by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
What if your nice, normal neighbors are not whom they seem to be? This 1956 movie played on people’s fears of what lay beneath the facade of conformity.
In this time of fear, the anti-Communists were on the march and out to crush, to stamp out, to extinguish their enemies. Hoover finally had his chance to clean out the Communist infection so that America would be safe, quiet, untroubled by strikes or protests against racism, and guarded by the growing file cards of the ever-vigilant FBI.
The FBI was everywhere. Between 1945 and 1953, you could listen to This Is Your FBI on radio, and if your local boys’ club hosted an FBI night, they might get mentioned on the air. In 1948, Hoover helped Hollywood make The Street with No Name, a crime drama about the Bureau, and used his lists of friendly press contacts to promote it. Two years later, the FBI started its Ten Most Wanted list. It was tacked up in every post office, reminding people to be scared, and simultaneously assuring them that G-men were watching.
There is always some reason to be afraid — whether that is because teenagers claim to be under attack from witches in Salem in 1692, or bombs explode in Washington in 1919, or Communist spies turn over atomic secrets thirty-five years later, or airplanes fly into the World Trade Center in 2001, or indeed whatever rumor rushes through a school today. But when personal worries are confirmed by police raids, congressional hearings, judges’ rulings, presidential decrees, newspaper headlines, gossip-column tidbits, and the whispers of government agents, the nation freezes.
In the early 1950s, Hoover was the center of a vast network of FBI agents, former agents, policemen, retired soldiers, newsmen, and religious leaders who shared his fears: they were all on guard against invisible microbes — of disease, of ideas, and of “perverted” desire. Hoover’s hidden network was the deep structure of the fearful ’50s: the age of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
A hardscrabble farm boy from rural Wisconsin who hustled his way through law school, then served as a marine during World War II, Joseph McCarthy made his own breaks. He was the face of men who’d grown up in the Great Depression and fought in the war; they knew what it took to get by in a hard, tough world. No one expected McCarthy to win when he ran for the Senate in 1946. But he defied the experts: he invented a record of wartime heroism and was such an energetic campaigner that he was elected. At thirty-eight, he was the youngest member of the Senate, yet that success only made him hungry for more attention, more power, and more glory. McCarthy’s need to be liked was so strong, it radiated around him like heat. As one senator recalled, he was “like a mongrel dog, fawning on you one moment and the next moment trying to bite your leg off.” His hungers had no limits — which is why he rose so far and so fast. And behind the scenes, where no one could see, Hoover fed him his lines. Take the speech that made McCarthy famous.
February 9, 1950. Senator Joe McCarthy was the scheduled speaker at a minor event in a minor city: a Republican women’s club meeting in Wheeling, West Virginia. “The Democratic Christian world,” Wisconsin’s junior senator warned, was in grave peril. And Joe knew the secret behind the rise of the forces of evil: “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those . . . who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer — the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.”
Anyone who had followed the chase for the A-bomb spies knew exactly what the rough-hewn senator was speaking about. Smooth-talking traitors had oozed into high government office, then steered the nation off course. It took a guy like McCarthy to tell the foul truth and to put the country right. McCarthy didn’t mind hard work. As a teenager he’d started his own little chicken farm and was known “as the only man who could go out to the barn on a cold winter night wearing two coats and come back with chicken droppings all over the outside coat and the inside one as well.” Now, in Wheeling, he was wading into the muck again. Maybe he’d get splattered, maybe he’d look dirty, but damned if he wouldn’t clean out the henhouse. McCarthy’s exact words have been lost to history, but he held up a piece of paper and said something like “I have here in my hand a list of 205 people working in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring.”
McCarthy was making it up; there was nothing on that piece of paper. Pressed to show his famous list, he always seemed to have left it in his luggage. And he quickly adjusted his numbers from 205 to 207 to 81 to 57. McCarthy took a gambler’s chance: he slapped the Democrats, FDR’s legacy, and the State Department across the face, and dared anyone to hit back, to prove him wrong. Senate Democrats obliged, charging a bipartisan committee headed by Millard Tydings, a Democrat from Maryland, with the task of making McCarthy show his evidence or admit his lies. Frantic, McCarthy called in his backup.
According to William Sullivan, then an assistant director at the FBI, Hoover was McCarthy’s secret source. “The FBI,” he later wrote, “kept Joe McCarthy in business. . . . We gave McCarthy all we had.” The network of former agents, reporters, and authors Hoover cultivated rushed to help out, as did the young congressman Richard Nixon. While Hoover’s men scoured their lists to find some real Communists in the State Department, the director’s allies crafted McCarthy’s speeches. McCarthy grabbed the moment. He was thrilled to be the exterminator who was going to rip off the rotting wood in Washington and force the insectlike Commie spies to scatter.
