by Jay Feldman
†Although none of the reports were related to national security, they did reveal the FBI’s proclivity for spying on civilians, particularly New Deal liberals, progressives, and radicals. Coplon’s conviction was eventually overturned when it came to light that the evidence against her had been obtained through illegal wiretaps and that the bureau had destroyed evidence in order to protect the agent who lied on the stand about not having tapped Coplon’s telephone.
CHAPTER 12
A Neurotic Nightmare
At the beginning of 1950, Joseph McCarthy was halfway through his first term in the Senate, and with very little to show for it. In three undistinguished years of service, the forty-one-year-old junior senator from Wisconsin had earned a reputation as an uncouth, hard-drinking, publicity-seeking troublemaker who demonstrated little regard for the Senate’s elaborate conventions of decorum, procedure, and seniority. McCarthy’s sustained efforts on behalf of the soft-drink lobby had earned him the derisive nickname the Pepsi-Cola Kid, and senators of both parties made a point of distancing themselves from him. Frustrated by his failure to gain recognition and casting about for an issue that would bolster him in his upcoming reelection campaign, McCarthy hit upon the theme of Communists in the federal government, a subject that was at once topical, sensational, apparently long-lived, and in keeping with his earlier track record of red-baiting.
The perjury conviction of Alger Hiss on January 21 had propelled the matter of Communists in the government onto the front pages of newspapers and into the minds of the American public. Four days later, after Hiss had been sentenced to five years in prison, Secretary of State Dean Acheson initiated a furor when he stated, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”1 Although Acheson went on to explain that his motivation came from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount,* the secretary of state’s intended magnanimity created a public relations disaster, as he foolishly left himself and the Truman administration open to attack for being soft on Communism.
With his Ivy League background and his aloof—some called it arrogant—patrician bearing, Acheson rankled many conservatives, who had been gunning for him since China was taken over by Mao Zedong’s forces the previous August. After the Chinese Communists’ triumph, the New Hampshire senator Styles Bridges had called on Congress to investigate the State Department, charging Acheson with “what might be called sabotage” of Chiang Kai-shek’s government.2 Now Republicans and southern Democrats seized on Acheson’s statement of loyalty to Hiss as proof that Communist sympathizers occupied positions of influence at the very top levels of the federal government, and that American foreign policy was being created by such men.
It was McCarthy who informed the Senate of Acheson’s remark, labeling it “a fantastic statement.”3 Richard Nixon, who had played a major role in Hiss’s original indictment, called it “disgusting”4 and cautioned that “the great lesson which should be learned from the Alger Hiss case is that … traitors in the high councils of our own government make sure that the deck is stacked on the Soviet side of the diplomatic table.”5 The Republican Robert F. Rich of Pennsylvania opined, “I don’t know if we have anybody working for Joe Stalin more than the Secretary of State,”6 and the Democrat Edward E. Cox of Georgia, though finding Acheson’s statement to be “no surprise,” added that it very well “might be terrifying to the American people.”7
The outrage over Acheson’s indiscretion had hardly died down when Truman announced on January 31 that since the Soviets were also now in possession of the A-bomb—having successfully carried out their first atomic test four months earlier—the United States would begin work on “the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb,” thus escalating the arms race and reinforcing the idea that we had much to fear from our adversaries.8 Three days later those concerns were confirmed when the British government announced that the English physicist Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, had confessed to having passed atomic secrets to the Soviets.
It was in this charged atmosphere, then, that McCarthy traveled to West Virginia on February 9 to address the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, as part of the annual nationwide Lincoln Day appearances by Republican legislators.†
It was the first of a five-stop speaking tour that would also take McCarthy to Reno, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Huron, South Dakota—a hinterlands itinerary that reflected his lowly status in the Republican hierarchy.
In his Wheeling speech to an audience of almost three hundred, McCarthy went directly for the jugular, claiming that America was at a disadvantage in international affairs, “not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation.” Zeroing in on his target, he said, “The bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been the worst … In my opinion the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with Communists.” He singled out Acheson, calling him a “pompous diplomat in striped pants with a phony British accent.”9
Then McCarthy uttered the sentence that would almost overnight transform him into a household name and soon thereafter make him the most feared man in America. “And ladies and gentlemen, while I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
There was no list. There were no names. McCarthy’s charges were loosely based on information in a July 1946 letter from Secretary of State James Byrnes to the Illinois representative Adolph Sabath that had been entered into the Congressional Record.10 The letter had to do with the screening of 3,000 federal employees who were transferred to the State Department after the war. Of these, 285 were not recommended for permanent employment, and 79 of that group had been terminated for unspecified reasons. By some fuzzy math and even fuzzier logic, McCarthy came up with 205 “active members of the Communist Party,” even though the letter contained no names or any reference to Communist Party membership.
McCarthy’s allegations were pure hokum, but nobody, certainly not McCarthy himself—who from all indications had no idea what he was getting into11—could have predicted the fallout.
