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, the administration of President Truman, Voice of America, and a United States Army research laboratory. He tried to expose government employees as CPUSA members and security risks. With the highly publicized Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, McCarthy's support and popularity began to fade due to his lack of actual evidence and defendant convictions. 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.

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.

1. Wicker, Tom. Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy. New York: Harcourt, Inc.,

2006.

1. The life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography, Thomas C. Reeves
2. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, Ellen Schrecker