This was not only generically true with regard to FBI procedures, but was specifically and necessarily true of the State Department and other federal agencies by the terms of Truman’s loyalty order. That order expressly named the secretary or other head of an employing department as the arbiter of loyalty questions, rather than lodging this power in some independent unit, as proposed by Rep. Rees of Kansas. In the case of State, this meant Dean Acheson or his designees would decide whether there were any loyalty risks in the department, and thus, not so incidentally, sit in judgment of their own past handling of such cases.*185
Nor, just to complete the record, did the Bureau have the power to decide the issue of prosecution, as suggested by Humphrey’s challenge to McCarthy. The Bureau could make recommendations on such matters but had neither the power to launch a prosecution nor the authority to conduct one. That was the province of the Attorney General, and we have seen in the Amerasia case a singular study of how that power was used by Truman Justice. It’s hard to believe Senator Humphrey didn’t know the facts about such procedures, and impossible to believe the Tydings panel didn’t—as its chief counsel, Edward Morgan, was himself a former Bureau agent.
In short, as with the “four committees,” all attempts to invoke the FBI as having been responsible for inaction on, clearance of, or approval for McCarthy’s cases were efforts to becloud the subject. The reality was that all the “clearances” being cited were strictly Foggy Bottom issue—clearances the State Department gave its own employees. Thus, the matter to be decided was what clearance by the State Department amounted to and whether in the cases raised by McCarthy it had been correctly granted. McCarthy’s point was, exactly, that the department had been clearing people whose records, as best he could determine, indicated they shouldn’t be on the payroll. To reply to that critique with the assertion that the employees had been cleared was to rephrase the question as the answer. Such circular reasoning was unimpressive to McCarthy, though apparently satisfactory to some historians of the era.
One high official who liked to tout the State Department’s clearance record as self-evident proof that its record was a good one was State’s loyalty chairman, General Snow. In the fall of 1951, the general mounted a polemical blitzkrieg in defense of State and against McCarthy, repeating and embellishing the broadsides that had been issuing from the department’s research warrens since the early days of 1950. In two publicized addresses, Snow in the usual manner accused McCarthy of making baseless charges, stirring up rancor, and misleading the American people as to the department’s excellent security record.
The proof of this excellence was the statistic wielded by the general when he said that, since the inception of the loyalty program, not a single Communist “had been found” in the ranks of the department. Nor, in this span, it further developed, had so much as a single loyalty risk been discovered among all of State’s thousands of employees.5 That record supposedly proved that the department was doing a first-rate job in terms of loyalty/security measures.
Others, however, had contemplated this same statistic and drawn a very different conclusion from it. Most notably, a starkly negative judgment on this basis came from the Loyalty Review Board of the Civil Service Commission, President Truman’s own creation. In 1951, the clearance-prone Seth Richardson had stepped down as chairman of this outfit, to be replaced by former Sen. Hiram Bingham of Connecticut—a very different breed of chairman. Under Bingham, the board would take a much tougher view of loyalty cases, and in particular a tougher view of what was going on at State. As revealed by records of the board, Bingham and other members were greatly bothered by the State Department loyalty record and said so in explicit fashion.
The person who brought all this to light, as in so many other cases, was the troublesome, interfering Joe McCarthy. Drawing on his supposedly nonexistent sources, McCarthy somehow got hold of the minutes of a meeting of the LRB, the contents of which turned out to be another bombshell. The meeting in question, held on February 14, 1951, involved discussion of loyalty cases at State, including that of Service, and what the board should do about them. From this the talk branched off to other issues, as members expressed concern about the State Department loyalty drill—making it plain that the department’s clearance of so many suspects on such a nonstop basis was considered not a good thing but a bad one.6
Chairman Bingham capsuled the theme of these exchanges when he said: “I think it fair to say that the State Department, as you know, has the worst record of any department in the actions of its loyalty board…[It] has not found anyone—shall I say ‘guilty’—under our rules. It is the only [departmental] board that has acted in this way.” Bingham further said he had told Dean Acheson that State’s loyalty board “was out of step with all other agency boards. In the Post office Department, 10 per cent of all persons examined were found to be worthy of separation from the government. In the Commerce Department, 6½ per cent. The average was about 6 per cent. The State Dept., zero.”7
Other members of the board chipped in on the matter of State Department clearance and the methods used to grant it. One revealing exchange went as follows: Question: “What are you going to do when the attorney who is presenting the charges [in a department hearing] acts as though he were the attorney for the incumbent? I read 100 pages in the record where 3 members of the [department] board were acting as attorneys for the employee.” Answer: “Oh, you are talking about the State Department. They are taking the attitude that they are there to clear the employee and not to protect the government. We have been arguing with them since the program started.”8
This led another member to raise the question of whether the Civil Service board was not remiss in letting the situation at State continue. Focusing on the statistical record brandished by Snow, this board member said: “I have been disturbed about the State Department—this remarkable record of never having fired anybody for loyalty, and yet we do nothing about it….I have been troubled about whether or not we owe the duty of having somebody call the attention of the President to the fact that the program simply does not work in that department….It seems to me we assume some responsibility when we sit back for three years and know that the country rests in a false sense of security that we are looking after their interests here when we know darn well that is it completely ineffective in one of the most important departments of the government…”9
Such comments were the more significant as they came from President Truman’s own LRB, not Joe McCarthy or his conservative GOP allies in Congress. Plainly, the views expressed were quite different from the bland assertions of Snow, John Peurifoy, and the Tydings panel—and writers who take such statements at face value—saying the security drill at State was fine and that all its employees should have been cleared because they had been.
