From these considerations, it’s evident that, whatever the senators finally looked at when they got to the White House, it couldn’t possibly have been “each and every one” of the “so-called 81 individuals accused by Senator McCarthy…” This statement, thrice made by Tydings, was demonstrably in error (the Lee list–only proviso itself sufficient to refute it). Still less was there compliance with the mandate of the Senate. In fact, there is no telling what the senators did see—how many files they may have viewed or what was in the folders they were given. The difficulty on this point was made the more severe by the restrictions imposed on the lawmakers themselves when they finally got a chance to see the records.
As presaged in the comments of Peyton Ford, the senators were on a very short leash when they went over to the White House. Two key limits were that they could have no professional staff members (or FBI agents) present, and could take no notes on what they were viewing. As nonspecialists in such matters, they would have had a hard time knowing what certain references might mean (membership in the League for Peace and Democracy or China Aid Council, connections to such as Miller or Mary Jane Keeney), and wouldn’t have been able write down information to take back to Morris or other security experts for detailed discussion.
Lodge, for one, considered the situation absurd. On May 12, he visited Hoover seeking guidance. The Director reported that Lodge was “terribly confused about the files in that the files contained no recommendations and in cases where loyalty hearings had not been held by the State Department there was no indication as to why they had not been held. He stated furthermore that in some instances there had been no indication that various leads had been followed out which appeared in the files…”*183 12
While all this unfolded, McCarthy was raising another media ruckus about the files. It appears from his public statements that he had some inkling of the limits on the number of cases to be examined but not the full extent of the restrictions. He did correctly state, however, that State Department security and personnel records were kept in such a loose-leaf way that it was impossible to tell if something were missing. Beyond this, he said, there was the further point that the files were very sloppily handled and that innumerable people had access to them (at least before they were locked up in the White House). Combined with the lack of a serial or pagination system, the possibilities for weeding or manipulation were many.
(This problem had been flagged to the attention of the Congress in 1947 by the Lee investigators, who noted that security files had been charged out and not returned, that various materials were missing, and that there was no way of checking what had happened to them. “These failures,” said their report, “can largely be attributed to the fact that apparently most anyone and everyone in the division has access to the files, removes files and replaces them with very little regulation or control.”)13
McCarthy, Hickenlooper, and others referred several times to rumors that the files were being rifled, though they had no hard proof that this was occurring. There was, however, proof that it had occurred before. On this point, McCarthy produced depositions from four past and present State Department employees who said they had been involved in a file-stripping operation at the department in 1946. If it had happened once, McCarthy argued, it could happen again. This brought a swift rebuttal from the State Department, Truman Justice, and Tydings saying McCarthy was once more talking through his hat and that no security data were missing from the State Department records.
On June 21, Tydings announced: “I have been advised by FBI agents that all of the material gathered by the FBI touching on the loyalty of the employees in question has been sent to the State Department and are [sic] part of the files which our committee examined.”14 This seemed official and conclusive. However, it developed that when Tydings made this statement, the FBI had conducted no analysis of the files, had made no judgment on them, and was nonplussed as to why he said it. When Hoover saw the Tydings comment, he flagged it to the attention of his staff, asking, “Is this correct?” and “Did we make any such check?” The next day, Mickey Ladd responded: “We have made no such file-by-file examination of the State Department files….We have never made any such comment to Senator Tydings.”*184 15
KNOCKOUT
In this letter to McCarthy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover categorically denies Senator Tydings’s claim that the FBI had investigated State Department security files.
Source: FBI McCarthy file
Thereafter, in an unusual move, Hoover would go public with the FBI denial. On July 10, in response to an inquiry from McCarthy, the Director made a definitive statement on the subject, saying: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has made no such examination and therefore is not in a position to make any statement concerning the completeness or incompleteness of the State Department files.”16 Tydings was thus caught flat-footed making a claim about the FBI that was categorically denied by Hoover. This was about as close to a total knockout of Tydings, State, and Truman Justice all at once as McCarthy could possibly have hoped for.
Two days later, picking itself up off the canvas, Truman Justice moved to have the FBI conduct the probe Tydings said had already happened. Following this eleventh-hour effort, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath wrote Tydings on July 17, saying such a Bureau inquiry had now been made and that, with one exception, “the files contain all of the FBI reports and memoranda furnished to the State Department on these cases.” This was two months after Lodge and Co. began examining whatever it was they were given at the White House, and almost a month after Tydings made his erroneous statement on the matter. It was also after the Tydings report had been drafted and made ready for printing. Tydings then shoehorned the McGrath letter into the report at the last minute, thus allegedly proving that McCarthy’s file-stripping comments were “utterly without foundation in fact.”17
For those of a doubting or cynical nature—for instance, Joe McCarthy—this two-month Kabuki dance around the files raised the question of yet another possible shuffle: that the files had had material missing when Lodge and other senators saw them, but that this was put back in when knowledgeable FBI agents came looking for their memos. This speculation draws support from the fact, as spelled out in the Truman guidelines, that entire files on the McCarthy cases, not merely portions, would have been withheld from viewing by the Tydings panel. Perhaps the clearest instance is, again, the case of Robert Miller, who was both a Lee list and a McCarthy case but whose file would have been withheld from the Senate according to the Truman provisos. Yet the Miller file was undoubtedly in the folders looked at by the Bureau.
