The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

by James Cross Giblin

  The Republicans in Congress did not admire President Truman's swift response to North Korea's invasion of the South. Sen. Taft declared that the Administration's "weak" Far Eastern policy had encouraged the Communist aggression. Joe McCarthy took an even tougher stand. A few days after the invasion, he charged that Truman's decision was further evidence of Communist infiltration into the highest levels of the administration. Speaking in the Senate on July 6, he accused Secretary of State Acheson of harboring "highly placed Red counselors" who were "far more deadly than Red machine gunners in Korea."

  As McCarthy spoke, the Tydings subcommittee was winding up its lengthy hearings and getting ready to write its final report. People who had contact with the committee members and Chairman Tydings spread the word around Washington that the report would come down hard on Joe.

  14. Revenge

  JOE MCCARTHY'S CHARGES against supposed Communists in the State Department, and the methods he had used to expose them, represented "perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruths in the history of the Republic." This was just one of the damning statements in the report that the Tydings subcommittee issued on July 17, 1950.

  All three Democrats on the subcommittee signed the report. The two Republicans did not. Senator Bourke Hickenlooper claimed he had not been invited to the meeting at which the report was voted on. The other Republican, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, issued a minority report of his own, criticizing the Democrats for conducting a "superficial and inconclusive" investigation.

  In fact, the subcommittee's report was unusually thorough. A careful study of the State Department loyalty files found no Communists on the roster of employees. All the individuals Joe had accused by name, including Dorothy Kenyon, Owen Lattimore, and John Stewart Service, were completely cleared of the charges against them. The report was especially critical of McCarthy's attack on Lattimore: "We have seen a distortion of the facts of such a magnitude as to be truly alarming."

  Joe's reaction to the report was angry and immediate. He issued a statement to the press, saying: "It is a signal to the traitors, Communists, and fellow travelers in our Government that they have no fear of exposure from this Administration.... The most loyal stooges of the Kremlin could not have done a better job of giving a clean bill of health to Stalin's fifth column [network of spies and secret agents] in this country."

  Joe's Republican supporters in the Senate echoed his denunciation of the report. Senator William Jenner of Indiana called it "the most scandalous and brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history." But no amount of frantic Republican maneuvering could prevent the report from being brought to the full Senate for consideration. There followed much heated oratory on both sides, some of it colored by the war in Korea, which American troops had just entered. Sen. Jenner asked, "Considering the fact that we are now at war ... how can we get the Reds out of Korea if we cannot get them out of Washington?"

  Despite such comments, and other delaying tactics, the Republicans failed to bring any Democratic senators over to their side. The Tydings report was finally approved in the Senate on a straight party-line vote, all Democrats for, all Republicans against. Joe refused to concede that he had suffered a setback. In a speech delivered in Wisconsin in late July, he called the report "dishonest." He went on to describe its Democratic authors as "men without the mental or moral capacity to rise above politics in this hour of the nation's gravest danger." The crowd of more than 4,500 broke into cheers and loud applause. McCarthy was still their man.

  Because of his anti-Communist crusade, Joe was now one of the best-known politicians in the United States. When he voiced a new charge of subversion in government, it would almost always make the front pages of the next day's newspapers. Joe reveled in the publicity he was getting—and all the things that came with it. These included thousands of fan letters from supporters; invitations to speak to groups all across the country; and unsolicited contributions—most of them in small amounts, five to fifty dollars—from ordinary Americans who wanted to join him in the fight against Communism. Joe used much of the money to hire more investigators, but some of it went to help pay his personal expenses.

  Not that Joe lived extravagantly, except for occasional nights of gambling. He still roomed with Ray Kiermas and his family in Washington, and he worked closely with longtime associates like Don Surine, Jean Kerr, and Ed Nellor. At some point, Joe's professional relationship with Jean had developed into a romantic one. Neither of them talked about it, but it was obvious from Jean's outbursts of jealous anger when she discovered Joe flirting with other women. On one occasion, she persuaded J. Edgar Hoover to have an FBI agent, the husband of a secretary in Joe's office, transferred to Alaska so Joe would no longer have contact with the attractive young wife.

