As suggested in preceding pages, the costs of all this in terms of empirical truth and historical understanding have been great. We need only note that standard treatments of McCarthy, and histories of the age that delve into these matters, repeat in pertinent detail the spurious version of McCarthy’s early cases invented by Tydings and his State Department allies: the Wheeling “205,” the ersatz radio affidavits, the innocuous Lee list, the four committees, all recycled in pat formulations with no hint as to the bogus nature of these factoids.
As has been shown, this Tydings version of the matter is false in virtually every aspect, and where not conclusively so is sharply contrary to the available record. Its falsehood is the more egregious considering the deceptions used in putting it together: the backstage collusion with the State Department, vanishing documents and transcripts, the recording Tydings professed to have but didn’t. Given all of which, we may well ask, why has the Tydings version been accepted, embellished, and purveyed to readers as a factual treatment of McCarthy’s early cases?
Similar questions might be raised about other chapters in the story: naming the names, the Gillette committee’s concealments and evasions, the multilayered cover-ups of Amerasia and felonious clearing of John Service, the Annie Lee Moss charade, and so on in grim procession. One has to search long and hard in conventional histories to find discussions of these matters that make the essential facts of record clear to the average reader.
That McCarthy made his share of errors, some contributing to his downfall, is true enough. A number of such have been noted in these pages: errors of detail in the presentation of his cases; the Marshall speech, a huge error of judgment and to some degree as well of fact; the unprovable “espionage” charge against Owen Lattimore; the emotional blowup with Zwicker; the use of harsh invective against various foes (though no harsher than the invective used against him). And errors, too, of omission: failure to tell the Senate he was mining data from the Lee list; not reining in Roy Cohn when he was badgering the Army about Schine.
These and other McCarthy miscues were important, not only because they were wrong or maladroit per se but because in the usual case they gave hostages to his opponents, who repeatedly used them to deflect attention from questions of lax security and loyalty risks on federal payrolls and make McCarthy himself the issue. He thus strengthened the hands of powerful foes who had more than enough political/media muscle to begin with.
It would be possible simply by stringing such episodes together to build an indictment of McCarthy, which of course the usual histories do. However, these treatments invariably tilt the verdict by omitting or glossing over the cases in which he was proved right (Amerasia, the IPR, the debacle of State Department security practice, a long list of suspects from Gustavo Duran to Aaron Coleman, and countless others). A true balance sheet would have to include all this and a good deal more of similar nature to be even remotely accurate in its conclusions.
And, of course, the ledger can’t be confined just to McCarthy, as if he were the only player in the drama. His record needs to be set over against that of his opponents, from Tydings and the State Department to Joe Welch and Stevens-Adams. On that kind of balance sheet, it’s plain that McCarthy was far more sinned against than sinning, and that on the central issues he was chiefly right and his opponents chiefly in error. This was most obviously true in the early going against Tydings and the Gillette committee, but would remain so in later battles also.
Perhaps the easiest way of judging the matter is to note that McCarthy, throughout, was battling for public disclosure of the relevant data, while the typical stance of his adversaries was to suppress or obscure the facts, on whatever pretext. Usually in such confrontations, it isn’t difficult to figure out that the people trying to hold back information are the ones who will be embarrassed by it, and thus the people who aren’t being truthful. Concealment of data by his foes was so consistent a feature of the McCarthy saga it’s hard to believe the writers who take the part of his opponents can’t see it.
And of course it wasn’t just concealment. It’s impossible to study the gross deceptions of the Tydings report, the bizarre testimony of Tydings about the supposed recording from Wheeling, or the clanking contradictions of Bob Stevens and John Adams about the genesis of their charges against McCarthy, without seeing the pattern of flagrant falsehood.*319 The point is significant in itself but becomes the more so when we consider the things that were being concealed or palpably misstated. Despite all of which, our histories and biographies across a span of decades have depicted Tydings, Stevens-Adams, et al., as the good guys, relatively speaking, and McCarthy as the villain.
