Blacklisted By History

by M. Stanton Evans

  Meanwhile, the contention that McCarthy claimed a “list of 205” Communists at State, then backed off from this and started crawfishing on the numbers, would be enshrined in the report of the Tydings panel as the alleged truth about the speech at Wheeling. From that source it would be repeated, and still is, in countless books, surveys of the Cold War era, and media productions of all types alleging that Joe McCarthy was a liar. The stark contrast between such standard treatments and what is actually in the record would become a model for virtually all discussions of McCarthy now available to readers.

  CHAPTER 15

  Discourse on Method

  COMPLETING his foray to the West, McCarthy arrived back in Washington on Saturday, February 18, after a brief stopover in Wisconsin, to what seems today a tame reception. The scant coverage he got on his return suggests that, nine days after Wheeling, his charges still hadn’t become a press sensation—though that was about to change abruptly.

  The Sunday Washington Post, for instance, gave no notice at all to his arrival, in contrast to its subsequent nonstop and generally hostile coverage of his doings. The Washington Times Herald, sister paper of the Chicago Tribune and later McCarthy’s main journalistic backer, did somewhat better by him, but only somewhat. It devoted a small item on page five to his return, headlined, “McCarthy to Tell ‘Facts on Reds,’” but not saying much besides this.1

  The Washington Sunday Star put McCarthy on page one but devoted only three brief paragraphs to him, below the fold, tagged to a somewhat longer story about Senate Democratic leader Scott Lucas of Illinois. In a statement from Chicago, Lucas had leveled a blast against McCarthy, saying he “simply doesn’t have the facts” and demanding “let him name the names.” In oblique response to this, the Star quoted McCarthy as saying he “intends to present considerable detailed information to the Senate tomorrow” (i.e., Monday) but “refused to say whether he would name the Communists.”2

  This long-distance press exchange between McCarthy and Scott Lucas was predictive of much that happened later. The let-him-name-the-names motif had been a feature of State Department responses to McCarthy for several days before this, so perhaps Lucas was merely echoing what he had seen somewhere about those statements. Or perhaps he already had a game plan of his own. At all events, his comment from Chicago prefigured the main point that he would stress when McCarthy went before the Senate.

  On Monday afternoon, apparently between 4 and 5 P.M., McCarthy as advertised rose on the Senate floor to make his charges and present the evidence he had to back them. According to eyewitness accounts, he had stacked before him a large pile of folders from which he would intermittently read material, flourish papers, and offer exhibits for viewing by his colleagues. In a marathon presentation clocked at better than six hours, he recited the cases of some fourscore past, present, and prospective employees of the State Department, all allegedly going to show massive subversion and security breakdown in Foggy Bottom.

  Before McCarthy could get into his presentation, however, a number of other things would happen. Almost immediately, he would be challenged by Scott Lucas as to what exactly he said about the 205 at Wheeling and the quote from the Frank Desmond story in the Intelligencer. In response, McCarthy would give the explanation of the numbers reviewed in the preceding pages, noting the difference between the 57 names he claimed to have and the statistical 205 derived from Byrnes. He also read in full the text of his speech as he said it had been given in both Wheeling and Reno, the telegram he sent to Truman, and excerpts from the Byrnes letter to Adolph Sabath.

  As this was the first occasion on which McCarthy would give his version of what he said at Wheeling-Reno, it’s an appropriate spot for a synopsis of these controverted lectures. In these remarks, he said the two speeches were the same and that both had been recorded “so there can be no doubt as to what I said.” The recording part was certainly true of Wheeling and apparently true of Reno, but as seen the Wheeling version was erased and nobody ever made that much of an issue of what he said at Reno. (From McCarthy’s comments, it doesn’t appear he then knew the Wheeling recording had been erased.)3

  In substance, the speech McCarthy read to the Senate wasn’t too different from the text excerpted on Chapter 1 of the Intelligencer. It was an impassioned call for all-out American resistance to the designs of Moscow and its agents, depicted as aggressively expanding their empire while the frontiers of freedom were shrinking (hence the population figures). In so stating, McCarthy cast the struggle starkly in religious terms—the confrontation of atheistic communism with the Christian civilization of the West. The United States, he said, had the resources, moral stature, and responsibility to resist this menace but hadn’t effectively met the challenge.

  The blame for this McCarthy placed squarely on elements in the State Department, and elsewhere in the federal government, who were either working for the Communist cause or heedlessly permitting others to do so. It was in this context that he mentioned four individuals—John Service, Gustavo Duran, Mary Jane Keeney, and State Department appointee Harlow Shapley—as examples of lax security practice and/or blindness to the Communist danger. (He further mentioned Alger Hiss and Julian Wadleigh, but as both of these had already been dealt with in court proceedings, neither was ever a McCarthy “case.”)

