Almost as odd as the obit itself were the events ensuing when, in my self-appointed role as part-time ombudsman on such matters, I wrote the Times about it, giving the facts above related, plus some pertinent data on the case the Times account omitted.*3 Over the course of a month and a half, I sent the Times three different missives on the subject without having a letter printed or receiving an answer, made two references to it on C-SPAN talk shows, and enlisted the aid of the late media critic Reed Irvine, who wrote directly to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger trying to get the thing corrected.
This apparently did the trick, as the Times at last provided on September 1 (the Friday of the Labor Day weekend) an obscure retraction, tucked into a corrections box between two numbingly soporific items (confusion of Mexican local politicians in a photo, misidentification of birds in Brooklyn). This confessed in bare-bones terms that the Times had erred as to the name and chairman of the committee that heard Shaftel. It thus took six weeks, half a dozen efforts, and the labors of two people to get a terse, nit-sized correction in no way comparable in scope or impact to the original mammoth error.
The point of this vignette isn’t merely the slapdash and remarkably ignorant reporting of the New York Times in its casual slurring of Joe McCarthy, but the extreme difficulty of getting the mistake corrected. The experience has been repeated in other attempts to set the record straight on media treatment of McCarthy and his cases. Responses to these sporadic efforts have always been the same—reluctance to admit or fix the problem, or even to run a letter pointing out the miscue. The prevailing attitude seems to be: We will print any off-the-wall assertion about McCarthy that comes along, without bothering to check any facts whatever, and if we get called on it won’t correct the record.
Why such a mind-set should exist, and what it says about the state of journalistic ethics, are intriguing questions, but less important than the effects of such slovenly reportage on our understanding of the Cold War and Joe McCarthy’s involvement in it. Multiply such episodes many-fold, over a considerable span of years, and the cumulative impact in terms of spreading disinformation on McCarthy and his times is obviously enormous.
Finally, less glaring than these journalistic pratfalls, but more harmful, are misstatements that occur in standard biographies of McCarthy and political histories of the era. You might think scholarly looking, footnoted tomes by pipe-smoking academics with years of research to go on are more reliable than ephemeral stories banged out tonight only to be thrown away tomorrow. Such, however, is not the case. These studies, too, are often rife with error. To be sure, the authors know McCarthy wasn’t a member of the House or chairman of the Jenner subcommittee, but feature other less easily recognized distortions that are more serious and enduring.
A last anecdote from this unhappy genre may suggest the nature of the academic problem, the more consequential as it involves another record of the federal government pertaining to McCarthy. In 2003, the U.S. Senate released for publication the long-secret transcripts of executive hearings conducted by McCarthy when he headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the early 1950s. This was an historical milestone of sorts, as the executive sessions provide detail about a number of controverted cases, in many instances going beyond the public hearings run by McCarthy and his counsel, Roy Cohn.
This major publishing event, however, would be badly marred by the invidious comments and introductory notes of associate Senate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited the hearings for publication. In these notes and press statements of which he was prolific, Ritchie routinely stacked the deck against McCarthy, up to and including glosses that were demonstrably in error. One such episode I discussed with him was the above-noted case of Annie Lee Moss, called before the McCarthy panel in 1954 and portrayed in most histories of the era as a pathetic McCarthy victim. Ritchie’s handling of the case, footnoted to three academic studies, reinforced the standard image of Moss as victim and McCarthy as browbeating tyrant.8
As will be discussed, this version of the Moss affair is quite false, a fact readily seen if one consults not the usual recycled histories but the voluminous official records on the case. When I got Ritchie on the phone I asked if he by any chance had reviewed these original sources, rather than simply repeating what he had picked up from other academics. When I further indicated that these records showed McCarthy was right about the case and offered to sum up the relevant data, the historian grew irate, said “I am growing very tired of this conversation,” and abruptly ended our discussion. The rebuff wasn’t all that different from the stonewalling responses of media outlets that have likewise distorted the Moss affair and other of McCarthy’s cases.
To pursue other such items from a long syllabus of media/academic error would preempt the contents of this book, which is in large part an effort to redress the many misstatements that have been made in the usual write-ups of McCarthy. Suffice it to say encounters of this kind have made me forever wary of secondhand news that can’t be traced to primary records. As an old newspaper adage has it, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Unfortunately, many who say and write things about McCarthy simply repeat what they have read somewhere, without the necessary checking. The net effect of such compounded error is an almost complete inversion of the empirical record on McCarthy and his cases.
While trying to unravel such confusions is a main object of this volume, I should stress that I haven’t attempted to track down and answer every McCarthy-related error that’s out there—which would be the work of a lengthy lifetime—or to quarrel in detail with every author who ever wrote something bad about McCarthy. While disagreements with such authors surface in several places, these passages are somewhat rare, and purely incidental to my purpose: to tell the story of McCarthy and the security problem he was addressing as clearly as I can do it, given my own limitations and the still-inchoate, but developing, condition of the record.
