The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

by James Cross Giblin

  She told the subcommittee she was an active member of such liberal organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Democratic Action, and the League of Women Voters. But she denied having ever been a member of the Communist Party, and said she had never joined or aided any organization known by her to be "even slightly subversive." As a delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women from 1947 to 1949, she had clashed many times with representatives from the Soviet Union and had been sharply criticized in the Soviet media.

  Democratic senators on the subcommittee were uniformly sympathetic to Miss Kenyon. Even Bourke Hickenlooper, Joe's stand-in, had to admit that he did not consider her disloyal or "subversive in any way." Nor did the Washington Post editorial page. It stated, "In truth, Case No. 1 turned out to be not only an outraged and innocent American, but also a woman of spirit."

  McCarthy conducts one of his many hastily called press conferences with reporters. The Library of Congress

  Other newspapers questioned the truth of McCarthy's claims, not only against Dorothy Kenyon but also against the other eight individuals he had charged with being dangerous subversives. Joe fought back with a barrage of press releases, all of them timed to meet the deadlines of the major morning and afternoon newspapers—a way of making sure that his statements would get maximum coverage without giving his opponents a chance to respond in the same edition.

  Midway through the hearings, Chairman Tydings called a news conference to report on his subcommittee's progress. When Tydings reminded the assembled reporters that to date Sen. McCarthy had not provided the subcommittee with the name of a single State Department employee accused of being a Communist, it appeared that he had shot down Joe's claims once and for all. But the Wisconsin senator wasn't through yet. He upstaged Tydings—and earned a fresh batch of headlines—by telling reporters that he was going to give Senate investigators "the name of the man, connected with the State Department, whom I consider the top Russian espionage agent in this country."

  12. The Top Russian Spy

  AS JOE HAD ANTICIPATED, his accusation became the big news story of the day. Everyone in Washington wondered who the top Russian spy might be. When the curiosity was at its height, McCarthy called Chairman Tydings and asked to appear before an executive session of the subcommittee. There, away from the popping flashbulbs of the news photographers' cameras, Joe told the senators that the man in question was China expert Owen Lattimore.

  Lattimore's name had come up before in House and Senate inquiries into who had "lost" China; McCarthy had invoked it himself. But never before had Lattimore been accused of being a master spy. Now Joe said, "I think he was the chief of the whole ring of which Alger Hiss was a part.... If you crack this case, it will be the biggest espionage case in the history of the country."

  Under questioning by Tydings and others, Joe admitted he had no fresh information about Lattimore. But he claimed—as he had in the past—that it could be found in the State Department's loyalty and security files, if only President Truman would authorize their release.

  Some thoughtful Republicans, like former Secretary of State and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, were troubled by Joe's continuing attacks on the State Department and its secretary, Dean Acheson. In a letter to the New York Times, Stimson praised Acheson and, without naming McCarthy, went on to say, "The man who seeks to gain political advantage from personal attacks on a secretary of state is a man who seeks political advantage from damage to his country."

  Owen Lattimore. The National Archives

  The Republican leaders in the Senate made it clear that Joe's claims were "not a matter of party policy." But other prominent Republicans played to the right-wingers in their party. Senator Robert Taft encouraged McCarthy and reportedly urged him "to keep talking, and if one case doesn't work out, proceed with another."

  And that's what Joe did. He revealed in a news conference that he had given the Tydings subcommittee the name of the "top Russian espionage agent," and pressed on with his demand that President Truman order the State Department to open its security files. Adopting a tough-guy tone, Joe said, "It is up to the President to put up or shut up. Unless the President is afraid of what the files would disclose, he should hand them over now." He applied further pressure in a telegram he sent the president the next day and simultaneously released to the press: "I feel that your delay of this investigation by your arrogant refusal to release all necessary files is inexcusable and is endangering the security of the nation."

  Worried about the impact of McCarthy's charges, Sen. Tydings asked President Truman to grant his subcommittee access to the files on Lattimore and the others Joe had named. The president acknowledged the bind Tydings was in but didn't want to set a precedent for other "fishing expeditions" by McCarthy and his fellow Republicans. Instead, Truman ordered J. Edgar Hoover to prepare an analysis of Lattimore's file for private examination by the members of the Tydings subcommittee.

