to the Shriners Club in Madison, he roused the crowd when he said, "We cannot blind our eyes to the fact that we are engaged in a showdown fight ... a final, all-out battle between Communist atheism and Christian democracy." He went on to say he was still convinced that David Lilienthal, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was disloyal and should be replaced. In the aftermath, pressured by Republican senators like Joe and ultraconservative Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, Lilienthal resigned his chairmanship on November 23.

  Meanwhile, Joe had identified other targets. At a meeting of Young Republicans in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on November 15, he condemned the loss of China to the Communists, blamed "pinkos" (individuals with Communist leanings) like John Stewart Service for the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek, and claimed the State Department was "honeycombed with Reds. [Communists]." In his new role of anti-Communist crusader, Joe came to rely heavily on Jean Kerr. She was even more conservative than he, and had long been an ardent opponent of Communism. By the fall of 1949, she and Joe had become very close, and insiders believed she had helped turn him toward the far right of the Republican Party.

  One surprise after another dominated the news in the first months of 1950, and each fed into the rising tide of anti-Communism. First, on January 21, Alger Hiss, a high official in the State Department from 1936 to 1946 and a participant in the Yalta Conference, was convicted on two charges of perjury. In 1948, a former Communist, Whittaker Chambers, had accused Hiss of being a member of the Communist Party and a Soviet spy. Hiss denied the charges, but after two years of hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee and two court trials, a jury determined that Hiss had lied.

  To the chagrin of those who believed in his innocence, the former State Department official was sentenced to five years in prison. But others, while satisfied by the verdict, thought the revelations about Alger Hiss were just the tip of the iceberg. Richard Nixon, a member of HUAC, called the Hiss case "a small part of the whole shocking story of Communist espionage in the United States."

  On January 31, President Truman announced that the United States would develop an even more powerful weapon, the hydrogen bomb. This second surprise heartened those who had been dismayed when the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb the previous fall. Not everyone was pleased by the president's disclosure, however. World-renowned scientist Dr. Albert Einstein warned that all life on earth could be wiped out by a hydrogen bomb, and another scientist, Dr. Vannevar Bush, declared that no defense could be mounted against it.

  The third surprising bit of news overshadowed Truman's announcement and revived the feelings of anger and fear aroused by the Soviet atomic test. On February 3, it was reported that Dr. Klaus Fuchs, a noted physicist, had been arrested in London as a Soviet spy. Fuchs, an exile from Hitler's Germany and a longtime Communist sympathizer, had fled first to England and then to America, where he had worked on the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. After the war, Fuchs had returned to England and continued his research on atomic energy. He als
o, according to the British police, passed along atomic and hydrogen bomb secrets to Soviet agents.

  Alger Hiss. The National Archives

  The U.S. reaction to Fuchs's treachery was quick and strong. The Chicago Tribune, one of the nation's most conservative newspapers, ran a huge front-page headline, "Reds Get Our Bomb Plans!" After expressing his shock at the news, Senator George W. Malone, Republican of Nevada, said, "Every move the State Department has made since 1934, when we recognized Russia, has been toward strengthening the Communists."

  Meanwhile, the Republicans were busy organizing Lincoln's Day speeches around the country. The speeches would be given during the week of Lincoln's birthday. In the talks, party leaders would lay out their themes for the midterm elections that fall. Prominent among the themes, of course, would be the need to fight Communism wherever it raised its ugly head. Because of anti-Communist talks he had given recently in Washington and Wisconsin, Joe was one of the Republican senators chosen to deliver Lincoln's Day speeches.

  Joe would not be speaking in big cities, where he might expect to get the most publicity. Sen. Taft and other senior Republican leaders hadn't forgotten the way McCarthy had offended them with his brashness and lack of respect. Consequently, he was handed a list of smaller cities. The tour began in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, and went from there to Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada, before winding up on February 15 in Huron, South Dakota.

  If Joe was annoyed with this rather out-of-the-way itinerary, he didn't show it. Instead, he prepared for the tour with the same energy and enthusiasm he'd displayed when campaigning in Wisconsin. He had his speechwriters draft two different talks, one on the nation's housing problems, the other on Communists in government. During the cab ride into Wheeling, the first stop on his tour, he asked the Republican politician who had met his plane which of the talks he thought would be more appropriate. Without hesitation, the politician chose the one on Communists in high places, and Joe agreed.

  That evening, more than 275 people gathered in the ballroom of a Wheeling hotel for the Lincoln Day celebration, sponsored by the Ohio County Republican Women's Club. A local radio station planned to broadcast Joe's talk, and reporters from Wheeling newspapers were present. No journalists from the major radio networks or big city newspapers attended the event. As far as they were concerned, it would be just another political speech by a little-known junior senator, and not worth the attention of a wider audience.

  Joe McCarthy attends a dinner before his Lincoln Day speech on February 8, 1950, to a women's Republican club in Wheeling, West Virginia. This was the speech in which McCarthy claimed that 205 members of the Communist Party were working in the State Department. Marquette University Archives

  They were right about most of Joe's remarks, which were a rehash of the Alger Hiss case and other examples of Communists allegedly working in the State Department. But then—in what would become a recurring gesture of Joe's—he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper. He waved it dramatically in front of the audience and said: "Ladies and gentlemen, while I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State [Dean Acheson at the time] as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

  This was not a new charge. In fact, Joe later admitted it came from a letter that the previous secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, had written to a congressman in Illinois four years earlier. The letter was in response to the congressman's inquiry into the backgrounds of 4,000 federal employees who had recently been transferred to the State Department from wartime agencies that were being shut down.