In trying to understand all the slanted history, and why it continues, it’s well to stress again that more is involved here than the doings of McCarthy. The real issue has always been the larger question of what actually happened to America—and the world—at the midpoint of the twentieth century, what it meant, and who was responsible for it. The point of the standard treatments, as seen, isn’t merely that McCarthy was mistaken, but that the perspective he represented itself was evil and needs everywhere to be combated.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in discussion of the “China hands” in the State Department. There have been countless books and essays through the years not merely justifying but glorifying such as John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, John Paton Davies, and others at State for their alleged foresight on events in China. It is this view of the China issue and others like it that dictates the authors’ attitudes on McCarthy. He was wrong because the China hands were right, or so these volumes tell us. From this angle, once more, McCarthy was almost an incidental figure. The motivations to write the history this way would be the same even if Joe McCarthy had not existed.
On the other hand, McCarthy in his heyday became a very consequential figure indeed, precisely because he threatened this reading of America’s ’til-then feckless Asian policy and those complicit in it. His 1950 charges, and the explosion of public protest that followed, hit the Acheson State Department, its “China hands,” and their various outside allies with stunning force—thus upsetting the plans and interests of many influential people. Numerous histories and biographies written in the intervening decades have been attempts to repair this damage, to win on the battlefield of history the war for public opinion that was lost so badly in the early 1950s.
And that, of course, is the other side of the story in deciding whether McCarthy was defeated or was in some sense the victor. It’s true that, ultimately, they got him; but it’s equally true that, before this happened, he got them—or at least a sizable number of them. In case after significant case—Service, Vincent, Lattimore, Jessup, Brunauer, O. Edmund Clubb, and scores of others—McCarthy’s targets were driven from the field, and with them the Amerasia/IPR agenda for more Far East capitulations. It’s doubtful that any other American figure, outside the confines of the White House, had more impact on the course of Cold War history. Whether that impact was for good or ill, of course, depends on one’s perspective.
There were some other consequences also, in what might be viewed as collateral McCarthy damage. The Communist agent Mary Jane Keeney would finally lose her job at the United Nations, while the Soviet henchman Sol Adler decided in May 1950, at the fever pitch of the McCarthy furor, that the time had come to quit the Treasury and leave the country. Lauchlin Currie, though no longer holding a federal job, had been hanging around since 1945. He, too, departed in 1950. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that these two Soviet agents decided to skip precisely at this juncture; and perhaps it wasn’t.
Still other direct and indirect examples of McCarthy’s impact might be cited—most notably the firming up of security measures by the Truman administration in late 1951, switching from the unworkable “reasonable grounds” criterion to “reasonable doubt” (as recommended by Hiram Bingham), providing some realistic prospect of ousting egregious risks who lingered on the federal payroll. Such was the tren
d toward tougher McCarthy-driven security measures that developed in the early 1950s—aka the “reign of terror.”
There are more instances of the McCarthy effect, but a couple relating to the Ike age and McCarthy’s tenure as committee chairman are offered here by way of wrap-up. It’s a remarkable but generally neglected fact that every major McCarthy investigation in the period 1953–54 resulted in some significant change in governmental practice: the State Department files, the business about Baker West, books in overseas reading centers, the loyalty drill at GPO, the Pentagon security daze suggested by Peress and Moss, and so on. In every instance, the officials in charge admitted there had been enormous foul-ups, and moved to take corrective action.
And there were also, as in the Truman era, some indirect consequences of McCarthy’s hearings. As the executive sessions and backup committee records show, McCarthy beginning in mid-1953 was on the trail of Robert Oppenheimer, a fact well known to Ike and his lieutenants. There isn’t much doubt this helped force the hand of the administration, impelling it to move on Oppenheimer before McCarthy did so. Thus Oppenheimer, too, could be added to the list of those who were in some fashion “victims” of McCarthy.
