The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

by James Cross Giblin

  Truman was not ready to grant the general's requests. The president feared that if the U.N. troops attacked China, with or without nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would almost inevitably enter the conflict, and that could precipitate World War III. In Korea, the situation on the ground had settled into a sort of stalemate. Each side launched attacks on the other in the area north of Seoul and just below the 38th Parallel, but neither side gained much territory.

  General MacArthur seemed to have accepted President Truman's decision. That was only to be expected; according to the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and has the final word on all military matters. But MacArthur, a man with a strong ego whom many called arrogant, was not used to having his plans questioned. He wrote a letter to Joseph Martin, a Republican representative from Massachusetts and minority leader in the House of Representatives, disagreeing strongly with the president's policies in Korea.

  When Truman heard of the letter and of other statements MacArthur had made about his leadership, he saw it as a challenge to his authority as president that had to be met swiftly and decisively. On April 11, 1951, Truman fired Gen. MacArthur for insubordination and replaced him with Gen. Ridgway.

  The president's action set off a firestorm of protest around the country. It was loudest among those who regarded MacArthur as one of the nation's great heroes. Senator Richard Nixon condemned the general's firing as "appeasement of the Reds," and urged the Senate to censure President Truman. Joe McCarthy went even further. Speaking with a reporter in Milwaukee, the enraged senator called MacArthur "the greatest American I know" and said of President Truman, "The son of a bitch should be impeached!" Joe went on to add that MacArthur's dismissal was "a victory for the Communists, homemade and foreign made."

  McCarthy was expressing in his own crude terms what many Americans were feeling. According to a Gallup poll, more than two thirds of those questioned disapproved of MacArthur's firing. At the same time, President Truman's approval rating had fallen to 30 percent, a new low.

  The Republicans exploited the national mood by sponsoring MacArthur's return to the U.S. and inviting him to speak before a joint session of Congress on April 19, 1951. More than 60 million Americans watched on television as the seventy-one-year-old general offered a spirited defense of his motivations and actions in Korea. The speech was interrupted by more than thirty ovations and concluded with an emotional farewell, delivered in MacArthur's deep, preacher-like voice. "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away," the general intoned. "And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye."

  Joe was profoundly moved by MacArthur's oratory. "It was actually the greatest speech I have ever heard or ever hope to hear," he told a Washington, D.C., audience a few days later. He went on to praise MacArthur as "the greatest military leader and strategist since even before the days of Genghis Khan [the ruthless Mongol general of the 1200s whose armies conquered a vast territory extending from what is today northern China in the east to European Russia in the west]."

  In the wake of MacArthur's speech, Joe remarked to close associates that, despite his age, the general would be his choice for the Republican candidate in the 1952 presidential election. Joe also laid the groundwork for an attack on another revered World War II general, George Marshall, who, he believed, had encouraged President Truman to fire MacArthur. Once again Joe sought revenge on someone who had opposed him—or, in this case, who had opposed one of his heroes.

  15. "We Like Ike!"

  WHEN JOE ROSE FROM his Senate seat on June 14, 1951, and launched his attack on General George Marshall, he was targeting one of the most respected public servants America had ever known.

  A 1902 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, Marshall had devoted his entire adult life to the Army. He had risen to the rank of general when he was nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be Army chief of staff. Marshall was sworn in on September 1, 1939, the same day that World War II began in Europe. As chief of staff, he oversaw the largest military expansion in U.S. history. He inherited a poorly equipped Army of 200,000 men and expanded it into a well-trained force of more than 8 million by the summer of 1942, six months after America entered the conflict.

  During the war, Marshall chose General Dwight D. Eisenhower to be supreme commander of the Allied armies in Europe, and Marshall was the man who planned Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France, which began on June 6, 1944, now known as D-Day. In December of that year, with the Allies advancing swiftly toward the border of Hitler's Germany, Marshall became the first American general to be promoted to 5-star rank. Time magazine named him Man of the Year for 1944, and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, hailed him as "the true organizer of victory" after first Germany and then Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945.

  His wartime job done, Marshall resigned his post as chief of staff. But his service to the nation didn't end with the war. In December 1945, as noted earlier, President Truman sent him to China to try to get the warring Nationalists and Communists to sign a truce and form a coalition government. Unfortunately, both sides rejected Marshall's proposals, and he returned to the U.S. empty-handed in 1947.

  Brigadier General George Marshall in l938. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

  Marshall may have failed in China, but his next assignment more than made up for it. Soon after the general's return from the Far East, President Truman appointed him secretary of state. The devastated European economy had barely begun to recover from the war and was a fertile field for the spread of Communism. To guard against this, Marshall suggested that the U.S. invest vast amounts of money to help the nations of Western Europe—including a former enemy, West Germany—to rebuild their shaky economies as swiftly as possible. This policy, which came to be known as the Marshall Plan, proved a great success. In recognition, Time magazine in 1948 once again selected Marshall as Man of the Year.

