Blacklisted By History
Page 1
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
PART I. THIRD RAIL
PROLOGUE The Search for Joe McCarthy
CHAPTER 1 An Enemy of the People
CHAPTER 2 The Caveman in the Sewer
CHAPTER 3 He Had in His Hand
CHAPTER 4 “Stale, Warmed Over Charges”
CHAPTER 5 Unthinking the Thinkable
PART II. BACK STORY
CHAPTER 6 The Witching Hour
CHAPTER 7 The Way It Worked
CHAPTER 8 Chungking, 1944
CHAPTER 9 Reds, Lies, and Audiotape
CHAPTER 10 When Parallels Converged
CHAPTER 11 What Hoover Told Truman
CHAPTER 12 Inside the State Department
CHAPTER 13 Acts of Congress
PART III. BLOWUP
CHAPTER 14 Wheeling, 1950
CHAPTER 15 Discourse on Method
CHAPTER 16 The Tydings Version
CHAPTER 17 Eve of Destruction
CHAPTER 18 A Fraud and a Hoax
CHAPTER 19 Of Names and Numbers
CHAPTER 20 The Four Committees
CHAPTER 21 File and Forget It
CHAPTER 22 All Clear in Foggy Bottom
CHAPTER 23 The Man Who Knew Too Much
PART IV. MOLE HUNTS
CHAPTER 24 The Trouble with Harry
CHAPTER 25 A Book of Martyrs
CHAPTER 26 Some Public Cases
CHAPTER 27 Tempest in a Teacup
CHAPTER 28 Little Red Schoolhouse
CHAPTER 29 “Owen Lattimore—Espionage R”
CHAPTER 30 Dr. Jessup and Mr. Field
CHAPTER 31 A Conspiracy So Immense
CHAPTER 32 The Battle with Benton
PART V. HARDBALL
CHAPTER 33 The Perils of Power
CHAPTER 34 Uncertain Voice
CHAPTER 35 The Burning of the Books
CHAPTER 36 Scott McLeod, Where Are You?
CHAPTER 37 The Getting of J. B. Matthews
CHAPTER 38 The Moles of Monmouth
CHAPTER 39 A Tale of Two Generals
CHAPTER 40 The Legend of Annie Lee Moss
CHAPTER 41 At War with the Army
CHAPTER 42 On Not Having Any Decency
PART VI. END GAME
CHAPTER 43 The Sounds of Silence
CHAPTER 44 Sentence First, Verdict Later
CONCLUSION Samson in the Heathen Temple
Notes
Appendix
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
For my mother
JOSEPHINE STANTON EVANS
who knew it all along
and for
TIERNEY MCCARTHY
wherever she may be
PROLOGUE
The Search for Joe McCarthy
IN THE peacetime summer of 1946, the first such summer in half a decade, a State Department official named Samuel Klaus drafted a long confidential memo about the grave security problems that were plaguing the department.
This 106-page report, dated August 3, contained some startling revelations. It discussed, among other things, the number of Soviet agents said to be on the payroll at State, alleged Communist Party members there, and others in the department described as “suspects” or “sympathizers.” In the cases of agents and CP members—some thirty-three people altogether—the names (one being Alger Hiss) had been compiled by State’s security screeners. As for the suspects and sympathizers, numbering more than ninety staffers, the names weren’t available yet as lists were still being assembled.1
Information of this type, needless to say, was both ultrasecret and of sensational nature. During the crisis of World War II, when the Soviet Union was our ally against the Nazis, comparatively little attention had been paid to the matter of Communists in the federal workforce. But in the early postwar era, the alliance with Moscow had rapidly unraveled and was being replaced with a series of hostile confrontations that would be dubbed the Cold War. The presence of CP members or fellow travelers in official jobs, formerly viewed with indulgence or ignored, would look shockingly different in 1946 when Sam Klaus composed his memo.
Some four years later, at the height of the loyalty/security furor then raging around the State Department, Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) learned about this memo and stirred up a major flap about it. Thanks to the McCarthy pressure, a Senate subcommittee chaired by Sen. Millard Tydings (D-Md.) requested a copy from the department and in due course received one. Thus, one of the most revealing documents ever put together about Red infiltration of the U.S. government was supplied to Congress. But thereafter, so far as the public record shows, the Klaus memo would mysteriously vanish.
In the National Archives of the United States there are at least two places where this report should be on offer. One is the legislative archive of the Tydings panel, which was weighing McCarthy’s charges of State Department security breakdown and which unquestionably got a copy. This is reflected in the department’s letter of transmittal, which survives and is included in the subcommittee records. So the memo should also be in the files, but isn’t.
The other place where this memo ought to be is in the papers of Sam Klaus, held in another section of the Archives. In the index to the Klaus papers, the document is listed, under its proper official heading. However, when the file was examined by this writer it turned out the report again was missing. In this case, at least, we know what happened to it. The file contained a notice where the memo had been, saying it was withdrawn from the Archives in March 1993—not quite half a century after it was written. So this important document is twice over absent from the nation’s official records.
