The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

by James Cross Giblin

  As the Tydings hearings continued, a number of Communists and former Communists testified that they had heard this and that about Lattimore's affiliations. But none of them provided solid evidence that he was a member of the party, let alone that the China expert had also been a Soviet spy.

  An objective evaluation of the Lattimore case, and Joe's overall campaign, would have to conclude that, almost three months after Joe's Wheeling speech, not one of his charges of Communist subversion in the State Department had been proved. But Congress and the nation weren't in an objective frame of mind in the late spring of 1950. A poll of Minnesota residents revealed that 41 percent believed Joe's claims that Communists were active in the State Department, while 29 percent did not and 30 percent were undecided. On the national level, a Gallup poll showed that 39 percent of those interviewed believed McCarthy's accusations were "a good thing," while 29 percent thought they were "doing harm" and 32 percent were undecided.

  With figures like those in hand, a majority of Republican leaders was convinced that Communist infiltration of the U.S. government would be a key issue in the coming midterm election of 1950, midway between the presidential election of 1948 and the next presidential contest in 1952.

  13. War Breaks Out in Korea

  AS THE TYDINGS HEARINGS dragged on, Democrats claimed that there was no basis to the charges Joe had first voiced in his Wheeling speech. "The time has now come to call a spade a spade," Senator Matthew Neely of West Virginia said in early May 1950. "If there is no foundation to this charge of 205 Communists in the State Department, I think the senator [McCarthy] will have destroyed himself in the Senate and will have destroyed his usefulness to the country."

  Joe erupted in rage. "Let's be done with this silly numbers game. If a word I said is not true, the President has only to open the loyalty files to show it!"

  In response, several Democrats went so far as to suggest that Joe himself should be the subject of an investigation as to whether his claims "constituted a hoax, a deceit, or a fraud ... upon the American people." To which Joe's ally Sen. Wherry retorted, "The American people want an investigation not of Mr. McCarthy but of subversives in the State Department!"

  Late the next day, pressured by Sen. Tydings and other Democrats who were eager to disprove Joe's case once and for all, President Truman agreed to open the loyalty files. But only those of the 71 cases McCarthy had introduced in his speech to the Senate on February 20 would be opened—and only to the members of the Tydings subcommittee. Sen. Tydings announced that the members would examine the files at the White House, and would not be allowed to take notes. These precautions were intended to ensure that the contents of the files would not be leaked to the press. Now that Joe had gotten what he had so often demanded, he had to figure out what to do next. He knew what Truman and Tydings knew—that he had obtained the names from the Lee report, which summarized the information in the State Department loyalty files. All three also knew there was no additional evidence in the files that would support his wild assertions. So as he always did when he found himself in a tight spot, Joe bluffed. In a speech to the Midwest Council of Young Republicans on May 7, he claimed that the files the senators would be looking at were "phony," that they had been tampered with—"raped," according to Joe—since he had learned about them.

  Meanwhile, the Tydings subcommittee had begun to go through the 71 files. In the end, Chairman Tydings and the three other Democrats on the subcommittee would read all of them. The two Republican members, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, would not be so thorough. Lodge examined only twelve of the files, Hickenlooper only nine. Perhaps they believed what Joe had said—that the contents had been altered.

  At the same time, the subcommittee began closed hearings on the case of John Stewart Service, another of the people in the Lee report whom McCarthy had accused of having ties to the Communist Party. Service, the son of American missionaries for the YMCA, was born and grew up in China, becoming fluent in the Chinese language. His parents returned briefly to the United States in the 1920s, and John graduated from high school in Berkeley, California. From there, he went on to Oberlin College in Ohio and upon graduation entered the Foreign Service. Because of his background, Service was assigned to the U.S. diplomatic corps in China. In a few years he rose from a clerk's position to the post of second secretary at the American Embassy in Chungking, the Chinese capital during World War II.

  Service gradually became disillusioned with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government, calling it "fascist" and "undemocratic" in reports he wrote for his superiors. In 1944, Service accompanied a U.S. Army observation group that traveled to Yenan, where the Chinese Communists had their headquarters. He was the first State Department official to visit this remote region in western China. While in Yenan, Service met and interviewed many of the Communist leaders, including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (spelled Chou En-lai at that time). He was favorably impressed by much of what he saw and heard, writing in one memorandum that "the Communists are in China to stay, and China's destiny is not Chiang's but theirs."

  John Stewart Service in 1948. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

  Back in Chungking, Service came to believe that all-out civil war was inevitable in China once Japan had been defeated. He urged the State Department to adopt an evenhanded policy toward the Nationalists and the Communists rather than continue to endorse Chiang's government exclusively. The new U.S. ambassador at that time, Patrick Hurley, a staunch supporter of Chiang, totally rejected Service's recommendations. Going further, Hurley asked that Service and others in the embassy who shared his views be recalled at once to Washington.

