The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  He may have been holding a laundry list, a shopping list, or an old Christmas card list. Whatever it was, it cannot have been important, because afterward he threw it away. Back in Washington the following week, with half the capital demanding that he prove his charges, he would try desperately—without success—to find out exactly what he had said. He even tried appealing to ham radio operators in the area who might have made a recording of the speech. He found none.

  Desmond’s story appeared in the Intelligencer and was reprinted inside the Chicago Tribune and on the front page of the Denver Post. Three days were to pass before the New York Times published the senator’s charges. The Associated Press put two paragraphs of Desmond’s account on its B wire, however, and someone in the State Department read them, for when the senator changed planes in Denver a newspaperman told him the department wanted the names of those accused so that investigations could begin at once. McCarthy said he had been misquoted; he had spoken not of 205 Communists but of 205 “bad security risks.” The reporter asked if he might see the list. Of course, said the senator. Then he said he had left it in his baggage on the plane. The Denver Post has preserved a photograph showing McCarthy peering forlornly into his battered briefcase, searching for the fugitive list.

  ***

  Late in the afternoon of February 20 a three-bell quorum call sounded in the Senate, and Joe McCarthy strode out on the floor carrying the tan briefcase, now bulging. The Democrats had demanded evidence, and twice since his return to the capital he had assured newspapermen that if he couldn’t come up with it, he would resign. Now he was going to give the Senate one of the wildest evening sessions in its history. He had more than figures this time, though not much more. Lee had provided him with photostated copies of the 108 two-year-old dossiers prepared from State Department files for the House appropriations subcommittee. Of their subjects, only 40 still worked for the department. All had been subjected to a full field FBI investigation and cleared. Nevertheless, McCarthy stacked 81 obsolete dossiers on his desk and those of nearby senators and grandly announced that he had penetrated “Truman’s iron curtain of secrecy.”

  The next few minutes were awful. Shuffling the first folders, he said that he would identify them by number only. That in itself was suspicious—after all, anything said on the floor was privileged—but what followed was shocking. Spectators realized that McCarthy was looking at these dossiers for the first time. He had to pause before each, riffling through papers to see what it contained. Another man would have been embarrassed beyond endurance. Not McCarthy. He stood there almost six hours, carrying the absurd farce forward, shrugging heavily when the files baffled him but never yielding the floor.

  Some of his cases had nothing to do with the State Department. Numbers 21 through 26 worked for the Voice of America. Number 12 had once been employed by the Department of Commerce; McCarthy blandly conceded that he had no idea “where he is today. I frankly do not know.” Number 62 was “not important insofar as Communistic activities are concerned.” Of number 40 he said, “I do not have much information on this except that there is nothing in the files to disprove his Communist connections.” Number 72 had the senator stumped. It was significant, he lamely said, “in that it is the direct opposite of the cases I have been reading…. I do not confuse this man as being a Communist. This individual was very highly recommended by several witnesses as a high type of man, a democratic American who… opposed Communism.” (In addition, 72 had never worked for the State Department.) Astounded, Richard Rovere asked, “Could anything but sheer lunacy lead a man discussing 81 Communists to say that one of the Communists was an important example because he was not a Communist?”

  But McCarthy plodded on doggedly. Number 9 was the same as number 77. Numbers 15, 27, 37, and 59 did not exist—they were just empty folders. Numbers 13 and 78 had only applied for jobs. Number 14, who was “primarily a morals case,” appeared in the dossier of number 41. Number 52 was of note only because he worked for number 16—“who,” McCarthy said, with the tone of a man finding gold at last, was “one of the most dangerous espionage agents in the Department.”