Aside from the expected coverage in the local Wheeling paper, McCarthy’s speech attracted little attention at first. The Associated Press sent out a brief three-paragraph piece to newspapers across the United States, but only eighteen publications carried the story on February 10, and of those, only three, most notably The Denver Post, gave it front-page placement. The Chicago Tribune ran it on page 5. Most large metropolitan dailies, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times did not publish the article at all.
During a thirty-minute stopover in Denver on his way to Salt Lake City on the tenth, McCarthy was surprised to find himself surrounded by reporters who confronted him with a State Department press release that categorically denied his accusations, characterizing them as “entirely without foundation.”12 The senator sneered at the agency’s denial and told the newsmen he had “a complete list of 207 ‘bad risks’ still working in the state department.”13 Where this new number came from is unclear, but when the reporters asked to see the list, McCarthy was caught off guard. Stalling for time, he opened his briefcase and made a show of digging around for the list, but as The Denver Post reported, he quickly “discovered he had left it in his baggage on the plane.” The paper also published a staged-looking photograph of the senator rifling through the briefcase, with the caption “Left Commie list in other bag.”
By the time McCarthy landed in Salt Lake City, he had devised a further refinement of his assertions, displaying the techniques that he would use to dazzle, deceive, and intimidate so many
members of Congress, the press, and the American people for the next four years. Weaving the beginning strands of what would become a vast web of half-truths, fictions, and outright lies—demonstrating what the historian Robert Griffith terms “his exceptional talent for compounding distortion upon distortion”—McCarthy informed the press that there were actually two lists.14 The first, which he had alluded to in Wheeling, was composed of 205 “bad risks” who were still employed by the State Department. The second, and even more threatening list, he now revealed, contained the names of 57 “card-carrying Communists” who worked at the agency.15
As with the original 205, the source of this new number was vague and outdated. The information came from the testimony of the House Appropriations Subcommittee investigator Robert E. Lee, who had reported in March 1948 that after reviewing the cases of 108 past, present, and prospective State Department employees who had been investigated as possible loyalty or security risks, 57 were at that time still working for the department. Not only were there no names on Lee’s list—the cases were referred to by numbers—but in the two years since it had been presented, four committees of the then-Republican-controlled Congress had reviewed the cases and had not lodged a charge of disloyalty against a single State Department employee. Many of the 108 individuals listed had simply been the targets of malicious gossip and rumor.
In Reno on February 11, McCarthy delivered the same speech he had given in Wheeling, but changed the 205 to 57. He also named four names, only one of whom, John Service, worked for the State Department at the time, and Service had been cleared of all charges against him on multiple occasions.
While in Reno, McCarthy received a State Department telegram asking him to name the “card-carrying Communists” who worked in the department. McCarthy, in turn, wrote to Truman, repeating his charges, blasting the State Department’s denial of them, and suggesting that of three hundred employees “certified for discharge by the President’s own Loyalty Board,” only eighty had been fired.16 He went on to condemn Truman’s 1948 order forbidding the release of any State Department employee’s loyalty records to members of Congress. “Despite this blackout,” McCarthy wrote, “we have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department.” The actual number, he insisted, was much larger and could be obtained from the secretary of state.
The State Department responded with an unqualified denial of McCarthy’s charges, saying that never had three hundred of its employees been designated by the Loyalty Review Board as disloyal, nor had eighty such workers ever been dismissed; in fact, the Loyalty Review Board had never recommended the dismissal of even one State Department employee.
By the time McCarthy returned to the Senate on the evening of February 20, he was the subject of front-page headlines from coast to coast. He was aware that the Democratic majority leader, Scott W. Lucas of Illinois, had announced that there would be no votes taken that evening, and when he sauntered to the microphone toting an overstuffed briefcase, there were fewer than ten senators in the chamber. “Mr. President,” announced McCarthy in his nasal monotone, “I wish to discuss tonight a subject which concerns me more than does any other subject I have ever discussed before this body, and perhaps more than any other subject I shall ever have the good fortune to discuss in the future. It not only concerns me, but it disturbs and frightens me.”17
For the next five hours, McCarthy harangued the Senate chamber, citing cases from the two-year-old Lee list without ever identifying it as his source, but claiming instead that his information came directly from State Department files that had been provided by “some good loyal Americans.” The entire speech was a bluff, one of the most fraudulent and mendacious presentations ever witnessed on the floor of the U.S. Senate. McCarthy read 81 of the 108 cases on the Lee list, exaggerating, distorting, and lying, as he changed information, omitted conclusions, and added fabrications in the most flagrant and irresponsible manner imaginable. Robert Taft, Republican of Ohio, one of the conservative stalwarts of the Senate, called it “a perfectly reckless performance.”18
Nevertheless, two days later, the Senate adopted Resolution 231, authorizing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to investigate whether there were disloyal employees in the State Department. At the insistence of Senate Republicans, the resolution called for the committee to subpoena the loyalty and employment files of all State Department personnel and of all employees in other suspect agencies.‡
A subcommittee of five was appointed, chaired by the Democrat Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, a stalwart conservative and anti–New Dealer serving his fourth term in the Senate. Hearings began on March 8.