  The general's reputation suffered a setback when the Chinese Communists defeated the Nationalists in 1949 and established the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong. Conservative Republicans in the U.S. were quick to respond. Their leaders, including Joe McCarthy, accused Marshall of being among those responsible for "losing China." The charge did not affect his job, however, since Marshall had left the State Department in January 1949.

  His government service resumed when the U.S. was caught unprepared by the outbreak of the Korean War, and President Truman turned to him to replace Louis Johnson as secretary of defense. Marshall's chief role was to help restore confidence in the Defense Department, which had been badly shaken by the intelligence failure in Korea. As he set about his new assignment, it was almost inevitable that Secretary Marshall would be subjected to fresh criticism by the Republican right. But no one expected the savage attack that Joe McCarthy aimed at him on June 14, 1951.

  McCarthy began his Senate speech by recapping what had happened in China before the Communists emerged victorious from their civil war with the Nationalists. He charged that Marshall, in his role as President Truman's envoy, was directly responsible for "the loss of China." According to McCarthy, the general had "sabotaged" a plan prepared by another American leader, General Albert Wedemeyer—a "wise plan that would have kept China a valued ally" in the fight against Communism.

  Why would Marshall have done such a thing? In answering that question, McCarthy went further than he ever had in his anti-Communist campaign. The reason, he claimed, why the U.S. "fell from our position as the most powerful nation on earth at the end of World War II to a position of declared weakness by our leadership" was because of "a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men." McCarthy did not name Marshall as one of the principals in this conspiracy and never used th
e word "treason" in his lengthy speech. But it was clear that Marshall was the chief target of the senator's accusation, and that the "infamy" of which he spoke—the so-called loss of China—was, in his opinion, a treasonable act.

  Liberal newspapers and spokesmen were outraged by Joe's denunciation of Marshall. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic governor of Illinois, called the speech "a hysterical form of putrid slander." In a full-page editorial, Collier's magazine told its more than 3 million readers that McCarthy's words set "a new high for irresponsibility," and it called on Republican leaders to disassociate themselves from his "senseless and vicious charges."

  Predictably, though, the right-wing press hailed the speech. Political columnist John O'Donnell, writing in the New York Daily News, judged it "a coldly documented, carefully edited, and restrained indictment in which damning evidence [concerning Marshall] marched steadily on the heels of accusation."

  Marshall himself refused to comment on McCarthy's attack, believing that any fair-minded student of postwar American foreign policy would dismiss it as unworthy of serious consideration. President Truman and other Democratic leaders ignored the speech also. Stewart Alsop, a moderate political commentator, had a different take on the matter. "His [McCarthy's] charge that Marshall is implicated in 'infamy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man' is so ridiculous that it may seem silly to discuss it seriously. Yet a man [Joe] who has proved that he can use demonstrable falsehoods to devastating political effect cannot be entirely laughed off."

  Many Americans in government and elsewhere were by no means ready to laugh Joe off in 1951. Despite the fear that he inspired in Congress, a number of senators did their best to challenge his arrogant and underhanded methods. A Senate subcommittee began an investigation into Millard Tydings's claim that Joe and his staff had used unfair tactics against Tydings in the 1950 election. Joe himself did not respond to three invitations to appear before the subcommittee. Jean Kerr agreed to appear, but she deflected most questions about her activities by saying she couldn't remember.

  The subcommittee's final report was a tame affair. It contrasted the "front street," or positive, campaign Tydings had waged with the "back-street effort conducted by non-Maryland outsiders." The report condemned the latter group's tactics, but it made no specific reference to McCarthy's key role.

  Despite its mildness, Joe took exception to the report, labeling it "an attempt to whitewash Tydings." He was particularly upset by the subcommittee's treatment of Jean. Using the kind of sexist language that was common at the time, Joe said, "What I most resent in this report is the reference to a little girl [Jean] who works in my office. There are a lot of small, evil-minded people in this town [Washington] who are trying to smear this girl just because she works for me. I'm not going to stand for that."

  Another, stronger attempt to weaken McCarthy's power in the Senate arose later in 1951, after McCarthy's denunciation of George Marshall. Senator William F. Benton, Democrat of Connecticut, decided that Joe had become a national menace because of his frequent and unwarranted attacks on high officials. Benton introduced a resolution on the Senate floor requesting an investigation of McCarthy's activities by the Rules Committee's Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections. The aim of the investigation: to determine whether or not Joe should be expelled from the Senate.

  McCarthy meets and greets supporters in Platteville, Wisconsin, in 1951.

  Marquette University Archives

  Joe responded with quick anger to this request. He referred to Benton as "Connecticut's mental midget" and went on to add that Benton, by introducing the resolution against him, had "established himself as the hero of every Communist and crook in and out of government."

  At first no senator spoke out in defense of Benton. Joseph A. Harsch, a Washington reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote that many Washington insiders thought Benton "went into this thing as an innocent, walking blithely to his doom." If Joe had kept quiet, Benton's resolution might well have been filed and forgotten. But McCarthy, on August 9, 1951, once again accused the State Department of harboring 26 employees "charged with Communist activities."