  He wasn’t, of course. There wasn’t a spy in the lot. But by inserting a phrase in a file here, deleting another there, and embellishing the whole performance with spurious investigative paraphernalia, he created an impression of subversion among those who read their newspapers by studying the comics first, the sports page next, and then glancing carelessly through the headlines. Sometimes McCarthy’s alterations of truth in that February 20 performance were small. Three people “with Russian names” became “three Russians.” Words like “reportedly” and “allegedly” vanished; “may have been” and “may be” were replaced by “was” and “is”; “considerable derogatory information” was translated into “conclusive evidence of Communist activity.” Other changes were startling. Notations of FBI clearance were omitted or turned into FBI findings of guilt. If a “good American” had been turned away by State Department recruiting agents it was because they hired only Communists; the fact that the applicant may have been nearly seventy years old was unmentioned. The Republicans were aghast. Kenneth Wherry, the party’s floor leader, did what he could for McCarthy with parliamentary motions, but avoided identification with him. Taft, who hardly knew McCarthy, told reporters afterward, “It was a perfectly reckless performance.”

  By the following morning the obsolescence of the folders was known and revealed on front pages. Jubilant Senate Democrats caucused and instructed their majority leader, Scott Lucas of Illinois, to call for “a full and complete” inquiry into “whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are or have been employed by the Department of State.” Since the other Republicans were keeping their distance from McCarthy, and since he had insisted that he would welcome an investigation, Lucas’s Senate Resolution 231 passed unanimously. Wherry did try to refer it to the Appropriations Committee, whose right-wing chairman, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, would have seen to it that liberal Democrats were given the least possible aid and comfort. That move failed on a straight party vote, and the matter went to Foreign Relations. There Tom Connally of Texas appointed a tough committee chaired by Millard E. Tydings, the aggressive patrician who had dominated Maryland politics for a quarter-century. Even before the naming of his fellow members (Brien McMahon of Connecticut and Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island, Democrats; Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Bourke B. Hickenlooper of Iowa, Republicans), McCarthy was calling it a kangaroo court. Tydings promised “neither a witch hunt, nor a whitewash.” In private, however, he spoke patronizingly of Wisconsin’s junior senator as “that boy.” He had no way of knowing that this would be the first of five senatorial attempts to investigate McCarthy’s charges, none of which would find anyone at the bottom of it all except McCarthy himself.

  ***

  Of course, he had some help. Nobody, not even Joe McCarthy, could build that big a bonfire all alone. No congressional endeavor can get very far without lobbyists of some sort, and the fact that McCarthy had phoned a Chicago Tribune correspondent before flying to Wheeling is an indication that he knew where help lay. The role of investigator Lee is another sign. From the moment McCarthy’s star began to rise over West Virginia, these men and their allies mounted a massive rescue operation, amassing names and data which would be available to him whenever he needed help. They hadn’t chosen him, but he had chosen their issue. No alliance formed to influence legislation lands a U.S. Senator every day; when one does, the last thing it wants is to see him discredited.

  This was the pressure group known as the China Lobby. For the most part it consisted of men employed by right-wing newspaper publishers: Willard Edwards and Walter Trohan of Colonel McCormick’s Tribune; George Waters of the McCormick-owned Washington Times-Herald; Fulton Lewis Jr., whose broadcasts were heard over McCormick’s Mutual radio network; Lawrence Kerley of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal-American; Hearst reporters Howard Rushmore, Ken Hunter
, and Ray Richards; and two Hearst columnists, George Sokolsky and J. B. Matthews. Matthews owned a copy of “Appendix Nine,” the vigilante equivalent of anti-Semitism’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Put together in 1944 by investigators for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Appendix Nine comprised seven volumes containing 22,000 names gathered indiscriminately from letterheads and programs of organizations whose patriotism had been challenged, from informers, and from ultraconservative pamphlets published in the 1930s. Even the House Committee on Un-American Activities had thought it outrageous. The full membership had called it back and suppressed it, but Matthews had kept a pirated copy. Armed with it, McCarthy could talk endlessly, and anything missing from it could usually be acquired from Alfred Kohlberg, founder of the China Policy Association and chief patron of the China Lobby. For thirty years Kohlberg had profitably imported Oriental textiles from the mainland; with the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek he had been cut off, and now he funneled contributions from his considerable fortune into such publications as Counter-Attack, the Freeman, and Isaac Don Levine’s Plain Talk.