  After studying Hoover's report, all the subcommittee members (except for Sen. Hickenlooper, who was absent that day) concluded that there was nothing in the file that showed Lattimore had ever been a Communist or a member of a spy ring.

  With these findings in hand, Sen. Tydings told a news conference that Joe's unnamed "top" agent had been employed by the State Department for only a brief period five years earlier, and since then had given only one speech to State Department employees. Joe was predictably disdainful of Tydings's statement. It was, he said, "a deliberate misstatement of the facts" and "another one of those obvious attempts to twist and distort the truth." He went on to charge that the accused "has a desk in the State Department, or at least he did until three or four months ago. He is one of their top advisers on Far Eastern affairs, or at least he was until three or four weeks ago."

  Next, McCarthy deliberately leaked Lattimore's name to Jack Anderson, a newspaper reporter who worked for columnist Drew Pearson. When Anderson asked if the information was on or off the record, Joe said "on." During his next weekly radio broadcast, Pearson identified Lattimore but went on to defend him and to reveal his own animosity toward McCarthy. "I happen to know Owen Lattimore personally," Pearson said, "and I only wish this country had more patriots like him."

  Lattimore himself was in Afghanistan on a mission for the United Nations when Pearson revealed his name. Asked for his reaction to Joe's charge that he was a Soviet agent, Lattimore called it "pure moonshine" and made arrangements to fly back to Washington as soon as possible.

  Four Democratic senators—including Theodore F. Green of Rhode Island, who was serving on the Tydings subcommittee—denounced McCarthy's tactics on a network radio program hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt. Sen. Green said Joe's attacks on respected figures like Owen Lattimore were "reckless and unfair, and did irreparable damage to America's image abroad." On a lighter note, when asked about Joe's claim that Lattimore had a desk in the State Department, Sen. Tydings laughed and said no one in the department could find it.

  A few days later, the Washington Post ran a cartoon by Herblock (pen name of Herbert Block) publicizing a new term that would come to define Joe's tactics and those of others who followed in his wake. The cartoon showed an elephant, symbol of the Republican Party, being dragged by its right-wing members toward an overflowing barrel of tar labeled "McCarthyism." "You mean I'm supposed to stand on that?" the anxious-looking elephant asks.

  Privately, according to his associates, Joe hated the new word. In public, though, he laughed off its negative implications and claimed that as far as he was concerned, McCarthyism meant the same thing as Americanism. In a speech later on, he expanded on this idea. "In my state," he said, "McCarthyism means fighting Communism. People write me all the time saying they wish there was more McCarthyism."

  Meanwhile, in late March 1950, Joe and his staff were busy assembling all the information they could find on Owen Lattimore for a speech Joe planned to give to the entire Senate. They worked until two in the morning on the day McC
arthy was to deliver the speech, and were back at their desks at seven o'clock after just a few hours of sleep.

  When Joe walked into the Senate chamber on the afternoon of March 30, the balcony was crowded with journalists and cheering supporters. But only thirty-six of the ninety-six senators, including eight Democrats, were in their assigned seats on the ground floor. Joe repeated his by now familiar charge that "Owen Lattimore is or was a Soviet agent" and went on to say that "he either is, or at least has been, a member of the Communist Party."

  He asserted that Lattimore had "a dominant influence over the formation and implementation of the policy which has delivered China to the Communists." Beyond that, Joe claimed that two State Department operations, the Far Eastern division and the Voice of America radio broadcasts, were "almost completely controlled and dominated by individuals [like Lattimore] who are more loyal to the ideals and designs of Communism than to those of the free, God-fearing half of the world."

  Angry Democrats frequently interrupted the speech to raise objections. Senator Herbert H. Lehman of New York said Joe was "making a spectacle to the galleries here and to the public where a man accused has no chance to answer." Joe responded quickly and heatedly to Lehman's attack. "Crocodile tears are being shed for traitorous individuals," he intoned, "but forgotten are the 400,000,000 people [referring to China's population, which was actually more than 600,000,000 at the time] who have been sold into slavery by these people."

