Joseph McCarthy

Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin between 1947 and 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public figure to stand up against a perceived communist infiltration of the United States. He was noted for claiming that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the federal government. Ultimately, his aggressive anticommunist tactics led to his being censured by the United States Senate. The term "McCarthyism," coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar dogmatic pursuits.

Early life

Born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, McCarthy earned a law degree at Marquette University in 1935 and was elected as a circuit judge in 1939, the youngest in state history.

At age 33, McCarthy volunteered for the United States Marine Corps and served during World War II, although he was still a circuit judge at that time. He maintained his post even while he was away for years. He served mainly as a briefing officer, who was responsible for informing pilots of their mission. (4) McCarthy was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952, but it was later discovered that he had exaggerated the number of missions he had flown in order to be eligible for this award. It was later revealed that he had exaggerated other aspects of his service as well (1,2).

While serving in the Pacific he ran in the Republican primary for Senate in 1944, but lost to Alexander Wiley, a longtime independent incumbent. He successfully ran again two years later defeating Robert M. La Follette, Jr.

McCarthy citations

In 1947, it was apparent that no individual in the U.S. Government realized that evidence of massive that evidence of Soviet espionage within the government was developing on twin tracks. There was an FBI counterintelligence investigation which empanelled a grand jury in New York, and the Army Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall reading Soviet cipher decrypts It was a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing. So when McCarthy later made charges that the Truman administration knowingly protected Soviet agents, on the surface, this appeared to large sectors of the American public as true."

• Beginning 24 June 1948 the first major crisis of the Cold War exposed the rift in the Alliance of World War II which had defeated Germany, when Soviet troops blockaded access points to Berlin, sparking the first Berlin Crisis, and lasting a year.

• On 16 August Harry Dexter White, the first head of the International Monetary Fund, a keystone post war institution, died of a heart attack three days after denying involvement with KGB during World War II before the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). His involvement was later positively determined by the FBI through evidence gathered by the Venona project as a Soviet agent code named "Jurist".[1]

• In late summer of 1949, on 29 August the Soviet atomic bomb project was revealed when it exploded a replica of Fat Man; the Soviet Union had gained nuclear technology by espionage from the United States, which spent $4 billion dollars (about $48 billion in today's dollars) to develop during World War II.

• Later that fall, on 1 October Maoist forces were victorious after the effective subversion of President Roosevelt’s support for the Chinese Nationalist government during World War II.

• On 21 January 1950, Alger Hiss, the General Secretary of the United Nations Charter meeting, was convicted of perjury for testimony before HUAC regarding espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. That same month, physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed in Great Britain to espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union while working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory during the War.

• On 25 June, the Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea; President Truman authorized deployment of American troops while the Allied Powers provided little or no assistance. The United States essentially stood alone in a confrontation that had the prospect of nuclear weapons being used — nuclear weapons technology that had been given to the enemy by US citizens, some within the government. Three weeks later, on 17 July, Julius Rosenberg was arrested on charges of espionage regarding the transfer of technology to the Soviet Union to build the atomic weapon.

• In May 1951, two members of the Cambridge Five — Donald MacLean, Second Secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., and Guy Burgess — defected to Moscow after it was discovered MacLean transmitted information on the atom bomb from the British Embassy to the Soviet Union during World War II.

McCarthy sought to characterize President Truman and the Democratic party as soft on or even in league with the Communists. McCarthy's allegations fell flat with Truman who was unaware of Venona project decrypts which corroborated Elizabeth Bentley's debriefing after her defection from the Communists.

It was McCarthy's charges of Communist infiltration of the State Department that shot him into prominence. During his famous February 9th, 1950 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia at the Colonnade Room of the McClure Hotel he stated:

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.”

The State Department denied McCarthy’s claims. In a radio interview in Utah the following day, McCarthy had changed the number to 57, and on February 11, in Reno at the Mapes Hotel, McCarthy again invoked the number 57 instead of 205, and named Robert Service, Gustavo Duran, Mary Jane Keeney and Harlow Shapley as being on the list. Several days later, when McCarthy was speaking to the Senate in Washington DC, the number had changed to 81. .”