We know this because we have Hoover’s memo to McGrath of July 13 summarizing the files that had at last been viewed by the FBI. This says, among other things, that the files on seventy McCarthy cases had been available for inspection. That number, of course, corresponded to the Truman-Tydings stipulation that only Lee list cases could be looked at, this being the total number of overlapping cases. As that total included the file on Miller—a case well known to the Bureau—it follows that this file would have been examined by the FBI, though under the Truman rules it wouldn’t have been given to the Senate.
The Hoover memo to McGrath also makes it clear that there were items that should have been in the files but weren’t—starting with the 10 McCarthy cases that didn’t overlap the Lee list. Hoover told McGrath that, in thirteen other cases, material transmitted from the Bureau wasn’t in the files, having been impounded by the President; that in six cases FBI loyalty reports on individuals who had moved on from State “were not in the State Department files” (this evidently reflecting the current-staffer restriction); and that, in five cases, materials from FBI investigations on State Department employees when they were with OSS—which, for reasons noted, could have been important information—“are not in the State Department files.”18
This breakdown is hard to reconcile with McGrath’s assertion that the files inspected by the FBI were complete, with one unspeci
fied exception. All told, the Hoover memo cites more than thirty items that even the Bureau couldn’t get a look at. If all this stuff was missing when the FBI agents came calling, the possibility that more was missing when Lodge and Co. were at the White House is plausible indeed. As the administration and its team of analysts/investigators had had at this point better than four months to go through the files at their leisure, some such fiddling seems more than likely.
In the meantime, McCarthy had come up with his depositions from four past and present employees of State saying that, in the late summer and fall of 1946, they had been given the task of expurgating department personnel records. This project had played out over a period of months and hadn’t been completed until December of 1946. The depositions included statements such as: “We were instructed to remove all derogatory material from the personnel files, and we were instructed to dispose of this material.” And: “All of the clerks on this project were to pull out of the files all matters considered derogatory, either morally or politically…the [data] I pulled out of the files pertained to either the morals of the person or in some way reflected on his or her loyalty.”19 (Emphasis added.)
In rebuttal to this, State issued another of its myriad press releases saying McCarthy was a liar, and that the project in question was not a “stripping” of the files but simply an effort to “reorganize them into some new, unified system…”20 This amounted to a direct conflict on the facts, in which case the obvious course for an investigative committee of Congress would have been to—investigate. Once more, however, this didn’t happen, as the Tydings panel was closing its doors and had its conclusions already written. Though various signers of the depositions were available to testify, they were never called to do so. Nor was any other testimony taken on the issue. Instead, as per the usual drill, Tydings accepted the State Department denials as conclusive and declared the matter settled.
The file stripping/reorganization had occurred in late 1946—which was, as may be recalled, a critical period in the history of the State Department security office. This was the era of Panuch and Klaus, the advent of the resignation strategy, the McCarran rider, and numerous internal battles over the proper way of handling cases. It was also the era, beginning in the fall, in which the realization dawned that brand-new, Republican committees of Congress would soon be empowered to look into security affairs at State. A most interesting time to be conducting a “reorganization” of personnel files of the department.
All that, however, was in 1946—predating the compilation of the Lee list and three-plus years before McCarthy brought his charges. His contention was that, if such a thing occurred before, perhaps still further “reorganization” happened at some later juncture. This was a subject he would continue to pursue and a surmise in which he turned out to be on target. There was indeed more such “reorganization” of the personnel files in the latter 1940s. Details would be provided by Mrs. Helen Balog, supervisor of the State Department Foreign Service file room, in an inquiry conducted by McCarthy in 1953.
In these hearings Mrs. Balog would testify that safeguards pertaining to FSO personnel files were extremely lax, that files were scattered about in a number of places, and that “three or four hundred people” had access to these records. In particular, she said, there was one individual who spent an inordinate amount of time in the file room working on the folders. In view of certain other matters noted, her testimony about this makes dramatic reading:
QUESTION: Now, Mrs. Balog, was there a time toward the end of 1948 or the beginning of 1949 when you were notified that a certain official of the State Department would be spending some time in the file room?
ANSWER: Yes, sir.
QUESTION:…Did this official, actually, physically appear down in the file room?
ANSWER: Yes, sir.
QUESTION: And did work on the confidential files?
ANSWER: Yes, sir.
QUESTION: For how long a period, would you say, did he continue to work on these confidential files in the State Department?
