The ironic outcome of this move, however, was to make the rider more of a nullity than ever. Though the names of the suspended employees were never officially published, they soon became as an anonymous group extremely famous.*96 A concerted press campaign was mounted, by Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune and others, depicting the firings as a gross violation of civil liberties and the ousted staffers as helpless victims. Whether this outcry was cause or pretext, State now flip-flopped again, and rather than entering the employees on its records as security dismissals changed their status to that of having resigned—“without prejudice”—from the payroll. This in effect reverted to the no-fault tactics of the past and basically spelled finis for the rider.16
While this debacle was unfolding, John Peurifoy made one last attempt to appease the mutinous barons on the Hill. In the late summer and early fall of 1947, in the spirit of his Busbey letter, he granted permission for staffers of the House Appropriations Committee to rummage through State’s security files and make a record of what they found there. This was in essence a follow-up on the requests of Stefan and would produce a much longer list of cases—108, to be exact. The investigators would compile fairly detailed entries on the cases, capsuling data from the files and offering comments about the way things were handled. Named after the chief clerk of the House committee, this roster would in future discussions usually be called “the Lee list.” It turned out to be a significant document, as it provided the most comprehensive view of State Department security practice ever supplied to Congress.
It would also be, for all practical purposes, the last such view, as a thick curtain of executive secrecy would soon be drawn across the topic. The provocations for this further volte-face occurred in early 1948, shortly after the Lee list was assembled and had started to become a contentious issue. In January and in March, two House committees reviewed the list and questioned State Department officials about its cases. At this time also, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was on the trail of Dr. Edward Condon, an alleged security risk of large dimension who headed the National Bureau of Standards. The committee had its own rap sheet on Condon, but learned there was an FBI report about him at the Department of Commerce, where the Standards Bureau was housed. The committee requested a copy of this report but was turned down flat in a March 4 response from then–Commerce Secretary Averell Harriman, saying such disclosure wouldn’t be in “the public interest.”
Worse yet, from the perspective of Capitol Hill, was soon to follow. On March 13, a sweeping executive order was issued by President Truman forbidding the provision of any further security data to Congress from any executive unit whatever. The Truman edict said all subpoenas or other requests for such information by Congress should be refused and that “there shall be no relaxation of the provisions of this directive except with my express authority.” With this ukase, the era of relatively full disclosure of security information was over. Henceforth, though Hill committees would continue wrestling with security cases—most notably the Hiss-Chambers and William Remington inquests in the summer of 1948—the information they could come up with was strictly what they could develop on their own.17
At the outset of this wrangle, the Truman order sparked efforts by outraged members of the House to defend what they considered the rightful powers of that body. The chosen battleground was the case of Condon. A leading spokesman on the issue, prophetic of many things to come, was freshman Rep. Richard Nixon (R-Ca.), a member of the Un-American Activities panel. In March of 1948, Nixon fired off a letter to Averell Harriman and Attorney General Tom Clark demanding that the FBI memo on Condon be disclosed to Congress. Based on what was already known about this memo, said Nixon, it revealed nothing of the Bureau’s sources. Accordingly, he said, “the public interest demands that the full text of Mr. Hoover’s letter be made public.”
This view of the matter was endorsed by the full Un-American Activities panel and the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and supported by a lengthy memo from the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress.*97 All this in turn would be backed by a huge bipartisan majority in the House, which voted by a margin of better than ten to one (300–29) to “direct” that the Condon report be handed over.18
Unfortunately for Congress, this brave initial stand against executive secrecy would also be the last one. In amazingly jaunty fashion, President Truman made it clear that he wasn’t about to back down from his secrecy order and defied Congress to do anything about it. The lawmakers, he said in paraphrase of Andrew Jackson, had made their ruling, now let them enforce it. This provoked still more congressional outrage and much denunciation of the White House. In a unanimous report about the Hiss case handed down in August of 1948, the House Un-American Activities Committee expressed its frustration this way:
The committee’s investigation of espionage among government workers has been hampered at every turn by the refusal of the executive branch of government to cooperate in any way due to the President’s loyalty freeze order[i.e., the secrecy edict]…The committee deplores the fact that the executive branch of government will in no way aid the committee in its efforts to protect the national security from those who are doing everything they can to undermine and destroy it.19
Equally irate was Sen. Homer Ferguson (R-Mich.), who led the probe of the William Remington case and ran into similar roadblocks. Reviewing this and other secrecy issues, Ferguson warned his Senate colleagues that “some day we shall have to meet the issue head on because the trend to presidential arrogance” in such matters was getting totally out of hand. Congress, he said, “is rapidly being pushed into the intolerable position of having either to legislate through a blind spot or compel the President to answer for his conduct in an impeachment hearing.”20
Strong words, but words Congress, at this point, was nowhere near ready to back up with action. So the secrecy order would stand, and continue standing long thereafter. In the months and years that followed, the Truman edict would be invoked with metronomic regularity, systematically denying Congress data on any and all loyalty/security suspects in the federal workforce. The lawmakers had thus learned enough about such as Hiss and various of the Bentley cases to know there was a serious problem to be dealt with. But now, as they saw it, they were estopped from getting the information they needed to gauge the full extent of the danger and take corrective action.
