In response, Army Signal Corps officials issued a statement declaring that Mrs. Moss had "no access whatsoever to codes, or to uncoded top-secret, secret, or confidential messages." She was a communications relay machine operator whose only job was to "feed into or receive from automatic machines unintelligible code messages." The officials added that the Army had begun its own investigation into the possibility that Mrs. Moss might be a security risk. They emphasized that their investigation had been well under way "prior to any action by the McCarthy subcommittee."
Reporters got in touch with Mrs. Moss, who was ill at home. She told them "she had no knowledge of Communism whatsoever" and "never was a member of the Communist Party or anything else." She also said she had "never been in a code room in my life."
The next morning, Mrs. Moss answered a summons to appear before the subcommittee even though she was still feeling sick. She entered the hearing room slowly, leaning on the arm of her attorney. When the attorney asked that his client's testimony be postponed until her health improved, Joe was annoyed. In the exchange that followed, McCarthy called Mrs. Moss a Communist several times, and suggested that her attorney was also a Communist.
Annie Lee Moss, with her attorney by her side, is sworn in as a witness before McCarthy's subcommittee. The National Archives
Democrat Senator Henry Jackson objected to Joe's labeling the attorney a "Red." Jackson, along with the other Democratic members, had only recently returned to the subcommittee. Joe responded angrily: "If you had been sitting with us over the past months, watching members of the Communist conspiracy violating their oaths as lawyers and misinforming and misadvising clients, then you would not make that objection."
Joe finally acceded to the attorney's request and granted Mrs. Moss a delay. But he couldn't resist adding, "I am not interested in this woman as a person at all." According to McCarthy, the issue concerning Mrs. Moss was the important thing. "Who in the military, knowing that this lady was a Communist, promoted her from a waitress to a code clerk? The information we have is that she has no special ability as a decoding clerk. Yet [we know] she has been handling classified material despite the statement issued by the military."
After Mrs. Moss left the hearing room, two other witnesses appeared that day. The first was supposedly the woman who had recruited Moss into the Communist Party, but she refused to answer any questions, taking the Fifth Amendment over and over. The second witness, Charlotte Oram, also took the Fifth when asked if she had ever been a member of the party. But she did tell the subcommittee she had never heard of Annie Lee Moss until she was summoned the day before. This contradicted the testimony of Mary Markward, who had cited Mrs. Oram as one of those who had had access to the party records in which Moss's name was listed.
The hearing ended early so that Joe and the Republican members of the subcommittee could attend a lunch with Army Secretary Stevens. The gathering had been arranged by Senator Karl Mundt. He and other leading Republicans feared that the party's unity might be shattered if McCarthy and Stevens clashed openly when the Army secretary finally testified before Joe's subcommittee the following day.
Reporters waited outside the room where Joe, Secretary Stevens, and the others were eating fried chicken. Eventually the door opened and Sen. Mundt stepped into the hall to read what he called "a memorandum of understanding" between the Army and the subcommittee. The newsmen caught a glimpse of Secretary Stevens and Joe sitting at opposite ends of a green leather sofa. Stevens's face had a solemn expression, while Joe was smiling broadly.
The reason for McCarthy's smile became clear as Mundt continued reading. The memorandum sounded more and more like a total surrender by Stevens. He agreed to permit Army officers to appear before the subcommittee; to provide the names of all military personnel who had been involved in the promotion and honorable discharge of Irving Peress; and also to make these persons available to the subcommittee if it wanted to question them.
Joe had apparently agreed to only two relatively minor concessions: the temporary postponement of Gen. Zwicker's return appearance before the subcommittee, and the cancellation of Secretary Stevens's appearance scheduled for the following day.
Stevens had come to the luncheon meeting in a hopeful mood. He sincerely believed that he could work out an accommodation with McCarthy that would benefit both the Army and the Republican Party. And in some ways he thought he had. When he returned to his office after the meeting with reporters, he told associates that the senators on the subcommittee had assured him Army officers would be treated with respect when they testified in the future. Only when he studied the final text of the memorandum did he realize that this condition was not spelled out.
Stevens began to wonder if McCarthy had gotten the better of him. Even so, he did not anticipate the harsh press response that greeted him the next day. The New York Post's account of the luncheon began: "Under severe party pressure, the Secretary of the Army surrendered to a senator [Joe] who had humiliated and bullied an Army officer." The Chicago Sun-Times was even more scathing: "Secretary Stevens' unconditional surrender to Senator McCarthy is shocking and dismaying."
The most hurtful criticism came from Joe himself. A reporter quoted McCarthy as saying after the luncheon that Stevens "could not have given in more abjectly if he'd gotten down on his knees." Later, Joe denied having made the remark, but by then the harm had been done.
Rumors swirled around Washington that President Eisenhower was about to ask Stevens for his resignation as Army secretary. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Eisenhower's press secretary, Jim Hagerty, wrote in his diary that the president was "very mad and getting fed up—it's his Army and he doesn't like McCarthy's tactics at all." Eisenhower went so far as to inform Hagerty, "My friends tell me it won't be long in this Army stuff before McCarthy starts using my name instead of Stevens's. He's ambitious. He wants to be President. He's the last guy in the world who'll ever get there, if I have anything to say about it."