As to the why of the fierce opposition to McCarthy and reasons for the censure vote, there were as noted different motives that came together to produce that outcome. The situation is clearest with respect to the Senate’s liberal Democrats and even with some of their conservative brethren. McCarthy was a thorn in the side of the Democratic party, as the issues of infiltration and security laxness all had their genesis under Roosevelt and Truman. The clamor McCarthy raised was extremely harmful to their party, which helps explain why under Truman every possible measure was taken to thwart McCarthy and obscure the truth about his cases.
Less understandable was the commitment of a Republican White House to cooperation in the censure—cooperation decisive to its success. Though there were obvious tensions all along, McCarthy until late in the day made it a point to say the problems he was addressing weren’t the doing of the Ike administration. This became harder to maintain when it came to open warfare in the Army hearings, but even here, from the J. B. Matthews blowup forward, the moves that escalated the battle into fratricidal mayhem came more from the administration side than from McCarthy.
Add the fact that the Army hearings and the censure battle were disastrous for the Republican Party, heading into a tough election year that cost it control of Congress. Given all those factors, and even discounting for the detestation of McCarthy by many Ike advisers, the White House drive to annihilate him is something of a puzzle. One answer appears to be that the President and some of those around him thought McCarthy was trying to take over the party and planned to challenge Ike himself in the 1956 election.
These apprehensions weren’t too realistic, and there is no evidence McCarthy seriously had such ambitions (beyond the why-not-me? syndrome familiar among politicians); he certainly had made no concrete plans to this effect that anyone was ever aware of. However, the Gallup poll in January of 1954 showed—rather incredibly, considering everything that had been said about him for four years running—that 50 percent of the American electorate had a favorable opinion of McCarthy, versus only 35 percent unfavorable. The Army hearings and censure battle would change those numbers in drastic fashion.
That McCarthy was a flawed champion of the cause he served is not in doubt (and who among us isn’t?). It would have been better had he been less impulsive, more nuanced, more subtle in his judgments. On the other hand, somebody more nuanced and refined wouldn’t have dreamed of grappling with the forces deployed against him. Those forces were powerful, smart, and tough, and they played for keeps. Taking them on was the task, not for a Supreme Court justice, but for a warrior. McCarthy, to his dying breath, was that.
Measured by the total record of his cases and political battles, McCarthy, whatever his faults, was a good man and true—better and truer by far than the tag teams of cover-up artists and backstage plotters who connived unceasingly to destroy him. The truth he served, moreover, was of the greatest import—the exposure of people who meant to do us grievous harm, and of long-standing indifference toward this menace by many at high official levels. In so doing, he summoned the nation to a firm-willed resistance to the Communist challenge, both abroad and on the home front. At the peak of his influence, the storm of protest he ignited shook a negligent ruling class to its foundations and scattered a host of furtive agents its lassitude had sheltered.
In the end he perished, politically and otherwise, in the rubble he pulled down around him. Yet when the final chapter in the conflict with Moscow was written, amid yet another pile of rubble, he was not without his triumph.
Notes
A Note on Citations
In the nature of the case, the names of certain individuals recur often in the titles of document collections, reports, and hearings cited in these notes. This is most obviously true of Joe McCarthy, the main character in the story. McCarthy maintained files, made speeches, conducted hearings, testified in other hearings and left certain materials now in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Also, he was himself the subject of various inquiries by the FBI, resulting in yet another file in which his name is featured.
A similar though slightly different situation obtains with McCarthy’s first formidable antagonist in the Senate, Millard Tydings of Maryland. The Tydings name appears in the hearings he conducted on McCarthy’s initial charges, the appendix to those hearings, and the report then issued by the investigating subcommittee. In addition, there are citations from the archive of the Tydings subcommittee, and from the file of Tydings’s personal papers at the University of Maryland.
