Though the first part of the VOA investigation was purely technical in nature, it produced one of the more horrific and enduring tales about McCarthy’s alleged reign of terror. The main issue was the siting of two VOA transmitting stations called “Baker West” and “Baker East,” in reference to their planned locations on the Pacific and Atlantic seaboards. Much of the testimony was to the effect that these stations were in the wrong places for global broadcast. Baker West was in the state of Washington, near Seattle, and according to expert opinion this location would subject its signal to interference from magnetic storms. The proper place for such a setup, said several witnesses, would have been to the south, preferably somewhere in California. (Similar but less extensive testimony was given about the location of Baker East.)9
There was other information provided in the hearings as to the peculiar nature of the contract for construction of Baker West, a feasibility study done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that had initially approved the site, and the qualifications of the VOA official in charge of the operation. The bottom line, however, was that Baker West was being built at the wrong place, would therefore be ineffective, and that the plans for that location should be scrapped.
As with the State Department file probe, there was active participation in these hearings by Democratic panel members. This was most significant in the case of Henry Jackson, who was from Washington State, where Baker West was sited. Despite this, Jackson was critical of the project—a conspicuous refusal on his part to let patronage concerns obscure security interests. That stance would presage his later career as a stalwart in the Democratic Party on defense and security issues. It was also stressed by McCarthy, who praised Jackson for his efforts in the matter, again suggesting the collegiality then prevailing.*256 10
Like the file probe, the investigation of Baker West also had therapeutic value, resulting in suspension of the project. At midpoint in the investigation, however, a personal tragedy struck that would later be alleged as a terrible black mark against McCarthy. On March 5, 1953, a VOA engineer and prospective witness in the Baker West affair apparently committed suicide. The engineer, Raymond Kaplan, on a visit to Cambridge, Massachusetts, fell or walked in front of a truck and was killed. A letter found in his pocket, addressed to his wife and son, was construed as a suicide note and cited as a reproach against McCarthy.
Kaplan’s death was, for instance, seized on by the disruptive subcommittee witness William Marx Mandel (who took the Fifth as to whether he was a Communist Party member), declaring that “you, Senator McCarthy, murdered Major Raymond Kaplan by forcing him, by pursuing him to the point where he jumped under a truck.”11 This version of the matter is repeated in several historical treatments of the VOA inquiry as proof of the fear and trembling at the agency caused by McCarthy. All of which, however, would turn out to be another batch of moonshine.
For one thing, it developed, Kaplan was to have been not a defendant but a friendly witness before the panel. As the note to his wife and son revealed, he had become convinced Baker West was in the wrong location and had earlier gone to California to find another spot for the transmitter. His view of the project thus would have supported the point otherwise established in the hearings. His note added, however, that he was afraid of being made a “patsy” (by unspecified parties) for errors committed in the program, that he feared “harassment,” and that “I can’t take the pressure on my shoulders any more.”12
As McCarthy at this point had had zero contact with Kaplan and knew little about him except that he was a prospective witness, these comments about not taking the pressure “any more” suggest someone else had been causing Kaplan grief before this. There was evidence also that he had wanted to testify before McCarthy to get his view of the project on record. This was brought out in executive hearings by Dorothy Fried, a coworker knowledgeable about Kaplan’s state of mind just before his death, in colloquy with committee probers:
COHN: As a matter of fact, from what he said to you, he [Kaplan] was anxious to testify?
FRIED: Yes.
COHN: Rather than being anything to be afraid of, he would show up very well. Isn’t that the impression you got from him?
FRIED: Yes.
McCARTHY: As of this time you cannot think of any reason he would commit suicide, and I gather from your testimony that the people who worked with him find it so unbelievable that some do not think he committed suicide.
FRIED: That is right. The fact that he called up close to five o’clock that evening [of his death], asking us to extend his travel authorization another day…
[DON] SURINE (committee investigator): You state that for a few days prior to his last trip to Boston, Mr. Kaplan was quite nervous and upset.
FRIED: Yes,…he said he was very anxious to testify… He seemed a little more nervous to me than he was generally.13 (Emphasis added.)
From these exchanges it would appear that, whoever was causing Ray Kaplan to be upset and nervous, it wasn’t Joe McCarthy. Evidently somebody was trying to scapegoat Kaplan for Baker West and he was eager to put his side of the story before the committee. Tragically, he never got the chance to do so.*257
The rest of the VOA investigation mainly concerned, not technical aspects of the setup, but the content of the broadcasts and the Cold War outlook this reflected. The hearings turned up considerable anecdotal evidence of a tendency to soft-pedal the question of Soviet Communism and its aggressive nature, and to disparage anti-Communist spokesmen and causes. There was a distinct suggestion also that people and attitudes from OWI continued to hold sway in these broadcast operations.
While emphasis on these points by McCarthy was no doubt to be expected, some particulars brought out by the hearings, again, may be surprising. One of the more contentious sessions involved McCarthy’s effort to find out why VOA higher-ups were canceling the Hebrew-language service beamed to listeners in Israel. Here we find the alleged anti-Semite McCarthy closely quizzing information official Reed Harris as to why this language service, above all others, should be targeted for extinction, and receiving some nottoo-persuasive answers.
