To all this there was an Orwellian sequel that can’t possibly be omitted. On May 31, 1954, two weeks to the day after issuing his secrecy order gagging federal workers and choking off information to the Congress, Eisenhower spoke to a Columbia University gathering in New York, a symposium on the weighty topic “Man’s Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof.” On this occasion Ike asserted, to great applause, that “whenever man’s right to knowledge and the use thereof is restricted, man’s freedom in the same measure disappears.” It was, the media sages agreed, a clear, long-needed rebuff to Joe McCarthy.
CHAPTER 44
Sentence First, Verdict Later
THERE is no getting around the fact that, in McCarthy’s endless verbal battles, the invective was often scalding, including many sharp exchanges with other members of the Senate. It was for offenses of this type that he would eventually be censured by his colleagues, indicating that in their view the dignity of the upper chamber itself was the main victim of his conduct.
To gauge the ferocity of debate, we need only note that there were occasions on which members of the Senate were accused, in effect, of being agents of the Kremlin. Nor was it necessarily conceded that, in serving the nefarious ends of Moscow, the lawmaker thus assailed was mistakenly acting out of good intentions. Consider the following Senate broadside against one member of that body, accused of being a useful tool of Red subversion:
We have marveled at the way in which the Soviet Government has won its military success in Asia without risking its own resources or its own men…What we are now seeing is another example of economy of effort and expansion of success in the conquest of this country for Communism. The preliminary campaign [in activity then occurring within the Senate] is successfully under way…Were…the senator [being attacked] in the pay of the Communists, he could not have done a better job for them.1
This was a pretty stiff indictment to be made by one member against another on the floor of the upper chamber, closely skirting, if not exceeding, the bounds of acceptable senatorial comment. It might thus understandably have brought down the wrath of the Senate on Joe McCarthy—if he in fact had said it. But, as it happened, this wasn’t anything said by McCarthy but rather something said about him, on the road to his Golgotha. The person who made this accusation was Sen. Ralph Flanders (R-Vt.), laying the polemical groundwork for the motion of censure against McCarthy he would file a few days later.*309
Flanders in this and further attacks made other charges against McCarthy of equally savage nature. One such was a passage in this same speech that implied, in innuendo so heavy no one could miss it, that McCarthy, Cohn, and Schine were a trio of homosexuals and that this perhaps accounted for their strange behavior.†310 In other statements—though this was common practice among McCarthy critics—Flanders analogized the Wisconsin senator to Hitler. So Ralph Flanders was perhaps not the ideal person to bring charges against a colleague on grounds of rhetorical violence or uncivil conduct.
This is, by the way, the same Ralph Flanders depicted in many standard histories as a supremely decent human being, second perhaps only to Joe Welch as a secular saint in the blessed crusade against McCarthy.‡311 Based on the now-available record, however, it appears Flanders was neither saint nor demon, but an eccentric who, for whatever reasons, became the pliable front man for divergent interests bent on doing in McCarthy. His willingness to parrot charges devised by others was such that it may well be doubted whether any particular statement Flanders made was of his own devising or something simply handed to him on his way to the Senate cloakroom.
These comments are more than speculation. Some days after his blast against McCarthy, Flanders would follow up with a list of thirty-three specific charges that became the main bill of particulars in the censure battle. Some of these charges were extremely odd, as would be admitted even by McCarthy’s critics. Questioned by majority leader William Knowland and Senator Herman Welker of Idaho as to where this unusual list had come from, Flanders blandly acknowledged that the whole thing had been given to him by the National Committee for an Effective Congress. He had simply taken the NCEC material and read it out before the Senate.*312
One consequence of such insouciant trashing of a colleague with secondhand data was that, when challenged on specifics, Flanders was hard-pressed to explain them. One item on his roster, Charge #8, said McCarthy had unleashed his investigative staff to spy on his committee colleague, Henry Jackson. When McCarthy categorically denied this, Sen. Homer Capehart (R-Ind.) asked Flanders what proof he had for his assertion. To this Flanders replied that the charge had appeared in a newspaper story but that he didn’t know anything else about it.
