by Jay Feldman
It was another con. Meeting with the committee in executive session, McCarthy fingered Dr. Owen Lattimore, a widely published author and recognized authority on Far Eastern affairs. Though a confirmed leftist and even a fellow traveler in the 1930s and 1940s, Lattimore was neither a spy nor a Communist and, except for a brief four-month stint five years earlier, had never been a State Department employee—aside from that service, his only affiliation with the department consisted of two speeches he had given there. McCarthy was undaunted, however, telling the committee, “If you crack this case, it will be the biggest espionage case in the history of this country.”29
McCarthy identified Lattimore as “one of the principal architects of our far eastern policy [whose] record as a pro-Communist goes back many years.”30 He claimed that Lattimore enjoyed “free access” to the State Department and even had a desk there. In truth, Lattimore had no direct influence on foreign policy, had no desk at the State Department, and, before McCarthy’s accusation thrust him into the national limelight, was unknown to Secretary of State Acheson.
Employing his trademark offensive tactic of innuendo, McCarthy implied under questioning that Lattimore’s FBI file would confirm everything he was saying. When the Connecticut Democrat Brien McMahon jumped in and tried to pin him down, McCarthy demonstrated his patented defensive technique of evasiveness:
MCMAHON: Have you seen the FBI files?
MCCARTHY: I think I know what is in them.
MCMAHON: That is not the question. Have you seen them?
MCCARTHY: I will tell you, Senator McMahon, do not worry about whether I have seen them or not.
MCMAHON: I am worried. You will either answer or you will not. You have or you have not.
TYDINGS: Nobody is going to ask you for your sources.
MCCARTHY: Senator McMahon, let me tell you this.
MCMAHON: Do not tell me anything. I am not interested in a single thing. That technique you have is not going to work on me. If you cannot answer the question, that you have or you have not, then I am not interested in anything else you are going to say. That is the question: Have you seen the FBI file or have you not.
MCCARTHY: I heard your question.
TYDINGS: Let me say this—
MCMAHON: You refuse to answer?
MCCARTHY: No; I don’t refuse to answer.
TYDINGS: We do not want to know your sources. But what I think we are entitled to know is, is this a speculation or have you had some contact with the files in one way or another that makes you think you have some accurate information?
MCCARTHY: I am about as certain as I could be of anything as to what those files will show. As to whether I have seen them, who might have helped me get information, or things like that—
TYDINGS: I do not want to know that.
MCCARTHY: I know you do not … I might say I have not seen the original FBI files.
MCMAHON: The original FBI files. Have you seen a copy of them?
MCCARTHY: I think, Senator, whether I have seen a copy or not, not having seen the original I would have no way of knowing whether I saw a copy unless I compared it with the original.
TYDINGS: Have you seen what purports to be a copy, or have you got your evidence from somebody who has seen the files? That is all.
MCCARTHY: Let me say this. To the best of my knowledge, and I think it is good, I think it has been proven so far in dates and places that I have been giving the committee, the FBI file will show in detail not the case merely of a man who happens to favor Russia, not the case of a man who may disagree with what we think about Russia, but a man who is definitely an espionage agent.
MCMAHON: See how he goes away from the question?31
Sticking to his bluff, McCarthy told the committee that the Lattimore case “will prove that I am completely wrong or it will prove I am 100 percent right.”32 A few days later, despite a State Department denial of the charges against Lattimore, McCarthy assured reporters, “I am willing to stand or fall on this one. If I am shown to be wrong on this I think the subcommittee would be justified in not taking my other cases too seriously. If they find I am 100 percent right—as they will—it should convince them of the seriousness of the situation.”33
From Afghanistan, where he was on a United Nations mission, Lattimore cabled the Associated Press, calling McCarthy’s “rantings pure moonshine” and vowing to return to the United States as soon as he was able. “Delighted his whole case rests on me,” read Lattimore’s cable, “as this means he will fall flat on his face.”34 In Lattimore’s absence, his wife asked that he be granted an appearance before the Tydings Committee.
In the interim, Truman ordered Hoover and Attorney General McGrath to prepare a confidential summary of Lattimore’s FBI file for the committee members. As Tydings would later inform Lattimore during his appearance, “There was nothing in that file to show that you were a Communist or ever had been a Communist, or that you were in any way connected with espionage information or charges, so that the FBI file puts you completely … in the clear.”35
On March 30, McCarthy delivered a four-hour speech to the Senate, supposedly detailing the proof of Lattimore’s treason. It was typical McCarthy “evidence,” full of half-truths, distortions, and lies. Lattimore’s attorney, the future Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, would later point out more than a hundred factual errors and misstatements in the speech.