All of which, from the vantage point of Capitol Hill, was rather as if a lid had been clamped down on a boiling kettle. As the laws of physics and politics alike suggest, that was a pretty good formula for an explosion. When it erupted, the shock waves would hit the Truman White House, State Department, and other executive agencies with shattering force, launching yet another security age of starkly different nature.
CHAPTER 14
Wheeling, 1950
JOE McCarthy stepped into the pages of Cold War history at Wheeling, West Virginia—in many ways a suitable backdrop for his plainspoken message: a hardworking mill and mining town by the Ohio River, perched on the rugged wedge of land that divides Ohio from Pennsylvania. The date was February 9, 1950, a Thursday. The occasion, a Lincoln Day address to the Ohio County (West Virginia) Women’s Republican Club, one in a series of political talks McCarthy was to give that month.
Not many people in Wheeling knew much about the speaker, then a young (forty-one) backbencher of the minority party in the U.S. Senate. The Republican ladies were expecting a discussion of farm problems or maybe housing, two specialties of the visiting solon, or perhaps a more generic party-building speech about Abe Lincoln and the GOP. What they heard was something very different—and infinitely more shocking.
However, exactly what they did hear would become, and long remain, a famous item of dispute. In general and without question, McCarthy told his 275 listeners at the Hotel McLure that there was a serious problem of Communist infiltration in the State Department, that this had been improperly dealt with, and that strong measures would b
e needed to correct it. Other things he had to say would be contested—most notably, and most lasting, just how many Communists in the State Department he was alleging. That this numerical aspect should be the focus of debate seems strange, but so the matter would play out.
In the immediate aftermath of the speech, national press attention was modest. The Friday-morning local paper, the Wheeling Intelligencer, devoted a front-page story to McCarthy’s comments, and the Associated Press sent out a brief account to member papers, about two dozen of whom would use it. All in all, something less than a media firestorm. But by the time McCarthy got to Nevada two days later, the State Department was issuing press releases, McCarthy was expanding on his charges, and the question of what he said at Wheeling was starting to attract some wider notice.
Touching off the battle of the numbers was the Intelligencer story, written by a reporter named Frank Desmond. According to this, McCarthy had told his audience in Wheeling: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”1 The same quote would appear in various AP stories that echoed the Intelligencer item and would be recycled many times thereafter. McCarthy, however, would always categorically deny that he had said this.
McCarthy’s version of what he said at Wheeling, and other places, was that he did indeed have a “list” of people in the State Department who were “either card-carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party,” but that the number of these was 57, not 205. He said the larger figure, which he acknowledged using from time to time, wasn’t a list but a statistic—derived from the letter Secretary of State James Byrnes had written in 1946 to Rep. Adolph Sabath.*98 From these differing versions of the speech there grew up an enormous wrangle featured in every book about McCarthy and most political histories of the era.
In one sense, what McCarthy did or didn’t say at Wheeling is not a matter of great moment—is, indeed, a derailment from the major issues. The crucial topics to be discussed, after all, were the conduct of the Cold War; whether in this context Soviet spies, Communist agents, or dubious loyalty/security risks had infested the State Department; and if so whether in 1950 they were still burrowing in the woodwork. This could be deduced, not by parsing McCarthy’s words and numbers, but by examining the security setup at State and tracking the leads and cases its officials had developed. McCarthy might have said there were 300 Martians in the State Department without affecting this larger issue one way or the other.
However, in another sense, the evidence on McCarthy’s talk at Wheeling is important. It was this speech that launched the whole McCarthy era, led to his more detailed address before the Senate, then triggered the Tydings hearings and everything that followed. Moreover, what McCarthy said at Wheeling is significant because his opponents contrived to make it so. To cite only the most obvious examples, the report the Tydings committee produced dwelt on the 205 at length, and Sen. William Benton (D-Conn.) would later use this as his main exhibit in urging the Senate to oust McCarthy. Since then countless articles, books, and media productions have picked up the Tydings-Benton thesis, saying McCarthy falsely claimed to have a “list of 205” at Wheeling, then backed down and changed his story. The subject thus goes to his credibility—and, it’s worth noting, that of his critics.
At a distance of more than fifty years, it’s of course impossible to reconstruct the facts on Wheeling with any great assurance. All the major players are gone and data that could have answered our questions in definite fashion are, for various reasons, missing. Most obviously, a recording of the speech made by Wheeling radio station WWVA for broadcast that evening was erased, apparently on the following day or perhaps a few days later. Most of the people who heard the speech are doubtless gone as well (though fortunately not all). Nonetheless, we do have a surprising amount of information to draw on in trying to figure out what happened.
