Among other intriguing features, the Duran affair provided some further clues as to McCarthy’s information sources. Virtually all the data McCarthy presented on the case had previously been cited by Reps. Parnell Thomas (R-N.J.) and Alvin O’Konski (R-Wis.), and it seems obvious that McCarthy inherited the files they had assembled. However, as he often did, McCarthy added a special fillip of his own, making the matter still more contentious. The provocation for this was a lengthy cover story in Time in October 1951 under the heading: “Demagogue McCarthy: Does He Deserve Well of the Republic?”
As foreshadowed by the phrasing, Time concluded that, no, McCarthy certainly didn’t deserve well of the republic, and one of the main reasons he didn’t was his shameful treatment of Duran. After giving a summary of McCarthy’s charges in the case, Time offered its own Olympian judgment: “Duran, never a Red, was definitely and clearly anti-Communist.”19 The basis for this flat assertion wasn’t clear, and became the less so when McCarthy, in his uncanny fashion, came up with additional data on the case from the files of Time itself.
This material confirmed the major points about Duran that McCarthy had made in his indictment and included a 1947 cover memo from James Shepley, then a Washington correspondent for Time. Among the topics addressed by Shepley was a defense offered by Duran and his supporters that it was a case of mistaken identity and that some other Gustavo Duran had been the bad guy, now being confused with the good Gustavo. Shepley sardonically debunked this thesis, concluding with the comment that “both Duran and [blank] are considered flatly to be MVD [KGB] secret agents.”20
McCarthy put all this Shepley material in the Congressional Record, prompting protests that he had “stolen” memos belonging to Time. (What apparently happened was that someone at Time who didn’t like what was going on there had leaked the Shepley info to him.) When McCarthy then brought the matter to the attention of Henry Luce, Time’s founder/publisher answered that the magazine hadn’t used the Shepley data because it wasn’t conclusively known that Duran was a Soviet agent.21 (That of course was true, but a far cry from Time’s statement that “Duran, never a Red, was definitely and clearly anti-Communist.”)
An epilogue to all of this would develop a half-century later when Yale University Press published Soviet archival records pertaining to the Spanish Civil War, under the title Spain Betrayed, showing the efforts of the Kremlin to control and exploit the Spanish fighting. The documents included a roll call of Loyalist commanders and their party/ideological affiliations. Listed under the “Communist” designation was Gustavo Duran. Also included were excerpts from the dispatches of the infamous “General Kleber” (Manfred Stern), one of the main Soviet commissars in the Spanish struggle.
These dispatches revealed that, among Kleber’s other responsibilities, he was the commanding officer of Duran, and included such statements as the following: “An excellent fellow, intelligent and dedicated to the party, a young party member, Comrade Duran, who served as a translator through the time in Madrid and at the fronts, I made my adjutant and, in fact, my chief of staff.” And: “…my interpreter and adjutant, Duran, was an absolutely worthy commander and commanded a division.” This was high praise indeed from a Soviet proconsul typically sparing in kudos for others.22
In these materials, there is no mention of a second Gustavo Duran active in the Spanish fighting who was “definitely and clearly anti-Communist,” nor have there to date been any sightings of this doppelgänger in other histories of the conflict. All of which would seem to settle the question of who, in the Duran dispute, “deserved well of the republic.”
TWO final suspects in this roster of midlevel McCarthy cases may be handled rather briefly. One was Prof. Frederick Schuman, who, despite a record of Communist-front affiliation exceeding that of Dorothy Kenyon, got invited to address a State Department gathering in 1946 on the then-dawning problems of the Cold War. When McCarthy made an issue of this, the State Department/Tydings answer was that, after all, Professor Schuman had given only one such lecture. That appeared to be true enough, but begged the questions of why he had been invited to give any such lecture at all and who asked him to do so. Some insight on that point would have been helpful in understanding what was then going on at State, but the Tydings panel, in normal mode, saw no reason to pursue it.