In particular, McCarthy wanted to know why this decision about the Hebrew-language service had been made precisely at a time when rampant anti-Semitism had openly surfaced in the Soviet bloc—most notably in the “doctors’ plot” in Moscow and show trials in Czechoslovakia, both involving Jewish defendants. McCarthy’s view of the matter was at one with the head of the VOA Hebrew desk, Dr. Sidney Glazer, and the acting head of the Near East desk, Gerald Dooher, who protested the order to ax the Hebrew-language service. Both argued that Soviet anti-Semitism was a subject that should be hit hard in broadcasts to Israeli listeners.
Reed Harris responded that these were simply turf-protection issues, that the reasons were strictly financial, and that there had been stepped-up attention to the problem of Soviet anti-Semitism in other services of the Voice. The head of the VOA Russian desk, Alexander Barmine, would, however, categorically deny the last, testifying that downplaying the anti-Semitism issue was part of a more general pattern of softening the anti-Soviet message. (This was the same Alexander Barmine who earlier testified that Owen Lattimore had been identified to him as a Moscow agent.)14
The committee further brought out the point that the Hindi-language service of VOA, which had been using anti-Communist statements by certain Indian spokesmen, had been told to halt this practice. These instructions had been issued despite the fact, according to the head of the Hindi desk, that the broadcasts were receiving strong responses, reaching the rate of 1,000 letters a month from Hindi listeners. (In an oblique way, this also connected up with some of McCarthy’s previous battles, as the Ambassador to India who reportedly wanted a softening of such broadcasts was Chester Bowles, business and political sidekick of William Benton.)
There was testimony to similar effect concerning other foreign-language broadcasts. Dr. John Cocutz, of the East European division of the Voice, said he had been told n
ot to use the word “communism” in broadcasts about our Red opponents in the region, but to use the word “totalitarian” instead. Like testimony was given about Spanish-language broadcasts to Central and South America. Dooher of the Near East desk cited a half-dozen cases in which policy guidance muffled direct criticism of the Communists or the Soviet Union, or cut back on language services that used such comment in their broadcasts.15
On the other side of the question, there was evidence of hostility to anti-Communist spokesmen and leaders. Employees of the French-language service testified that, when Whittaker Chambers’s Witness appeared and a proposal was made to review it on the air, the head of the section had said, “Whittaker Chambers is a psychopath. Don’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.” In this same unit, as Everett Dirksen personally knew—since he had been asked to participate in the venture—a Lincoln’s Birthday broadcast was prepared, mentioning as a supposed highlight that Lincoln had received on the occasion of his reelection a congratulatory letter from Karl Marx. To Dirksen’s and McCarthy’s simplistic way of thinking, this didn’t seem to be effective Cold War propaganda.16
In contrast to the alleged softening and blurring of anti-Soviet themes, the Voice had seen its way clear to reporting vigorous press criticism of South Korea’s anti-Communist president Synghman Rhee (one of Professor Lattimore’s least favorite “little Chiang Kai-sheks”) on the eve of a Korean election. This happened while the Korean war was in progress, with South Korea as our ally, and caused Rhee to ban VOA broadcasts from being carried in the country. It provoked the following exchange between McCarthy and VOA policy director Edwin Kretzmann:
McCARTHY:…there is no question but what your broadcasts beamed to
South Korea over the VOA’s facilities were critical of Synghman Rhee, you say of his methods, just at a time shortly before the elections were held? There is no question about this, is there?
KRETZMANN: That is right, sir.
McCARTHY: And as a result of that, the South Korean government denied facilities of the South Korean radios to the Voice, is that correct?
KRETZMANN: That is correct.
McCARTHY: Did you carry any favorable comment on these broadcasts about Synghman Rhee?
KRETZMANN: We did not, because we could not find any in either the American press or the European press at the time.17
Other discoveries in the VOA investigation suggested a nostalgia for past practices under OWI. One such, recalling the days of Short Wave Research and its backdoor hiring methods, was the outsourcing of script writing and other chores to “purchase order” employees, rather than assigning these jobs to full-time staffers. This technique was used, according to the testimony, to get around security requirements at the Voice: Employees ineligible on security grounds for full-time jobs were often given these assignments. (Though even this, as pointed out by Mundt, was contrary to the law pertaining to the subject.)18
The affinity for certain bygone customs extended also to certain people. In numerous cases, the committee learned, much of the broadcasting complained of was the work of holdovers from the days of OWI, a fact that perhaps accounted for the ideological angle of the product. It also developed that a number of VOA officials had backgrounds in left-wing and Marxist politics that they had allegedly repudiated—though evidence of such repudiation was sketchy.
A prime example of such holdovers was Reed Harris, acting head of the information service, who got grilled about the Hebrew-language broadcasts. An alumnus of the Acheson State Department, Harris had come up through OWI and his early doings matched with those of many others from that unit. He had an extensive background of radical left activity, dating from his tenure as a student at Columbia University in the 1930s. Among his other ventures there, he appeared at a rally with then-Communist Nathaniel Weyl and others, protesting the ouster from the Columbia faculty of the Communist Donald Henderson, later a notorious leader of Red causes.