In the meantime, McCarthy, apparently realizing just how deep a hole he had dug for himself, was scrambling behind the scenes to find some concrete evidence of something, anything, that he could use to support his claims. In the aftermath of the Wheeling speech, he had phoned J. Edgar Hoover and asked for help. “This caused headlines all over the country, and I never expected it,” McCarthy told Hoover, “and now I need some evidence to back up my statement that there are Communists in the State Department.”19 Hoover gave McCarthy “unshirted hell” for his recklessness but immediately issued instructions to FBI staff to review the files for anything that might be of assistance to the senator.20
Hoover also suggested that McCarthy engage Donald Surine, a hard-nosed ten-year FBI veteran whom the director had recently been forced to fire for becoming involved with a prostitute during the course of an investigation. McCarthy promptly hired Surine as his investigator and set him to work collecting information on suspected State Department employees. Surine quickly became one of McCarthy’s most trusted aides, and every week during the time he worked for the senator, the two of them had lunch with Hoover to share information and compare notes.
The wave of publicity that attended McCarthy’s February 20 Senate speech thrust him into the role of standard-bearer for the red-baiters and witch-hunters. Few newspapers adopted a critical stance similar to that of The New York Times, which accused McCarthy, in a February 22 editorial, of conducting a “campaign of indiscriminate character assassination.” On the contrary, the typical press accounts of the proceedings made him sound rather reasonable, and in no way conveyed the manic, chaotic, semi-deranged quality of his live presentation. McCarthy suddenly appeared to be a populist champion of ordinary Americans, a dedicated crusader acting out of pure patriotism in order to expose a confirmed spy ring, rather than a calculating demagogue deviously exploiting an undercurrent of fear.
Immediately picking up on the momentum of the unexpected outpouring of popular support, Republicans rallied behind McCarthy and latched onto his coattails. Within a matter of weeks, Senator Taft, who had criticized the February 20 talk as “perfectly reckless,” encouraged McCarthy to keep on with his accusations, telling him, “If one case doesn’t work, try another.”21
Appearing before the Tydings Committee, McCarthy was combative, defiant, and abusive. When Senator Theodore F. Green of Rhode Island refused to allow him to obfuscate in answering a question and persisted in attempting to pin him down, McCarthy shouted, “You be quiet until I finish.”22 When Tydings demanded the names of the “good loyal Americans” in the State Department who had supposedly furnished the list of suspects, McCarthy countered:
You are not fooling me, Senator. I know what you want. I know what the State Department wants. They want to find out who is giving out information on these disloyal people so their heads will fall, and so far as I am concerned, gentlemen, no heads of any loyal people in the State Department will fall … I am very surprised and disappointed, Senator, that this Committee would become the tool of the State Department, Senator, not to get at the names, the information, of those who are bad security risks, but to find out for the Department who may have given me information so those people can be kicked out of their jobs tomorrow.23
Realizing he had to come up with something concrete, McCarthy named Dorothy Kenyon, a New York City lawyer
and former municipal judge who had never worked for the State Department but had served as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women from 1947 to 1949. The sixty-two-year-old Kenyon was a long-standing, distinguished liberal who had been affiliated over the decades, however loosely, with a number of liberal and left-of-center organizations that the Dies Committee had designated as Communist fronts. There was no evidence whatsoever that Kenyon had ever belonged to the Communist Party.
Kenyon responded immediately, calling McCarthy an “unmitigated liar” and demanding to appear before the committee.24 In her testimony, she stated, “I am not, and never have been disloyal. I am not, and never have been a Communist. I am not, and never have been a fellow traveler.” At the same time, she also articulated the plight of so many caught in the web of the witch hunts. “Literally overnight,” said Kenyon, “whatever personal and professional reputation and standing I may have acquired after many years in private practice and some in public office, they have been seriously jeopardized, if not destroyed by the widespread dissemination of charges of Communistic leanings or proclivities that are utterly false.”25
McCarthy’s next target was the State Department’s ambassador at large Dr. Philip C. Jessup, whom the senator accused of having an “unusual affinity for Communist causes.”26 This second attempt was similarly wide of the mark. Jessup denounced McCarthy for making “false and irresponsible” charges that demonstrated a “shocking disregard” for the national interests of the United States, and the committee’s chairman, Millard Tydings, read into the record strong letters of support for Jessup from the former secretary of state Marshall and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.27
His first two supposedly “big names” having amounted to nil, McCarthy was on the spot to produce something that would stick. Confronted by reporters on March 21, he impulsively told them that he had just given the committee “the name of the man—connected with the State Department—whom I consider the top Russian espionage agent in this country.”28