The alternatives here were of course correctly stated. However, Symington curiously failed to note that he had already taken it on himself to clear Mrs. Moss, in a televised public hearing, based strictly on her own denials. That episode seems to have been forgotten, along with his chivalrous promise to get her a job if she were ousted from the Army.*294
There was the further question of Mrs. Moss’s duties with the Signal Corps, and whether she would have been capable in this job of doing any damage. In the March hearing, Symington, McClellan, et al., treated her with utmost condescension, implying she was too ignorant to do any harm with the messages she was handling. (After Mrs. Moss had stumbled reading a notice sent to her by the Army, McClellan paternally asked, “Did you read that the very best you could?”)13 However, the official description of the Signal Corps post held by Mrs. Moss suggests this was by no means the job for an ignoramus. This reads in part:
Examine messages received in tape form in code and clear text from Receiving Banks, to determine coherence thereof, whether numbers are in correct sequence, correctness of time and date group, precedence and whether complete…. Messages received in code must be more carefully scrutinized inasmuch as it is more difficult to detect omissions or errors in coded letter or number groups….Process high precedence messages immediately by hand-carrying to overseas desk for quick routing…[Duties include] recognition, recording and disposition of encrypted messages destined for or received from the Crypto Center….As workload requires, ascertain and record final disposition of messages addressed to this station and originating overseas or by State Department, Army Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, General Staff, etc…. If necessary perform research through the various files of Manual Teletype Unit to locate disposition actions, including commercial circuit files, misrouted files, staff Communication Branch files, etc.14
And so forth at some length. Looking at these requirements, it’s hard to believe anyone as unsophisticated as Mrs. Moss seemed to be could have carried out the job in question. When we add the much-neglected fact that she was a licensed real estate agent in good standing in the District of Columbia, it would appear she wasn’t quite the simpleton suggested by Symington-McClellan’s patronizing questions. In which event, she would have been capable with her security clearance, working with clear text as well as coded data, of learning a lot more from the material she handled than her condescending champions suggested.
As instructive as the substance of the Moss case has been scholarly and journalistic treatment of it. Even after the dispositive ruling of the SACB and the matter of the R St. address, writers on the topic couldn’t bring themselves to admit that McCarthy was right all along and that the mistaken-identity plea was bogus. In fact, the statements above quoted about the Moss affair from historians of the era were all written well after the SACB ruling was handed down in 1958. In most such cases, it appears, the writers didn’t do their homework and just went with the legend, which is bad enough. But in other, still more troubling cases, it’s evident the McCarthy critics do know about the findings of the SACB, but for motives we can only guess at have chosen to obscure them.
A prime example, earlier cited, is the handling of the case by associate Senate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited the executive hearings of the McCarthy panel released in 2003. The official status of this collection gives its discussion of the Moss affair, and others, a cachet exceeding that of any academic study and makes its errors less forgivable than if committed in some purely private writing. As Ritchie’s version bears the imprimatur of the Senate, his comments will not unnaturally be thought by researchers to be established facts of record.