  McCarthy and his chief assistant, Jean Kerr, look over a compilation of Communist attacks on the senator that she assembled. The Library of Congress

  Joe and Jean frequently quarreled, broke up, then came back together. Whatever the state of their romantic involvement, they needed each other. Joe relied on Jean's quick mind, her writing and organizational abilities, and her unwavering faith in his anti-Communist investigations. She, in turn, depended on him to put her own long-held conservative beliefs into action. They made a formidable team, and their partnership was never more effective than in the campaign they launched in the fall of 1950 to defeat Millard Tydings's bid for reelection to the Senate.

  Joe had a long history of seeking revenge on anyone who stood in his way, most notably Cedric Parker, the Madison, Wisconsin, newspaper editor. But he went all out in the effort to "get" Tydings, who had badgered him in the Senate subcommittee hearings. McCarthy had plenty of time to devote to the anti-Tydings campaign, since he himself was not up for reelection in 1950. He began by helping to enlist a Republican opponent for Tydings, a tall, good-looking, and conservative Baltimore attorney named John Marshall Butler. Jean arranged for Butler to meet her close friend Ruth McCormick Miller, the influential editor of the Washington Times-Herald, and Mrs. Miller seemed to be impressed.

  Once Butler was in place, Joe, Jean, and other members of his staff met in Baltimore with the candidate's public relations advisor to plot strategy for Butler's primary campaign. Joe suggested Butler use the postcard tactic that had worked so well for McCarthy in his Wisconsin races. Butler's advisor agreed, and more than 200,000 handwritten cards, supposedly bearing Butler's signature, were mailed to prospective Republican voters in the weeks before the primary. Jean provided Butler's speechwriters with anti-Tydings information she had researched, and they wove it into the candidate's speeches.

  Butler faced strong opposition in the Republican primary but ultimately won by a thin margin. At that point, McCarthy and Jean met again with Ruth McCormick Miller, who told them she was ready to announce her editorial support for Butler. This was a major coup, since her newspaper circulated widely in the Baltimore suburbs where many Republican voters lived.

  Now Joe, Jean, and other members of his staff planned Butler's campaign against Tydings in the general election. Joe got on the phone and persuaded wealthy Texas oilmen like Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt to donate large sums of money to the effort. As a result, Butler was able to outspend Tydings three to one. Joe also made two speeches in Maryland, one in Baltimore and another in Hyattsville, in support of Butler. Otherwise, he tried to keep a low profile so as not to arouse Tydings's suspicions. He put Jean Kerr in charge of most campaign operations, assigning her to the job full-time.

  One of Jean's chief contributions was a four-page, large-format brochure titled From the Record, which she saw through from manuscript to publication. The brochure accused Tydings of, among other things, "sponsoring Owen Lattimore in a series of lectures on Communist Russia," blocking appropriations to arm South Korea in the Senate Armed Forces Committee, and, as chairman of the subcommittee investigating Joe McCarthy's statements, "refusing to carry out Senate instructions to investigate disloyalty in the State Departme
nt." The majority of these accusations were either lies, exaggerations, or half-truths.

  The most controversial part of the brochure was a photograph of Tydings in a friendly conversation with Earl Browder, a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A. The caption admitted that the photo was a "composite." Close examination revealed that it had been doctored to give the impression that the two men were in the same room when actually they were not.

  Up till then, Tydings, a four-term senator, had run a rather complacent campaign, assuming he would easily defeat the relatively unknown Butler. But when he saw the doctored photograph, he exploded. "That picture," he said, "brings into clear focus the intent of the conspirators [Joe and staff] to deceive the people of the State of Maryland in the selection of a candidate for one of the highest offices in the land."