  In these comments, the centrality of the religious issue was perhaps the most striking feature. It was the Communist denial of God and its “religion of immoralism,” McCarthy said, that made the differences between East and West irreconcilable—far more than the many obvious distinctions in political and economic systems. The choice at this fundamental level, in his view, was clear-cut and inescapable, and had to be met without equivocation. “Today,” he said, “we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.” The message, in both tone and content, was apocalyptic.

  Even back in 1950, the strong religious note was a bit unusual for a political stump speech to a secular audience, which in more typical cases might have had a passing reference to such matters but wouldn’t have made them a main thesis. Another notable aspect of the talk, which recurred in several places, was its distinctly populist flavor, expressing disdain for the elitists who had become enmeshed in revolutionary causes.

  “It has not been,” said McCarthy, “the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling out the nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has to offer—the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs the government can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been the worst.”4

  The glaringest of the glaring, said McCarthy, was Alger Hiss, “who sold out the country which had given him so much” and had been convicted in federal court a few weeks before for having done so, then lying about it under oath. This led in natural sequence to Dean Acheson, who had recently made the famous statement that he wouldn’t “turn his back” on Hiss, his erstwhile subordinate in the State Department. In defense of this comment, Acheson had cited the passage in the Book of Matthew ending “I was in prison and you came to me.” This reference outraged McCarthy, who denounced “this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent,” for blasphemously invoking the words of Christ to justify complaisance toward a traitor.

  This was pure essence of Joe McCarthy, combining religious and patriotic themes, populist leanings, and anti-Communist fervor in one package—all of it unloaded on the high official who in his view epitomized what was wrong with American conduct in the Cold War. It was Dean Acheson’s fostering care, as McCarthy saw it, that had permitted such as Hiss to flourish. To McCarthy, what Acheson said about Hiss was simply inconceivable—indicative of a mental and moral blindness that threatened the very survival of the nation. (That view would be reciprocated by Acheson and his allies, who thought the inconceivable danger was McCarthy and the
“primitives” he represented.)

  McCarthy said a number of other things as well—concerning the deals cut by Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta conference with Joseph Stalin, the 1949 testimony of former FBI agent Larry Kerley about Soviet spying in World War II, and an assertion that the main Cold War evil to be combatted was not espionage, bad as that was, but Communist influence on American conduct overseas. “In discussing the Communists in our government,” said McCarthy, “we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.”5

  It was at this point that the paragraph concerning 57 “card-carrying Communists” was inserted, almost in incidental fashion, as illustrative of the policy problem. Again, since this would be so much disputed, it’s well to have McCarthy’s version of what exactly he had said about the matter, as follows: “I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.”6

  Something more than incidental was McCarthy’s focus on John Stewart Service. Not only was the Service-Amerasia matter mentioned in the Wheeling-Reno text, it became a subject of further comment in its own right. McCarthy rehearsed for the Senate the tale of the Amerasia scandal and Service’s reports from China touting the cause of the Yenan comrades. He then sharply criticized the way the case had been handled by the Truman administration. The whole affair, he said, showed that something was badly amiss in the State Department and the White House.

  Other topics McCarthy mentioned in his prepared remarks, and in impromptu exchanges with his colleagues, were those touched on in earlier comment: resort to the resignation strategy rather than discharging suspects outright, failure to invoke the McCarran rider, the secrecy in which all such topics had been mantled. In which connection, McCarthy made a particular point of the need for Congress to get access to security records rather than merely taking the say-so of the State Department or the White House as to what was in them.

  By reading the text of this speech before the Senate, McCarthy plainly wasn’t backing down from his previous claim that he knew the identities of 57 people in the State Department “who would appear to be card-carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.” In fact, he read the identical number/allegation into the Congressional Record in the text of his wire to Truman. In so doing, he bound himself to a hard-line critique of State, the specific number 57 in reference to Communists or their clones at Foggy Bottom, and the contention that he had the names of this many suspects. Unlike the confusion over what was said at Wheeling, all of this was extremely clear and readily documentable from the Record.

  However, when McCarthy finally got going on his cases, the Senate speech was more varied and nuanced than the text from Wheeling-Reno. This was perhaps to be expected, if only because of the obvious difference between a stump speech to the party faithful and what amounted to a formal proffer of charges in an official setting. There was the further point that the Senate speech discussed a large number of individual cases that varied from one instance to the next and couldn’t all be handled in identical fashion. Also, the nature of the evidence itself was mixed, apparently stemming from different kinds of sources.

  In this presentation, McCarthy did say, in so many words, that various of the suspects he was describing had been identified by knowledgeable witnesses, FBI reports, and intelligence data as Communist Party members. Other allegations were less direct, though not exactly reassuring: association with known Reds, hiring and promotion of Communists, contacts with suspected Soviet espionage agents, employment by Soviet or pro-Communist groups, and the like. To judge from his presentation, there were certainly a lot of people on his roster—perhaps more than 57—who could plausibly be described as Communists or “certainly loyal to the Communist Party” if the McCarthy allegations were correct and current.