As already noted, Ritchie is remarkably free with dicta on the hearings, and nowhere more so than in his exegesis of the Moss case. In a fairly lengthy essay on the subject, he throws in a twenty-four-word reference to the findings of the SACB, but so phrased as to blur their meaning. He says the board confirmed Markward’s identification of Moss, but then adds the cryptic comment that “the board conducted no further investigation of Moss” and had said “Markward’s testimony should be assayed with caution.” These asides can only suggest to readers that there is some lingering doubt about the matter—the more so as Ritchie follows up with an extended eulogy to Moss offered by a liberal writer, attesting to her blameless conduct.15
These Ritchie comments, however, are demonstrable obfuscations. For one thing, the point of the SACB inquiry, as the board itself observed, wasn’t to investigate Moss but to gauge the credibility of Markward. Moss was not before the SACB, and as the board stressed in several places there was neither intent nor reason to pursue her case beyond acquisition of Communist Party records to check the Markward statements. Thus Ritchie’s gratuitous comment about “no further investigation of Moss” is a red herring, suggesting some SACB action on Moss had been projected but never taken.16
Likewise, the board’s comment about viewing Markward’s evidence “with caution” pertained to other matters entirely, and specifically didn’t pertain to Moss. In context, “assayed with caution” concerned the issue of payment from the FBI and the way Markward construed this. Reviewing the Markward testimony on Moss, the SACB repeatedly said the undercover agent was proved accurate in her statements on that aspect. As the board put it in yet another ruling (January 15, 1959), again citing the CP records, “we conclude that…the Communist Party’s charge that Markward gave perjurious testimony is not substantiated. Consequently Mrs. Markward’s credibility is in no way impaired by the Annie Lee Moss matter….”17 (Emphasis added.)
So despite the verbal fuzzballs of Donald Ritchie, the SACB unequivocally said Markward was vindicated in the Moss affair, and never made any findings that weakened this conclusion. In fact, reviewing half a dozen SACB references to the subject, it’s evident the Moss case was the thing that most clearly bolstered Markward’s credibility with the board.18 All of which is the exact reverse of the impression conveyed to the American public by the associate historian of the Senate.
A second recent treatment of the Moss affair that deserves brief notice isn’t a scholarly work, but undoubtedly has done more to spread disinformation about the case than a dozen history books together. This is the George Clooney film Good Night and Good Luck, released in 2005, based on the 1954 confrontation between McCarthy and Edward R. Murrow (the title of the film is taken from Murrow’s habitual sign-off). This Clooney opus portrays McCarthy as a fearsome dragon and Murrow as the brave knight-errant who dared to slay him. In a mix of modern production methods and video clips taken from the archives, the movie affects to be a study in cinema verité, supposedly revealing the evil of McCarthy simply by showing him in action. The case of Annie Lee Moss is featured, as it was by Murrow himself back in the 1950s.
It’s of interest that neither in the Clooney film nor in the original Murrow broadcast is there any evidence cited to indicate Moss was an innocent victim—the message being conveyed instead by video clips of Moss and of McClellan browbeating Cohn for allegedly treating her unfairly. In the case of the Murrow broadcast, when not all the relevant data were known, this was to some extent excusable (though had Murrow and Co. been the crack journalists they professed to be, they could have dug out the facts about Hattie Griffin and the like from the hearing transcripts). In the case of the Clooney film, there is no excuse whatever, as the truth about the case is fully available to anyone who bothers to review the voluminous SACB reports and archives of the Bureau.
Amazingly, in a press interview about all this, Clooney made it clear he had been informed that Mrs. Moss was a Communist and that he didn’t deny it. Instead, he said, the real question stressed by Murrow and his colleagues, and therefore in the Clooney film, was that “they simply demand that she has a right to face her accuser.”19 We are thus informed, after fifty years of being told Mrs. Moss was not a Communist but a mistaken-identity victim, that wasn’t the point at all! It was, instead, her right to face her accuser.
If Cl
ooney was indeed aware of the copious evidence on the case, as he should have been in presuming to inform the world about it, he certainly disguised this knowledge in his movie. In the interests of historical truth, the data set forth above should at least have been alluded to, making it clear Mrs. Moss was in fact what Markward (and McCarthy) said, and not the victim of a mistaken-identity foul-up. But, of course, if Clooney had brought out these facts of record, he would have had no movie. Such information would have undercut the thesis of the film about the bullying and reckless lying of McCarthy.