Eisenhower convened a working group at the White House that included Vice-President Nixon, trusted aide Sherman Adams, and Secretary Stevens. They met in the president's study to draft a statement for Stevens to make in his own defense—a statement designed to counter the impression left by the original memorandum.
The president agreed that Stevens should read the statement from the White House. This would indicate, first to reporters and then to the general public, that the Army secretary had Eisenhower's full support in his confrontation with McCarthy.
22. Exposed on Television
AT SIX-FIFTEEN IN THE EVENING, Press Secretary Hagerty summoned reporters to his White House office and handed out copies of the statement. Then Stevens had a chance to tell the reporters his side of the story.
He began by saying that the memorandum issued after his meeting with McCarthy had been misinterpreted. He stated firmly that, in the meeting, "I never receded ... from any of the principles upon which I stand." Then he went on to spell out his position in more detail. "I shall never accede to the abuse of Army personnel under any circumstances, including committee hearings. I shall never accede to them being browbeaten or humiliated." Stevens ended on a positive note. "From assurances which I have received from members of the subcommittee, I am confident that they will not permit such conditions to develop in the future."
Before taking questions from reporters, Press Secretary Hagerty made one thing perfectly clear. "On behalf of the president, he has seen the statement. He approves and endorses it one hundred percent."
Even so, the first question concerned Stevens's future. "Will you continue as Army secretary?" a reporter asked.
Caught off-guard, Stevens hesitated before answering, and Hagerty stepped in. "Of course," the press secretary said.
Joe was in his Senate office, surrounded by reporters who had heard that Army Secretary Stevens was about to make a statement and wanted to get the senator's reaction. One of the reporters took down Stevens's words in shorthand over the telephon
e and read them to McCarthy. This was long before any significant news event was covered instantaneously on twenty-four-hour cable television.
Joe could barely contain his anger. He claimed that Stevens had made "a completely false statement" when he said he had been assured no future Army witnesses would be "browbeaten or humiliated." McCarthy said he had made it clear to Stevens in their meeting that "if witnesses are not frank and truthful—whether military personnel or not—they will be examined vigorously to get the truth about Communist activities." The senator wrapped up his remarks with another swipe at Stevens. "I very carefully explained to the secretary a number of times that he was Secretary of the Army and not running the committee."
After the meeting broke up, McCarthy invited a reporter from Time magazine home with him to have a drink and continue the conversation. Joe and Jean had moved into an eight-room house in Washington following their marriage. The house was owned by Jean's mother, Elizabeth Kerr; she rented half of it to the McCarthys and lived in the other half.
Jean was not there when Joe and the Time reporter arrived. She had suffered a fractured ankle and was recovering in a hospital. After pouring drinks for his guest and himself, Joe sank wearily into an easy chair and said, "I'm getting old." Later, the reporter wrote, "McCarthy is 44. His digestion is bad, and he has sinus trouble. But he is not slowing down. And he is decidedly not mellowing."
Joe chose to be more agreeable when he went to the Senate the next day. When asked what he thought of the president's backing the Army secretary, Joe smiled and said, "Eisenhower is against browbeating witnesses—I am too." But he added a postscript, saying he would "continue to expose Communists, even if it embarrasses my own party."
Stevens's statement, and Eisenhower's support of it, emboldened some commentators to question McCarthy and his methods more openly. Walter Lippman, one of the nation's most respected political columnists, had criticized Joe before. But he had never gone as far as he did in a column published in late February 1954, calling McCarthy "a candidate for supreme boss—for the dictatorship—of the Republican Party." He went on to spell out the danger he felt McCarthy posed to his party and the entire nation. "This is the totalitarianism of the man: his cold, calculated, sustained and ruthless effort to make himself feared. That is why he has been staging a series of demonstrations, each designed to show that he respects nobody, no office, and no institution in the land, and that everyone at whom he growls will run away." Lippman wrote with such urgency because he believed McCarthy's assault on the Army was part of a determined effort to intimidate President Eisenhower.
McCarthy brings his wife, Jean, home from the hospital, where she was treated for a fractured ankle. With them is Mrs. McCarthy's mother, Elizabeth Kerr. The National Archives
The columnist had thousands of readers, ranging from Washington politicians to concerned citizens across the country. Many of them began to look more critically at Sen. McCarthy after Lippman sounded the alarm. Other writers and publications echoed Lippman's charges. Time magazine wrote: "No one but the president can get McCarthy out of his dominant position in the headlines—a position from which he gives the false impression of dominating the government."
Insiders in the Republican Party were also troubled by McCarthy's ongoing conflict with the Army. In February, Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), had called Joe a "great asset" to the party. But on March 2, after a meeting with the president, Hall changed his tune. Referring to the McCarthy-Zwicker exchange, Hall told reporters, "I don't think anyone would say generals in our Army are not fighting Communism." When pressed, Hall said Joe's investigation of Army personnel might hurt Republican chances for victory in the fall midterm elections.