  Jean Kerr, when questioned later, saw nothing wrong in doctoring the photo. "I think it did him [Tydings] a favor," she said. The kid-glove treatment the senator had given Browder when the Communist leader appeared as a witness before Tydings's subcommittee was "a hundred times more damaging than the photo," Kerr added.

  Joe McCarthy sounded a more cautious note when asked to comment on the photo. "In the main, composite photos are wrong," he said. "They should not be used." But then he cleverly shifted his position to echo what Jean Kerr had said. "Luckily, it [the photo] didn't do any injustice to Tydings," McCarthy continued, "because if they had taken the testimony, the statements made between Tydings and Browder [in the subcommittee hearings], it would have shown their relationship to be much closer and much more cooperative [than the photo indicated]."

  Senator Millard Tydings. The National Archives

  Such comments only served to fuel Tydings's anger. In the days just before the election, he went on Maryland radio and the new medium, television, to denounce the brochure as a whole and the altered photograph in particular. But by then it was too late. The brochure had already been distributed to hundreds of thousands of Maryland homes and had created its own strong impression.

  Many in Maryland were stunned when, on election night, Millard Tydings lost his Senate seat to newcomer John Marshall Butler by more than 40,000 votes. But not Joe. He had seen how successfully tactics like the use of "personally signed" postcards and boldly stated lies had worked in his own campaigns against Judge Werner and Sen. La Follette in Wisconsin. Now the Tydings defeat showed that such tactics were equally effective when used on another candidate's behalf.

  Joe had other reasons to celebrate the outcome of the 1950 midterm elections. He had campaigned actively on behalf of many conservative Republican candidates, and all of them had either retained or won their House and Senate seats. In Ohio, Senator Robert Taft triumphed over his Democratic opponent by taking more than 57 percent of the vote and now seemed poised to make a run for the White House in 1952. And in California, Representative Richard Nixon, running for the Senate, trounced his Democratic opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, in a hard-fought contest, during which Douglas was the first to call Nixon "Tricky Dick."

  Joe was disappointed, however, with the overall outcome of the election. Although the Republicans had gained twenty-eight seats in the House and five in the Senate, control of both bodies still remained in the hands of the Democrats. Even so, McCarthy's influence in the Senate had been greatly enhanced. All the successful Republican candidates had claimed to be his allies in the fight against Communism. That fight seemed even more urgent in light of recent developments in the Korean War.

  By September 1950, two months before the midterm elections, the North Koreans had driven the forces of the United Nations all the way down to Pusan, a city in the southeastern corner of South Korea. The beleaguered allies then launched a massive air offensive using B-29 bombers based in Japan. The air raids knocked out North Korean supply dumps along with bridges, roads, and railroad tracks used to transport food and equipment to the North Korean troops. The North Koreans, with only a limited number of planes at their disposal, were unable to slow or halt the U.N. air assault.

  The American people were deeply troubled by the fighting in Korea. A letter to Senator Theodore Green, Democrat of Rhode Island, was typical of those received by lawmakers in Washington. "There is something wrong in the government," the letter said. "How else do you account for the tragedy in Korea?"

  President Truman responded quickly to the criticism that the country was unprepared for the North Korean invasion. He fired the man with overall responsibility, Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson, and replaced him with one of the greatest heroes to emerge from World War II, General George Marshall.

  But Truman's moves failed to satisfy Joe McCarthy. In his campaign speeches, Joe capitalized on the anxious mood of the country: "The government is again playing politics with the lives of other people's sons." He went on to warn, "If you want more of that, keep them [the Democrats] in office. But if you vote for them, remember this: When the Communist trap to conquer this nation is sprung, it will be your vote that pulled the trigger."

  The nation's mood brightened noticeably when Gen. MacArthur launched a successful landing at the city of Inchon, on the western side of South Korea. Caught by surprise, the North Koreans retreated, and the U.N. forces advanced. Their fellow fighters in the southeast were finally able to break out of the area around Pusan, where they had been under siege since the summer.