At the end of February, the head of the State Department’s own security team assured Congress that it had already removed 202 “security risks.” Ninety-one of these employees lost their jobs, even though there was no evidence that they had ever been pro-Communist. Instead, they were fired because they were said to be homosexuals. Looming beneath the fear that Communists had infiltrated Washington was the even deeper concern that “perverts” were weakening our nation and our government from within.
This 1951 exposé claimed that there were more than six thousand homosexuals in government and that these “dumb, dull deviates” ruled the city through their “femmocracy.” The authors combined fear of homosexuality with resentment of a growing government in tough language people enjoyed reading. The book was an instant hit, selling more than 150,000 copies in its first three weeks and reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Why the concern over homosexuals? During the busy days of the New Deal and the hectic war years, single men and women rushed to Washington to find work. Naturally enough, the city provided relatively open meeting places for all kinds of mutual attraction. The backlash against that tolerant Washington was one more way postwar Americans were trying to erase, and clean up, their pasts. But there was another, more personal, side to the campaign to get homosexuals out of government. A national survey of college-educated white men first published in 1948 reported that more than a third had had at least one homosexual experience. This was completely at odds with the dominant images of American masculinity. The Kinsey Report, as the survey was known, fed the unease of the time. What lurked within Washington, the government, or a person’s own past and secret desires? A passion for the wrong ideas? Or the wrong person?
Bernon Mitchell and William Martin were indeed American intelligence experts who fled to the Soviet Union. But they were not lovers and had not been blackmailed by the Communists. Fear of Russian influence, homosexual secrets, and growing government blurred together in sensational stories like this one.
Mickey Spillane’s novels were the most popular books in America; they featured he-man heroes and a silent, efficient FBI. Many were made into films.
By 1952, McCarthy had set up his own echo of Hoover’s files of illegally obtained information. He even boasted about it: “I have instructed a vast number of federal employees that they are duty-bound to give me information even though some little bureaucrat has stamped it ‘secret’ to defend himself.” In other words, Sen
ator McCarthy instructed government employees to break the law, steal material they were not allowed to see or share, and pass it along to him.
After conducting his investigation, Tydings called McCarthy a “fraud” whose accusations were nothing more than street-corner gossip. “You,” he told his fellow senators, “will find out who has been whitewashing — with mud and slime, with filth, with the dregs of publicity at the expense of the people’s love for their country. I ask the Senate: What are you going to do about it?”
The Senate split along party lines. Republicans supported McCarthy, and Democrats condemned him. And that fall, when Tydings ran for reelection, McCarthy did his worst. He blended a photo of Tydings with a completely different one of the head of the American Communist Party so that it looked as if they were in close conversation. The caption said it was a “composite,” but at a glance, Tydings seemed to be good friends with a known Communist. Money secretly contributed by Texas oilmen covered the costs of distributing the doctored photo far and wide. Tydings lost badly, and McCarthy enjoyed his revenge on the man who had called his bluff.
The large image is the composite photo McCarthy supporters used to smear Senator Tydings in his reelection campaign. It purports to show the senator (right) listening to Gus Hall, head of the American Communist Party. The two smaller pictures are the original images from which the composite was made.
Bullies fight dirty; they want their victims to look weak and foolish. That was McCarthy’s gift: he was so unscrupulous, so determined to win, that he simply ignored any rules of fairness or even logic. The fighting marine just attacked, and attacked, and attacked. As one Republican senator said to him, “You’re a real SOB. But sometimes it’s useful to have SOBs around to do the dirty work.” Joe was such an obvious blowhard that his critics were either horrified or terrified: horrified that he could behave so badly, terrified when his coarse, crude lies proved to be immensely popular.
Anyone could see that McCarthy kept changing his accusations, hammering at his enemies with the vaguest evidence. But for a lot of Americans who felt they had paid their dues in poverty and war and wanted a safe, normal, happy life, that was just fine. Joe McCarthy wasn’t one to wait around for the enemy to attack or to gather every little fact about egghead conspirators; he was going to pound first and ask questions later. As McCarthy put it, one of his childhood chores had been to “dig out and destroy” skunks. “It was a dirty, foul, unpleasant, smelly job. And sometimes after it was done, people did not like us to sit next to them in church.” That was just like exposing Communists. Joe might bend some rules, speak too loud, beat up the wrong guy. He might wrinkle some noses in the rare air of the Senate. McCarthy didn’t care. “Some people,” he said, “have told me that I shouldn’t get so rough. . . . As long as I am in the United States Senate . . . I don’t intend to treat traitors like gentlemen.” For the people who liked McCarthy and hated Commie skunks, half-dirty accusations that were half true were true enough. That left the one woman in the Senate to challenge him.
Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was a moderate Republican and quite ready to believe that Communists and homosexuals had infiltrated the State Department. But she could not abide Joe’s wild-swinging accusations. He was a barroom brawler, and she was a New England lady. And so, on June 1, 1950, she stood up in the Senate and made her declaration of conscience. “The American people,” she insisted, “are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.” In the heat of the anti-Communist fury, basic American rights were being lost: “The right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us doesn’t? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in.”