The last case in this group, and one of the more ironic, was Prof. Harlow Shapley. His record of Communist-front affiliations rivaled that of Schuman; in addition, he had served as chairman of a notorious Soviet-spawned operation in 1949 called the World Peace Conference. This was so blatant a pro-Moscow venture that none other than Dean Acheson would describe it as a “sounding board” for Communist propaganda.23 Yet, McCarthy noted, Dr. Shapley had before this twice been appointed by the State Department, when Acheson was Under Secretary, as a U.S. representative liaising with UNESCO, and was still so liaising in 1950. (An instance, it would appear, of the left hand not knowing what the far-left hand was doing.) And these, as noted, were merely some of McCarthy’s midlevel suspects. The big McCarthy cases, some very big indeed, were in all respects much more revealing.
Postscript
As to whether loyalty-security problems in the federal government had been cleaned up before McCarthy came on the scene, it’s worth pausing to reflect that the vast majority of the suspects discussed in the preceding pages were still serving in official jobs in 1950.
Of the public cases noted in this chapter, Haldore Hanson, Esther and Stephen Brunauer, Gustavo Duran, and Harlow Shapley were all occupying official posts of one sort or another when McCarthy made his charges—though Duran was at the United Nations and Shapley held a noncompensated appointment at State. Among McCarthy’s other public cases, to be discussed in more detail hereafter, both John Stewart Service and Philip Jessup were holding down responsible jobs in the department, while Professor Lattimore was off on a mysterious junket for the United Nations.
Among the less celebrated McCarthy cases discussed in Chapter 25, only one—Richard Post—wasn’t on an official payroll when McCarthy made his early speeches and went before the Tydings panel. All the others—Askwith, Carlisle, Ferry, Fierst, Geiger, Hunt, Lloyd, Lovell, Meigs, Rommel, and Thayer—were serving in official jobs in 1950. Seven of these were in the State Department, and three had moved from State to other official venues—just as McCarthy contended.
Add to this line-up still other cases discussed in previous chapters: Solomon Adler, O. Edmund Clubb, V. Frank Coe, John Paton Davies, Cora Dubois, Stanley Graze, Mary Jane Keeney, Raymond Ludden, Philleo Nash, Franz Neumann, Edward Posniak, Philip Raine, William Remington, William Stone, John Carter Vincent, David Weintraub, and David Zablodowsky. All these people, too, were found working in official jobs in 1950, mostly at the State Department but also at the White House, Treasury, Commerce, and the global organizations.
This is but a sampling of the total roster of the original McCarthy cases then at official posts, and a considerable number of others would surface in still later inquests. It also doesn’t include such notorious suspects as Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Condon—both on the McCarthy radar screen but neither considered one of his cases—also occupying official posts in 1950. From all of which it would appear that loyalty-security problems were by no means over and done with pre-McCarthy. As earlier seen, however, once he applied the blowtorch of public notice to such cases, things had a sudden way of changing.
CHAPTER 27
Tempest in a Teacup
SO FAR AS press and public were aware, the loyalty/security battles of the early 1950s were a partisan shoot-out between the Republican maverick Joe McCarthy and the Democratic administration of the feisty Harry Truman.
That impression was correct up to a point, but didn’t go nearly far enough in gauging the scope and nature of the conflict. Nor could it have done so, as some of the heaviest fighting was in secret, the facts about it concealed for decades. Behind the scenes and out of the headlines, a grim twilight struggle was being waged inside th
e executive branch itself, pitting officials in the Department of Justice against J. Edgar Hoover and a rebellious FBI, keeper of the security data.
At issue in this dispute was what exactly should and shouldn’t be said about the McCarthy charges, how much should be disclosed or held back, and how to phrase answers to dicey questions about security problems of the 1940s. Conflicts of this type occurred on several fronts, including the State Department’s security records and the cases of specific McCarthy suspects whose files were locked up in the White House. However, by far the biggest single battle involved the Amerasia scandal and what to say about it as the Tydings hearings inched their way toward this still-ticking time bomb. In this struggle, the combatants were backed into fairly narrow corners, which made the fighting especially bitter.