As for “facing her accuser,” Mrs. Moss was not denied such right by McCarthy. In keeping with its standard practice, the subcommittee notified Moss and her attorney that there would be testimony about her and summoned her to appear at that time to answer Markward’s statements. Mrs. Moss herself, via a letter from her attorney received the day of the hearing, declined to do this, saying she was too ill to testify. She was then asked to appear the following day and came to the hearing room, but her attorney again said she wasn’t in condition to take the stand. McCarthy, though skeptical of this, said if she were really too ill to testify he didn’t want her to do so, but would reschedule her response to Markward. Mrs. Moss then appeared on March 11, the delay occasioned by her own requests, and not the doing of McCarthy.*295
Finally, on the substance of the case, there are a couple of minor footnotes to be added. One is that, contra all the statements above quoted, there weren’t three Annie Lee Mosses in the Washington phone book, at least not when the author, as a cub reporter, checked out the matter back in the 1950s. The occasion for this bit of niche reporting was a comment in December 1958 by William Shannon of the New York Post, who claimed there was no evidence the Mrs. Moss in the McCarthy hearings and the one in the Communist records were the same person, citing the inevitable “three Annie Lee Mosses” in the phone book. My response to Shannon read in part as follows:
…there are not three different Annie Lee Mosses listed in the Washington phone directory, as you allege. There is one “Anna Lee Moss,” one “Annie Moss,” and one “Annie L. Moss.” I have just this moment placed calls to all three of them. In the first-cited instance (“Anna Lee Moss”), I talked to the lady’s husband, who said that his wife had never listed herself as “Annie Lee Moss,” and had never been called by that name; in the second instance, I talked to the daughter of “Annie Moss,” who said that her mother had never used the middle name “Lee,” but called herself simply “Annie Moss.” This leaves only one “Annie Lee Moss,” who is listed in the Washington phone book as “Annie L. Moss,” and she is the Mrs. Moss who was involved in the McCarthy hearings. (An interesting footnote is that when I talked to this Mrs. Moss, she would answer no questions whatever, other than to affirm that she was the woman who had testified; she insisted that I call the Department of the Army if I wanted any other information concerning her.) Thus your statement on this point is in error.20
This missive to Shannon, a prominent writer for the then-liberal Post, also noted the information on the 72 R St. house, and the unlikelihood “that there should be two persons of that name living at the same address.” These comments never received an answer, nor to my knowledge was the false assertion about no evidence linking the Army Moss with the Markward data ever corrected by the Post. Writing Shannon was roughly equivalent to dropping a bottle in the ocean. That experience with media treatment of the case would be uncannily replicated, almost half a century later, in further efforts to set the record straight with journalists holding forth about Moss-as-victim.
One such episode involved Ken Ringle of the Washington Post, who in 2003 briefly capsuled the ersatz version of the case in a write-up of the McCarthy executive hearings and the views thereon of historian Ritchie.21 Reporter Ringle had zero interest in hearing any details about the matter or citations from official records, saying the conventional version was plenty good for him and that he didn’t need to know any more about it. A similar episode concerned a misleading discussion of the case by Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal.22 A letter to the editor correcting this mangled treatment and setting forth some facts about the matter received no acknowledgment, was never printed, and so far as I know resulted in no correction—another message lost at sea in yet another drifting bottle. A lot can change in fifty years, but purblind denial on the subject of Annie Lee Moss—and Joe McCarthy—is something you can always count on.
Postscript
As to why the Democrats on the McCarthy panel went through their charade with Moss after Scoop Jackson had been so thoroughly briefed by the FBI, we can only speculate. However, pending further revelations, a possible clue may be found in the date of the hearing—March 11, 1954. This was the same day an Army chronology regarding the situation at Fort Monmouth and asserted misdeeds of Cohn-McCarthy appeared in the press, intimating among other things that McCarthy’s allegations of lax security in the Army Signal Corps were phony.
In this context, the Moss case—wherein Pentagon security screeners at high levels had overridden conclusive data from the FBI—would have been a home run for McCarthy, especially coming on the heels of the all-too-similar Peress fiasco. At a minimum, if the facts about the Moss affair had been clearly understood, the case would have impeded the full-court effort that now commenced portraying McCarthy’s quarrel with Pentagon security practice as mudslinging without factual basis. Blanketing Moss with a smog of obfuscation could—and did—avert this danger.
