by Jay Feldman
Stung by “that prick Nixon,” as McCarthy privately referred to him, and claiming that the Army was trying to blackmail him into abandoning his investigation, McCarthy announced the next day that he was temporarily relinquishing the chairmanship of the subcommittee so the panel could conduct a public investigation into the Army’s charges against Cohn and himself.83 The inquiry would be directed by Mundt. Before the hearings began, McCarthy was forced to resign from the subcommittee; he was, however, allowed to choose his successor, and selected a strong supporter, the archconservative Henry C. Dworshak of Idaho.
The impending hearings clearly held the key to McCarthy’s political future, and as they approached, his support continued to slip away. Newspapers from across the political spectrum lambasted him on their editorial pages. In public opinion polls, McCarthy’s approval ratings declined sharply, going from a 50-29-21 percent favorable-unfavorable-no opinion ratio on January 15 to a 38-46-16 percent ratio on April 4.84
The subcommittee replaced Cohn with the Tennessee trial lawyer Ray H. Jenkins as its chief counsel, and the Army engaged the prominent sixty-three-year-old Boston attorney Joseph Welch as its representative. The Army-McCarthy hearings began on April 22, and for the next month and a half they became the first such governmental proceedings to be televised from gavel to gavel. The Senate minority leader, Lyndon Johnson, arranged the telecast with the American Broadcasting Company in the belief that showing the entire proceedings “would make people see what the bastard was up to.”85
Johnson’s intuition was correct. Television brought McCarthy’s customary arrogance and truculence into the living rooms of America, and his loathsome character and malevolent behavior were fully revealed. As Cohn later wrote, “With his easily erupting temper, his menacing monotone, his unsmiling mien, and his perpetual 5-o’clock shadow, he did seem the perfect stock villain. Central casting could not have come up with a better one.”86
The climax of the hearings came on June 9, when McCarthy introduced the name of Frederick G. Fisher, an attorney in Welch’s firm who had originally been one of the team chosen to assist on the case. When Welch had learned, however, that Fisher had been a member of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild as a Harvard law student, he had sent Fisher back to Boston.
The Fisher matter was supposed to be off-limits. Two days earlier, Cohn and Welch had agreed that in exchange for McCarthy’s not bringing it up, there would be no mention of Cohn’s having failed the physical exam for admission to West Point. McCarthy had approved the arrangement, so when he went back on the bargain, introducing Fisher’s name and charging that he had been a member of “the legal arm of the Communist Party,” Cohn and Welch were stunned.87 The former was visibly upset and hastily wrote a note to McCarthy that said, “This is the subject which I have committed to Welch we would not go into. Please respect our agreement as an agreement, because this is not going to do any good.”88 McCarthy crumpled the note and persisted with his smear of Fisher and Welch.
When, after several minutes, Welch was finally able to get the floor, he delivered a speech that, more than any other single event, spelled the end of McCarthy’s career. “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch began.
Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us … Little did I dream you could be so reckless and cruel as to do an injury to that lad … I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I will do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me … Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?89
The hearing room erupted with applause, and McCarthy was all but finished. Soon afterward, Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a seventy-four-year-old liberal Republican, defied the party leadership and introduced a resolution calling for McCarthy’s censure. On September 27, a bipartisan select committee of six senators submitted a report unanimously supporting censure. Two weeks later, the Senate passed a resolution to “condemn” rather than “censure”—an inconsequential difference—by a vote of 67–22, with every Democrat and half the Republicans present voting for it. Senator after senator, many of whom by their erstwhile silence had facilitated McCarthy’s reign of terror, now rose to self-righteously denounce him.
The meteoric rise and fall of Joe McCarthy was complete. He quickly became a pariah, ignored by the press, the public, and his fellow legislators alike. He served out two and a half more years of his term, until his death on May 2, 1957, from cirrhosis of the liver, but he was never again a factor in the Senate or in national affairs, despite his continued harangues and attacks on everybody and anybody he deemed worthy of such attention.
“The damage that Joe McCarthy did is incalculable,” wrote Fred Cook in The Nightmare Decade. “There are no scales on which to weigh his impact on the soul of the nation, but it is safe to say that he left America less free than he found it.”90
For all the hundreds of individuals McCarthy accused, he never discovered or exposed a single Communist or any instance of espionage. In no small way, he was a creation of the press; even those reporters who despised McCarthy—and they were by far the majority—lent him credibility by their relentless coverage of his baseless charges and masterful evasions.