ANSWER:…I am quite sure he was there practically the whole year of 1949.
QUESTION: Did he ask for the keys so he could spend the night working in the file room on more than one occasion?
ANSWER: Quite a number.
QUESTION: Now, would you please tell the chairman and the members of the committee the name of this person in the State Department who worked on these confidential files at night….
ANSWER: It was John Service.21
CHAPTER 22
All Clear in Foggy Bottom
FOR Millard Tydings and the State Department, the magic word was “clearance.” Though they couldn’t or wouldn’t supply details, they told the world McCarthy’s charges were humbug since all of his suspects still on the rolls had “clearance.” Such accusations had been made before, were carefully looked into, and the employees “cleared”—or, in some versions, “approved.” McCarthy’s accusations were thus not only warmed over and stale, but false and perjured.
While oft-repeated, this “clearance” mantra was and is beclouded by several types of ambiguity, and considerable falsehood of it own. The main ambiguity involved the question of who, exactly, had issued the clearance that was talked of. Frequently, in making such assertions, State and its defenders used the passive voice—saying suspects “had been cleared”—so you couldn’t tell what agency or person had done the clearing. This same ambiguity pops up in several histories of the era.
As seen, Tydings and the State Department claimed that four committees of the 80th Congress had done such clearing, but this turned out to be more moonshine. The only such clearance Tydings could come up with was Representative Jonkman’s slightly dotty one-man “report,” and even this said nothing about any particular targets of McCarthy. All the other committees referred to didn’t issue any clearances at all, but instead expressed utmost alarm about security affairs at State. Who, then, supplied such “clearance”?
In State Department memos and press releases there is a kind of answer, or at least something that might appear to be an answer if scanned quickly by un-wary readers. These statements often combined the passive-voice construction with yet another verbal fuzzball, dropping a murky reference to the FBI into some backward-running sentence concerning clearance. This much-used technique would lead the casual reader to believe the FBI was among the agencies that did the clearing.
Thus, to cite a prominent instance, John Peurifoy told the Tydings panel that all McCarthy suspects still in the State Department in 1950 “either had received full FBI field investigations or had otherwise been processed under the President’s loyalty program and the department’s security program and their continued employment approved.”1 (Emphasis added.) Since this didn’t say who did the approving, and since the FBI was front-loaded in the sequence, readers who didn’t know much about the matter might suppose (and undoubtedly many did) that the FBI was involved in issuing the approval.
In similar obfuscating vein were the comments of Gen. Conrad Snow, head of the department’s loyalty board, extolling the labors of that unit. In the course of this defense, Snow said that since the inception of the Truman loyalty program his board had “had before it over 500 cases of State Department employees who had been investigated for loyalty by the Federal Bureau of Investigation…. and not one case has been found of a present Communist working in the State Department.”2 (Emphasis added.) Again, the melding of the passive voice with mention of the FBI conveys the notion that the Bureau had something to do, maybe a lot, with the claim Snow was making.
This technique of obliquely dragging in the FBI was so often used by State and its defenders as to suggest a conscious effort at deception. Sometimes the McCarthy critics made the point other way around, arguing that if one said security suspects at the State Department hadn’t been correctly dealt with, this was an outrageous criticism of the FBI. This line was taken early on by Senators Scott Lucas and Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.), who contended that i
f any subversives had been on the State Department payroll, FBI Director Hoover would have long since rooted out the comrades, made such information public, or prosecuted the offenders.
This argument first surfaced in the clash between Lucas and McCarthy when McCarthy made his initial speech before the Senate. To charge that there were any “card-carrying Communists” in the State Department or elsewhere in the federal government, said Lucas, “is to reflect seriously upon the FBI.” The FBI, he added, “knows practically every card carrier in the United States and the FBI would not knowingly permit any card carrier to remain in any government department.”3 Hence, McCarthy’s allegations of Communists in the federal workforce were clearly bogus.
Humphrey made the identical argument a few weeks later. “Would it not be a dereliction of duty on the part of the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he asked McCarthy, “…if he were not to reveal the identity of a traitor?” Humphrey further challenged McCarthy to say whether “he believed the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been derelict in the sense that he has not prosecuted what the Senator from Wisconsin calls a top Communist agent?”4 As Hoover had done neither of these things, the self-evident implication was that McCarthy’s charges were phony.
Whatever the variations, all such innuendoes and statements about the FBI were false and had to be known to be so by the State Department, Senator Lucas, Senator Humphrey, or anyone else who had the slightest acquaintance with the subject. In point of fact, the FBI did not, would not, and could not “clear” State Department employees or any others outside the Bureau itself (though it often had pungent off-the-record thoughts to offer about such as Gustavo Duran, Carl Marzani, or John Service). The FBI conducted its investigations, provided the information to State or other employing venue, and the agency took it from there. Any “clearance” that resulted was the responsibility of the employer, not the Bureau.
Blacklisted By History Page 36