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†94 On the second visit, again indicating the degree to which Congress had developed certain information, Busbey asked Klaus about his secret memo of the preceding summer. Klaus replied that it was, indeed, secret and couldn’t be released except by Peurifoy’s authorization (which in this case was not forthcoming).
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*95 Hoover had in fact opposed that effort to seek indictments, reasoning (correctly) on the analogy of the Amerasia case that this would predictably result in failure. Toward the end of this phase of the grand jury process, the government would switch signals and instead obtain indictments of a dozen Communist Party leaders, none of whom was a Bentley governmental suspect.
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*96 The names of these employees would eventually be published by the Washington Times Herald, suggesting some significant linkages to security inquests that have been mentioned. The ten discharged employees were James Ansara, Harold Bellingham, Woodrow Borah, Hannah Goldman, Irving Goldman, Alexander Lesser, Florence Levy, Bernard Nortman, Leonard Rennie, and Harold Weisberg. (September 21, 1947) Most of these were subjects of or spin-offs from the Gregory investigation.
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*97 The legal eagles at the reference service had prepared a memo on “the Right of Congress to Require Information from the Executive Department,” saying it was essential to the legislative/oversight process that Congress have access to data on the performance of executive agents.
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*98 Byrnes said there had been 284 State Department employees on whom security screeners made adverse findings, and that 79 of these had been removed from the department as of July 1946. Hence, 205 such employees were then still on the rolls at State.
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*99 On this point the questioning went as follows: Question:“You had at the time of the meeting made those notes when he was speaking. Is that correct? Then you later pulled the piece of paper out of your purse and said, ‘I want to remember this?’…”Answer:“That is exactly how it happened.”Question:“Do you remember the note saying…that there were 205 of some larger group of suspects? And did those notes say ‘57 cc’”? Answer:“Yes some 57 were found to be [card-carrying Communists].”Question:“So that is very vivid in your memory. That is one reason you remember it so well?”Answer:“That is right.”
*99Nor, be it noted, did Mrs. Ingersoll wait fifty years to make these assertions. In 1970, she was interviewed by a representative of PBS for a documentary being made about McCarthy. In this interview she gave the same rendition of what McCarthy said at Wheeling.
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*100 Some McCarthy critics argue that this editorial may have been written by Gieske on Saturday to help out McCarthy ex post facto when a flap developed about the numbers. This speculation is based on a misunderstanding of how newspapers work. An editorial appearing in the Saturday paper would have been written not on that day but on Friday—at which point there was as yet no particular flap about the numbers.
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*101 The same edition of the Denver Post that carried this story also had an AP account, datelined Salt Lake City, that recycled the “205” quote from Wheeling. Interestingly, various historians of the era (e.g., Oshinsky, Reeves) conflate this AP dispatch with the “Commie list” caption, making it appear that they occurred in the same story—thus indicating that McCarthy claimed a “list” of 200-plus in Denver. As with the omitted headline stressing “57,” this conflation is of a curious nature, since the local Denver story is quite explicit on McCarthy’s distinction between the 57 and the 205. (See inset, Chapter 15.)
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†102 On Saturday, the story in the Salt Lake Tribune began: “A charge that at least 57 card-carrying Communists are in the State Department was reiterated in Salt Lake City by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.)…‘If Secy of State Acheson would call me I could read him the list of 57 names,’ Sen. McCarthy said.” This story was headlined: “Visiting Solon Cites Reds’ Infiltration,” with a kicker that read: “Lists ‘at Least 57.’” A like story ran in the Salt Lake Telegram, which quoted McCarthy as saying: “If Secretary of State Dean Acheson would call me I could read him the list of at least 57 card-carrying Communists who are in his department…There may be more. We just have the names of 57.”
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*103 In anti-McCarthy treatments of all this, as with the Gieske editorial, some of the Friday statements are discussed as though they amounted to “changing his story” in response to a backlash from Wheeling. This ignores the facts (a) that there are no credible data that he ever did tell any other story; (b) that by Friday afternoon, when he got to Denver, there hadn’t been much backlash; and (c) that, even if there had been, McCarthy, cooped up in a plane all day, would have had scant occasion to know it.
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*104 A point of considerable relevance later, when McCarthy’s failure to cooperate with this committee became one of the two counts on which he would be censured by the Senate. (See Chapter 44.)
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*105 A single—and noble—exception to these comments is the Buckley-Bozell book about McCarthy, which has a quite accurate discussion of the memo, to which the authors were given access. It was this book that prompted Howe to write his note to Benton.