Shortly after leaving Columbia, Harris had written a book, called King Football, providing further insight as to his political outlook at that era. The book was, as the title implies, a denunciation of American colleges for overemphasis on football, but it was other things as well. It contained a rather vigorous trashing of U.S. society in general—attacks on the American Legion, gibes at business institutions, and slams at organized religion—all somewhat tenuously linked to the main thesis. It also contained two separate plugs for the way they did things in the Soviet Union (no football there) and cheers for a subsequently cited Communist front called the National Student League.19
Questioned on all this by McCarthy, Harris repudiated the book as a youthful indiscretion, saying his views had changed dramatically since he wrote it. There were, however, other items in his record of like nature. He had been, for instance, a member of the League of American Writers, a Francis Biddle–cited front group, was listed as a sponsor of a dinner for yet another cited front, the American Student Union (into which the National Student League had been merged), and appeared on the editorial board of Directions, a publication of the Communist-infiltrated Federal Writers Project. In each case, Harris had an explanation: He was in the League of Writers only briefly and got out when he saw the Communist influence there; the use of his name on the editorial board of Directions was purely honorary and pro forma; and so on.20
Neither McCarthy nor anyone else on the subcommittee argued that Harris had no right to do these things if that had been his inclination, but panel members openly wondered if someone of such background was the proper person to be in charge of Cold War propaganda against the Soviet Union. As Harris vehemently argued that he was now a solid anti-Communist, McCarthy pressed him for something specific attesting to this change of outlook. The same question would be raised by others on the committee, including Karl Mundt and Democratic members of the panel.
“I would like to ask you,” said John McClellan, “whether, since you wrote [King Football ], you have written any articles for publication…that refute the philosophy and views you expressed in that book?” Henry Jackson’s version was: “I think what Senator Mundt and I are interested in is any contradictory evidence, anything that contradicts that book and your views as there expressed…I am trying to get some evidence here which, if you had it, would indicate a contrary position.”21 The Harris answer was that while he had experienced a drastic change of view, he hadn’t written anything for publication that revealed this but could offer a vast sheaf of testimonials as to his militantly anti-Communist outlook.
Given Harris’s high-ranking job helping run America’s Cold War propaganda efforts, the questions raised about all this by the committee members hardly seemed unreasonable. And, from McCarthy’s standpoint, there were some other more generic questions that also needed answers. Why, he wondered, did U.S. propaganda officers so often seem to have radical leftist backgrounds, and what was there in the experience of such people that fitted them for the work they were doing? It was a puzzle that would recur in future hearings.
Postscript
While the VOA hearings were unfolding, the McCarthy panel was simultaneously pursuing another inquiry, spawning a brief conflict with the Ike administration that would smolder on for several months and then flare up again the following autumn. This probe, mostly the work of Robert Kennedy, concerned the issue of trade by America’s allies with Communist China, at that time still at war with U.S. and U.N. forces in Korea, and the enforcement of official measures to prevent such traffic. Kennedy produced a detailed report about the matter, indicating that efforts to suppress such trade, though mandated by Congress, were in many cases not being enforced, so that critical materials were reaching the enemy in time of warfare.22
Though the entire thrust of this Kennedy project was unwelcome in high administration circles, one aspect in particular would become a cause célèbre. According to Kennedy’s account of the affair (and also that of Newsweek’s Samuel Shaffer), McCarthy staffers had been told by Ike’s new foreign aid administrator, Harold
Stassen, that the government could do nothing to interdict foreign trade carried by private vessels, many belonging to Greek ship owners. The scope of the law reached the acts of allied governments but not those of private parties.
Whereupon, with Stassen’s encouragement (per Kennedy-Shaffer), Kennedy and fellow McCarthy aide George Anastos met with the ship owners and got them to agree not to carry prohibited goods to Communist China. Kennedy and McCarthy would then announce this coup de main at a press conference in March of 1953. The episode was testimony both to the effectiveness of Robert Kennedy and the work of the McCarthy panel. But it would also fuel hostility within the administration toward McCarthy and be used against him as an instance of his unlimited hubris, usurping an executive function. Meanwhile, still other such disputes were brewing that would soon explode into the headlines, leading to an even more significant rupture between McCarthy and the White House.
CHAPTER 35
The Burning of the Books
LANGSTON Hughes was a celebrated black poet and author of the twentieth century who in his younger days was, to say no more, a sympathizer with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and whose works expressed this rather freely.
The most famous of many poems that voiced his radical outlook was one called “Goodbye Christ.” This said, among other things: “Goodbye Christ, Lord Jehovah, Beat it on away from here, make way for a new guy with no religion at all, A real guy named Marx, Communism, Lenin, Peasant, Stalin, worker, me.” In another early work Hughes had written: “Rise workers and fight…the curtain is a great red flag rising to the strains of the Internationale.” And in another: “Put one more ‘S’ in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA.”
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