Unfortunately for researchers of such matters, this elusive memo is but one of many Cold War papers that have gone AWOL. Some two dozen other documents from the State Department relating to security issues were likewise supplied to Tydings and should be in the Archives also. In these cases handsomely embossed cover sheets, signed by Dean Acheson, Secretary of State in 1950, are still there in the folders. In every case as well, however, the material once enclosed has been stripped from the cover sheet, leaving small wads of paper beneath the staples that held the documents together.
Other historical data that ought to be in the subcommittee records are documents provided to the panel by McCarthy. These included a McCarthy-to-Tydings letter of March 18, 1950, listing the names of eighty loyalty/security suspects at State and elsewhere, some of whose anonymous cases McCarthy had earlier recited to the Senate. Enclosed with the McCarthy list was a letter from the head of the Central Intelligence Agency concerning one of the eighty suspects. In addition, McCarthy that same week gave Tydings a list of two dozen other names as potential subjects of inquiry. All told, a pretty sizable package of information on the most burning issue of that day, and many days thereafter.
As these papers were part of an official proceeding of the Senate—and as we know from other sources they were in fact provided—they should all be in the Tydings archive. Again, however, so far as diligent search reveals, all of them are missing, with no explanation of what happened to them, no hint that they were ever there, and no withdrawal notice. They are simply gone. Since they were documents central to any assessment of McCarthy’s charges, their absence is a critical gap in the archival record.*1 That absence, it bears noting, affects more than our understanding of Joe McCarthy. It affects our knowledge of the issue he was addressing, and thus our comprehension of the Cold War era.
Such problems with McCarthy cases didn’t cease with Millard Tydings but would occur also with the records of McCarthy’s own committee, when he became himself the chairman of a Senate panel three years later. It’s evident
that a lot of records here are likewise missing. A notable instance involves the case of Annie Lee Moss, a security suspect in the Army who appeared before McCarthy at an historic committee session. In the hearing record, reference is made to an “Exhibit 18,” an FBI report about Mrs. Moss that was obviously important in gauging the merits of the case and what McCarthy had to say about it. But there is no “Exhibit 18” to be found in the archive of the McCarthy panel pertaining to the Moss case.2
Nor are such troubles confined to official sources. They extend to private-sector data that should in theory be open to researchers. A significant case in point concerns the famous speech McCarthy delivered in February 1950 at Wheeling, West Virginia, kicking off the whole McCarthy epoch. As is well known, what McCarthy said in this speech became a hotly controverted issue. Much of the dispute revolved around a story in the local morning paper, the Wheeling Intelligencer, saying McCarthy claimed to have a “list” of 205 Communists working at the State Department. This quote appears in every book we have about McCarthy and many histories of the Cold War. McCarthy would, however, deny he said it, and whether he actually did so would become, and remain, the cause of vast confusion.3
The task of researching the Wheeling speech, and sifting collateral data on it, prompted the thought that, while all discussions of the subject fixate on this one story, there may have been other items in the local paper about such a major event in the life of Wheeling. And if so, these accounts might shed some light on what McCarthy did or didn’t say there. This hunch, as it turned out, was correct. However, a trip to Wheeling would reveal that these documents, too, were missing.
For one thing, the Intelligencer no longer had a morgue of stories from the 1950s. Instead, back issues of the paper were now on microfilm at the Wheeling public library. This seemed fair enough, and as the library was only a couple of blocks away, not an overwhelming problem. However, a visit there produced another disappointment. All issues of the paper, dating to the nineteenth century, were microfilmed and apparently in their appointed places—except the issues that were in question. Conspicuously absent were editions for January and February 1950—the sequence jumping, without explanation, from December 1949 to March 1950. Written inquiry to the librarian produced no reply as to what had happened to these records.
The further thought then occurred that the Library of Congress, which maintains back issues of numerous journals from across the country, might have Intelligencers in its holdings. And indeed, the Library does have such a collection—except, again, not these particular issues. According to the notice provided by the clerk who checked the records, the Library had no copies of the Intelligencer prior to August 1952. That made three trips to the well, and three times the bucket had come up empty.
This is perhaps enough for now about the subject of disappearing records, which will recur often in these pages. (It should be added that some of the items mentioned did survive in other, less predictable places and were recovered.) However, a couple of connected points need making about primary source material on such issues, and its availability—or lack thereof—to would-be researchers. Again, these problems concern not just the facts on Joe McCarthy but the entire clandestine history of the Cold War.
Among the more voluminous collections of such data are the once-secret records of the FBI. These files are a treasure house of information on Communist penetration of American life and institutions, suspects tracked down by the Bureau, countermeasures taken, and related topics. To its credit, the FBI was watching these matters pretty closely while others allegedly standing guard were dozing, or in the throes of deep denial. The material in the Bureau files is both revealing and extensive.
Thus, to pick some prominent cases, the Bureau knew as early as December 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist then becoming a central figure in the atomic energy project, was identified by Communist leaders as a secret party member who had to be inactive because of the wartime work that he was doing. Likewise, in 1945, the FBI obtained credible information that high-ranking government figures Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, and Harry Dexter White were Soviet agents. Also in 1945, the Bureau knew the espionage case of diplomat John Stewart Service and the pro-Red magazine Amerasia had been fixed, lied about, and covered up by a cabal of top officials.