On April 5, the day before Lattimore was scheduled to appear, the committee heard from the State Department’s Loyalty and Security Board chairman, Conrad E. Snow, and the Civil Service’s Loyalty Review Board chairman, Seth W. Richardson. The former had been a brigadier general in World War II; the latter had served as an assistant attorney general in Herbert Hoover’s administration. Both were lifelong Republicans. Snow told the committee, “If there are any Communists in the State Department, the Loyalty Security Board is uninformed of their existence.” Richardson testified, “The FBI has considered nearly 3,000,000 files. More than 10,000 of those cases have been given a field investigation by the FBI. Not one single case, or evidence directing toward a case, of espionage has been disclosed in that record … [N]ot one single syllable of evidence has been found by the FBI … indicating that a particular case involves the question of espionage.”36
This was consistent with the committee’s findings. With Richardson on the stand, Tydings announced that four weeks into the hearings, the committee had “not yet received the names or the evidence of any card-carrying Communist from any source, including Senator McCarthy, … now in the State Department, up to the present time.”37
The following day, Lattimore began his testimony by reading a prepared statement that took an hour and three-quarters. Calling McCarthy’s charges “base and contemptible lies,” he vowed to show “in detail” the speciousness of those accusations, and in turn accused the senator of having “flagrantly violated” the responsibility of his office.38 Invoking his “right and duty to list these violations,” he specifically charged McCarthy with:
impairing the effectiveness of the United States Government in its relations with its friends and allies, and … making the Government of the United States an object of suspicion in the eyes of the anti-Communist world, and undoubtedly the laughing stock of the Communist governments.
… [I]nstituting a reign of terror among officials and employees in the United States Government, no one of whom can be sure of safety from attack.
… [W]ithout authorization us[ing] secret documents obtained from official Government files.
… [V]ilif[ying] citizens of the United States and accus[ing] them of high crime, without giving them an opportunity to defend themselves.
… [R]efus[ing] to submit alleged documentary evidence to a duly constituted committee of the Senate.
In the conclusion to his prepared statement, Lattimore challenged the underlying principle of the Cold War red scare, that is, the suppression of dissent. “If the people of this country,” he said, “can differ … onl
y at the risk of the abuse to which I have been subjected, freedom will not long survive.”39
For most of the rest of the day, Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper of Iowa—McCarthy’s staunchest supporter on the committee—badgered Lattimore, trying to pin the blame for the fall of China on him. Lattimore acquitted himself eloquently and convincingly, bringing a depth of knowledge to the discussion that made Hickenlooper appear uninformed and overmatched.
The parade of witnesses in the weeks that followed made a mash of the charges against Lattimore, and Lattimore himself, appearing again on May 2 and 3, put to rest any lingering notion that he was “the top Russian espionage agent in this country.”
McCarthy was 0 for 3, and the Lattimore case on which he was “willing to stand or fall” had been revealed as a sham, but it made no difference. All at once, the junior senator from Wisconsin was the man of the hour and in great demand as a speaker. Intoxicated with the media attention and emboldened by the backing of his Republican colleagues, he stepped up his attacks. Addressing the American Society of Newspaper Editors, McCarthy called the former secretary of state George Marshall “a pathetic thing … completely unfit” for the office and branded Dean Acheson “completely incompetent.” He condemned “the Reds, their minions and the egg-sucking phony liberals who litter Washington with their persons” and belittled “the pitiful squealing of those who would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers who have sold 400,000,000 Asiatic people into atheistic slavery and have the American people in a hypnotic trance, headed blindly toward the same precipice.”40 Speaking to the Midwest Council of Young Republicans, he defended doing “a bare-knuckle job” and derided Tydings and McMahon as Truman’s “political puppets,” saying they knew “little or nothing of Communist techniques—even less about how to conduct an investigation,” and labeling the Tydings Committee hearings “Operation Whitewash.”41
It was almost three months since the Wheeling speech, and not a single one of McCarthy’s accusations had been credibly proved. Referring to the Wheeling talk, Representative Frank M. Karsten, Democrat from Missouri, called for an “inquiry … as to whether or not a hoax, a deceit, or a fraud, has been practiced somewhere, by someone, upon the American people.”42 The Republican Kenneth S. Wherry of Nebraska, another of McCarthy’s loyal backers in the Senate, angrily defended his ally, saying, “The American people want an investigation not of Mr. McCarthy but of subversives in the State Department.”43
On May 4, at the urging of Tydings, Truman decided to allow the committee members to examine the FBI files of all eighty-one individuals McCarthy had accused in his February 20 Senate speech. The president had resisted opening the files on the advice of J. Edgar Hoover, who had sanctimoniously told the committee on March 27, “I would not want to be a party to any action which would smear innocent individuals for the rest of their lives. We cannot disregard the fundamental principles of common decency and the application of basic American rights of fair play in the administration of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”44§
Tydings, however, pointed out to Truman that the dossiers had already been examined earlier by Republican-controlled congressional committees, who had found nothing incriminating in them. Accordingly, the president agreed to allow members of the Tydings Committee to review the files at the White House. The senators could not bring any staff, and they would not be allowed to take notes. As anticipated, the files revealed nothing damaging to any of the eighty-one cited individuals.