Flanders would make the same response when asked about still other of his charges. He had dramatized his role by walking into the Army hearings, while McCarthy was on the stand, and handing McCarthy a note saying an attack would be forthcoming in the Senate. McCarthy interrupted his testimony and invited Flanders to make whatever allegations he cared to, under oath, then and there before the Mundt committee. Flanders not only didn’t do this but, when asked about the matter later, said he might appear in such investigative format, “but I would have to begin by making a statement that I have nothing to testify, and that I read it all in the newspapers.”2
The astonished reaction of Senator Capehart seems to have been apropos. Since when, Capehart asked, “does a senator of the United States, on the basis of reading something…in a newspaper, rise on the floor of the United States Senate and condemn a fellow senator?”3 The answer to that, as events would show, was fairly simple: since Joe McCarthy had become a target for censure—an undertaking in which the usual rules of evidence and rational discourse were conspicuously not adhered to. The performance of Ralph Flanders and his inability to support his charges when quizzed about them were fitting prologue to the censure hearings.
Of course, questions about Flanders’s newspaper reading were somewhat off the point, since he admitted he wasn’t really the author of the charges. Such questions should have been addressed instead to Maurice Rosenblatt, George Agree, the aides of William Benton, and other officials and supporters of the NCEC, as they were the real instigators of the accusations. And even here, not too many questions were needed, as an examination of the list would have indicated rather plainly where the charges came from. Anyone familiar with the Benton resolution, the activities of the Gillette committee, the battle of Fort Monmouth, or other disputes already noted would recognize most of these allegations at a glance.
Included in the rundown, for example, were the supposed mistaken-identity case of Annie Lee Moss, the blowup with General Zwicker, defiance of the Gillette inquiry, opposing the Bohlen nomination, possession of the Monmouth memo, resistance to the Ike secrecy order, and so forth. It was a kind of “greatest hits” collection, a potpourri of just about every kind of charge against McCarthy the NCEC could think of or that had been passed on to it by other critics of McCarthy. The whole thing had been hurriedly thrown together without much rhyme or reason by the Rosenblatt group and conveyed to Flanders, who then read it all verbatim to the Senate.4
While the charges were of disparate nature, there was one obvious common thread that tied them into a single package. If McCarthy did something with which the compilers disagreed—appointing J. B. Matthews, sending Cohn and Schine to Europe (both on the NCEC-Flanders list of charges)—then he should be censured for it. Censurable conduct could thus be anything and everything McCarthy said or did that his critics disapproved of, for whatever reason. Viewed from another angle, the hodgepodge nature of the list indicated the reverse-English method of proceeding: The notion that McCarthy should be censured was arrived at first, then divers items were pulled together, on whatever basis, to support the preconceived conclusion.*313
The counts just mentioned, moreover, were those of relatively serious nature. Some others were so far-fetched as to suggest they were added simply by way of ballast. There was, for instance, Flanders’s Charge
#26—that McCarthy had caused the Army hearings, that this “necessitated the interruption of the subcommittee’s work and its exclusive preoccupation” with that matter, and that for this hiatus McCarthy should be censured.5 Thus, for having been targeted by the Army charges, then having to sit through two months of hearings on them, McCarthy was deserving of official condemnation. By this logic, he might have been censured also for having become the target of Flanders—since this would produce still another break in the work of the McCarthy panel.†314
That a charge of this nature should have been submitted in all seriousness to the Senate, and on the basis revealed by Flanders, is suggestive of the political atmospherics then prevailing in the Capital City. And while most of the charges had more gravitas than this, a bland indifference to facts of record was notable throughout. Thus, while the full story on Annie Lee Moss had not yet developed, there was zero basis for such a charge, other than her own assertions, and ample reason to disbelieve it. Likewise, numerous data about the strange doings of the Gillette committee were available to the Senate, as were the facts about J. B. Matthews and other items in the Flanders lineup.