Further insight into these matters would be provided by a high-profile series of hearings, beginning in March 1952, in which Snow and Assistant Secretary of State Carlisle Humelsine would be the State Department spokesmen. These were sessions, again, of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee charged with reviewing the performance of the department before granting it more money. Members of the panel included Pat McCarran of Nevada (the subcommittee chairman), the ever-present Ferguson, and—Beelzebub himself—none other than Joe McCarthy.
From a State Department standpoint, this should have been a most welcome showdown, as its officials here had a chance to challenge, face-to-face, the liar who had been spreading falsehoods about their department. Assuming they were themselves telling the truth and knew whereof they spoke, here was a golden opportunity to expose McCarthy, confront him with the solid facts at their disposal, and discredit him in an official public setting. Unfortunately for State, it didn’t work out in quite that fashion. In fact, to the intense embarrassment of Foggy Bottom, pretty much the reverse would happen.
These hearings were especially useful as they gave the senators a chance to review, seriatim, a sizable number of McCarthy cases and t
hus elicit certain information not otherwise available in the record. Among these were Esther Brunauer, O. Edmund Clubb, John Paton Davies, Herbert Fierst, Haldore Hanson, Val Lorwin, Peveril Meigs, Edward Posniak, John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent. Of course, given the Truman secrecy order, the senators were unable to get substantive data on the cases, but did manage to find out something about the way they had been handled.
Even at this level, obtaining the relevant information was far from easy and the colloquy often went round in circles. Nonetheless, the discussion revealed a lot about the department’s procedures, how its clearances were arrived at, and how the statistical record bragged of by Snow had been kept so impeccably free of adverse findings.
Easily the most dramatic moments of the session occurred when McCarthy and Snow went head-to-head concerning the alleged evils and falsehoods of McCarthy. In his orations, Snow had predictably defined the plague of “McCarthyism” as making false and irresponsible charges. McCarthy, backed by Ferguson and McCarran, challenged Snow to support these statements. Ferguson put it this way: “…we are going to ask for the proof that these statements by Senator McCarthy were false, and we want your proof. We don’t want your conclusion now…. Let us have the Hanson file to prove that what he said about Hanson is untrue. Let us have the file on Service. Let us have the file on Davies.”
To all these suggestions General Snow demurred, saying he couldn’t give information on specific cases and, anyway, he hadn’t mentioned these people in his comments. But, said Ferguson, you have made sweeping statements that McCarthy’s charges were false across the board, and these were among his foremost cases. McCarran seconded the motion: “You make a blanket statement and say that what Senator McCarthy says is false from beginning to end…you blanketed everything that he said as being false. Now, you will prove to us that they are false.”10
As might have been expected, this resulted in a complete dead end. The State Department position was, and would remain, that McCarthy was lying about the cases, but its officials couldn’t reveal the facts that proved this; so public and Congress would simply have to take their word that he was lying. Getting nowhere with this approach, McCarthy and his colleagues then asked Snow to give specific examples of McCarthy falsehoods—a drill that was also revealing. In response to this, Snow came back with a series of McCarthy statements that were allegedly in error. These items will be somewhat familiar to the reader, as they rehearse points touched on in preceding pages. Some of the exchanges went as follows:
SNOW: [As an example of McCarthy falsehoods] the accusation is that the State Department had 205, or whatever number he chose to call it, known Communists…. He made the same statement over and overagain.
MCCARTHY: Let me interrupt the witness now. Mr. Snow, are you aware of the fact that the investigators for the Gillette-Monroney Committee went to Wheeling, W.Va., and completely disproved what you have said?
SNOW: I am not aware of that.
MCCARTHY: Did you not read that in the paper?
SNOW: No, sir.
MCCARTHY: Did you not think that before going out and making that statement, that you should check on matters like that?11
A like discussion would ensue on the matter of the State Department security files. In this case, Snow cited McCarthy statements to the effect that the files had been “purged,” “raped,” “denuded,” “tampered with,” and “stripped.” These statements, said Snow, were self-evidently false; he personally knew the files were intact because he had them in his possession. McCarthy then questioned Snow about the affidavits on this subject submitted to the Tydings panel:
MCCARTHY: Are you aware of the fact that the statements cover a period of time before June 9, 1947 [when Snow took over the State Department loyalty board]? That the raping was before the files were handed over to your board? Are you aware that we have those statements?
