As recorded in this memo, the defector said he had been working at a Communist scientific lab in Poland when a Russian scientist shared some technical material with its staffers, prompting one to ask if it “had come from Evans Signal Laboratory in Fort Monmouth.” The memo further quoted the defector as saying that, in previous confabs, “the name of Evans Signal Laboratory had been mentioned several times.” He further said that, on another occasion, a Russian had shown a film about the atomic energy setup at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and that the drill was “pretty much the same as with the microfilm I saw of Evans Signal Laboratory.”16
When McCarthy shared the contents of this astounding memo with Army officials, they said they didn’t know anything about it and seemed baffled by McCarthy’s comments. As it turned out, however, the Army brass did know something of the matter but hadn’t followed up because they were told the report was “fabricated,” that the defector had recanted, and that he wasn’t a credible witness.17
Nonplussed by this, McCarthy sent one of his aides to Europe to check the story out directly. In late October of 1953, committee investigator James Juliana tracked the defector down in a remote part of the (West) German Federal Republic. The object of this search turned out to be a youthful (twenty-four-year-old) technician named Harald Buettner, who talked with Juliana at length and gave him a notarized statement, the most obvious feature of which was that the witness had recanted nothing. The defector told Juliana he had been employed in September 1950 at a Soviet-run scientific installation in Poland, along with Red technicians from other countries. One evening, he said, he and his colleagues were told by a Russian scientist that he had some brand-new information to show them from the United States.
As the group followed the professor to his lab, said Buettner, he heard some coworkers talking in Russian. Asking for a translation, he was told, “I just wanted to know if it was from Evans Signal laboratory in ‘Fort M’”—this accompanied by laughter. “Another person who interrupted our conversation said, ‘From where else should it be?’” These comments, Buettner said, were borne out when the data were examined. “In his work room [the Russian] professor turned on a table sized microfilm projector apparatus, into which he inserted a Leica film,” wherein “the term Evans Signal Laboratory was mentioned several times.”18
These remarks, far from being a recantation, obviously confirmed the first report in its essentials. Who, then, had said that Buettner recanted? And what was there about this unpretentious story that was shown to be a fabrication? As the authorities apparently never followed up, we don’t have answers to such questions—or information about the missing papers described by Sheehan, or data on numerous other security problems surfaced in the McCarthy hearings. The proper response to all these matters would have been an in-depth investigation to sort things out in systematic fashion. The official response, so far as the available record shows, had been to drop the subject entirely.
With ample reason, McCarthy was appalled by the security muddle at Monmouth and its network of suppliers. However, the more he learned about the subject, the more he became convinced the problem wasn’t with officials on the ground, either at Monmouth itself or at First Army. Captain Sheehan was an example of someone who had been on the scene and tried to get the problem corrected. Monmouth security chief Andrew Reid, who had first nabbed Aaron Coleman, was another.
Reid’s perspective was of special value, as he had extensive knowledge of the Monmouth setup. He had been at the post since 1940 and thus had a good long-term view of the way things developed there, both in the generic security meltdown of the war and in the years that followed. Though under orders not to provide information on specific cases, Reid did tersely answer certain McCarthy questions. One brief exchange, in which McCarthy did most of the talking, went as follows:
MCCARTHY: Over that 13-year period of time [since 1940] have you repeatedly furnished information on individuals who you considered to be very dangerous to the security of this country, and discovered that they were kept on year after year even after you had supplied the complete facts on them?
REID: Yes, sir.19
Of like implication were data the McCarthy probers gathered concerning the post commander, Major General Kirke B. Lawton (of whom more later), who had previously been a player in the muffled SCIA inquiry. According to an undated fall 1953 memo by McCarthy staffer Juliana, “General Lawton was commanding general at Fort Monmouth for one year and nine months prior to the [McCarthy] hearings and investigation…[During that period] even though he kept the Department advised of all the security risks at Monmouth, he was unable to suspend a single individual because of the Security Screening Board and the Secretary of the Army’s letter of 1950 [forbidding security suspensions by the base commander].”20
In the light of such information, McCarthy became increasingly focused on the review board that had been overturning so many adverse security rulings. The situation had a striking resemblance to what had happened at the State Department, when suspects recommended for removal by security screeners were nonetheless approved at higher levels.*276 (McCarthy had raised the issue of Army security reversals as early as September 1953, when the probe was getting started, and would revert to it often in the hearings.)
McCarthy’s concerns about these matters would soon link up with other, more famous Army cases, to be discussed hereafter. In all such instances, his main interest wasn’t in the individual suspects, though he considered some of them quite important, but in the workings of a system that repeatedly granted clearance to people who, judged by the available record, were dubious security risks, to put the matter no more strongly. He accordingly planned to call before him members of the Pentagon Review Board, to find out who had been making such decisions and why they made them.
This would for some reason prove to be the most bitterly contested aspect of the whole Fort Monmouth battle, eventually provoking a constitutional showdown of epic nature between McCarthy and executive branch officials. The administration was determined that the Pentagon reviewers not appear before the McCarthy panel, and McCarthy was equally determined that they should. The conflict over this seemingly peripheral issue would become the most decisive single episode in the Red-hunting career of Joe McCarthy, and in many respects the most puzzling chapter of the entire McCarthy story.