The evidence gathered by the State Department, Tydings subcommittee, and Senator Benton to prove McCarthy lied about the Wheeling speech consisted of five items: First, the Desmond article in the Intelligencer containing the “205” quotation. Second, a letter from an executive of the paper, Col. Austin Wood, more or less vouching for the Desmond story. Third, a rough draft of the speech McCarthy brought to Wheeling, in which the 205 quote in fact appeared, copies of which had been given to Desmond and representatives of the radio station. Fourth and fifth—and most crucial—depositions from two officials of the station about the broadcast of the lecture.2
These affidavits would be central to the indictment of McCarthy, as they served as stand-ins for the lost recording (and were significant for other reasons also). In them, station officials Paul Myers and James Whitaker swore they had checked McCarthy’s draft against the talk he had delivered and that he read the text verbatim—in which event, he did indeed lay claim to a “list of 205,” since that is what the rough draft stated. Such was, and such is now, the case against McCarthy.
As it happened, all this would be carefully looked at in 1951 by investigators from the U.S. Senate. When Benton brought his charges urging McCarthy’s expulsion from that body, they were referred to the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections (a panel of the Rules Committee), chaired by Sen. Guy Gillette (D-Iowa). As a charge of perjury about the Wheeling numbers was the first item on Benton’s list, the Gillette committee sent its staffers up to West Virginia to dig out the facts about it. The findings they came back with were capsuled in a forty-page memo that is the most comprehensive source of data now available on the subject—and probably was the best source then.3
Of particular interest in this memo is the immediate prehistory of the speech, as sketched by the committee staffers. In this account, McCarthy arrived at the Wheeling airport on the afternoon of February 9, where he was met by ex-Congressman Francis Love, former GOP senatorial candidate Tom Sweeney, and reporter Desmond. At this time McCarthy gave a copy of his projected speech to Sweeney for the use of WWVA, and another to Desmond. According to both Love and Sweeney, McCarthy stressed that this was a rough draft he was going to revise before delivery.
The Senator was then driven to the Fort Henry Club in Wheeling, where he said he was going to work on the speech for a couple of hours. At 7:00 P.M. or thereabouts, he was picked up again by Sweeney and driven to the Hotel McLure, where he would deliver his address. Among those in the audience that evening was the editor of the Intelligencer, Herman Gieske. As Gieske told the Senate staffers, McCarthy stressed to him as well that the draft supplied to Desmond was not the speech delivered and that any press treatment of the talk should be based on what McCarthy actually said that evening.
In the course of their investigation, the committee staffers interviewed Love, Sweeney, Desmond, Gieske, and others who had been at the meeting. They also talked with station officials Myers and Whitaker about the depositions they had given. From this round robin the investigators learned a number of intriguing things about the draft, the Desmond story, and the Myers-Whitaker affidavits. Their chief findings were as follows:
• According to the investigative memo, reporter Desmond conceded that the “205” quote in his story was taken from the rough draft of the speech, not what McCarthy said at the McLure. As the memo related, Desmond “admits that he did not hear Senator McCarthy make that statement and that, in quoting McCarthy in his news article, he relied on the script which had been delivered to WWVA, a copy of which had also been given to him.”4 The memo later revisited the question in four separate passages:
“Desmond admitted he ‘got the figure’ he used in his news article from the script” “…the true source of the figure cited in his news story was the ‘rough draft’ of the speech which Senator McCarthy had given him” “Desmond admitted to our investigators that the script was in fact the sole source of the figure ‘205,’ used by him in his news account of the speech” “…the explanation made to subcommittee in
vestigators by Desmond…concerning the circumstances surrounding the publication of the news article [and the letter from Austin Wood] show these two items of proffered evidence to be lacking in evidential value on the point at issue.”5
All of which would seem to make matters pretty clear concerning the draft, the Desmond story, and where the “205” quotation came from.
• As for the depositions of Myers and Whitaker, the Gillette committee inquiry found equally disturbing problems. In particular, it was hard to square their statements that McCarthy read the draft verbatim with the testimony of other people at the dinner. These witnesses were unanimous in saying McCarthy spoke more or less extemporaneously, apparently not following a text at all, rough draft or other. The consensus was that he may have read some sections of the speech but ad-libbed others, waving papers around, pacing behind the podium, and speaking as the spirit moved him.
Meeting chairman William Callahan, for instance, stated: “I have a distinct impression that McCarthy cut, eliminated, passed over, jumped through parts of his speech.” Tom Sweeney would agree, recalling: “McCarthy was not reading the speech. It was a combination of both [reading and extemporizing]. He was walking around the platform. He referred to the manuscript from time to time. He did not read the speech.” Francis Love concurred: “It seems to me that McCarthy talked extemporaneously but that he had papers in front of him and might have read a paragraph now and then.”6
Also suggestive on this point, the rough draft of McCarthy’s speech included some grossly erroneous population figures that would have shocked everyone present if read verbatim. Most jarringly, the draft said the Soviet Union at that time controlled some “80 billion people” while the population of the free world had shrunk to “500 thousand.” Nobody recalled McCarthy saying anything that outlandish, but if the affidavits were true he must have.
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