The Three Barons

by J. W Lateer

  The first fact that jumps out about McCarthy is that he was almost an honorary member of the Kennedy family. When Robert F. Kennedy graduated from law school at the University of Virginia, the only job he wanted was to be head counsel for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the McCarthy Committee.

  RFK was hired by McCarthy and was to remain as either an assistant counsel or counsel for that committee or its later modified form until September 1959, with only a few months’ hiatus during that period. RFK served the McCarthy Committee until it merged with the Labor Committee. It was renamed the Senate Rackets Committee – or the McClellan Committee – as it was referred to in the press. Since Senator John F. Kennedy was a member of the Labor Committee before the merger, the Kennedy brothers served together on behalf of the Committee as it investigated mobsters and labor racketeers.

  What most people are never told, is that the stated purpose of the McClellan Committee was to investigate Communists in the Labor movement. Barry Goldwater was a major force on the McClellan Committee in that cause. The transformation of the McCarthy Committee from an anti-Communist to a “Labor” committee mirrored the conversion of the Kennedy brothers from militant Catholic anti-Communist activists to, some would say, apologists for known Communists.

  This conversion did not sit well with the international Catholic clergy.

  Sen. Joseph

  McCarthy

  Joseph McCarthy was born and reared in a rural area near the towns of Grand Chute and Appleton, Wisconsin. Joe’s community was mostly German. His father Tim was an Irish Catholic and fathered ten children. The children were taken to church in Appleton. Around this time, Appleton became one of the larger cities in the region.

  McCarthy earned his high school diploma in only one year, at age 20. In the years prior, he had earned a significant amount of money by starting his own business raising chickens.

  The Fox Valley of Wisconsin was also heavily Catholic. Appleton was 40% Catholic; nearby Green Bay was 73% Catholic. So, not only was the community in which Joe McCarthy grew up mostly Catholic, but when he left the Fox Valley, he was to spend the following five years at Marquette University in Milwaukee, a Jesuit institution. There he presumably earned his bachelors degree in some form, since he also graduated with a degree in law which normally follows the undergraduate baccalaureate. In addition to earning both his degrees there, Joe also participated as an amateur boxer.

  Like the unique Fox Valley of Wisconsin, Milwaukee would be somewhat atypical when compared to other large cities in the Midwest. It featured many residents of German heritage who lived on the north side and many of Polish heritage who lived on the south side. Milwaukee was more old-world in its outlook than a typical American city. Being settled by Germans and Poles, some undoubtedly may have brought such attitudes as anti-semitism and other prejudices from the Europe of the 1800’s.

  Wisconsin was the birthplace of the Progressive movement led by Senator and Governor “Fighting Bob” La Follete. Wisconsin had the first income tax and introduced unemployment insurance to the U.S. The anti-slavery Republican Party began in the tiny Wisconsin community of Ripon. Despite this fundamentally liberal tradition, Wisconsin gave the country Senator Joe McCarthy. Unfortunately for his state, his name in the form “McCarthyism,” became an unpleasant addition to Webster’s dictionary.

  McCarthy had an almost uncanny talent when it came to the art of character assassination. There is no school which offers a major in character assassination. There is no academy of libel, no college of slander. So how did McCarthy gain this almost unique skill in this very nasty art? And why did someone like Joseph McCarthy become so involved with the Kennedy family and why did he turn out to be a close friend of Robert F. Kennedy right up until his death in 1957? Let’s dig a little deeper.

  After graduation from law school Joe quickly, on his own, opened a private law office. As a small town attorney with many competitors, the office of judge was a quick way to get financial security. To achieve this office, Joe ran a political campaign against a much older incumbent judge. Joe may have been a born politician. At age 30, Joe became the youngest person ever to be elected as Circuit Judge in the history of Wisconsin. To understand the character of Joe McCarthy, one can look at the reason for these very rapid achievements.

  At first glance it would seem that finishing high school in just one year might indicate that a person was a young prodigy. In the case of Joe McCarthy, though, the case is quite different. McCarthy was often quick across the finish line, as when he became a judge at a record young age.

  But McCarthy would always be like a runner cutting across the infield to the finish line. He never had patience to achieve goals methodically. It was this trait which caused him to grab onto anti-Communism. It was a quick way for him to be at the center of attention.

  If not for his rabid anti-Communism, Joe would have had to patiently develop a reputation as a leader and a successful Senator. He would have to develop contacts, friendships, accomplishments and newspaper endorsements. For McCarthy, Red-baiting was a short-cut to instant attention and, albeit negative, notoriety.

  In his habit of cutting across the infield on his way to the finish line, one could ask who was cheated along the way? The sad answer is: McCarthy’s desire for notoriety didn’t require him to climb the slopes of seniority to wait his turn. He realized he could get instant fame and notoriety by slandering and defaming people. Under the law of Senatorial immunity, he couldn’t be sued libel and slander.

  Joe got enough experience as a judge at such a young age that he learned how to exercise authority in his courtroom. The power possessed by a judge is something rarely experienced by someone 30 years old. This position immediately taught Joe how to exploit the power of the law. Joe would also learn how to find a middle ground between the arguments of opposing counsel. And he would learn how to make quick decisions to resolve the countless issues that come up in trials, hearings and other proceedings. Finally, he obviously learned quickly which types of arguments succeed and which arguments are doomed to fail.