  All told, McCarthy said, he was going to present information on 81 cases—which, for a variety of reasons, was not precisely the number covered. Reading from what he said were data from “State Department files,” or digests thereof, he painted a lurid picture of security meltdown. In reciting the cases, he indicated that he knew the identities of the people he was discussing but supplied no names, listing the suspects by numbers only. Adding to the air of mystery, various contacts of these individuals, alleged espionage agents and such, were also nameless.

  While treatment of particular cases must be deferred, a few of McCarthy’s comments about some of his suspects are worth a note in passing to get the tenor of the discourse. These statements, in most instances, were somewhat detailed, though brief, and often of sensational nature. They also provided to knowledgeable students of such matters significant clues as to where McCarthy’s data had come from. Here, for example, was case No. 1:

  “The man involved in case No. 1 is employed in the office of the Assistant Secretary of State. The intelligence unit shadowed him and found him contacting members of an espionage group. A memorandum of December 13, 1946, indicated that he succeeded in having a well-known general intervene with an assistant secretary in behalf of one man who is an active Communist with a long record of Communist Party connections. There is another individual who is very closely tied up with a Soviet espionage agency. There is nothing in the file to indicate that the general referred to knew these two individuals were Communists.”7

  Here was case No. 11: “This individual was an analyst in OSS from July 1943 to August 1945, and was employed in the Division of Map Intelligence in the State Department after August 1945. He is a close pal of a known Communist and has stated it would be a good idea if the Communists were to take over in this country. He is a regular reader of the Daily Worker. This individual is not in the State Department at this time, but has a job in the CIA as of today.”8

  Case No. 28: “This individual has been with the State Department as a Foreign Service officer since 1936. He is still holding a high salaried job with the government, and to the best of my knowledge he is now stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. A report of June 1947 indicates that he is a member of the Communist Party, that he attended the Youth International in Russia in 1935….He had been discharged previously from the AFL Federation of Government Employees on the charge of Communistic activity…. The file discloses the interesting information that he is a member of the central group, whose task is to spearhead an attack on J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI….”9

  And case No. 46: “[This] is the case of a man who holds a high position in the State Department. He had been affiliated with the magazine Amerasia from May 1937 to November 1941. This magazine consistently followed the Communist Party line. It was under the direction of Philip Jaffe and Frederick Vanderbilt Field [both identified, later self-admitted Communists]…. On March 22, 1946 the State Department’s own security agency recommended [his dismissal]…. The Department took no action on this recommendation.”10

  As to the sources of such information, McCarthy repeatedly said it came from “the State Department’s own files” or from the department’s “security agency” and was accordingly known to Secretary of State Acheson and his assistants. McCarthy further asserted that, were it not for “some loyal employees” of the State Department, he wouldn’t have been able to give such data to the Senate. His references to the State Department’s security files were many: “I do not have complete State Department files, information to which we are entitled….I am trying to recite the facts which the State Department’s own security agency dug up…”11

  Concerning the security division at State and certain of its “loyal employees” who had tried to enforce more rigorous standards, McCarthy made some suggestive statements about Joe Panuch. These indicated that McCarthy knew something of the internal struggles in the security division—though not, apparently, the full story. They also evinced a high regard
for Panuch and his colleagues, in implicit contrast to the Acheson appointees who replaced them. As McCarthy phrased it:

  …the information I get—and this is not so much from the files—is that this man Panuch tried to do a job of housecleaning and was given somewhat of a free hand under Jimmy Byrnes in starting to accomplish the job. However, when Byrnes left and Marshall took over—senators will recall Acheson was then Under Secretary—the first official act of General Marshall was to discharge this man Panuch. Obviously, General Marshall did not know anything about the situation….Here is one man who had tried to do the job of housecleaning, and the ax falls.12

  At several places, McCarthy also expressed the nature of his own role as he conceived it. He wasn’t the head of the FBI, or an undercover agent, or a professional security expert. “I do not,” he said, “have a counterespionage group of my own.” He was not alleging on his own authority that the cases he recited were security risks or Communists, but rather that data to this effect were contained in the records of the State Department. He repeatedly noted that the cases were “nothing new,” that many had been kicking around for years but had been ignored or treated with indifference. All of which meant, he said, that it was time for the U.S. Senate to take responsibility for such matters and conduct a thoroughgoing inquest.13

  Working his way through a mass of data, and subject to countless interruptions and digressions, McCarthy stumbled in several places. Most obviously, he omitted about half a dozen of his cases and, toward the end of his recitation, undoubtedly bleary-eyed, repeated a case already dealt with. Beyond this, as subsequent checking would show, he made a number of other errors: whether a given person was still in the State Department, the date on which something happened, the particular office held by someone at a particular time. Also, as his critics would note, if the security information said someone had been identified as a Communist, he tended to cite the identification as fact—no “allegedly” about it. In prosecutorial mode, he pushed the evidence hard to make an indictment and seldom erred through understatement. Conversely, as such discussion made clear also, he wasn’t simply inventing charges out of whole cloth.