From one angle, the position of Truman Justice was the more complex and awkward, which caused its spokesmen to do and say things one has to presume they didn’t want to. In the view of the department, the Amerasia affair might have been a horror movie titled The Thing That Wouldn’t Die. Pre-McCarthy, the scandal had been twice buried—first by the fix that let John Service walk, then by the pro forma Hobbs inquiry that found nothing amiss in the way the case was handled. Justice had been involved in both these efforts—the main cover-up at the beginning and the cover-up of the cover-up before the Congress.
Now, thanks to the interfering Joe McCarthy, the whole thing had been exhumed again—a collage of crimes and lies, including theft of official papers, cover-up, perjury, and grand jury rigging—so yet another burial was called for. Wielding the shovel this time was Senator Tydings, who would reprise the Hobbs performance, opining that the case was no big deal and that Truman Justice nobly did its duty by it. Suggestions of a fix, said Tydings, were a “disgusting” smear of prosecutor Robert Hitchcock and an insult to Judge James Proctor.1
But of course there had been a fix, though Judge Proctor was completely in the dark about it; Hitchcock, on the other hand, was one of the officials at Justice most deeply implicated in the plot to free John Service. He, James McInerney, and James McGranery had all told the Hobbs committee the case died of its own inertia and shouldn’t have happened to begin with. Now they would have to trudge back up Capitol Hill to do the job again in the new hearings prompted by McCarthy.
A federal official fixing any case, one supposes, would be concerned about the implications of such action, but rigging a case of this astounding nature would have made the troubling aspects even more so. Beyond this was the fact that the FBI knew the case was fixed and had the wiretap logs to prove it. And while Justice officials may not have been privy to this early on, they would be advised about it later. All of which added up to a very tight spot for Truman Justice.
Meanwhile, FBI Director Hoover had problems of his own. Though by tradition and Bureau precept nonpolitical and quasi-independent, the FBI was an arm of Justice, taking its orders from the Attorney General and keeping its mouth shut in public on controverted matters. The standing rule was that if anything like Amerasia was to be the subject of quotable comment, that would come from the department, not the Bureau. Now, however, the FBI knew the case was rigged and that Justice itself had been complicit. So Hoover’s bureaucratic obligations pointed him in one direction, his knowledge of the facts in quite another.
At any given moment, Hoover could have blown the whole thing sky-high, a dreaded possibility that undoubtedly occurred to officials at Justice—this over against the Bureau’s technical subordination, culture of silence, and long history of discretion. Even short of full and purposeful exposure, FBI agents were going to be called before the Tydings panel to be quizzed concerning the scandal and the Bureau’s knowledge of it. And Hoover’s men weren’t about to perjure themselves to protect the higher-ups at Justice.
This situation led to a terrific struggle in which the FBI and Truman Justice repeatedly clashed on what to say to Tydings. The delicate problem facing Justice was how to get enough cooperation from the Bureau to keep the cover-up intact, while alternately trying to appease and muzzle Hoover. It was a daunting task, and with any Senate chairman less in the tank than Millard Tydings couldn’t have survived one reasonably active subcommittee session posing some obvious questions.
For one thing, Justice spokesmen would say and do things that enraged the Director, pushing him to the brink of public protest and sometimes beyond it. One high-risk Justice gambit was to put out statements on the alleged views of Hoover and the FBI that were quite different from their real opinions. That such misrepresentations were even attempted, as occurred on several topics, is indicative of the desperation then prevailing in certain quarters.
The main Justice tactic on Amerasia, starting with the initial fix, was to downplay the significance of the case, describing it as a trivial matter not worth all the fuss and feathers. The prosecutors, it was said, really didn’t have much on the defendants; the evidence had been badly handled; the documents were of no importance. These points were made often by Justice spokesmen and spelled out in a lengthy memo supplied to Tydings explaining why the case had foundered. All this read more like a brief for the defense—which it was—than for the prosecution. And all of it would bring a sharp rejoinder from the Bureau.