Notwithstanding all of this, it was decided that the Flanders charges—plus overlapping and reinforcing charges brought by Senators Fulbright and Wayne Morse of Oregon, making a grand total of forty-six—would be referred to a special committee of the Senate, to be given the most solemn consideration. Thus began the fifth and final investigation of Joe McCarthy—though, had it been needed, a sixth, or seventh, might have been laid on also. These anti-McCarthy inquests were conducted, indeed, like a relay race: As soon as one concluded, the next would instantly be started. Thus, the report of the Mundt committee on the Army-McCarthy battle would be filed on August 30,1954. The very next day, brand-new hearings were convened, with McCarthy once more in the dock, to hear the charges that would produce his censure.
From the standpoint of his foes, this relay technique had several useful features. Most obviously, as long as McCarthy was defending himself in some investigation or other, his own subcommittee was virtually out of business. Equally important, while he was thus on the defensive, the spotlight would be on his alleged misdeeds rather than on the topics of subversion, lax security, or alleged cover-ups of such problems. And there was yet another helpful angle from the perspective of his critics: McCarthy was required to run the gauntlet again and again, each time facing a fresh set of inquisitors, albeit on overlapping charges, in the manner of interrogations designed to break the will of an imprisoned suspect.
The politics of all this were of interest, as both the Army-McCarthy probe and the censure hearings were conducted by a Senate nominally under GOP control, though closely divided as to numbers. Even more to the point, both inquests occurred with a Republican administration in the White House, and with its approval (to say no more), which was the crucial factor. As long as McCarthy had faced off against a Democratic president, he could with a few exceptions count on at least the tacit backing of his party in the Senate. Now, with a Republican White House aligned against him, there were GOP solons more concerned to work with a powerful Republican chief executive than to stand by a battered colleague obviously marked out for extinction.
One such Republican was Utah senator Arthur Watkins, at the time considered a conservative of moderate hue (though he would subsequently make many statements that belied this), who would head the special Senate committee weighing the charges against McCarthy. A former judge, Watkins was generally viewed as bland and unobtrusive, known for his attention to western water issues. His fellow Republicans on the panel, Francis Case of South Dakota and Frank Carlson of Kansas, were of like background and temper. All were Eisenhower loyalists and were chosen for the committee by Vice President Nixon in consultation with majority leader Knowland. None was likely to do anything remotely contrary to the wishes of the White House.
The Democrats on the panel—Edwin Johnson of Colorado, John Stennis of Mississippi, and Sam Ervin of North Carolina—were cut from the same bolt of homespun cloth: moderate conservative types not noted for flamboyance. (Ervin was the liveliest of the group, and his reputation to this effect would develop only later.) As condemnation of McCarthy would become a party-line issue for Democrats, it was certain none of these would take up the cudgels to defend him. All in all, a beige-and-gray committee, exactly what was wanted to handle a methodical, unswerving process after the wild and woolly shoot-out between McCarthy and the Army.
Linked to the committee’s low-keyed personalities were its sotto voce methods. Though the hearings would be public, they weren’t on TV, and Watkins ran them in eye-glazing fashion, featuring endless excerpts from the records of the Gillette and Mundt committees, legal memos, letters, assorted statutes, court decisions, and recitations of other printed matter. (One wag remarked that the panel might or might not decide to censure McCarthy but could conceivably bore him to death.) Integral to this approach were ground rules aimed at restricting McCarthy’s role—stipulating that, when his attorney spoke in his behalf, McCarthy would be precluded from speaking also. All these measures were geared to reining in McCarthy—stifling his pugnacious debating tactics and penchant for appealing to the public.
McCarthy’s counsel in these hearings was Edward Bennett Williams, one of the most renowned trial lawyers in the country, who would handle many high-profile cases in a long and colorful career before the bar. His preparation for the McCarthy defense lived up to his billing. He and his associates Agnes Weill and Brent Bozell had done their homework. They knew the Senate precedents, knew the law, knew a good deal about the charges, knew in particular about the peculiar antics of the Gillette committee. Williams was ready and more than able to conduct a legal defense of McCarthy and knock down the charges on their merits.