Postscript
“Fort Monmouth” was the omnibus term for McCarthy’s Army investigations, and the Monmouth complex the main focus, but the search for suspects funneling data to Moscow would lead to other venues also.
Among the more celebrated of these other cases was Prof. Wendell Furry, who taught physics at Harvard and MIT, had done extensive work on radar for the U.S. government, and knew many other scientists who did so. He was also, admittedly, a former member of the Communist Party and had scientific contacts who were, or had been, party members.
Called before the McCarthy panel, Professor Furry refused to name these CP-connected colleagues, though citing no constitutional basis for such refusal, would be cited for contempt and thereafter treated as an heroic figure for standing fast against McCarthy. As typically portrayed—by Furry himself and by numerous writers—McCarthy in this episode was trying to punish dissident intellectuals for their political opinions, and Furry the defender of academic freedom had refused to be complicit in the witch hunt.
Omitted from this didactic treatment is that certain of the past or present CP members McCarthy wanted Furry to name had worked on radar-connected and similar projects involving the nation’s defenses. It was this aspect of the case, not the political opinions of the academics, that concerned McCarthy. It was in his view quite possible that one or more of these onetime CP members might still be such, and—Professor Furry’s assurances notwithstanding—might be providing secret radar or other military data to Moscow. Not quite, therefore, a simple morality play about academic freedom.21
CHAPTER 39
A Tale of Two Generals
THERE is more to be s
aid about the battle of Fort Monmouth, as it would prove to be a pivotal chapter not only in the saga of Joe McCarthy but in the political history of the nation. For the moment, a last installment must suffice.
The central figure in this phase of the story was the Army officer who knew more about the Monmouth probe than did any other, and was most directly affected by it: the commanding general of the post, Maj. Gen. Kirke B. Lawton, who testified before McCarthy at an executive session in mid-October 1953. In so doing, he would give an inside view of events at Monmouth, render judgment on the McCarthy inquest, then pay a price for his disclosures.
A thirty-seven-year veteran of the Army and former deputy director of the Signal Corps, Lawton had taken over at Monmouth in 1951. Shortly after his arrival, he became concerned about security problems at the post and set out to fix them. Unfortunately, as discussed, he hadn’t been too successful in the effort. His testimony on this point went beyond the laconic answers of Andy Reid, though less discursive than the reports of Captain Sheehan. As post commander, however, he spoke with more authority than either of those officials.
Like Reid and Sheehan, Lawton would make it tolerably clear that efforts to get a tougher security stance at Monmouth had foundered on the rocks of resistance and/or indifference at higher levels. From the standpoint of his bosses, these comments would be considered less than helpful. Lawton, however, made things worse by adding some further incautious comment in praise of Joe McCarthy. The colloquy on this went as follows:
McCARTHY: Would you say that since you have taken over, and especially in the last six months, you have been working to get rid of the accumulation of security risks in the Signal Corps and that you have suspended a sizable number?…
LAWTON: That is a question I will answer “yes,” but don’t go back six months….Effective results have been in the offing the last 2 weeks. I If youhave been working for the past 21 months trying to accomplish what has been accomplished in the last two weeks.
McCARTHY:…So that you would say that in the past several weeks you have been getting more effective results?
LAWTON: Absolutely, than we have gotten for the past 4 years.
McCARTHY: Could you tell us why it is only in the last 2 or 3 weeks that you have been getting effective results?
LAWTON: Yes, but I had better not. I know this so well, but I am working for Mr. Stevens [Secretary of the Army].1
Lawton’s views to this effect were given in executive session and wouldn’t be published until somewhat later. However, Army counsel John Adams was in the room when the general testified and would have wasted little time in conveying the essence of the matter to Army Secretary Robert Stevens: That Lawton praised McCarthy for achieving results at Monmouth the Army itself had failed to get, and along the way made a not-so-flattering reference to Stevens. None of this would endear the general to the secretary, still less to others in high places.
Though contrary to the official line on Monmouth, the reason for the positive impact of the McCarthy probe as described by Lawton wasn’t far to seek. By focusing publicity on security issues, McCarthy empowered officials at the Fort to move ahead with planned suspensions while staying the hand of whoever in the Army food chain had been reversing such decisions. In this respect, as in others, Monmouth developments tracked those at State; in both cases, the glare of the public spotlight had forced a tightening of standards.*277
The general’s judgment on the hearings would send another message also—rebutting the notion that McCarthy was conducting an unwarranted “attack against the Army.” Lawton was very much of “the Army,” as were Colonel Allen at SCIA, Captain Sheehan, Andrew Reid, and others in the ranks who thought Signal Corps security deplorably weak. As McCarthy was fond of saying, his beef wasn’t with “the Army” and its million-plus uniformed personnel, but rather with unknown civilians behind the scenes who were neutering security safeguards. Lawton was walking, talking proof that such decisions were far from being a consensus of “the Army.”