President Eisenhower scheduled a news conference for March 3. A record-breaking 256 reporters attended. Rumors had spread in Washington that the president would openly criticize McCarthy at last, and the reporters wanted to be there to hear him do it, but Eisenhower disappointed them. After an opening statement in which he admitted that the Army had made "serious errors" in its handling of the Peress case, the president went on to say that steps were being taken to make sure such errors did not occur in the future. "I am confident that Secretary Stevens will be successful in this effort," he concluded. And that was it. Eisenhower never mentioned McCarthy's name, and the press conference turned to other issues. Apparently the president was still not ready to confront McCarthy directly.
Joe, too, was caught unawares. He had heard the same rumors as the reporters and had prepared a strong statement in response to Eisenhower's expected attack. After his secretary read her transcription of Eisenhower's actual remarks at the conference, Joe made a few minor changes in his statement. It still seemed over-the-top to the newsmen who had gathered in Joe's office to hear him deliver it.
McCarthy began by asserting yet again that "this silly tempest in a teapot" had only come about because "we [the subcommittee] dared to bring to light the cold, unpleasant facts about a Fifth Amendment Communist officer [Irving Peress] who was promoted, and finally given an honorable discharge with the full knowledge of all concerned that he was a member of the Communist Party." Later, he couldn't resist lobbing another attack at Gen. Zwicker. "If a stupid, arrogant, or witless man in a position of power appears before our committee and is found aiding the Communist Party, he will be exposed. The fact that he might be a general places him in no special class so far as I am concerned."
He concluded by implying that even President Eisenhower was unaware of the seriousness of the problem. "When the shouting and the tumult die, the American public and the president will realize that this unprecedented mudslinging against the committee by extreme left-wing elements of the press and radio was caused because another Fifth Amendment Communist in government was finally dug out of the dark recesses and exposed to public view."
Joe's belligerent remarks may have pleased his ardent supporters, but they did not go over well with moderate Republicans, who thought them extremist. New York Times columnist James Reston offered his own wry comments on the Eisenhower-McCarthy exchange. "President Eisenhower turned the other cheek today, and Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, always an obliging fellow, struck him about as hard as the position of the president will allow."
Democrats believed that the president's reluctance to confront McCarthy reflected his determination to avoid doing anything that would hurt Republican candidates in the fall congressional elections. Adlai Stevenson took that tack in a nationally broadcast half-hour speech he gave in Miami on March 6. He claimed that "a group of political plungers has persuaded the president that McCarthyism is the best Republican formula for political success." Stevenson labeled the party "half McCarthy and half Eisenhower" and charged that it had "embarked on a campaign of slander, dissension, and deception in order to win the 1954 elections."
Joe, furious, demanded that the radio networks give him thirty minutes of equal time to reply to Stevenson. When Leonard Hall heard this, he immediately sent telegrams to the networks, asking for equal time in the name of the Republican National Committee instead. Hall made it clear that the RNC would designate its own spokesman. "This is not a matter for personal rebuttal by any individual," he added, in an obvious reference to Joe. Later, a source who asked to remain anonymous leaked the information that President Eisenhower himself had summoned Republican congressional leaders to the Oval Office and told them that McCarthy should no longer be allowed to present himself as a spokesman for the Republican Party.
All the radio networks accepted Leonard Hall's request for equal time, and denied Joe's. If Joe was furious before, he was boiling now. "The networks will grant me time or learn what the law is," he blustered. Meanwhile, Hall announced that Vice-President Nixon had been chosen to reply to Adlai Stevenson. Insider leaks to Time revealed that Nixon was the president's personal choice.
It seemed that the tide was finally beginning to turn against McCarthy. On March 9, Ralph Flanders, the seventy-three-year-old Repub
lican senator from Vermont, rose in the Senate to deliver an attack on Joe. Flanders had opposed McCarthy on many earlier occasions, from the argument over sugar rationing in 1947 to the controversy surrounding Senator Millard Tydings's reelection campaign in 1950, but never until now had he denounced the Wisconsin senator in such strong terms.
McCarthy, Flanders charged, was "doing his best to shatter the Republican Party, by intention or through ignorance." Joe belonged, Flanders said, to "his own one-man party, and its name is 'McCarthyism,' a name which he has proudly accepted."
Surveying the earth's trouble spots, from Eastern Europe to the Far East, Flanders said the world was engaged in a struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of Communism. And what was Sen. McCarthy doing in this monumental struggle? "He dons his war paint," Flanders said. "He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist."
McCarthy faced an even greater challenge that evening, when Edward R. Murrow broadcast "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy" on CBS television. Murrow was one of the most respected figures in radio and television journalism. He had made his reputation with his nightly radio broadcasts from London during the worst of the German bombing raids on the British capital in World War II. By the 1950s, he had become a prominent and popular journalist in the new broadcast medium, television. His weekly television news program, See It Now, was watched by millions of Americans.
Edward R. Murrow. The National Archives
Milo Radulovich. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy Page 20