The famed attorney, however, made one huge miscalculation—though in the end it probably didn’t matter. He was used to arguing cases in a courtroom where the process was open-ended, facts and law were salient, and outcomes decided on this basis. Such was the course he now gamely tried to follow, without much success to speak of. What he initially failed to realize, though he would grasp it fairly quickly, was that his legal tactics were nothing to the purpose in the assize run by Watkins. The hearings, while cast in legalistic form, were in fact a political process, the results of which would be, or already were, politically determined. Legalistic points could shape this in certain ways but couldn’t fundamentally change it.
Williams would discover this early on, at the first session of the hearings, after learning that Colorado’s Senator Johnson had been quoted in a Denver paper as saying all the Democratic leaders of the Senate “loathed” McCarthy. This raised some doubts as to Johnson’s objectivity (though he pointed out that he didn’t say he personally loathed McCarthy), as Johnson was now supposedly acting in a judicial role, impartially weighing McCarthy’s conduct. Chairman Watkins, however, airily dismissed the matter as being of no concern whatever. Edwin Johnson had been chosen to be on the committee, and that was that; whether he made the statement in question and what exactly he meant by it were completely immaterial. After all, said Watkins, with faultless logic, “we are not trying Senator Johnson…”6
When McCarthy tried to argue against this, he was gaveled into silence; Williams had already spoken on the matter, so McCarthy couldn’t. When McCarthy again protested, Watkins again banged the gavel, stopping McCarthy in midsentence. “We are not,” said Watkins, “going to be interrupted by these diversions and sidelines. We are going straight down the line.”7 And so, in fact, they were. The episode was prophetic of what would happen in later sessions, indicating rather clearly where the line being followed would take the hearings.
Watkins gave a like response, outside the hearing room, to the oft-asked question as to why McCarthy was subject to charges for saying unflattering things about his colleagues, though they weren’t subject to similar charges for saying unflattering things about McCarthy—the Flanders diatribe providing t
he premier, but no means the lone, example. The Watkins reply to this was once more revealing—“the Select Committee could function only within the limits of its assignment, that is to investigate McCarthy,” period.8 It wasn’t investigating senators who said insulting things about McCarthy, but only what McCarthy said of others. The question thus contained its own irrefutable answer: We aren’t doing what you suggest because that isn’t what we’re doing.
Similar logic would be applied to what would become the main issue of the hearings, McCarthy’s supposedly contumacious behavior toward the Gillette committee. The centrality of this charge had been apparent from the beginning, and it was a charge attorney Williams was well prepared to answer. His main points were that the Gillette committee had been operating ultra vires, was prejudiced against McCarthy, and had transgressed the rules of right behavior in its relentless efforts to pursue him. McCarthy could hardly be blamed, said Williams, for failing to cooperate with a group so plainly out to get him and using illicit means to do it.
The Williams presentation on this was strong, and would have been still stronger had he known all the facts about it. Mostly he hammered the point that the Gillette committee had violated its mandate under the Benton resolution—to investigate alleged wrongdoing by McCarthy since his election to the Senate. As Williams knew, and McCarthy knew even better, the committee had blithely altered this proviso to rummage through every aspect of McCarthy’s finances, and those of his friends and family, extending back for more than a decade before he ever ascended to the Senate. (And this, as seen, was prelude to still other efforts to stack the deck, including suppression of the Wheeling memo and refusal to print his testimony on Benton.)
However, Williams could have had ten times the documentation he did about the failings of the Gillette committee and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. The responses Chairman Watkins had given on Edwin Johnson and rhetorical onslaughts against McCarthy presaged his answer on this one. What the Gillette committee might or might not have done to McCarthy in connection with its original mandate, said Watkins, “so far as I can see, is wholly immaterial. What is material is his conduct with respect to that committee and its activities.”9 Case closed, let’s hear no more about it, and on to the next question.
Blacklisted By History Page 74