To be sure, he had his defenders, most notably William F. Buckley Jr., who with L. Brent Bozell wrote a 1954 defense of the senator titled McCarthy and His Enemies. While criticizing his excesses, they supported McCarthy’s crusade as “a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”91
Called by one biographer “the most gifted demagogue ever bred on these shores,” McCarthy was, as noted, more than anything else, an opportunist who exploited the political climate of his times, profiting from an environment that was created and cultivated by many others.92 As another of his biographers has astutely noted, “McCarthy could have been stopped cold at any time by, say, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, or Dwight Eisenhower—men with authority, who knew when he was bluffing and lying.”93 The truth, however, is that for all the later condemnation of McCarthy, he served a useful purpose for such “men with authority”—he carried out their dirty work, and it was only when he went too far and careened out of control that they found it expedient to put him out of business.
McCarthy was done, but McCarthyism lived on. The red scare was hardly over, as the “men with authority” carried on.
*Acheson referred reporters to the following passage: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me … Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
†The Wheeling talk was delivered the same day that Nixon, speaking in Ogden, Utah, called the Alger Hiss case “only a small part of the whole shocking story of Communist espionage in the United States” (see Chapter 11, above).
‡This set up a head-on collision with Truman, who refused to allow the files to be removed from the State Department’s archives; instead, in a compromise, he ruled that committee members would be allowed to examine individual files at State Department headquarters.
§Hoover’s lofty defense of civil liberties was self-serving and hypocritical—at the time, the FBI had files on seventy million Americans, and the bureau regularly supplied HUAC with derogatory, and frequently unproven, information about people, which HUAC then made public in its hearings, often causing great and undeserved personal damage to reputations, livelihoods, and personal relationships.
‖In addition to Smith, the six others were George D. Aiken (Vt.), Robert C. Hendrickson (N.J.), Irving M. Ives (N.Y.), Wayne L. Mors
e (Ore.), Edward J. Thye (Minn.), and Charles W. Tobey (N.H.).
aAs portentous as this feature was, Attorney General McGrath instructed Hoover to ignore it in favor of the Justice Department’s secret and more stringent police-state-style emergency detention plan of August 3, 1948 (see Theoharis, FBI and American Democracy, p. 69; for the Justice Department plan, see Chapter 11, above).
CHAPTER 13
There Were Many Wrecked Lives
Eisenhower may have disliked McCarthy’s crudeness and renegade approach, and maintained his distance from the senator, but he was in full accord with the Republican Party’s support of McCarthy’s red-hunting agenda. As the Eisenhower historian Herbert S. Parmet has written, “When Dwight Eisenhower … arrived in Washington there was little doubt that … the public was more insecure than the nation.”1 Like Truman, Eisenhower almost certainly understood that the security threat from domestic Communism was minuscule. In 1944, when the population of the United States was 150 million, Communist Party membership peaked at eighty thousand and steadily declined thereafter; by 1951, the year before Eisenhower was elected, the CP had fewer than thirty-two thousand members. Like his predecessor, however, Eisenhower recognized the political benefits of the crusade against American Communists and was dedicated to hounding radicals.
In April 1953, barely three months after taking office—with McCarthy and two other congressional Republicans at his side—Eisenhower announced a further tightening of the loyalty program. Under Executive Order 10450, the standards for dismissal were changed from mere “disloyalty” to any behavior that could be construed as inconsistent with “the interests of the national security.”2
Attorney General Herbert Brownell proclaimed, “Under the new program, an employee or applicant for employment may be loyal in his own mind, but still, because of personal habits of conduct, a background of negligence, or failure to observe reasonable rules of security, he is in fact a security risk and therefore not acceptable as a government employee.”3 The new rules meant that government workers could be fired for alcohol abuse, homosexuality, psychological disorders, associating with radicals, or any “behavior, activities, or associations which tend to show that the individual is not reliable or trustworthy.”4 It was much easier, in other words, to label a person a “security risk” than a “disloyal American.” Moreover, all decisions were the responsibility of departmental heads, whose verdicts were final. As a result of the new policy, more than twenty-seven hundred of the ninety-three hundred government employees who had already been investigated and cleared once again found themselves under investigation.
The State Department was particularly vulnerable, terrorized as it was by the former FBI agent and McCarthy confidant Scott McLeod, who was brought in to rid the department of subversives. As head of the department’s Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, McLeod and his staff of about two dozen former FBI agents created what one employee called “a police-state atmosphere,” coming into State Department offices after hours and scrutinizing desks, drawers, and file cabinets.5 State Department personnel quickly came to regard McLeod as a “bogeyman [whose] shadow … lurks over every desk and over every conference table” of the department.6 In the first year of McLeod’s tenure, 306 civilian employees and 178 aliens were fired from the department without a single hearing having been held or any concrete proof having been presented that any of those 484 dismissed individuals were security risks. McLeod’s influence was so pernicious that the New York Herald Tribune columnist Stewart Alsop defined “McLeodism” as “the State Department’s dutiful imitation of McCarthyism.”7
At the same time, with Eisenhower’s blessing, the FBI, HUAC, and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee were ratcheting up the ongoing assault on the teaching profession that had been simmering on a low heat since the inception of the Cold War.