  This was too much for the Senate majority leader, Ernest W. McFarland, Democrat of Arizona, who publicly condemned Joe as a "character assassin." The Arizona senator's courage was catching. Other senators voiced support for Benton, and the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, chaired by Iowa Democrat Guy M. Gillette, voted on September 24 to hear William Benton present his case.

  Benton appeared before the subcommittee on September 28, 1951, and read a statement accusing McCarthy of "practicing deceit and falsehood on both the U.S. Senate and the American people." After hearing Benton lay out ten examples of such falsehoods, the subcommittee voted unanimously to have its staff conduct a thorough investigation into Benton's charges.

  In October, the subcommittee's investigators conducted interviews about Joe in Washington, Wheeling, and several towns and cities in Wisconsin. Joe attempted to block the investigation, claiming in a letter to Guy Gillette—with copies to the newspapers, as usual—that the subcommittee was "stealing from the pockets of the American taxpayer tens of thousands of dollars and then using the money to protect the Democrat [sic] party from the political effect of the exposure of Communists in government." Gillette dismissed Joe's claim as "of course, erroneous," and the investigators went on with their work.

  The frustrating stalemate in Korea had continued through the summer months. Both sides in the conflict had dug into positions just north of the 38th Parallel, and negotiations aimed at reaching a truce had begun on July 10. At the same time, the U.N. troops kept on bombing Communist military positions in North Korea, and the Communists launched raids on U.N. forces in South Korea. Both sides were determined to gain as much territory as they could before a truce was signed.

  Back in Washington, the media in the fall of 1951 started to focus on the upcoming presidential election. After twenty years with Democrats in control of the White House, Republicans believed they had an excellent chance of winning it back in 1952. Voters were deeply troubled by the lack of progress in the Korean War and the rising number of American combat deaths. In February 1952, President Truman's approval rating sank to its lowest level yet, 22 percent, and he abruptly canceled plans to campaign for a second full term.

  The Republican Party was divided into two wings: the conservatives led by Robert Taft and other senators like Joe McCarthy, and the moderates represented by such senators as Henry Cabot Lodge and Margaret Chase Smith. Joe himself was up for reelection in 1952. His friend Taft gave McCarthy's campaign a boost when he arranged for him to give one of the evening speeches at the Republican nominating convention, ensuring that Joe would get major media attention.

  Taft and Gen. MacArthur were the leading conservative contenders for the Republican nomination, and MacArthur was scheduled to deliver the keynote speech at the convention. The earlier enthusiastic support for the general had cooled, though, after a Senate investigation of his removal from command largely vindicated President Truman's decision. The Republican moderates hadn't settled on their contender yet. But they were looking beyond the party for someone who might appeal to conservative Democrats and independents as well as the Republican base. Many thought they had found their man in another military hero: General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  Eisenhower had earned the nation's admiration as supreme commander of the Allied armies that had helped to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. He was serving as commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Europe when both the Democrats and the Republicans sounded him out as a possible candidate for president. Eisenhower had never registered with either party, but in the spring of 1952 he made it known that he had always voted Republican. He resigned from active duty, returned to the United States, and entered the race for the Republican nomination.

  Sen. Taft, the conservative favorite, had already lined up 40 percent of the delegates prior to the
convention and appeared to have a lock on the nomination. But Eisenhower defeated him in a write-in campaign in the New Hampshire primary, and polled more than a 100,000 votes in another write-in campaign in Minnesota. MacArthur was no longer a serious contender, but Joe continued to endorse him anyway. It was a good way to stay out of the developing conflict between Taft and Eisenhower.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower in his four-star general's uniform. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

  Joe was under a lot of stress in the spring of 1952. Besides the upcoming convention—it was set to take place in Chicago in early July—he and Jean and the other members of his staff were hard at work laying the groundwork for his reelection campaign in Wisconsin. At the same time, the Gillette subcommittee labored on, trying to find something criminal in McCarthy's past that would justify his expulsion from the Senate, or at least derail his reelection.

  In the face of these pressures, Joe began to drink heavily. Before speaking to the Republican state convention in Milwaukee that spring, he darted into a men's room, pulled out a bottle of Scotch from his briefcase, and swallowed a large amount in one long gulp. On another occasion, an Associated Press reporter was startled when Joe ordered nothing for breakfast except a glass of whiskey, into which he poured a tablespoon of orange juice. His old problem with sinusitis had returned, and his doctors said an operation would be necessary. But first Joe was determined to attend the Republican convention and deliver his important evening speech.

  The convention opened on July 6. Taft came into the gathering with 530 committed delegates; Eisenhower had amassed 427; Harold Stassen, a "favorite son" candidate from Minnesota, had 100 or so; and a number of delegates still supported General MacArthur. The latter's keynote speech at the convention, in which he condemned "those reckless men [President Truman and those close to him] who, yielding to international intrigue, set the stage for Soviet ascendancy as a world power and our own relative decline," was received enthusiastically.