As these comments also suggest, a main emphasis of this study is the importance of finding primary sources on McCarthy, his cases, and the Cold War in general. However, no one person can possibly review all the primary data, which now run to literally millions of pages. Fortunately, there are some excellent scholars and Cold War experts who have done yeoman service in such matters, having devoted endless hours to reviewing, for instance, the Venona decrypts (secret messages between Moscow and its U.S. agents), data from the Soviet archives, and details on certain intricate policy matters. Rather than trying to replicate such efforts, I have where appropriate availed myself of these heroic labors—the due bills for which are set forth in the acknowledgments and notes—and sought to combine them with my own researches.
A further aspect of the subject that needs stressing is that, by and large, all of us still know much less than we need to of the total story. In the vast moraine of documents and security data held by the FBI and reposing in the National Archives, there are scores or possibly hundreds of books still waiting to be written—about the rolling coup d’état that transformed the U.S. State Department in the 1940s, the wartime infiltration of the Office of War Information and Office of Strategic Services by Communists and Soviet agents, the conduct of our postwar occupation forces in Germany and Japan, and much else of similar nature. Likewise in need of examination, arguably most of all, is the linkage of such questions to policy outcomes in the early Cold War years affecting the fate of Eastern Europe and much of Asia.
In the present volume, such policy questions are briefly touched on to give some notion of the larger issues at stake in the McCarthy battles of the 1950s. McCarthy himself was but a single actor in an extended historical drama that stretched out for decades and involved a milling crowd of players who trod the stage before him. Only if that broader context is in some measure understood is there much likelihood of comprehending the McCarthy saga. As the matter currently stands, the real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet sea
rch to find him. This book is my attempt to do so.
Hamilton, Virginia
April 2007
CHAPTER 1
An Enemy of the People
THOUGH he’s been dead and gone since 1957, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) lives on in American legend with remarkable staying power, unmatched by other notable figures of his day. Not that Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, two eminent critics of McCarthy in the 1950s, are forgotten. It’s just that they don’t come up all the time in squabbles of the modern era. Joe McCarthy does, and then some.
Scarcely a week goes by, it seems, without some press reference to McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusading, the “ism” that he spawned, and the harm he supposedly inflicted on the nation. Books and media retrospectives in which he is featured have been many. Any obituary of anybody involved in the security battles of our domestic Cold War is bound to have some mention of McCarthy. He’s invoked also when new civil liberties disputes arise—always in grave warnings that, unless we’re careful, the dread McCarthy scourge will once more be upon us.
The reasons for all this McCarthyana are well known and don’t need much explaining. McCarthy’s alleged stock-in-trade was spreading hysteria about an ersatz internal Communist threat and smearing innocent people as subversives, without a shred of fact to go on. In particular, it’s said, he launched wild unsupported charges against employees of the U.S. State Department, shattering the lives of hapless victims who never got a chance to answer. Lying and headline-grabbing accusations were the supposed essence of his method.
This fearsome image of McCarthy has been driven home through years of repetition, with little if any countervailing comment. Whole generations have come of age hearing nothing else about him, assume what they are told is true, and have no cause to doubt it. In this respect as well, the McCarthy case is somewhat distinctive. Other public figures have been savagely treated in their lifetimes but enjoyed a bit of historical comeback later. To look no further than officeholders with varying degrees of political kinship to McCarthy, such revaluations have occurred with Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and even with Sen. Barry Goldwater, the conservative champion of the 1960s whose media image in his prime most resembled treatment of McCarthy.
For the junior senator from Wisconsin, however, there has been no redemption. On the contrary, with the passing of the years and departure from the scene of people who knew anything about him, the negatives are more pronounced than ever. He had a pretty bad press when he was alive, but that press is infinitely worse today. Back then he had at least some supporters in book-writing and journalistic circles who set forth a different version of the story. But most of those people are gone as well, or their early work neglected, while defenders of McCarthy in the academic/media world today are so microscopically few as to be practically nonexistent.
So deeply etched is the malign image of McCarthy that the “ism” linked to his name is now a standard feature of the language, defined in all the dictionaries as a great evil and routinely used this way by people accusing others of low-down tactics. Nothing could better illustrate the point than that conservatives who think their opponents are making baseless charges are apt to complain about “McCarthyism of the left.” This is immortality of a sort, but not the sort anyone aspires to—that of utter and eternal demonization.
That one man should be so vilified for such a lengthy stretch of time would seem strange, except that issues are at stake much larger than the doings of a single politician, however wayward. If McCarthy had killed someone during a spree of drunken driving, or been caught in adultery with a student intern, he would have been denounced and gone into the history books as a scoundrel (or maybe not). But he wouldn’t have been rhetorically embalmed, placed on exhibit as an “ism,” or have his effigy dragged around the public square forever after. All too obviously, such nonstop derogation has occurred, not just to blacken the memory of an individual, but to serve a broader purpose.