SNOW: No sir.
MCCARTHY: You never heard of them.
SNOW: Never heard of them; never saw them…
MCCARTHY: As chairman of the loyalty board, do you not think you have the duty to check these affidavits?
SNOW: I was so confident that the files had never been rifled that I had no presentiment of any duty to investigate what the basis of your speech was.*186 12
Snow’s next example of alleged falsehood was McCarthy’s statement that Dean Acheson had ousted the relatively tough-minded security board at State under Joe Panuch. Snow said this was just a procedural changeover, closing down one board and starting up another, and that “Secretary Acheson had nothing to do with either event.” Some of the exchanges about this were as follows:
MCCARTHY: Let us see if you are telling the truth, or not. One of the men on the original board was Bannerman, is that right?
SNOW: I don’t know who was on the original board. It was before my time.
MCCARTHY: Do you know whether Panuch was on it?
SNOW: I don’t know.
MCCARTHY: Do you know who got rid of Bannerman?
SNOW: I don’t know anything about that except the board went out of existence before we came in under Secretary Marshall.
MCCARTHY: But Bannerman and Panuch were the men having to do with security in the State Department. You know that, do you not?
SNOW: That was before my time.
MCCARTHY: Do you say I lied when I said Acheson had gotten rid of them?
SNOW: Yes.
MCCARTHY: You know that Bannerman and Panuch are no longer there, do you not?
SNOW: I don’t know that; no.13
Indeed, General Snow seemed to know very little about the topic altogether, prompting the not unreasonable question from McCarthy: “…on what theory can you say I was lying when you now tell us you do not know who the men were; you do not know who fired them; you do not even know how they were forced out of the department?” (This riposte was more plausible yet as Acheson did in fact cashier Panuch, albeit in the form of accepting Panuch’s “resignation”—both parties to the encounter making this clear in later comments.) Worse than Snow’s apparently bottomless ignorance was the statement of Carlisle Humelsine, who chipped in with the misleading observation that Joe Panuch had not been ousted but “went of his own accord.” Panuch himself would say otherwise in testimony before the Senate.14
Later, McCarthy addressed the famous issue of the numbers. Questioning the State Department spokesmen, he adverted to the matter of the 205, as revealed in the James Byrnes letter to Adolph Sabath, and wanted to know what had happened with the cases recommended for dismissal in 1946. Humelsine promised to come up with an answer and thereafter supplied the following update:
“The 205 individuals referred to are included in a group of 341 individuals on whom the screening committee of which Bannerman was a member had indicated a preliminary disapproval. Of this entire group, 46 are still employed in the department after having been thoroughly investigated and cleared…. Of the remaining 295 cases two were discharged under the McCarran rider. The remaining 293 were removed through various types of personnel action.”15
As a glance at Chapter 20 will show, this was the identical statement given the Tydings panel two years before, but with a revealing alteration in the figures. In the earlier comment, 58 of the employees were still on the department payroll after having been “investigated” and given “full clearance.” In 1952, this number had for some unspoken reason dropped to 46, while the number “removed” through “various types of personnel action” had risen by the identical margin—from 281 to 293. In other words, a dozen people “cleared” in 1950 had been “removed” by 1952. (What had mainly happened in the interim, of course, was the uproar caused by McCarthy and concomitant pressure on State to tighten its procedures.)
Also of interest in this memo was the vague reference to “various types of personnel action” by which employees were “removed.” While no breakdown was given, it’s evident from what has gone before that the main such “personnel action” was the resignation
method. This resort to resignations was troubling not only to McCarthy and others in Congress, but also to members of the LRB, as revealed in the review board’s minutes—the main problem talked of being that employees who thus departed could, and did, get jobs at other federal agencies.*187
In questioning Humelsine and Snow, McCarthy brought out several examples of such resignations and the effects of handling cases in this manner. A main exhibit was Peveril Meigs (who had been McCarthy’s case No. 3 before the Senate). As McCarthy put it: “…I think we ought to know how many of those who resigned got jobs in another department. Take the case of Meigs. He resigned from the State Department while under investigation. He went over to the Army and got a job in the Army. Whether he was handling classified matter or not, I do not know. Their loyalty board held a hearing and ordered him discharged. I am just wondering how many other cases there are somewhat analogous to his.”*188 16
Beyond the question of employees moving to other assignments, there was a further aspect of the resignation method developed in these sessions: its contribution to State’s unblemished record of never having found a Communist (or loyalty risk) in its employ. The way it worked was fairly ingenious. If an employee resigned while under investigation, the process was instantly halted, the case was pulled out of the system, and the employee was listed in the records as a voluntary separation. No conclusive judgment having been reached, no loyalty risks or Communists would be discovered. This was brought out by McCarthy and McCarran as follows:
MCCARTHY: Mr. Snow, I note the review board objects to your practice of allowing individuals to resign instead of firing them. Do you still take the position that—
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