McCarthy charged that the files had been altered and became even more strident, widening his accusations, painting the reputed Communist conspiracy in ever broader strokes, and in the process keeping himself on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. Most Republicans in Congress backed him.
Only a handful of seven Republican moderates repudiated McCarthy. On June 1, the freshman senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the chamber’s only woman, read the seven senators’ “Declaration of Conscience” to the Senate.‖
The statement began by expressing concern over “the growing confusion that threatens the security and stability of our country” and blaming the source of that confusion on the Truman administration’s “lack of effective leadership” and “complacency to the threat of communism here at home.” But it quickly went on to denounce “certain elements of the Republican party [who] have materially added to this confusion in the hopes of riding the Republican party to victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance.” In her speech accompanying the statement, Smith lamented that the Senate “recently … has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of Congressional immunity.”45
That only one other Republican, H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, publicly expressed his support of the “Declaration of Conscience” was a measure of how powerful McCarthy had become in the space of just three months. In fact, except for Wayne L. Morse of Oregon, who left the Republican Party to become an Independent in 1952 and then a Democrat three years later, all the signers and supporters of the “Declaration of Conscience” would soon abandon their criticism of McCarthy.
But Joe McCarthy was just getting started. The fear that he inspired would continue to build for four more years before his reign of terror was finally brought to a halt.
The Tydings Committee hearings ground on, but on June 25, 1950, they suddenly became page 2 news when North Korean soldiers crossed the border and attacked South Korea. Two days later, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling on member nations to provide military assistance to South Korea, and two days after that Truman instructed General Douglas MacArthur, as head of the UN Command, to invade North Korea. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the red scare intensified, as the anti-Communists and red-baiters shifted the hysteria into overdrive. “The greatest Kremlin asset in our history,” proclaimed Senator Taft, “has been the pro-Communist group in the State Department who promoted at every opportunity the Communist cause in China.”46
The Tydings Committee concluded its hearings on June 28 and released its report on July 17. Meticulously scrutinizing and analyzing the evidence, the report found McCarthy’s charges of espionage and disloyalty in the State Department to be “false,” “irresponsible,” and “unwarranted.” The report also offered a blistering indictment of McCarthy, calling his accusations and methods “what they truly are: A fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the Senate of the United States and the American people. They represent perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruth in the history of this Republic. For the first time in our history, we have seen the totalitarian technique of the ‘big lie’ employed on a sustained basis.”47 The report was signed by the committee’s three Democrats; the Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. submitted a short minority report, while Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa remained silent.
McCarthy immediately went on the counterattack. “The Tydings-McMahon report is a green light to the Red fifth column in the United States,” he maintained. “It is a signal to the traitors, Communists, and fellow travelers in our Government that they need have no fear of exposure from this Administration … [T]he Tydings-McMahon half of the committee has degenerated to new lows of planned deception. The result of their work is a clever, evil thing to behold. It is gigantic in its fraud and deep in its deceit.”48
The timing of the Tydings Committee report could not have been worse. The same day it was released, the FBI announced the arrest in New York of the electrical engineer Julius Rosenberg, the fourth American apprehended in an atomic spying case that developed out of the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in Britain. In June and July, nine U.S. citizens, including Rosenberg’s wife, Ethel, and her brother David Greenglass, were arrested on charges of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Although none of the arrestees was affiliated with the State Department, the very fact of apparent atomic espionage was enough to lend credibility to McCarthy’s charges that the Tydings Repor
t had been a whitewash. Not only did the Tydings investigation fail to slow McCarthy down, but his power and influence were actually enhanced in the process.
The atomic spy case further fueled the new wave of panic ignited by the Korean War. In this frantic environment, Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950 on September 12. Also known as the McCarran Act for its chief sponsor, the Democratic senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, the ISA was, as one historian puts it, “one of the most massive onslaughts against freedom of speech and association ever launched in American history.”49 Among other things, the broad-spectrum bill required the registration of Communist-action and Communist-front groups; established the Subversive Activities Control Board, which could designate any organization as a Communist action or Communist front if it failed to voluntarily register; and prohibited members of any so-designated organizations from working for the government or for a private company engaged in defense work.
The most ominous aspect of the law, however, was the provision for a preventive detention program—proposed by seven liberal Democratic senators, including Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Herbert Lehman of New York—that empowered the president, in time of national emergency, “to detain … each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe … probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or of sabotage.”50a
The ISA passed in the Senate by 70–7; the House approved it by 354–20. To his credit, Truman vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode his veto, 57–10 in the Senate and 286–46 in the House. On December 21, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee was established to oversee the administration and enforcement of the ISA. With McCarran as its chairman, SISS became the Senate version of HUAC and, like the House committee, received secret, confidential information from the FBI in carrying out its investigations.