  In the letter, Byrnes responded that case histories of more than 3,000 transfers had already been examined, and it was recommended that 285 of these people not be given permanent employment. Further examinations led to 79 being let go, many of them aliens—that is, not American citizens—who were ineligible for postwar government employment. That left 206 (not 205) still employed by the State Department—in 1946, not 1950, when Joe delivered his speech. And Byrnes never said that any of those involved were members of the Communist Party.

  Not knowing these background facts, the Wheeling audience that night reacted to Joe's words with shock and dismay. The major local paper, the Wheeling Intelligencer, gave his talk front-page coverage with banner headlines, and a part-time Associated Press reporter in Wheeling phoned in a couple of paragraphs from the story to his boss in Charleston, the state capital.

  The boss was astonished by Joe's claim that there were 205 known Communists working in the State Department, and asked his reporter to double-check the figure with McCarthy. Joe confirmed its accuracy, and later that day, February 10, the reporter's 110-word story went out on AP newswires to papers all across the country.

  At first not that many newspapers picked it up. Then, after the State Department issued a denial on February 11, the story received much wider coverage. When Joe's plane landed in Denver on its way to Salt Lake City, reporters gathered at the airport asked for his comments on the denial. One wanted to see the list of Communists Joe had referred to in his talk.

  Joe didn't have the copy of Byrnes's letter to the Illinois congressman with him; it was in his Washington office. The piece of paper he'd displayed to the Wheeling audience was just a page from his speech. But as he so often did when cornered, Joe decided to bluff. It had worked in the past; why not now? He would be glad to show the reporter the list, he said, but unfortunately he had left it on the plane. "If Dean Acheson calls me in Salt Lake City," Joe said, "I'll be glad to read the list to him."

  When he got to Salt Lake City, Joe, in a radio interview, said he had the names of 57 "card-carrying members of the Communist Party" who were currently at work in the State Department. If the interviewer noticed the discrepancy between this figure and the 205 Joe had cited in Wheeling, he didn't comment on it.

  This lower number came from another report that Joe's researchers had dug up. It concerned a 1947–48 House investigation into the State Department's personnel security procedures. After examining hundreds of employee files, the investigators, led by Representative Robert Lee, concluded that the loyalties of 57 men and women were "suspect."

  Spokesmen for the State Department had responded quickly when the Lee report was issued. In early March 1948, they stated that out of the 57 men and women whose loyalty had been questioned, 35 had been cleared for employment by the FBI, and the remaining 22 were still being probed. Moreover, none of the 57 had been accused of being Communists. And, in fact, no American Communist was still carrying a party membership card in 1950, when Joe issued his charge. The Party had recalled the cards several years earlier.

  Secretary of State Dean Acheson. The National Archives

  If Joe was aware of these facts, he chose to ignore them. At the end of the radio interview in Salt Lake City, he repeated the offer to Dean Acheson that he had made in Denver. "Now, I want to tell the Secretary of State this, if he wants to call me tonight at the Hotel Utah, I will be glad to give him the names of those 57 card-carrying Communists." This time Joe said he would give the secretary the names only if Acheson agreed to provide "all information as to their Communistic activities" to a congressional investigating committee.

  Once again, Joe was bluffing. He knew perfectly well that Acheson could not release that information because President Truman had issued an executive order in 1948 sealing all the personnel files of federal employees. The president had acted because he felt HUAC and other such committees often misused the files in the course of their investigations. In Truman's opinion, expressed during the 1948 presidential campaign, "HUAC is more un-American than the activities it investigates."

  Joe was bluffing in another, more significant way. Neither the Byrnes letter to the cong
ressman in 1946 nor Lee's report on the 1948 House investigation contained any names. The House report used numbers rather than names to identify individuals, and only the chairman of the subcommittee and one other member of Congress had names to match the numbers. This was a problem Joe would have to deal with later.

  On February 11, Joe flew on to Reno, where he was greeted with a telegram from a State Department official requesting the names of the 205 Communists who Joe alleged were working in the department. Instead of being rattled, Joe sensed an opportunity for some fresh publicity. He fired off a letter to President Truman that was released to the press by the senator's Washington office at the same time. In the letter, McCarthy said he had obtained the names of 57 Communists in the State Department. "But you can obtain a much longer list by ordering Secretary Acheson to give you a list of those whom your board listed as being disloyal [back in 1946] and who are still working in the State Department."

  He ended the letter with a warning. If the president didn't demand that Secretary Acheson reveal "all the available information" on the State Department suspects, and if he didn't revoke his order sealing the department's personnel files, he [Truman] would be acknowledging that the Democratic Party was "the bedfellow of international Communism."

  Writing to the president in this fashion was an unusually arrogant move on McCarthy's part. He followed it up with an even bolder one that evening, in his speech to a crowd of more than 500 dedicated Republicans in Reno. For the first time, Joe offered the names of four suspects that he must have obtained from one of the congressmen who had been briefed on the 1948 House investigation. Two of the four men named were little known, but the others—Harlow Shapley, professor of astronomy at Harvard, and China expert John Stewart Service—were prominent figures in their respective fields.