The source for the original number McCarthy offered, “205,” turned out to be a letter written in 1946 by Secretary of State James Byrnes in reply to a question from Democratic Congressman Adolph Sabath about the screening of several thousand federal employees in the wake of post-war reassignments. There was no mention of either Communist party membership or names in that letter. The names McCarthy later offered in Reno came from a 1948 report by an ex-FBI agent Robert E. Lee on “incidents of inefficiencies” in the state department that had subsequently been passed on to the HUAC.

Thomas C. Reeves painstakingly well-documented 1982 biography of McCarthy includes part of the exchange in the Senate between Senator McCarthy and Democratic Majority Leader Scott Lucas on February 20th, during which McCarthy offered evidence for his claims by going through the Lee list. There were marked differences between what the Lee report actually said, and what Senator McCarthy claimed on the Senate floor. For instance, the Lee list read:

“The subject was described in reports by various witnesses as interested in communism as an experiment but his political philosophy is in keeping with liberal New Deal social reform under democratic processes of government; ‘he is a very ardent New Dealer; he is a live liberal;’ but an informant who also lived in the International House at one time said ‘He was one of those accused of being a Red here but the people who do get up and talk communism are refuted.’”

McCarthy read this as “He was described in reports by various witnesses as interested in communism and by his roommate at the International House as a communist.”

Where the Lee list read "This employee is with the office of Information and Educational Exchange in New York City. His application is very sketchy. There has ben no investigation. (C-8) is a reference. Though he is 43 years of age, his file reflects no history prior to June 1941. Case is awaiting a report from the New York Office."

McCarthy read: "This individual is 43 years of age. He is with the Office of Information and Education. According to the file, he is a known Communist. I am not evaluating the information myself, I am merely giving you what is in the file. This individual also found his way into the Voice of America broadcast. Apparently the easiest way to get in is to be a known Communist."

McCarthy made charges of Communist infiltration of the State Department and the administration of President Truman and a United States army research laboratory. In 1953 McCarthy claimed that employees at Voice of America, were engaging in deliberate sabotage, selecting sites for transmitters that would make it easier for the Soviets to jam signals. Attention was also focused on the content of VOA broadcasts, which in Truman’s time had a policy of “balanced presentation” that did not exclude communist writings. VOA overseas libraries were scrutinized, and among the several hundred books that ended up being purged from the libraries at the urging of McCarthy’s staff were works by Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Jean Paul Sartre, and Theodore H. White.

The VOA hearings that resulted often involved closely questioning witnesses, not about the transmitters, but about their past and present political or religious orientations. Director of Religious Programming Roger Lyons was asked if he was or had ever been an unbeliever. Lyons insisted “I am not an atheist. I believe in God.” When he mentioned that he had studied in Switzerland under associates of Carl Jung, McCarthy asked if “this professor” attended a church or a synagogue.

Reed Harris, acting chief of the IIA, was repeatedly questioned over three days of testimony about statements he’d made in a book he’d written twenty one years before as a college student at Columbia University. (The offending statement had been the assertion that communists had the right to teach.) Harris resigned from his job shortly after appearing before the committee.

Dr. Julius Hlavaty, a teacher of Mathematics at Bronx High School and the first Chairman of that prestigious target school’s mathematics department, was called as a witness because of a broadcast he’d made in 1952. After being questioned about his personal beliefs and asked if he were a Communist, Dr. Hlavaty invoked his rights under the Fifth Amendment, which resulted in his automatic dismissal from the New York School system.

One potential witness, Voice of America engineer, Raymond Kaplan, was so frightened by the prospect of testifying before McCarthy’s committee that he committed suicide after writing a lengthy suicide note. “You see, once the dogs are set on you everything you have done since the beginning of time is suspect,” he wrote. “I have never done anything that I consider wrong but I can’t take the pressure upon my shoulders any more.”

No evidence of espionage was found in the VOA investigation, though hundreds of employees were fired, some overseas libraries were closed, and some foreign language programming discontinued.

McCarthy’s 1953 investigation into the United States Army Signal Corps Center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, was prompted by a defecting East German Scientist’s claim of having seen microfilmed documents from that center..” An investigation had led officials to the conclusion that he was unreliable, but Senator McCarthy’s subcommittee still began holding hearings on the case, suspending, among others, researcher Aaron H. Coleman. Coleman had been suspended in 1946 for not keeping classified documents he’d taken home in a safe with a three combination lock. Army officials had determined that the documents, which were of little importance, had been used for personal study rather than any attempt at passing on information, but McCarthy declared that Coleman, who was guilty of having been a college classmate of Julius Rosenberg, “may have been the direct link between the laboratories and the Rosenberg Spy Ring.