  These forces had been wandering around Washington looking for a leader. Now they were McCarthy’s, and for the most part they served him well. His adversaries were formidable: the Democratic leadership on the Hill, President Truman (who said of him off the record that “the son of a bitch ought to be impeached”), and virtually every journalist to the left of McCormick and Hearst. In that first onrush of McCarthy, Joseph and Stewart Alsop were particularly effective, ridiculing the M.I.5 theatrics in McCarthy’s office—how during phone conversations he would strike the mouthpiece with a pencil “to jar the needle of any listening device,” and how toward the end of a telephone conversation obviously staged for the benefit of his interviewers, he gripped the receiver and muttered: “Yeah, yeah, I can listen, but I can’t talk. Get me? You really got the goods on the guy? Yeah? Well, I tell you. Just mention this sort of casual to Number One, and get his reaction. Okay? Okay, I’ll contact you later.”

  Walter Lippmann reported the impact of the senator’s pyrotechnics on the Secretary of State: “No American official who has represented this government abroad in great affairs, not even Wilson in 1918, has ever been so gravely injured at home.” Many old liberal publications such as the Baltimore Sun were strangely reticent in McCarthy’s first year, but the Washington Post fought him every inch of the way; so did the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; and Time climbed on his back and stayed there. Probably the greatest stroke on either side of the battle was the work of Herbert Block (“Herblock”), the Post’s cartoonist. Block created an eponym by crudely lettering “McCarthyism” on a barrel of mud shakily supported by ten mud-bespattered buckets.

  Yet the senator and his gamy henchmen always seemed to be gaining. Lippmann’s stately prose was a pale thing beside McCarthy’s description of the country’s majority party: “The Democratic label is now the property of men and women who have… bent to the whispered pleas from the lips of traitors… men and women who wear the political label stitched with the idiocy of a Truman, rotted by the deceit of an Acheson, corrupted by the red slime of a [Harry Dexter] White.” Even Herblock’s contribution was turned around when Fulton Lewis told his listeners, “To many Americans, McCarthyism is Americanism,” and the senator, addressing a Wisconsin audience, said, “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.”3

  None of his sloganeering and billingsgate would have mattered much had it not been for one painful fact: McCarthy had kindled a fire in America’s grass roots. Even as his facade was torn asunder, as his fellow senators took his accusations apart one by one and exposed his lies two by two, till he sat exposed (and grinning) before them, his support grew and stiffened across the land. The evidence was unmistakable. Gallup consistently found that 50 percent of the public had a “favorable opinion” of the senator and thought he was helping the country; only 29 percent disapproved of him and 21 percent had no opinion at all. Reporters who accompanied McCarthy on post-Wheeling campaign trips were shocked by the tributes to him, and those on the Hill who discounted their stories were confronted by the most convincing attestation of all: the pyramids of rumpled dollar bills and change which arrived in McCarthy’s mail each morning.

  McCarthy invested the money in soybean futures while his fellow Republicans began having second and then third thoughts. Wherry began throwing an arm around Joe’s husky shoulders. William E. Jenner asked to be photographed with him. Homer Ferguson exchanged subversive lists with him. Owen Brewster and Karl E. Mundt offered the services of their staffs. Hickenlooper, sitting on the Tydings committee, began coming down hard on the side of his embattled colleague from Wisconsin. Over in the House, a District of Columbia subcommittee took testimony on one of McCarthy’s most preposterous claims, “links between homosexuality and Communism,” notably a Soviet plot to ensnare “women employees of the State Department by enticing them into a life of lesbianism.” Finally the last GOP pillar fell. The possibility of unearthing another bona-fide Democratic traitor who would do to the administration’s China policy what Hiss had done to the New Deal was too much for Robert A. Taft, and that monument of integrity announced that “the pro-Communist policies of the State Department fully justify Joe McCarthy in his demand for an investigation.” He then said to McCarthy, “If one case doesn’t work, try another.” As though Joe needed to be told.