Twelve years after her Declaration of Conscience, Margaret Chase Smith ran for the Republican Party nomination for president, the first time a woman had sought the nomination from either major party. She lost to the eventual candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater.
Senator Smith defined America as a place of argument, dissent, and protest, not a land to be governed by fear and “thought control.” She was exactly like Louis Post protecting innocent immigrants from deportation. But at the time, almost all her Senate colleagues abandoned her. McCarthy was too popular, and McCarthyism — angry anti-Communism — was a tide no one wanted to buck.
When McCarthy, with rising polls at his back, clashed with Smith, the voice of conscience, Hoover not only fed documents to the rabid senator; he also doctored some of them so that they could not be traced back to the FBI. If we look back with the eyes of a historian, we might say that McCarthy was a lying bully; Hoover was a deceitful, manipulative lawbreaker; Smith, Tydings, and the citizens who dared to join with them were the heroes. That is where the story used to end. But there is still another layer to this war of shadows, and it was not revealed until the 1990s. Beneath this evident clash between liars and people of conscience lay one more secret chamber. In fact, there had been far more Communist spies in Washington than liberals wanted to admit, and the man who knew that, for sure, was J. Edgar Hoover.
Soviet spies in America needed to communicate with their handlers back home, so they devised what should have been a perfect system. Each message was encoded, then encrypted by a method that would be used only once. Even if every single message was intercepted — and in fact that did happen for three years — there should have been no patterns for the Americans to analyze. Each message would have its own unique secret key. So, for example, if every cable read “Hello. How are you? I am fine. The spying is going well today,” a person who intercepted it would have no way to know what that meant, since each day every single letter, space, or punctuation mark could mean something different. “A” might be a letter one day, a number the next, and a placeholder on the third.
One of the decryptions from Venona. Notice the title-line reference to Enormous — the name the Soviets gave to their all-out campaign to obtain the secrets of the atomic bomb.
But by 1943, the Americans, aided by the British, learned that the Communists had been sloppy; they were getting such a flood of information that they sometimes reused the same encoding pattern. With three years of extremely careful and painstaking work, the code breakers of the Venona Project began to be able to read the Soviet cables. Some 2,900 notes originally sent between 1940 and 1948 were decoded; they are now on the Internet for anyone to read. But at the time, Venona was a top-secret project.
By 1948, Hoover knew about the Venona decryptions. President Truman, current evidence suggests, was never told. In each of the big flashpoint cases of the period — the revelations from “Carl” and other former spies, the Rosenberg trials and protests — Hoover knew more than the president.
As long as the Venona Project was active, it could not, of course, be made public. If the Soviets knew that the Americans had cracked their code, they would change it, as indeed they did when William Weisband, an American Communist who actually worked on the Venona Project, managed to pass on word of what was going on. But that meant that when liberal critics attacked testimony given in court, they were seeing only the tip of the iceberg. When Hoover claimed that the American Communist Party was the pawn of Stalin’s plan to undermine and ultimately overturn the government of the United States, he was not being a prisoner of his fears; he was passing along the essence of the secret that Venona revealed. The American Communist Party, as a very recent history book that incorporates the Venona decryptions makes clear, was an “auxiliary service to Soviet intelligence.”
Hoover, and even McCarthy, were right in some particulars: there were more spies in government t
han FDR’s administration cared to know about when “Carl” contacted them in 1939 or than Truman believed when his Republican enemies attacked him as soft on Communism eight years later. The Republicans were using the issue of Communism as a political ploy. But in fact the Communists had diligently infiltrated Washington. The Democrats were denying evidence and protecting old friends. The most recent count says that from the 1930s until the late 1940s, as many as five hundred Americans were directly assisting the Soviets, and they did real damage. They passed on information about secret weapons, from the atomic bomb to radar and sonar, and did their best to block America from learning Russia’s plans.
The woman in sunglasses on the left is Elizabeth Bentley, known as the Red Spy Queen. Like Chambers, she had been a Communist spy (code-named Umnitsa, meaning “clever girl”) but came forward, admitting her crimes and naming others. Here she is speaking to HUAC, while Alger Hiss, who denied all allegations against him until the day he died, sits at the same table, on the far right.
In what the National Security Agency itself calls “perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in U.S. history,” Weisband alone managed to blind our ability to read secret Soviet dispatches just before the Korean War, when Russia was plotting with the North Koreans.
But the anti-Communists were wrong in general — in spreading fear throughout the country, as the Democratic attorney general J. Howard McGrath did in 1950. “There are,” he warned, “today many Communists in America. They are everywhere — in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private business. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.” With scare words like that, anti-Communists had an easy way to bludgeon union activists, civil rights leaders, intellectuals, and artists.