  John Service returned to Washington and the State Department in the spring of 1945. Shortly thereafter, he met and befriended Philip Jaffe, editor of Amerasia magazine, which focused on U.S. relations with Asian nations. He agreed to share with Jaffe some of the memos about Chiang's forces and the Communists that he had written while stationed in China. Service said later that he believed Jaffe was simply an interested journalist, and that he did not know that Jaffe was under surveillance by the FBI as a suspected Communist.

  On June 6, 1945, to his great surprise, Service was arrested and charged with "conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act" by passing confidential State Department documents to Philip Jaffe. The Justice Department submitted its evidence against him to a federal grand jury. After studying the material carefully, the jury members voted 23–0 not to indict Service. They stated that none of the papers Service had given Jaffe were classified. J. Edgar Hoover, joined by conservatives in the House and Senate and the right-wing media, refused to accept the grand jury's verdict, then or later. They called it a "whitewash," and five years later Joe McCarthy used the Service case as a prime example of Communist influence in the State Department.

  This fresh charge led to Service's being called upon to defend himself once again, this time before the Tydings subcommittee. At his request, the hearing was open to the press and public. Service recounted in detail his friendly relations with Philip Jaffe and said he had lent the Amerasia editor nine or ten personal copies of memos he had written while in China. He emphasized that they were "factual in nature and did not contain discussions of United States political or military policy." While he admitted to the subcommittee that he was probably guilty of "indiscretion," he insisted that he was innocent of the charge of treason. And he heatedly denied that he was a Communist or a Communist sympathizer.

  The Democrats on the subcommittee responded favorably to Service's candid, straightforward manner, but Joe did not. In a speech in Janesville, Wisconsin, McCarthy said: "Service was arrested by the FBI in connection with the theft of hundreds of secret government documents.... At the time Service and his five codefendants were arrested, J. Edgar Hoover, according to a Washington newspaper, said, 'This is a 100 percent airtight case of espionage.' But Service did not go to jail." Joe summarized his charges against Service with a question to his audience. "Do you want on your payroll
a man who admits turning government secrets over to a Communist, and who was caught by the FBI giving secret military information to a convicted Communist thief of government secrets?"

  The audience greeted McCarthy's remarks with loud applause. Most of them probably had no means of judging whether he had conveyed the facts of the Service case or doctored them to suit his own partisan purposes. A majority of those present had voted enthusiastically to send Joe to the Senate. Now, like many other Americans across the country, they were proud that he had dedicated himself to getting rid of all the "Commies" in the government. As a woman in St. Paul, Minnesota, put it, "If it wasn't for courage like McCarthy's, we'd be run like Stalin runs Russia."

  Not all the members of his own party marched in step with Joe, however. Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine surprised colleagues, the press, and the public when she rose in the Senate on June 1, 1950, to deliver a speech lamenting the wild accusations and personal attacks that had marked so many recent Senate debates. Although she never mentioned Sen. McCarthy by name, it was clear that he was the chief target of her attack.

  Margaret Chase Smith had long been recognized for her firm principles and independent thinking. She came to Washington in 1940 as a replacement for her late husband, Clyde H. Smith, in the House of Representatives. Smith served eight years in that body, then decided in 1948 to run for the U.S. Senate. Upon her election, after a hard-fought campaign, she became the first woman in the nation's history to serve in both houses of Congress, and the first woman to be elected to the Senate in her own right. At the time, she was also the only female senator.

  A moderate Republican, Smith was at first impressed by Joe's disclosures of Communist activity in the State Department. "It looks as if he is onto something disturbing and frightening," she remarked to a Senate colleague. But after she'd examined some of the documents Joe had cited as evidence, and listened to more of his vehement speeches, she came to question the accuracy, credibility, and fairness of his charges, and she felt compelled to voice her feelings in what she hoped would be a constructive way. Smith drafted a "Declaration of Conscience" that she planned to introduce in a Senate speech. She circulated the draft among six other moderate Republican senators, all of whom agreed to endorse it, and a seventh senator later added his name to the list.

  When Smith entered the Senate on June 1 to give the speech, she saw Joe in his usual seat two rows behind hers. They did not exchange greetings.

  Smith began by saying, "I speak as briefly as possible because too much harm has already been done with irresponsible words of bitterness and selfish political opportunism." Soon she reached the heart of her speech. "Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism." She went on to list those principles: "The right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of independent thought."

  Emphasizing their importance, she said, "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."

  Senator Margaret Chase Smith discusses a Senate matter with an aide.