  What with McCarthy's lengthy list of charges and all the interruptions, the speech went on for more than four hours. Midway through, Joe removed a small bottle from his breast pocket and took a long swallow from it. To quell any suspicions that the bottle contained liquor, Joe smiled and told the crowd that it was just cough syrup. Which it was. His old sinus problem had returned, and with it a cough, as Joe told reporters the next day when he entered a Washington hospital for treatment. McCarthy's friend and ally Senator Kenneth Wherry explained to the Senate the reason for Joe's absence. Majority Leader Tom Connally asked how long McCarthy expected to be out. "Just today," Sen. Wherry replied. "Is that all?" Connally said dryly.

  Meanwhile, President Truman, on vacation in Key West, Florida, had called a news conference even before Joe had finished his speech. Making no effort to conceal his anger, Truman charged that McCarthy and other right-wing senators were playing politics with American foreign policy. He went on to call Joe "the greatest asset that the Kremlin [the seat of Soviet power] has."

  Sen. Taft, now one of Joe's strongest backers, denounced the president's news conference statement as a "bitter and prejudiced attack on Republicans." Reversing Truman's comment about Joe, Taft said, "The greatest Kremlin asset in our history has been the pro-Communist group in the State Department." The Ohio senator concluded his remarks by hailing Joe as "a fighting Marine who risked his life to preserve the liberties of the United States."

  Even Sen. Wiley, Joe's moderate senatorial colleague from Wisconsin, joined Taft and other Republicans in loudly criticizing the president's words. "The nation wants to get the facts," Wiley said, "and it does not want to see Senator McCarthy or any member of the Senate smeared merely because he has the guts to seek those facts on behalf of the American people."

  By now it was early April, and the Tydings subcommittee was getting ready to hear Owen Lattimore's side of the story. The beleaguered China expert had returned to the United States from Afghanistan a few days earlier. At the airport, he assured reporters that he was neither a Communist nor a fellow traveler [someone who usually followed the Soviet political line]. He called Joe a "base and miserable creature."

  The thin forty-nine-year-old Lattimore looked more like the college professor he was than the stereotypical image of a dangerous spy. He had been director of the Walter Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University from 1938 until 1950 and was a lecturer at the school after that. Born in the United States, Lattimore was raised in China, where both of his parents were teachers of English at a university in the port city of Tientsin.

  Lattimore, who spoke Chinese like a native, became the editor of Pacific Affairs magazine in the 1930s. He sought articles written from different perspectives and was later accused of publishing too many pieces that presented the Chinese Communists in a favorable light. In 1944, President Roosevelt had asked Lattimore to accompany Vice-President Henry Wallace on a fact-finding mission to China for the U.S. Office of War Information. After the war, Lattimore occasionally served as a consultant to the State Department on Far Eastern matters.

  Joe was at home, recuperating from the sinus attack, when Lattimore flew back to Washington. Stung by Lattimore's harsh words at the airport, McCarthy contacted Sen. Tydings and asked for the right to cross-examine the professor when he appeared before Tydings's subcommittee. Tydings denied Joe's request but invited him to submit any questions he had through a subcommittee member. McCarthy rejected that idea.

  On April 6, 1950, surrounded by photographers armed with flashbulbs, Owen Lattimore entered the packed Senate caucus room and was sworn as a witness before the subcommittee. Tom Connally, the Senate majority leader, sat with Tydings and the other subcommittee members. Behind them sat a group of conservative Republican lawmakers, Joe among them. As Lattimore, who faced the senators, looked at Tydings, he couldn't help but see Joe's face, too. Later, the China expert wrote, "I soon found out something interesting. Joe McCarthy couldn't look you straight in the eye."