The Army averred that no documents were missing and its own investigation had found no evidence of a spy ring, maintaining that what the defecting scientist had seen had probably been Signal Corp data that had been shared with the Russians during the War under Lend Lease. Still, the investigation went on. When electrical engineer Carl Greenblum broke down and wept during Roy Cohn’s cross-examination and had to be led, visibly upset, from the closed door session, McCarthy announced to the press that “I have just received word that the witness admits he was lying the first time and now wants to tell the truth.” Greenblum’s name was leaked to the press and he and his family were harassed, a hammer and sickle was painted on the door of their house. Greenblum explained that he'd been upset about the death of his mother two days before, and that after he’d broken down he’d “sent word that I wanted to go back and tell my story from the beginning. That may have been interpreted to mean I was lying but that certainly was not the case.” Greenblum was fired from his job, but reinstated in 1958.

The fifteen hearings resulted in no indictments of any individuals, and established only that a few Communists had worked at Fort Monmouth from 1941 to 1947 – something that was already known by the Army -- and that there had been a small communist cell at one of their subcontractors in Nutley New Jersey. There was no substantive evidence to connect these groups or individuals to espionage.

What ultimately destroyed McCarthy’s career were the famous Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. McCarthy had already alienated the Army with his treatment of General Ralph Zwicker, the Commander of Camp Kilmer who had angered McCarthy by refusing to defy an executive order that forbade him to release names to McCarthy during McCarthy’s investigation into the promotion of an army dentist named Irving Peress who had invoked the Fifth Amendment while filling out the military loyalty questionnaire. McCarthy had implied Zwicker was lying and strongly implied that this World War II veteran, who had served at Normandy and the Ardennes and had been awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters and Arrowhead, the British Distinguished Service Order, and the French Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre with Palm, and that he was “not fit to wear that uniform.”

The focus of the Army-McCarthy hearings was the accusation that McCarthy had sought special treatment for an army private named David Schine, a friend of Roy Cohn’s who had been added to McCarthy’s committee as an unpaid consultant and who, it was claimed, had through this association enjoyed special privileges. It is unclear what Schine’s qualifications were for being on McCarthy’s committee other than his friendship with Cohn.

From the day he addressed the Senate in 1950, paraphrasing excerpts from the Lee List, Joseph McCarthy had based much of his momentum on showmanship. In the Army McCarthy hearings he met his match in the army’s counsel, a 62-year-old Republican attorney from Boston named Joseph Welch who succeeded in baiting McCarthy into displays of open sarcasm and malice. As a result, the press coverage that had, before, been McCarthy’s best friend now became his worst enemy.

The most famous exchange from the hearings is the “have you no decency” speech that many people today see as the fatal blow to Senator McCarthy’s public career. It happened while Welch was cross-examining Roy Cohn about the work Schine had had done with Cohn for the committee. When the interrogation seemed to be going badly for Cohn, McCarthy excused himself, left, then returned and, contrary to an agreement earlier made with Welch, launched into an attack on a young law associate of Welch’s, Fred Fisher. Cohn was horrified by this breach, and sent McCarthy a note reading, “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.” (The agreement had been that if Welch would not bring up Cohn’s military history, McCarthy would not bring up Fred Fisher.) McCarthy acknowledged this only with the comment, “I know Mr. Cohn would rather it have me go into this," then went on to say:

“In view of Mr. Welch’s request that the information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing any work for the Communist party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher whom he recommended, initially, to do work on this committee, who has been for a number of years a member of an organization which was named, oh, years and years ago, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party…I am not asking you t this time to explain why you tried to foist him on this committee. Whether you knew he was a member of that Communist organization or not, I don’t know. I assume you did not, Mr. Welch, because I get the impression that, while you are quite an actor, you play for a laugh, I don’t think you have any conception of the danger of the Communist party.”

This was, as Roy Cohn knew, a miscalculation, likely only to genuinely infuriate an opponent who was not going to become flummoxed or lose control as past opponents had. It was a bit of showmanship – McCarthy knew full well about the agreement and knew Welch was aware of Fisher’s past – being unwisely used against a superior showman.