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*106 In this context, McCarthy made a statement he would later regret and which was often used against him: that if the day came when he said something on the floor he wouldn’t say elsewhere, he would resign from the Senate. This comment occurred, of course, against the backdrop of his refusal to name the names. Once he was required to do so, this high-sounding pledge was impossible to keep, not only because of possible harassment through libel suits, but because news media wouldn’t use the names unless they were privileged. McCarthy would conduct an interesting test of this later on when he offered the names of certain suspects to the media off the floor of Congress. No reporter would use them.
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*107 Budenz discussed Lattimore’s services to the Communist Party—as related by CP officials—in some detail, stressing that the professor’s principal job was to spread propaganda depicting the Chinese Communists as reformers.
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*108 Hickenlooper would later return to this line of thought in further examination of Budenz, asking if he had ever personally seen Joseph Stalin or V. M. Molotov. Budenz answered that he had not, but knew both of them were Communists.
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*109 These questions strongly suggested that information from the FBI’s surveillance had made its way to Congress, one of several clues that McCarthy-Morris-Hickenlooper knew more about the Amerasia case than they let on in public.
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†110 The locution used here by Browder, who was careful in his choice of words, seemed odd, speaking of an “organized connection.” Did this mean there was some other kind of connection on the part of Kenyon or Hanson to the Communist Party? Browder’s way of putting the matter cried out for clarification, but no effort of this nature was made by an inert committee.
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*111 These questions were especially pointed and involved such matters as who had promoted and protected Alger Hiss, Berle’s assertion about a pro-Soviet clique inside the State Department, soft treatment of Soviet spies Ovakimian and Gorin, the “FBI chart” mentioned in the Klaus report, and other items of like nature. Lodge also wanted to know who had been responsible for obtaining Lattimore and Schuman as speakers at the State Department, the relationship of Lattimore to the Far East desk, and why exactly the dismissal of the ten security suspects in June 1947 had been reversed by the department.
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*112 Based on the other evidence in the record, the most likely source of this memo was the State Department. See below.
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*113
Truman’s attitudes toward and statements on the Hiss case are considered in Chapter 24.
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†114 As reflected in the internal papers of the White House, the steps thus recommended would soon be taken. In succeeding weeks, Truman staffers scrambled to position the President as a vigorous, no-nonsense foe of Communism at home as well as overseas. A key player in this effort was presidential assistant Stephen Spingarn, a specialist in security matters, who plied White House speechwriters with data—for instance, the declining membership of the Communist Party—that allegedly showed Truman’s leadership in thwarting the subversive menace. Also, a compromise of sorts would be effected on the matter of the files—all this linked to a concerted blitz against McCarthy in the House and Senate. That Tydings caused all this to happen with his letter may be doubted, but his tactical notions obviously marched with the trend of White House thinking.
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*115 Both the Benton and Chavez attacks occurred as mentioned, but Benton, no master of detail as he sometimes admitted, erred as to the sequence. His speech that used this phrasing was delivered on May 9. By this time several well-orchestrated attacks against McCarthy had been made in both the House and Senate.
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*116 On close inspection, as the Gillette committee investigators would observe, Wood’s letter was considerably short of being conclusive. For one thing, it amounted to hearsay, as Desmond himself would have been the obvious person to say whatever it was he had to say about the matter. For another, even in Wood’s paraphrase, Desmond had simply said McCarthy used the figure 205 in “referring to” his cases. That wasn’t quite the same as claiming a “list” of 205—which was the issue to be settled.
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*117 Subsequently, Tydings would expand on this reminiscence in an exchange with attorney Edward Bennett Williams, serving as counsel to McCarthy. In this encounter, Tydings acknowledged not only that State Department investigators had obtained the radio affidavits but that he had asked the department to send its representatives to Wheeling for this purpose. (When Williams, with some incredulity, commented, “You used State Department investigators in an investigation of the State Department itself,” Tydings responded that the identity of the people obtaining the affidavits was “immaterial.”)
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*118 For example, Tydings staffer Robert Heald talked with Lee researcher Harris Huston, who provided some general comments about the nature of the inquiry. The committee also went through the formality of officially requesting a copy of the list, which it almost certainly already had in its possession, from the House of Representatives.
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*119 Others include the fact that the data imparted were intimately known to State but not to others, that key omissions from an otherwise comprehensive treatment were such as served the interests of the department, and that locutions were used which reflected an internal State Department—not congressional—viewpoint: for example, “The [congressional] investigators… had access to hundreds of files and their reasons for selecting these particular cases, and this particular number, are not known.” (Emphasis added.)
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†120 This instant turnaround of information, from execution of the affidavits to Kilgore’s letter to Humelsine’s response, suggests that the U.S. postal service, and the wheels of government in general, worked much more rapidly in 1950 than they do today. Or possibly it suggests something else.