  The National Archives

  When she'd finished, Smith braced herself for Joe to respond in his usual sharp-tongued way. He surprised her by leaving the chamber without saying anything. A few senators rose to praise her remarks, but most remained silent. Perhaps they were afraid—especially the Republicans—of saying something that would arouse Joe's ire. Later, Sen. Tydings called Smith's speech "temperate and fair" and complimented the senator from Maine on her "stateswomanship." The next time President Truman came to the Capitol for lunch, he invited Sen. Smith to join him. Over sandwiches and coffee, he told her, "Mrs. Smith, your 'Declaration of Conscience' was one of the finest things that has happened here in Washington in all my years in the Senate and the White House."

  The reaction from Sen. McCarthy's camp was slow in coming but predictably mean-spirited when it finally did. First, one of Joe's chief aides, Don Surine, labeled Sen. Smith "Moscow Maggie" in a meeting with reporters. Then Joe himself demeaned Mrs. Smith and the seven Republican moderates who had signed or endorsed her declaration by calling them "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

  McCarthy's mocking comment seemed to intimidate Smith's Republican supporters. Less than a week after Smith's speech, Senator Irving M. Ives of New York switched his allegiance back to Joe and accused the Tydings subcommittee of "trying to whitewash the State Department." Within a short time, all the Republican senators except one, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, had backed away from Smith's strong stand on civil rights.

  Sen. Smith may have been disappointed by her colleagues' defections, but she took them in stride. As she later recalled in an interview, "Joe had the Senate paralyzed with fear. The political risk of taking issue with him was too great a hazard to the political security of senators." No one, Republican or Democrat, wanted to be labeled by Joe as "soft on Communism," especially in an election year.

  Even so, Margaret Chase Smith's declaration would go down as one of the earliest and most powerful challenges to the undemocratic methods Joe employed throughout his anti-Communist campaign. She herself summed up its importance in these words: "If I am to be remembered in history, it will not be because of legislative accomplishments, but for an act I took as a legislator in the U.S. Senate when on June 1, 1950, I spoke out in condemnation of McCarthyism."

  For a week or so after she delivered it, Sen. Smith's speech, and the various reactions to it, occupied center stage in the U.S. press. All that changed on June 25, when North Korea shocked America and the world by invading South Korea.

  Just the week before, on June 20, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had told Congress that U.S. intelligence agencies believed war between North and South Korea was highly unlikely. Acheson had felt compelled to speak because of reports that tensions between the two Koreas were steadily mounting. At the end of World War II, Korea was divided between a Soviet occupation zone in the North and an American occupation zone in the South. The two zones were divided at the 38th Parallel above the equator. In the North, the Russians installed a Soviet-style regime under the leadership of Kim Il Sung, a Korean Communist who had spent the war years in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in the South, the United States supported the government of President Syngman Rhee, an ardent anti-Communist.

  General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of U.N. forces, arrives at the South Korean port of Inchon aboard the U.S.S. Mount McKinley on September 1, 1950. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

  In 1948, the Russians and the Americans agreed to withdraw their respective occupation armies. The North became known as the People's Democratic Republic of Korea while the South claimed the name Republic of Korea. The stated goal of all parties concerned was the eventual reunification of the two Koreas. But Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee had very different ideas for a reunified Korea: Kim envisioned a Soviet-type state, while Rhee imagined a dictatorship with some democratic features.

  Their views of government were so far apart that any compromise through diplomacy seemed impossible. If either leader was to achieve his vision, force would probably be required. In 1949 and the early months of 1950, a number of armed skirmishes between North and South broke out along the 38th Parallel. But no Western leader—including Dean Acheson—expected the full-scale civil war that Kim Il Sung launched in the predawn hours of June 25, 1950.

  As the North Korean army, equipped with tanks and aircraft the Russians had left behind, drove south, President Truman acted quickly. On the day the North invaded, Truman asked the United Nations Security Council to authorize a police action against the aggressors. The Security Council responded immediatel
y by passing a resolution that called for all hostilities in Korea to end and for North Korea to withdraw to the 38th Parallel.

  President Truman went further to support South Korea in its struggle for survival. On June 27, he authorized the use of American land, sea, and air forces, at that time stationed in Japan. The American forces were eventually joined, in what was officially a "police action" rather than a war, by troops and supplies from fifteen other U.N. members, including Britain, France, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. General Douglas MacArthur, the World War II hero who was in charge of the American armed forces in Japan, was named supreme commander of the U.N. effort.

  In the meantime, North Korea ignored the U.N. resolution and advanced farther south, meeting only limited resistance from the less well equipped South Korean army. Seoul, the South Korean capital, fell to the North on June 28, just three days after the war began. The first American troops to reach Korea—a task force from the Army's 24th Infantry Division—entered the fray on July 5. Outnumbered by the North Koreans, they suffered heavy losses and were forced to retreat.