“Until this moment,” Welch responded, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…” Welch went on to explain that he had discussed Fred Fisher’s membership in the Lawyer’s Guild with Fisher, and had decided not to recommend him for the committee because he feared that membership would be used against Fisher. He concluded with the now famous words, “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?”

Later in 1954, a special Senate committee was appointed to study and evaluate McCarthy's methods and actions. The committee exonerated McCarthy on all substantive charges (citation needed). Following the recommendations of this committee, the full Senate voted to censure Senator McCarthy by a vote of 65 to 22 (the votes for censure included all the Democratic senators and about half the Republican senators) for failing to cooperate with the subcommittee that was investigating him, and for insults to the committee that was trying to censure him , making him one of the few senators ever to be disciplined in this fashion. [2] McCarthy died in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, at the age of 48. The cause of his death was acute hepatitis from smoking and drinking.

McCarthy’s most enduring legacy may be in giving a name to the conflation of dissent with disloyalty, a tendency to cite criticism of an administration as if it were evidence of treason, or even treason itself – “McCarthyism.” Perhaps an inevitable result of the Cold War era, “McCarthyism” was the acceleration of something that had existed before McCarthy became famous, and waxed and waned long after he had dropped from public sight.

VENONA files

In 1995, when the VENONA transcripts were declassified, further detailed information was revealed about Soviet Union espionage in the United States. VENONA specifically references at least 349 people in the United States—including citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents—who may have cooperated in various ways with Soviet intelligence agencies. It is generally believed that McCarthy had no access to VENONA intelligence, but VENONA supports the view that some of the individuals investigated by McCarthy were indeed Soviet agents. These are several prominent examples:

• Mary Jane Keeney, a United Nations employee, and her husband Philip Keeney, who worked in the Office of Strategic Services;
• Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to President Roosevelt;
• Virginius Frank Coe, Director of Division of Monetary Research, U.S. Treasury; Technical Secretary at the Bretton Woods Conference; International Monetary Fund
• William Ludwig Ullman, delegate to the United Nations Charter Conference and Bretton Woods Conference;
• Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Chief Planning Technician, Procurement Division, United States Department of the Treasury and head of the Silvermaster network of spies;
• Harold Glasser, U.S. Treasury Representative to the Allied High Commission in Italy;
• Four staff members of the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee, a Senate subcommittee on labor rights.
• Allan Rosenberg, Chief of the Economic Institution Staff, Foreign Economic Administration; Counsel to the National Labor Relations Board;

Venona transcripts confirm the Senate Civil Liberties Subcommittee, chaired by former Senator Robert LaFollette, Jr., whom McCarthy defeated for election in 1946, had at least four staff members working on behalf of the KGB. Chief Councel of the Committee John Abt; Charles Kramer, who served on three other Congressional Committees; Allen Rosenberg, who also served on the National Labor Relations Board, Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA) and later argued cases before the United States Supreme Court; and Charles Flato, who served on the BEW and FEA, all were CPUSA members and associated with the Comintern.

While the underlying premise of Communists in the government was true, many of McCarthy's targets were not complicit in espionage. Recent scholarship has established of 159 persons investigated between 1950 and 1952, there is substantial evidence nine had assisted Soviet espionage using evidence from Venona or other sources. Of the remainder, while not being directly complicit in espionage, many were considered security risks.

Support from Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter has argued that McCarthy was "a great American patriot. [3]"

References

1. Herman, A. (1999). Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator. Free Press, p 30. ISBN 0-684-83625-4.
2. Morgan, T. (Nov./Dec. 2003). Judge Joe: How the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history became the country's most notorious senator. Legal Affairs.
3. Anticommunism's Two Faces, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Foreign Affairs, January/February 1996; as review of Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. Richard Gid Powers. New York: The Free Press, 1995.
4. Wicker, Tom. Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006.
5. Wicker, Tom. Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2006.
6. The life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography, Thomas C. Reeves
7. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, Ellen Schrecker
8. Time Magazine
9. McCarthy Hearings, 1953-54 Vol 1.
10. McCarthy Hearings, 1953-54 Vol 3.
11. Operations of the MGB Residency at New York, 1944-45
12. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html.