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*121 The other Democratic senator from West Virginia.
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†122 Peurifoy made this comment on the extraneous question, apparently thrown in for ballast, of Owen Lattimore’s allegedly having a “desk in the State Department,” according to McCarthy. This McCarthy statement, said Peurifoy, contained “not a shred of truth.” Concerning which, see Chapter 29.
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*123 It may well be doubted that Tydings needed Harley Kilgore to obtain these affidavits, or anything else of similar nature, from State. But this exchange established a public record as to why Tydings had the State-originated affidavits in his possession and how exactly he came to get them—with no provable ex parte contact between the chairman and the people ostensibly under investigation.
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*124 On this score, Kilgore and Lucas deserve somewhat higher marks for acknowledging that the material they used derived from State. Of course, in reading a State Department press release, Lucas could not very well have disguised its place of origin.
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*125 A final executive session of the panel was held on July 7. The report of the subcommittee became available on July 17 and the printed hearing record a week later. Senators thus got the report before they could read the transcript.
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*126 Something less than half of that in the printed version. (See below.)
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†127 Later, when Sen. William Knowland (R-Calif.) asked to see the transcript, Lodge said: “I have the one copy, which I have obtained with some difficulty. I shall be glad to let the senator from California have it, but I hope he does not let it out of his sight because I understand that, if he does, he may never see it again.”
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‡128 The closest that anything would come to an explanation was a later notation in the Tydings record that, in this session, “members of the subcommittee and staff were canvassing certain procedural matters…” This suggested that the portions left out were technical in nature, though almost the entire discussion concerned the substantive inadequacy of the hearings.
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*129 In fact, the bulk of it was already drafted, as Tydings would admit when pinned down by Lodge.
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*130 Beyond this, Ferguson also said, was the problem of outright falsehood. Specifically, he blasted the repeated Tydings statement that “four committees” of the Republican 80th Congress had looked into security affairs at State and exonerated the department. Having served on two such committees in that Congress, Ferguson knew what they had done and denounced this as a fabrication. Why, he asked, did the report repeat, and italicize, “an untruth about four committees of the Republican Congress,” contrary to the documented record? (See Chapter 20.)
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*131 The “if true” was a particularly nice touch, a device by which it would be possible to pass along any slur whatever—as in “It has been suggested by some of his critics that Millard Tydings must have been in the pay of the Soviet Union. If true, this would have been despicable on the part of Tydings.”
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*132 And tells us something about these books. Thus, David Oshinsky writes about the Wherry-Morgan fisticuffs in the same chapter using, as authentic, the alleged Wherry quote about McCarthy being “out on a limb.” Oshinsky doesn’t inform the reader that the confrontation occurred because Wherry denied that he had made this statement.
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*133 The coincidence was strictly that. As the latter-day Lee would entitle his unpublished memoir, Only the Name Is the Same. He wasn’t a descendant of the general. Ironically, one of the main security suspects in the Bentley inquiry, Duncan C. Lee, was—as he was reputedly fond of noting.
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*134 For example, the congressional comments about the nature of the internal feuding in the State Department security shop, quoted in Chapter 12, are taken from this memo.
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*135 A further modulation, also hinted at by Tydings, is that McCarthy didn’t have the names when he went before the Senate but managed to obtain them later.
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*136 In some versions it’s argued that McCarthy had nothing at all when he set out for Wheeling-Reno but somehow came up with the Lee list and other documentation for his speech when he returned to D.C. Conside
ring that he got back to Washington on Saturday and went before the Senate Monday afternoon, the nature of the documentation he had makes this not only unlikely but virtually impossible. There was no way the data reflected in this speech could have been assembled in this forty-eight-hour period, which included much of Saturday and all of a Sunday, when government offices where such information reposed would have been shut down for the weekend.
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*137 Leander Lovell was in fact McCarthy’s case No. 28. See Chapter 25.
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†138 McCarthy subsequently addressed many more cases than those listed. However, discussion of the point is confined here to the period of the Tydings hearings, as indicative of what McCarthy did or didn’t know as of this initial go-round.
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*139 Wife of Robert Barnett, mentioned in his Lee list entry but not considered a separate case. Not counted in aggregate number of non-Lee cases in text.
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†140 Case provided by McCarthy in connection with Esther Brunauer, wife of Stephen. Latter not considered by Tydings as one of McCarthy’s cases since not in the State Department.
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*141 Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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*150Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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*152Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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*154Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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*157Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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*158Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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*160Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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*166Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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*167Cases not on Lee list (total 28).
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