McCarthy’s literary and journalistic foes, indeed, have made the point explicit. He is treated this way, they tell us, because he crystallized an impulse and a cause that far exceeded his personal failings. He stood for a much wider evil that swept the nation at midcentury—a “Red scare” allegedly fertile of many horrors. In a siege of mass paranoia, it’s said, innocent people were hounded out of public life, fired from jobs, and otherwise made to suffer as agents of a fantastic plot that existed only in the fevered brains of know-nothings and vigilantes. As McCarthy was the main avatar of this delusion, continued harping on his crimes is essential to make sure nothing of this dreadful nature will ever again be allowed to happen.
The pervasiveness of this McCarthy image is its most conspicuous feature. Running a close second, however, is the fact that people who talk and write about him in this way, generally speaking, know little of McCarthy, and would be hard-pressed to back their view with plausible specifics, or indeed with anything whatever. The main exceptions to this rule are a relative handful of writers—perhaps a dozen—who do know something of McCarthy and have published harshly critical books about him, often used as sources by journalists and other authors. While there are occasional variations, all these treatments are pretty much the same in substance, and their aggregate impact in conveying the baleful image of McCarthy has been accordingly immense.1
In the established version of the story, as told by these writers, McCarthy began his ill-omened anti-Red crusade with a series of mendacious speeches in February 1950, then enlarged on these in Senate hearings conducted by Sen. Millard Tydings (D-Md.) that began the following month. The essence of the McCarthy charges was that the State Department (and other agencies of the U.S. government) had been infiltrated by Soviet agents, members of the Communist Party and their fellow travelers, and that officials supposedly guarding against this danger had first let it happen then covered up the facts about it.
In these early speeches, McCarthy recited what he said were lists of Communists and security suspects—mostly anonymous, some identified by name—as examples of the infiltration problem. These statements triggered fierce disputes before the Tydings panel, in the press, and in public forums throughout the country. McCarthy’s charges were denounced as outrageous lies by President Truman, other prominent politicians, the State Department, media pundits, academics, civic leaders, and a vast array of other critics.
At the end of this initial go-round, we’re told, McCarthy’s charges proved to be completely baseless. The relevant data as conveyed by Tydings and since reprised by countless others showed not only that McCarthy’s charges of subversion were false but that he lied about everything else from start to finish. He didn’t have any “lists” of Communists or loyalty suspects, had constantly changed his numbers and other aspects of his story, didn’t have inside information sources as he claimed, and otherwise deceived the Senate and the country. The whole thing was a “fraud and a hoax,” and the American people could rest assured that charges of massive Communist penetration of the State Department were fearmongering nonsense.
In the conventional treatment, this opening McCarthy battle was the template for all that followed. Though discredited in this first encounter, he would simply forge ahead by making other, even wilder charges, smearing other victims, and spreading still more havoc. The rampage would continue unabated until the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 and censure proceedings in the Senate a few months later, when he would be condemned in an official action of his colleagues. In these final struggles, McCarthy was at last brought low, destroyed by his own excesses. Such was the mad career of Joe McCarthy, such was his dismal end, and good riddance to him.
Thus in brief compass the universally accepted version of the tale, set forth in all the usual biographies and histories of the era, and recited around the media campfires late at night as standard lore about McCarthy. Few episodes are limned more clearly in the chronicles of the Cold War, or more incessantly repeated. Yet despite its canonical status, as shal
l be seen, there are numerous problems with this telling of the story. For the moment, the main point to be noted is a further modulation of the ignorance factor, affecting not only members of the general public who admittedly don’t know much about McCarthy but also the historians-biographers who have made him the object of their study. As it turns out, despite the many certitudes they express about McCarthy and his cases, these learned gentry in some respects are as innocent of the facts of record as are their trusting readers.
Astonishing as it may seem, very little has been known, by historians or anyone else, about the vast majority of McCarthy’s suspects, the security practices of the State Department in 1950, or Communist penetration of the government when he made his charges. This strange epistemological problem stemmed from several causes, the most obvious of which was that most of the McCarthy cases given to the Senate were presented in anonymous fashion and would remain that way for years thereafter. This made it impossible for outside observers to know who the suspects were, or whether they were even in the State Department, much less whether their hypothetical presence there posed any kind of danger.
Aggravating this knowledge gap were secrecy measures that affected virtually every other aspect of the struggle. Some of this was inherent in the super-confidential nature of the subject, but a great deal of it was merely willful. State Department security records were unavailable for public viewing, but also for the most part terra incognita to Congress. Efforts by congressional committees to obtain such records ran into countless roadblocks, foremost among them stringent secrecy orders handed down by President Truman. Less accessible yet were records of the FBI, whose investigations were the ultimate source of nearly all such data on State Department or other cases of like nature.
Blacklisted By History Page 2