  Soon after Joe’s accession to the bench, World War II broke out. He enlisted in the Marines at the age of 33. He received a direct commission as an officer. During the War, he saw combat duty as an aviator and served in the South Pacific on bombing runs.

  After the war, he returned to Wisconsin and soon ran for the Senate. The Wisconsin constitution made it illegal for a person to hold public office in addition to his position as judge. The Wisconsin statutes enforced this law by making this practice a felony. But one of Joe’s political friends got the penalty of felony repealed for Joe. So it was merely illegal and unconstitutional, but not a felony for him to hold these two offices. He was elected to the Senate and remained on the payroll as a judge. His excuse for doing this was that everyone is entitled to maintain their source of income and the position of judge was his source of income. Although it was illegal, McCarthy didn’t stand on formalities.

  McCarthy’s personal qualities included extroversion, the habitual borrowing of money from friends, gambling, drinking (which would eventually cause his early death), playing the stock market and generally leading a fast-paced, helter-skelter lifestyle.

  Some of those who knew him claimed that he enjoyed the company of many women and that women flocked around him. Others pointed to a lack of any steady female companionship and that he “was not the marrying kind.” There isn’t any evidence that Joe even had more than one date with any female up until his marriage in his 40’s. There were no signs of Joe settling down into an ordinary everyday relationship, which might have been of benefit to him and his career. There was clandestine information passed between journalists of possible gay behavior, though never proved.

  His marriage just before his death at age 45 was less about romantic attachment and more about an employer-employee relationship with his eventual wife and staffer Jean Fraser Kerr. All this probably makes sense. Joe would have made a terrible husband by any standard. Wh
en Joe finally married at age 45, he was well on his way to serious health problems stemming from his alcoholism.

  The Malmedy Massacre

  After being elected to the Senate, Joe’s early legislative interests included just two issues: 1) public housing and 2) investigating the Malmedy massacre.

  McCarthy, for no logical reason, took an intense interest in the Malmedy Massacre. The key to this part of the McCarthy story is that upon becoming Senator, he was immediately taken over to Europe and involved in a case involving Nazis.

  This pattern was also followed by one of McCarthy’s successors, Senator Thomas Dodd. Dodd had been assistant prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. The third McCarthyite Senator, Pat McCarran of Nevada was also involved in Europe: in his case it was face-to-face involvement with Hitler ally Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain.

  The Malmedy massacre occurred during the Battle of the Bulge, when a German SS division captured a group of American soldiers, and then proceeded to machine gun 83 of them to death in cold blood. In the immediate vicinity of this atrocity, up to 500 people were killed by these German soldiers.

  Some American military personnel responded in kind by allegedly torturing or otherwise mistreating the Germans who had committed these acts. Various Quaker and several other Church groups got involved in this issue. The Malmedy massacre wound up in a Senate investigation. The Special Investigations Subcommittee was involved in the investigation and McCarthy was a member.

  Joe became emotionally involved in the Malmedy massacre situation. This was especially true when it was alleged that a Communist over in Europe had stirred the whole issue up just to give America some bad publicity.

  In the Malmedy case, the position taken by Joe was opposite to that taken by the U.S. military. This anti-military attitude would surface again in when he investigated the military for allegedly harboring Communists.

  After the Malmedy Massacre, Joe found other issues with which to be involved. He introduced an amendment to the European Recovery Act. This amendment was approved by Arthur Vandenberg, a prominent moderate Republican. It required the return of all prisoners of war as a precondition for any economic aid for any country.

  Joe, however, went even further. He called for the repudiation of certain portions of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements relating to the theory that prisoners of war could somehow be considered war reparations. Joe labeled this concept of reparations as foreign to American principles. For some reason, Joe considered himself so important that he could reverse the outcome of a major event like the Yalta or Potsdam conferences. This was a sign of McCarthy’s grandiosity. Somehow he believed that he could second-guess the work of such world figures as Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, or Truman. His proposal was also a typical cheap shot and an empty exercise. Repudiation of Yalta or Potsdam would obviously never happen.

  Dinner at the Colony Club

  It was not long after that when Joe McCarthy jumped directly into the business of hunting and bashing Communists. There is some debate about how and why this happened. Historians tend to agree on one point: that this all began over a famous “dinner at the Colony Club.”

  On January 7, 1950, McCarthy met with three people at a dinner at the Colony restaurant in Washington, DC. The three were Charles Kraus, William A. Roberts (the attorney for investigative journalist Drew Pearson) and Father Edmund A. Walsh, 63, founder of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.

  Drew Pearson, along with his partner, Jack Anderson, were journalists who “poked their nose” into the affairs of the U.S. Government, often behind the scenes. They did so to an extreme which has no parallel in post-2000 journalism. Father Walsh, also at the table, was founder of the Foreign Service School at Catholic Georgetown University. This university had achieved preeminence in Washington higher education, especially when it came to foreign policy. If any issues of national importance were discussed over that dinner they would likely be foreign policy. This was a time of great international uncertainty and upheaval. Most historians date the beginning of McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade to that dinner in 1950. It should also be mentioned that Joe claimed to be initially motivated in his anti-Communist crusade by James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense.