  Heartened by these initial victories, the U.N. troops marched steadily northward. MacArthur recaptured Seoul in late September and drove the North Koreans back past the 38th Parallel. Then the Truman government reached a fateful decision. Before, Truman's policy had been to contain the Communists' movement and prevent them from acquiring more territory. Now, spurred on by MacArthur, the president saw an opportunity not only to contain but to roll back the Communists and, in the process, reunite North and South Korea under the auspices of the United Nations.

  The U.N. gave its assent to this change in U.S. policy, and MacArthur pressed on into North Korea, seizing control of its capital, Pyongyang, on October 19. By late October, a week before the midterm elections in the U.S., the North Korean army was reeling under constant air attacks and the U.N. forces had taken more than 135,000 prisoners. As the American troops and their allies marched farther and farther north, they got ever closer to the Yalu River, North Korea's border with China. Now the question became: How will China's Communist leaders respond?

  U.S. Marines take a break along a North Korean road during the bitterly cold winter of 1950–51. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

  Many in the United States, including Joe McCarthy and his fellow conservatives in the Republican Party, believed it would be necessary to go on into China in order to destroy the fuel and equipment depots that were supplying the North Korean army. But Truman and his chief advisors hesitated to make any hasty moves that might bring China—and possibly even the Soviet Union—into the conflict. Consequently, they urged General MacArthur to be extremely cautious as he neared the Chinese border. But what if the Chinese attacked first?

  In mid-October, China had warned the U.S. through a third-party diplomat (since the U.S. had no direct diplomatic communication with China) that it would use "all means necessary" to protect its national security. Neither Truman nor MacArthur took the warning seriously, thinking, as Truman said, that it was just "a bold attempt to blackmail the U.N." MacArthur was so confident that he boasted to his men, "The war is over. The Chinese are not coming.... The Third Division will be back in Fort Benning [Georgia] for Christmas dinner."

  MacArthur's and Truman's high spirits were based on reports from the CIA. The intelligence agency had informed Truman that, after evaluating all the evidence, agents believed it highly unlikely that China would enter the war. So the president and Gen. MacArthur were caught off-guard when, in late November, 270,000 Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River under cover of darkness and attacked a large U.N. force gathered on the other side. The unprepared U.S. and U.N. soldiers beat a hasty retreat as the Chinese and North Koreans moved swiftl
y forward. The retreat continued through December 1950 and on into January 1951, with heavy casualties on both sides. The Chinese and North Koreans recaptured Seoul on January 4 and drove the allied troops farther south.

  Korea 1950–51

  Back in the United States, the public was distressed by the losses, and especially by the mounting death toll of American soldiers. Conservative Republicans, sensing the rising dissatisfaction with President Truman and other Democratic leaders, stepped up their attacks on the administration. Led by Joe McCarthy, Robert Taft, and Richard Nixon, the Republicans called for the resignation or impeachment (formal accusation) of Secretary of State Dean Acheson. They also aimed sharp criticisms at President Truman and George Marshall, the new secretary of defense.

  In Korea, the U.N. troops halted their retreat in late January when they realized that the Chinese and North Korean forces were no longer advancing. The Communists had outrun their supply lines and had to pause until more food and ammunition reached them from China.

  Gen. MacArthur and his second in command, General Matthew B. Ridgway, seized the moment to go on the offensive once more. The American and U.N. troops under their command, bolstered by American air support, forced the Communist armies to fall back before they could be resupplied. On March 14, after fierce fighting, U.N. forces recaptured Seoul, which by now was in almost complete ruin. This was the fourth time in a year the city had changed hands, and its prewar population of 1,500,000 had dwindled to fewer than 200,000.

  As Americans and their allies continued to advance and approached the 38th Parallel, Gen. MacArthur called the situation in Korea "an entirely new war" that should be fought to a successful conclusion. He repeatedly asked President Truman for authorization to strike the bases in northeastern China that were supporting the Communist armies. According to insiders, the general also wanted permission to use nuclear weapons if he felt they were necessary to achieve victory.