At this stage of the proceedings, in fact, the positions of several Army players were in flux, changing on almost a daily basis. Initially, Stevens had voiced his desire to work with the committee, and McCarthy repeatedly praised him for cooperation. However, as the hearings wore on and drew heavy media coverage, they were seen as an embarrassment to Stevens and people in the echelons above him. The original revelations of lax security reflected on the preceding Democratic administration. But evidence of continued laxness reflected on the new one, or seemed to, spurring hostility to McCarthy in certain quarters where there was plenty of animus to start with.
In this unfolding conflict, Bob Stevens was caught squarely in the middle. A successful business executive in private life (J.P. Stevens and Co.), he was a conservative Republican and strongly anti-Red in his convictions. There is no doubt he wanted to clean out any subversives who might have been at Monmouth, or that he had been ready to work in tandem with McCarthy. However, he was in an awkward spot as revelations about Monmouth and its labs continued, and obviously under top-down pressure to contain the damage.
Accordingly, in late 1953, Stevens began to counter the negative press on Monmouth, saying there was no present espionage there that the Army knew of.*278 In time this stance would morph into an even more emphatic denial—that there was no serious security problem at the post and that McCarthy was raising an uproar over nothing. There had been problems in World War II and a while thereafter, but these had all been properly handled. Like many such denials from the era, this version has entered into the mainstream of historical writing and is commonly stated as the truth about the Monmouth inquest.
As in other cases, however, these assurances don’t stack up too well—and didn’t then—when gauged by the empirical record. There were the grave security issues described by Sheehan, stemming not from World War II but from the period 1951–52. There was the terse avowal of Andy Reid that he had been struggling with the security problem for years with small success to speak of. And now there was confirmation of the point by Lawton, the world’s leading expert on the subject.
Ironically, Lawton hadn’t at first been forthcoming with McCarthy staffers, unsure of how much to tell them, but on the instructions of Stevens had given them access to Monmouth workers (a further indication that Stevens was then trying to work in concert with McCarthy). Thereafter Lawton had been not only cooperative but active in the hearings, attending sessions, taking notes, and liaising closely with the panel. Now, after his October statement, he would be perceived by his superiors as being more cooperative—and talkative—than needed.
In fact, the general was now in serious trouble, and knew it. About a week after this session, McCarthy praised Lawton for the security stand he was taking. To this Lawton replied, per the account of Cohn, “Yes, but that stand will cost me my promotion. And I will be lucky if I survive much longer here at Fort Monmouth.”2 This was prophetic, as Lawton would indeed be passed over for promotion, and before another year had run would be gone from his command. He thus apparently knew what he was in for when he made his statements, but thought the situation was such that he went ahead and made them.
Second only to the general himself as a pivotal figure in these events was Army Counsel Adams. A self-professed moderate GOPer, former Capitol Hill employee, and holdover from the Defense Department under Gen. George C. Marshall, Adams had cast about for a job with the new regime after the Republican sweep of 1952. Somehow he got referred to Stevens and hired as the department’s counsel. Despite the legal-sounding title, Adams would become in essence a full-time lobbyist with the McCarthy panel. Adams was by the same token the troubleshooter for Stevens with military figures such as Lawton and others called in the McCarthy hearings. The counsel thus became a busy go-between in discussions involving McCarthy, Cohn, Monmouth, Lawton, and a host of other topics.
The significance of Adams appears in retrospect the more so, as we have his own account of what he was privately doing and thinking when the h
earings were in progress. As he later told it, he thought there was no serious security trouble at Monmouth, that the people seen as suspects were simply victims, and that his task as Army Counsel was to do all he could to make sure nobody got suspended. His views were thus at one with those of the Pentagon reviewers who kept reversing such suspensions, hence the opposite of McCarthy’s.3
Also, Adams had other attitudes and contacts that put him on collision course with McCarthy, and also with Lawton. As a Pentagon official under Marshall, Adams had helped prep Mrs. Anna Rosenberg for confirmation hearings in 1950, when Marshall chose her as an assistant secretary of defense. Mrs. Rosenberg was at the time seen as a McCarthy “case,” though McCarthy himself had little to say about her. However, McCarthy staffers had been in touch with ex-Communist witness Ralph de Sola, who said he saw Mrs. Rosenberg at a meeting of the Communist John Reed Club in the 1930s. She angrily denied this, saying there was some other Anna Rosenberg who was the John Reed member; the Senate accepted this denial and confirmed her.
John Adams was thus a partisan of Mrs. Rosenberg, while officers complaining of lax security in the Signal Corps in 1951 and ’52 said she was a big part of the problem. Various memos in the McCarthy files pertaining to the SCIA dispute refer to suspect employees who were “Mrs. Rosenberg’s people” or sent by Mrs. Rosenberg’s office. These same documents show General Lawton, before his transfer to Monmouth, had sympathized with the complaining officials. Thus Adams was not only antagonistic toward McCarthy but de facto on the opposite side from Lawton before any of them ever got to Monmouth.4
Blacklisted By History Page 65