  But there is still a third theory. In his 1968 book, Roy Cohn, a close associate of McCarthy, claimed that a military intelligence officer at the Pentagon distributed a 100-page FBI report to four Senators. According to Cohn, this officer hoped that at least one of the four Senators would take up the anti-Communist crusade. According to this story, three of the Senators refused – but Joe agreed.

  As a factual matter, there were two other people who prompted Joe McCarthy to launch his unbridled, mostly single-handed attack on worldwide Communism. The first of the two was Joseph P. Kennedy, patriarch of the Massachusetts Kennedy clan. Kennedy was a Catholic activist and leading spokesman and personal friends with Eugenio Pacelli, who ruled as Pope Pius XII from 1938 to 1958. Kennedy invited McCarthy to his Hyannis Port compound as a guest starting in the late 1940’s. He apparently also encouraged one or more of the Kennedy daughters to date McCarthy, which, fortunately for them, never went anywhere.

  Let’s take a closer look at that situation. McCarthy was an alcoholic with no real kind of life going for him. The idea that Joseph P. Kennedy would push McCarthy on his daughters is just another example of the character of Joseph P. Kennedy. He would not hesitate to use his own family as props in his wide-ranging plan for America.

  One can add to this the fact that McCarthy hired Robert Kennedy as counsel for his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Joseph P. Kennedy had landed this job for RFK. According to the story, Kennedy, Sr. was promised that RFK would soon be made chief counsel. Of course, this never happened. RFK then resigned from the staff of the Committee. It is hard to see how this kind of job, with the questionable reputation which the Committee soon developed, would be of interest to a person just beginning his career in the law and had a world of opportunities.

  The second high-level instigator for Joe McCarthy’s career was J. Edgar Hoover. McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover dined at a local restaurant in Washington on a regular basis. McCarthy was the only elected official who made use of Hoover’s box seats at a local racetrack when Hoover was absent. Just for the record, Hoover was not a Catholic activist, he was a Presbyterian so McCarthyism spread quickly beyond the world of Catholic activism.

  It would be a mistake to ignore the obvious role of the above mentioned Catholic priests in getting McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade off the ground. And importantly, there was also Joseph P. Kennedy himself. For two decades, Kennedy had been considered by many, including Franklin Roosevelt, to be the preeminent Catholic in the United States.

  We have mentioned the devastating civil war in Spain where the Communist-supported democratically elected Republic had been forced from power. This victory had been achieved by General Francisco Franco. Franco had characterized his counter-revolution in Spain as a crusade on behalf of the Catholic Church. Anti-clerical forces in Spain had set fire to convents. The Republicans had been democratically elected, but they were secular in outlook. Their only real ally was Joseph Stalin.

  Another example where the Church was pitted against Communism was Italy. In 1958, the CIA had run its largest operation of the decade. The intelligence agency had spent over $10 million on the country’s moderate political parties trying to avert an expected electoral victory by the Communists. In hindsight, it seems impossible to imagine how there could have been a Communist threat in Italy, since Italy has always been 99% Catholic and was home to the Vatican. It was called, after all, the Roman Catholic Church. Hard to imagine a Roman Catholic Church centered in a Rome which was Communist.

  In France during World War II, the French resistance had been spearheaded by the Communists. The Communists in France were almost the only force ruthless enough to stand up to the Nazis. In France, these same Communists ex-partisans were still around after World War II, and thus were consi
dered as part of the threat of Communism.

  And as if all the above issues were not enough, the Soviet military had occupied all of Eastern Europe and probably had the military capability to overrun the entirety of Europe if they so chose. Communism reigned in Yugoslavia which bordered on Italy. In this nightmare scenario, one could imagine St. Peter’s Church being turned into a museum of Communism. One could envision statues of Lenin and Stalin decorating St. Peter’s Basilica. In the worst case scenario, the Catholic Church could have been relegated to survive only in Ireland and the poor countries of Latin America. History would have changed beyond imagination.

  And on top of all of this was the galloping threat of worldwide Communism. It was not just a threat in Eastern Europe, but all around the globe. In the U.S. there soon arose an even more pressing situation, the “loss of China” to the Communists. This China situation was very traumatic to American conservatives. Still another hot spot was Korea. On top of that, there was the defeat of the French by Vietnamese Communists at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and there was impoverished and vulnerable Latin America. And finally there was the imminent collapse of the great colonial empires of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal.

  Onto this chaotic scene rode Joe McCarthy.

  As has already been seen with the Malmedy investigation, Joe was prone to plunge headlong, suspiciously and with great emotion into his favorite controversies. Because of U.S. democratic principles, the Communist Party was allowed to appear on election ballots everywhere in the U.S. This status was upheld and enforced by the courts. According to democratic principles, if Communism was a bad idea, that should be the decision of the American people and not a decision made by an invisible minority with vested interests. McCarthy did not see things that way.