In April 1948, George Parker, a teacher at Evansville College in Indiana, was dismissed because of his “political activities, both on and off campus.”8 These included introducing “political discussion” in his philosophy and religion classes and distributing literature for Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign while serving as chairman of the county Citizens for Wallace Committee. Parker had raised the hackles of Evansville conservatives by being photographed with Wallace at a local campaign rally, and the college’s president, Lincoln Hale, caved in to community pressure to fire Parker.
In January 1949, the cases of six tenured University of Washington professors were brought before the faculty Committee on Tenure and Academic Freedom. Two of the professors, who were acknowledged Communist Party members, and a third who was not had refused to answer, before the state’s Un-American Activities Committee, the question of whether or not they were Communists. The other three, who had long since left the party, admitted past membership but refused to name others who had been members. None of the six had violated any of the five grounds for a tenured faculty member’s dismissal: “incompetency, neglect of duty, physical or mental incapacity, dishonesty or immorality, and conviction of a felony involving moral turpitude.”9 The Tenure and Academic Freedom Committee recommended retaining all except the associate psychology professor Ralph Gundlach—the one man among the six, perversely enough, who had never been a Communist. The university’s president, Raymond B. Allen, ignored the committee’s recommendations, firing Gundlach and the two others who had refused to answer the “are you now or have you ever been?” question and placing the three who declined to name names on two-year probation.
In June—the same month that HUAC sent a letter to eighty-one institutions of higher learning, demanding to see a list of textbooks used in various academic disciplines—Truman and the U.S. commissioner of education, Earl McGrath, both endorsed the National Education Association’s policy that “members of the Communist Party shall not be employed in the American schools.”10 This principle had been formulated by the NEA’s Educational Policies Commission, whose twenty members included Eisenhower—then president of Columbia University—and Harvard’s president, James B. Conant.
At the NEA national convention the following month, the policy barring Communists from teaching was approved by a near-unanimous vote of the three thousand delegates, who at the same time insisted that “the campaign against Communist teachers be conducted in a democratic fashion; that no one should be unjustly accused; that no ‘witch hunts’ should take place. Only the bona fide dues-paying Communist teacher … should be hounded out of the schools.”11
By this time, twenty-five states required teachers to sign a loyalty oath, as the chill continued to spread. In November 1950, Dr. Willard Goslin, widely recognized as “one of the nation’s ablest public schoolmen,” resigned after serving two years as superintendent of schools in Pasadena, California.12 Goslin had been hounded out of the district by right-wing citizens’ groups who labeled him a “Communist subversive” and carried on a two-year campaign against his progressive approach to education, which included rezoning the district to create racially integrated schools, instituting sex-education courses, broadening the reading-writing-arithmetic curriculum, and creating a grading system with only “satisfactory” and “unsatisfactory” as categories. In explaining his “subversive” educational agenda, Goslin said, “The primary purpose of the public school is not to get a bright boy a soft white-collar job but to underwrite and extend democracy in this country.”13
Early in 1951, the regents of the University of Colorado hired the former FBI agents Dudley Hutchinson and Harold Hafer to ferret out subversives on campus. In a 126-page report, the two identified nine faculty and two staff members who were suspected of being Communists. Two of the faculty members refused to talk to the investigators and were informed that their contracts would not be renewed.
Fear and conformity were fast becoming oppressive presences in American education. As the prominent educator Robert Hutchins observed, “The question is not how many teachers have been fired, but how many think they might be, and for what reasons … Th
e entire teaching profession of the U.S. is now intimidated.”14
In May 1951, The New York Times reported the results of a study it had conducted of seventy-two major American colleges and universities. Although the article was titled “College Freedoms Being Stifled by Students’ Fear of Red Label,” the piece made it clear that the trepidation was by no means limited to students but rather affected the entire academic community. This development, said the article, “struck a body-blow at the American educational process, one of democracy’s most potent weapons.” The story also reported that FBI agents “were constantly inquiring about students applying for Government jobs” and that “Federal security officers were making careful checks of the memberships of liberal organizations.”15
In June 1952, twenty-eight California public and private colleges and universities, including the University of California and Stanford, each brought to campus a former FBI agent or military intelligence officer whose job it was to report on subversives to the state’s Un-American Activities Committee. By the following March, there had been more than a hundred dismissals or resignations, and over two hundred teaching appointments had been prevented. William Wadman, the agent at UC Berkeley, later acknowledged that he had filed reports about every faculty member on campus.
On February 25, 1953, Eisenhower gave the educational witch hunt a great incentive when he declared, during his second presidential press conference, that he was opposed to any “card-carrying Communist in such a responsible position as teaching our youngsters because it is teaching and preaching as opposed to teaching facts.” A clever teacher, said Eisenhower, could even “use mathematics to put across a doctrine.”16