That subcommittee Democrats and various of their colleagues at this time were in backstage contact with the Ike administration to drum up resistance to McCarthy is apparent from Bureau and other records—for instance, a rather improbable liaison between Assistant Attorney General William Rogers and ur-liberal Democrat J. William Fulbright. Further such contacts would be revealed in the Army-McCarthy hearings soon to follow and would become even more pronounced in the climactic struggle over censure. It thus does not strain credulity that the Democrats on the subcommittee, in successfully blurring over the facts concerning Moss, were helping out their allies-of-convenience in opposition to McCarthy. Why these same obfuscations have been repeated for fifty years by historians of the matter is a somewhat more difficult question.
CHAPTER 41
At War with the Army
PRECEDING chapters have noted certain parallels between the experience of the Dies committee and the later doings of McCarthy—like effects and causes, similar issues, and sometimes the identical people. There remains one further such connection to be considered, perhaps the most suggestive of them all.
The jihad against the Dies committee was unceasing, but reached an apogee of sorts in 1944. This was at the height of the wartime honeymoon with Moscow and correlative efforts to abolish antisubversive records held in official archives. On both counts the House Committee on Un-American Activities was an obvious and inviting target. Its obdurate anti-Communism would of course have been distasteful to our Soviet allies and their minions. As for antisubversive files, the committee was among the worst offenders, not only holding extensive records of this type but frequently sharing them with others in Congress and executive agencies checking out security matters.
Given those factors and the longtime New Deal aversion to the panel and all its works, it’s not perhaps surprising that an attempt was made in 1944 to close its doors and disperse its records.*296 In sync with this projected crack-down, a campaign was launched to draft the committee’s top professional staffer, chief investigator Robert Stripling, into military service. Stripling was then thirty-one years old, married and a father, held a key congressional job relating to security matters, and was specifically exempted from the draft by the Legislative Deferment Committee of Congress.
Notwithstanding all of which, as Stripling would relate, he was advised by his draft board that “there’s been a lot of pressure on us to get you into the Army”—hence classified as 1-A and a candidate for conscription.1 Columnist Drew Pearson and some of his journ
alistic brethren then mounted a vigorous press campaign to have Stripling called to active duty. This in fact occurred, and the ex–chief investigator would spend the next year and a half as an Army yardbird. Occasionally, efforts were made by Army officials to assign him to intelligence duties more suited to his background, but up until the tag end of his service these attempts were unavailing.
Stripling would later comment that, in all this, somebody at high levels “never lost sight of me—though I was indistinguishable from millions of other privates.”2 But of course he was quite distinguishable from other privates, precisely because he had been the top investigator of the House Committee. Neither Drew Pearson nor people at high official levels would have paid any attention to Bob Stripling had he been a plumber, carpenter, or insurance agent—or a State Department type like, say, Robert Miller or Alger Hiss, both in their thirties at the outset of the war but never drafted.*297
The Stripling story would be repeated, mutatis mutandis, in 1953, with another staffer for yet another anti-Red committee, and with the ever-watchful Pearson once more hovering in the background. This staffer was G. David Schine, pal of Roy Cohn, part-time consultant to the PSI and soon to be the most famous private in the Army. He was also to be the proximate cause of yet another investigation of McCarthy, this one the most important in the series.
In terms of Hill prestige and clout, Schine was no Bob Stripling. Rather than being a top-line staffer, he was a somewhat marginal figure—an unpaid voluntary helper. However, he had done a fair amount of work on the VOA and USIS investigations and was involved in writing reports about those inquests. Also, as the executive hearings show, he assisted with the Monmouth probe, interviewing potential witnesses who would later come before the panel. Considering the committee’s workload and small staff of about a dozen investigators, these contributions were of some value.
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