Such are but a few of the revelations in the colossal trove of records housed in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and while they concern some of the more notorious cases that would later come to view are by no means the most astounding. That said, there is still other information in the Bureau files that isn’t open to researchers. In case after significant case, entries have been held back or heavily “redacted” (blacked out), sometimes for dozens of pages at a stretch. In nearly every instance, such redactions concern materials fifty years of age and counting. It’s hard to imagine any national security interest of the present day that would be threatened by these ancient data.
Considering the stuff that’s available in the Bureau records, one has to wonder about the stuff that isn’t. Vide the memo reprinted overleaf, written in September 1946 by FBI Director Hoover to the Attorney General (at that time Tom Clark) concerning a shadowy Cold War figure named David Wahl. A former federal employee, Wahl had come to notice in one of the most intensive probes ever conducted by Hoover’s agents. In this memo, Hoover says Wahl “as early as 1941…was reliably reported to be a ‘master spy’ for the Soviet government while employed by the United States government in Washington, D.C.”4 After this jolting revelation, however, the next paragraph is blacked out entirely. The obvious question arises: If the Hoover comment that Wahl was “reliably reported” to be a Soviet “master spy” is left in the records, what must be in the part that’s missing?
These matters are brought up, not to ask the reader’s sympathy for the researcher (well, maybe a little), but to suggest the rather parlous state of the historical record concerning some important topics. Without the documents referred to, and without the items blacked out in the records, attempts to chronicle our domestic Cold War, while not entirely futile, are subject to the most serious limits. Lacking these materials, we are left in many cases with secondhand data of doubtful value that are nonetheless recycled from place to place as supposed truths of history.
It’s not too much to say, indeed, that the loss of so many primary records has created a kind of black hole of antiknowledge in which strange factoids and curious fables circulate without resistance—spawning a whole other group of research problems. And while this thought again pertains to several aspects of the Cold War, nowhere is it more often true than in discussion of Joe McCarthy. The result has been to ply the public with many apocryphal tales about him and his alleged doings.
Some of these stories are simply fabrications—things McCarthy supposedly said, or did, that can’t be confirmed from credible records. In particular, there seems to have been a cottage industry that cranked out purported statements by McCarthy that have no known valid basis. A leading example is an alleged McCarthy comment that welcomed the support of the Communist Party in the Wisconsin Republican primary of 1946 against Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. Nobody has ever been able to verify this quote, despite a considerable effort to do so, and it is almost certainly bogus. Yet it has been recycled many times in treatments of McCarthy.5
REVELATIONS REDACTED
FBI Director Hoover wrote this memorandum concerning an investigative suspect on September 16, 1946. Following an especially startling revelation, an entire paragraph is blacked out in the Bureau’s records.
Source: FBI Silvermaster file
On top of such inventions, and more common, are episodes from McCarthy’s hectic vita that did in fact occur but are presented in such a way as to be unrecognizable to anyone somewhat familiar with the record. (Most McCarthy factoids are of this nature, many resulting from the work of the Tydings panel, fons et origo of countless errors.) And there are just plain mistakes, some fairly obvious, some more subtle and harder to disentang
le. These often stem from jaw-dropping ignorance of the subject matter—not only of McCarthy and his cases, but of other happenings in the Cold War or of American history and institutions. A few such miscues are of serious import, some merely goofy, but all add to the smog bank that veils the story.
We are informed, for instance, by two of the nation’s leading dailies—the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post—that there was once a weird mutant entity of the U.S. government called “Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.”*2 It seems inconceivable, but is obviously so, that there are people writing for major papers who don’t know we have a bicameral legislative system, so that a senator wouldn’t head a House committee. And while such bloopers are amusing, they can have effects that historically speaking aren’t so funny, pinning responsibility on McCarthy for things to which he had no connection (e.g., the House committee’s investigation of Reds in Hollywood, often imputed to McCarthy).
One further instance in this vein is worth a bit of notice, as it illustrates not only the ignorance problem but the unwillingness or inability of some who write about such matters to get the simplest facts in order. In this case the offender was the New York Times, which in May 2000 published an obituary of a recently deceased New York professor with a domestic Cold War background. This ran on the Times obit page under a four-column headline reading, “Oscar Shaftel, Fired After Refusing McCarthy, Dies at 88.”6
This article said Shaftel, once a teacher at New York’s Queens College, had lost his job back in the 1950s when he refused to answer “some questions” about alleged Red connections posed by the “investigations subcommittee of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee headed by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” The obit then went on to offer a lengthy tribute to Shaftel, describe his lonely years of exile, and suggest that, despite this ill treatment, his gallant spirit had remained unbroken.
The errors in this story were stunning, starting with the bedrock fact that Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with the late professor, the committee that brought him to book, or his alleged hardships. Indeed, there was no such thing as “the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Internal Security subcommittee.” The security unit, as the name clearly says, was itself a subcommittee (of the Judiciary Committee), its chairman at the time of the Shaftel hearing Sen. William Jenner of Indiana. McCarthy wasn’t even a member of this panel, much less the chairman of it.7