  ***

  On March 21 the conjurer’s bag of tricks was empty, or so it appeared. Then McCarthy concocted the greatest prank of all. He told the Tydings committee that he was about to name the “top Russian espionage agent” in the United States. The committee assembled for an emergency session. There McCarthy blandly admitted that he had nothing new. “There’s nothing mysterious about this one,” he said. “This has all been put in the record already, plus some exhibits.” And so it had. Owen Lattimore, a professor at Johns Hopkins and specialist in Asian studies—he was at that moment in the interior of Afghanistan—was neither a Communist nor an employee of the State Department. He had advised the government in Far Eastern matters, and the cold realism of his reports on Chiang Kai-shek had aroused the wrath of the China lobbyists, particularly Kohlberg. Everything there was to know about the man was known on the Hill. All the same, McCarthy informed the incredulous Tydings that Lattimore was “definitely an espionage agent,” that his file was “explosive.” He added: “If you crack this case, it will be the biggest espionage case in the history of this country.” The following morning he laid all this before the press, withholding only Lattimore’s name. He said, “I am willing to stand or fall on this one. If I am wrong on this, I think the subcommittee would be justified in not taking my other cases too seriously.” The man whose name was in his pocket, he said, was that of the superspy who had been “Alger Hiss’s boss in the espionage ring in the State Department.”

  That was on a Tuesday. By the end of the week Lattimore was being mentioned with increasing frequency in the Senate press gallery, and on Sunday, March 26, Drew Pearson broke the story. McCarthy, meantime, was going into one of his disappearing acts, vanishing only to return with an entirely different charge. Summoned from Afghanistan, Lattimore had sent word that he really wasn’t the top Russian espionage agent in the United States, and he was flying back to clear up any misunderstandings on that score. But McCarthy had begun to say that he, too, had been misunderstood. “I fear in the case of Lattimore,” he said on the Senate floor the following Thursday, “I have perhaps placed too much stress on the question of whether or not he has been an espionage agent.” What he had really meant to say was that the professor was “the chief architect of our Far Eastern policy.” The man was a “policy risk,” McCarthy said, and then he said, “I believe you can ask almost any schoolchild who the architect of our Far Eastern policy is, and he will say, ‘Owen Lattimore.’” The press gallery, where men were still trying to get information about the obscure professor, rocked with laughter.

  Lattimore test
ified before the committee under klieg lights on April 6. The crowd in the marble-columned Senate caucus room, the largest since Wendell Willkie’s appearance there to endorse lend-lease nine years earlier, heard the witness deny every allegation. He produced personal letters from Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang expressing profound gratitude for his services. Tydings then revealed that four members of the committee had studied his loyalty file and found no evidence of subversion in it. Lattimore received an ovation and departed. Four days later McCarthy produced Louis Budenz, a former managing editor of the Daily Worker, who swore that in 1944 his superiors in the party had told him “to consider Owen Lattimore as a Communist.”

  The right-wing senators crowed. There, they said triumphantly; Joe had proved it; Budenz had been Lattimore’s Whittaker Chambers. Two conservative newspapermen were briefly gulled. William S. White reported that Budenz had been “officially informed” that Lattimore was a traitor, and Arthur Krock observed that “many fair-minded persons” were changing their minds about McCarthy. They didn’t keep them changed long. Abe Fortas and Paul Porter, Lattimore’s lawyers, led Budenz through a devastating cross-examination. Yes, he conceded, in four years of FBI interviews he had told everything he knew about the Communist party. No, he had never mentioned Owen Lattimore. Yes, in 1947 he had advised a State Department security officer that Lattimore was not a Communist. Yes, in early 1949 he had written an article for Collier’s magazine denying that Lattimore was a Communist. Yes, it was true that Owen Lattimore’s name had appeared in none of Budenz’s books about American Communists. How did he reconcile all this with his present testimony? He replied weakly that “in another book which I am writing Mr. Lattimore is very prominent.” He stepped down and was succeeded by two other ex-Communists, Bella V. Dodd and Freda Utley. Miss Dodd ridiculed the notion that Lattimore was a Communist. Miss Utley was hazier, but she was certain he hadn’t been a spy—and when it came to that, even Budenz found the allegation of espionage startling. McCarthy was unrepentant. He set his sights on another old China hand who, he averred, had written “a book which sets forth his pro-Communist answer to the problems of Asia as clearly as Hitler’s Mein Kampf set forth his solutions for the problems of Europe.” Questioned after reporters had left, he admitted that he hadn’t read the book. In fact, he didn’t even know the title. He promised to look it up. Once more he had been confuted; once more his name was in all the headlines.