While most of this wrangling occurred backstage, one semipublic battle was triggered by journalist Walker Stone of the Scripps-Howard news chain, who reported that Hoover thought the data on Amerasia presented a “100 percent airtight case.”2 This was, of course, directly counter to the official line and was picked up and quoted by McCarthy as he hammered away at Service and the Amerasia crowd in general. In response, John Peurifoy at the State Department asked Justice for a rebuttal to the McCarthy statements, duly supplied by Assistant Attorney General Peyton Ford, then furnished to the press corps.
Ford sent Peurifoy a letter denying the “airtight” quote, saying “Mr. Hoover did not make the statement which has been attributed to him.” James McInerney would follow suit in testimony before the Tydings panel, saying “Mr. Hoover did not make any such statement….He has denied it.” John Peurifoy promptly issued another press release touting Hoover’s alleged denial, the not-to-worry view of Amerasia, and the chronic lying of McCarthy.3
All of this, however, itself was false, and directly counter to Hoover’s true opinions. As the FBI records make clear, Hoover obviously did think the case “airtight,” most probably said something like this to Walker Stone, and certainly hadn’t issued any disavowals of it. On the contrary, he was outraged by the Ford-McInerney comments and took pains to put his thoughts on record to both State and Justice. So, on top of its misrepresentation of Service/ Amerasia, Justice was now explicitly misrepresenting Hoover.
Compounding matters, Hoover had protested Ford’s letter in draft form, so Justice knew the denial was false even before it was supplied to State. When a draft was sent over for his approval, the Director had told Peyton Ford, “I have carefully reviewed the letter and I cannot approve it.” Hoover added that, “with respect to the case itself, I must point out that in the event I had been asked at the time the arrests were made whether I thought we had an airtight case, I would have stated that I thought we had. Further, if I were asked today, I would have to so state.”4
Apparently unfazed by this, Ford sent the letter anyway, and Peurifoy happily made it public. Hoover was livid. As he wrote Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, “I want you to know that at no time did I ever give any such clearance for the use of my name by either the Department of Justice or Mr. Peyton Ford, and I must certainly protest the use of my name, particularly when that use does not reflect my views.”5 Ford would later tell Hoover the denial had been “inadvertently” mailed to State—some kind of screwup at the office—and that Peurifoy had released it without his knowledge.*212
Correlative to the airtight fiasco, Justice, State, and Tydings were doing all they could to downplay the importance of the Amerasia papers. In the Hobbs hearings that at last got printed at this juncture, Rober
t Hitchcock had used the phrase “teacup gossip” to describe the contents of the purloined memos.†213 6 Similar trivializing comments would be made by Hitchcock before the Tydings panel, and by James McInerney, now successor to Tom Clark as head of the criminal division at Justice.
McInerney said the idea that the documents had any serious bearing on national defense was “silly” and repeated the “teacup gossip” line to Tydings:“I would say that with respect to all these documents that they were innocuous, very innocuous documents. If I would estimate that 1 percent of them related to national defense, that would be about right. They had to do with very minor political and economical matters in the Far East…. These things impressedme as being a little above the level of teacup gossip in the Far East.”*214 7
“AIRTIGHT”
To counter McCarthy, the Truman Justice Department denied that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered the Amerasia/Service case “airtight,” but here Hoover reveals that Justice misrepresented his views about the matter.
Source: FBI Amerasia file
These comments were infuriating to Hoover and the Bureau, who had the papers in their custody and well knew what was in them. A Hoover memo of May 31 capsules a conversation with Peyton Ford in which the Director recalled that “I said Hitchcock’s statement was outrageous.” As Hoover further stated: “I told Ford I was outraged that men in the Department like Hitchcock and McInerney had gone up to the [Tydings] committee and made the statements that they did…if the documents were actually silly, or ‘teacup gossip,’ as McInerney put it, then we should not have had the investigation, or arrested people.”8
The FBI did several analyses of the papers relating not only to this aspect but to others. One such exercise occurred when Republican Bourke Hickenlooper of the Tydings panel issued a statement to the press challenging the “teacup gossip” label. In fact, he said, many papers retrieved from Amerasia concerned military and strategic matters that could have affected the war in the Pacific or been of value to the Yenan Reds in the struggle for control of China.
Blacklisted By History Page 45