  Lattimore began his testimony by reading a lengthy prepared statement. Employing the same direct, uncompromising tone he had used in his airport remarks, he denounced McCarthy, calling his behavior "unworthy of a senator or an American" and saying his charges were "base and contemptible lies." He went on to assert that Joe had become a "willing tool" of the right-wing China Lobby, "the simple and willing dupe of a group of fanatical persons who have been thoroughly discredited."

  Many of the spectators in the caucus room cheered Lattimore's comments. Others, like Joe and his fellow Republicans, remained silent. They were among the conservative Americans who sided with the China Lobby and believed that Chiang Kai-shek could have won his struggle with the Chinese Communists if only the United States had continued to back him.

  Lattimore wasn't through yet. He accused McCarthy of using secret government documents, like the Lee report, without permission; of destroying the reputations of American citizens without giving them a chance to defend themselves; and of launching a "reign of terror" among federal employees. He claimed that McCarthy was making the U.S. government "an object of suspicion in the eyes of the anti-Communist world, and undoubtedly the laughingstock of the Communist governments."

  Responding to Joe's assertion that he had "a desk in the State Department," Lattimore said that he had had "only three brief associations" with the department over a period of more than five years. He had served on a postwar mission to Japan in 1945, had offered his views on the Far Eastern situation in a requested memo to the department in 1947, and had taken part in a two-day panel discussion on China at the department the previous October. "I think I can fairly claim, with great regret," Lattimore said, "that I am the least consulted man of all those who have a public reputation in this country as specialists on the Far East."

  Democrats on the subcommittee responded favorably to Lattimore and had few questions for him. Sen. Hickenlooper, however, asked one question after another, most of them concerning the fall of China. In response, Lattimore blamed Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists for losing the support of the Chinese people, and expressed the then highly controversial opinion that the new Communist government of China should be recognized by the United States. Throughout the questioning, Lattimore revealed a broad knowledge of China and the Far East that Sen. Hickenlooper obviously could not match.

  Joe remained surprisingly quiet and expressionless during Lattimore's appearance. His anger emerged only later, when he told reporters, "I am not retracting anything. I intend to prove everything I have said." The
next day, in another meeting with reporters, he announced that he had given Senate investigators the name of a witness who would swear that Lattimore either was or had been a Communist.

  The mystery witness turned out to be Louis F. Budenz, a former Communist who had joined the party in 1935 and had been managing editor of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, from 1941 until 1945. Budenz resigned from the party that year, saying he had become disillusioned with Communism and the policies of the Soviet Union. In 1946, he gave a full confession to the FBI, and after that he became a key government witness at trials and congressional investigations.

  Before the Tydings subcommittee, Budenz testified that he had been told by Communist leaders in 1937 that Lattimore was part of a group of Communists associated with the Institute of Pacific Relations. He also said that, while editing the Daily Worker, he had seen highly confidential Communist reports with the code name "L" or "XL" written on them. Party officials had told Budenz, he said, that the reports came from Lattimore. But under questioning by Democratic members of the subcommittee, Budenz admitted that he had no direct, personal knowledge that Lattimore was a party member.

  In a follow-up question, the former Communist editor was asked whether, as McCarthy did, he believed Lattimore was the top Soviet agent in the United States. Budenz paused for a moment, then said, "Well, to my knowledge, that statement is not accurate. I do not know, of course, the whole story, what other evidence there is, but from my own knowledge I would not say he was a top Soviet agent."

  Although Budenz's testimony had seriously weakened Joe's case against Lattimore, Joe was not about to acknowledge it. Instead, he fought back fiercely that evening in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. "I knew it would be thus," he said, "that vilification, smear, and falsehoods would follow [Joe's charges about Communists in the State Department]." Using wildly inflated language, he continued. These falsehoods were "peddled by the Reds, their minions, and the egg-sucking phony liberals who ... clutter up American thinking with their simple-minded arguments. Some write columns for your newspapers. It is your privilege to buy them; mine to ignore them." He had nothing but scorn, Joe said, "for the pitiful squealing of those who would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers who have sold 400 million Asiatic people into atheistic slavery and have the American people in a hypnotic trance, headed blindly toward the same precipice."