Still another source of multiple citations is the voluminous archive of the FBI, which conducted investigations on a host of subjects covered in this essay. Utilization of these records is further complicated by the highly technical “serial” numbering system with which the Bureau organized its reports and summaries—a system no doubt useful to the FBI but difficult for the layman to fathom. Also, while some of these files are paginated and indexed, a great many of them are not, making it hard to follow up citations.
In dealing with such issues, I have used certain procedures I hope will be helpful to the reader, sort out some complexities, and give a fairly clear idea of where the information came from.
As elsewhere suggested, there are three main tranches of McCarthy papers referred to in these pages: (1) A collection of McCarthy documents, case files, backup data, and other materials, pertaining mainly to his early cases; (2) some backup records of the McCarthy Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, dating from 1953 and early 1954, held in the National Archives; and (3) a sizable group of later files, dealing with Fort Monmouth and potential investigations of other topics, extending both in subject matter and duration beyond the records in the archives. Rather than reciting all this each time one of these sources is mentioned, I have labeled these groups as McCarthy papers I, II, and III.
Otherwise, where McCarthy is referred to in the notes, the citations are from fairly standard public records—a collection of his speeches from the Government Printing Office, remarks in the Congressional Record or in public statements as reported by the press, hearings in which he testified or otherwise took part, and the hearings of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations when he was its chairman.
In the case of Senator Tydings, the designations are as numerous but less complex. The citations used here, after the introduction of some formal titles, are: Tydings hearings, Tydings appendix, Tydings report, Tydings subcommittee archive, and Tydings papers.
As to the records of the FBI, rather than trying to follow the Bureau’s system of “serials,” the notes generally give the main title of the file—e.g., FBI Silvermaster (Elizabeth Bentley) file, FBI Oppenheimer file, FBI Lattimore file, FBI Amerasia file, FBI McCarthy file, and so on. Throughout, the FBI volume number within
the file is given (frequently called “section”), and where pagination is available the page number is likewise provided.
Prologue: The Search for Joe McCarthy
1. “Survey of Departmental Personnel Security Investigations,” S. Klaus, August 3, 1946. For further comment on the Klaus report see Chapter 12, note 3.
2. Hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee (hereafter cited as McCarthy hearings), February 23,1954.
3. “McCarthy Charges Reds Hold U.S. Jobs,” Wheeling Intelligencer, February 10,1950. Concerning which, see Chapter 14.
4. FBI Silvermaster file, Volume 71.
5. For discussion of this purported quote, see Thomas Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (Stein and Day, 1982), pp. 93–94 and accompanying note; and David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy so Immense (Free Press, 1983), p. 47 (especially footnote).
6. New York Times, May 24, 2000.
7. “Subversive Influence in the Educational Process,” hearings of the Internal Security subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (hereafter cited as Senate Internal Security subcommittee), February 10, 1953, pp. 414–33; and February 24, 1953, p. 463.
8. Executive sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, 1953–54. (Hereafter cited as McCarthy executive hearings.) Five vols. Made public January 2003.
Chapter 1: An Enemy of the People
1. While by no means exhaustive, the list of books referred to includes the Reeves and Oshinsky volumes above cited; Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear (University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); Richard Fried, Men Against McCarthy (Columbia University Press, 1976); Jack Anderson and Ronald May, McCarthy: The Man, the Senator, the ‘Ism’ (Beacon Press, 1952); Lately Thomas, When Even Angels Wept (Morrow, 1973); and Richard Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt Brace, 1959). Briefer versions of the standard treatment are legion, usually provided as part of a more extensive survey of Cold War issues. Fairly representative are David Caute, The Great Fear (Simon & Schuster, 1978); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes (Little, Brown, 1998); Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor (Free Press, 1995); Fried, Nightmare in Red (Oxford University Press, 1990); Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker (Ballantine Books, 1979); and Fred J. Cook, The Nightmare Decade (Random House, 1971). A recent, more sympathetic treatment is Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy (Free Press, 2000).
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