Confidential Memorandum
“It is apparent that the report of the House investigation did not utilize information from the Department of State files which would disprove charges of disloyalty or security risk with respect to each individual. The House investigators’ report being not for the primary purpose of challenging the department’s conclusion as to disloyalty or security risk did not, in most instances, concern itself with the merits of each case.”
Rep. Frank Karsten, May 1, 1950
“It is apparent that the memoranda prepared by the House investigators in 1947 were selective and did not presume to set forth information from the State Department files which would disprove charges of disloyalty with respect to each individual. As a matter of fact, the House investigators’ report being not for the primary purpose of challenging the State Department’s conclusion as to disloyalty or security risk, did not in most instances concern itself with the merits of each case.”
Confidential Memorandum
“It is fair to say, in terms of Senator McCarthy’s charges, that the House report was a specialized selection from the State Department’s files. Since it is apparent that Senator McCarthy in turn twisted, colored or perverted in many instances the House report, his charges on the Senate floor on February 20, 1950, constituted a double perversion of the Department’s file in terms of the situation in 1947.”
Tydings Report, July 20, 1950
“In terms, therefore, of the charges made by Senator McCarthy, it is fair and proper to say that the House memoranda were a specialized selection from the files of the State Department…[McCarthy] twisted, colored or perverted the House material….In many instances, his speech of February 20, 1950, to the Senate constituted a distortion compounded of the State Department’s files in terms of the situation that prevailed, not in 1950, but back in 1947.”
Confidential Memorandum
“There is no factual information on any of the February 20 81 cases which does not exist in its counterpart in the ‘108 list’…where the language of the House investigators was conditional or doubtful, Senator McCarthy’s language was positive, unequivocal, and colored…”
Tydings Report
“There is no factual information relative to any one of the February 20 cases which does not have its identifiable counterpart among the ‘108 list’…In those instances where the language of the House investigators was conditional or doubtful, Senator McCarthy’s language is positive, unequivocal, and colored.”
It was by such devices and from such sources that the pattern for virtually all subsequent treatments of McCarthy’s early cases was established. With no conspicuous exceptions, mainstream bios and histories of the era have taken their cues from Tydings and/or the orations of Karsten and his colleagues, repeating as supposed fact their statements on the Wheeling numbers, the Lee list, and other alleged proofs of McCarthy’s lying. Readers of these works have no way of knowing—and the authors themselves don’t seem to know—that the whole thing was concocted by the State Department. All of which would seem to be questionable in itself, but becomes the more so when we reflect that the material thus passed on, in case after case, was grossly in error.
From all of which, a number of conclusions are apparent. That Tydings conducted no investigation of the State Department hardly needs much stressing. The true investigative efforts of the subcommittee, such as they were, focused strictly on McCarthy, aimed at discrediting his statements, digging up evidence to be used against him, and otherwise doing whatever might be done to injure him in his set-to with the State Department and the White House. Equally obvious is that, throughout, Tydings was operating in tight collusion with the State Department, as he would in essence admit in later comments. On the central points at issue, Tydings did little more than act as a willing conduit for whatever information—or misinformation—the State Department chose to give him.
Beyond these self-evident gleanings from the backstage history are a couple of other items that bear noting. One is the formidable array of forces that had lined up against McCarthy and were acting in concert to bring about his downfall. To cite only the major players, these included the Truman White House and its agents; the State Department and the apparently limitless resources it was willing to devote to discrediting its obstreperous critic; Tydings himself and other majority members of his panel; prominent members of the Senate, including Lucas, Kilgore, Benton, Chavez, and others; and, in a somewhat unusual cross-pollination between chambers of the Congress, influential figures in the House, including Karsten of Missouri and senior members of that body such as Rooney and McCormack.
A final important point worth noting—in some ways the most important—is the extreme violence of this opposition, which from the beginning took the Catonian view that McCarthy should be not only refuted with answers to his charges but politically annihilated. The attitude throughout was delenda est McCarthy. It’s noteworthy, indeed, that the idea of censuring McCarthy, expelling him from the Senate, and destroying him as a political figure was voiced so vehemently and so often in this early going in the spring of 1950. Such was, for instance, the note struck in the strategy memo Tydings sent to Morgan, the comments of Truman to his staffers, the secret Tydings apartment confab, and the follow-up memo from State directed to the White House.
Granted that McCarthy had made a lot of people angry, this over-the-top reaction seems quite strange. Assuming he was wrong about his cases, as his critics argued, why not simply show this, thus besting him in the usual manner of our discourse? Why the instantaneous determination to censure him, eject him from the Senate, annihilate him altogether? People in Congress disagree every day, sometimes for years on end, often in the most heated manner, without trying to expel or censure their opponents or destroy them utterly as political figures. Yet such was the fate decreed for Joe McCarthy from the beginning, and such when all was done would be the outcome of his struggle.
CHAPTER 18
A Fraud and a Hoax
SOME two weeks after Chairman Tydings gaveled proceedings to a close, the printed record and report of his subcommittee were ready for transmission to the Senate. True to the spirit of the hearings, both documents would give rise to bitter conflict between the parties and strange occurrences that were puzzling then and remain so decades later.*125
Probably the most surreal aspect of the ensuing melee was the matter of the disappearing transcript. Among the first to notice the problem was Henry Cabot Lodge, who received the printed hearings on July 24 and thumbed through them to check up on certain items. When he did he found something missing—his statement at the last full session of the panel, saying many significant topics hadn’t been covered and posing a series of questions he said had not been answered. Angrily raising the issue before the Senate, Lodge noted that this entire section of the hearings had vanished.
Addressing Homer Ferguson, who had the floor, Lodge asked: “Is the senator from Michigan aware of the fact that in the printed copy of the hearings on disloyalty there are omitted, beginning at page 1438, about 35 typewritten pages of the transcript of June 28?”*126 Lodge added that these pages dealt with “some very important matters” and that their disappearance obviously wasn’t accidental. The deletion, he said, “could not have been a mistake…because after the omission of the large number of pages…in the printed copy of the hearings appear the last sentences shown in the typewritten transcript, including the part about adjournment.”1 Somebody had surgically removed thirty-five pages of stenographic record, then tacked on to what was left the concluding phases of the hearing to give the appearance of a completed session.
On even a cursory survey of the omitted pages, it’s evident the things discussed were indeed important. They included not only the questions raised by Lodge but Hickenlooper’s comments about witnesses not called, the Tydings-Morris exchange about not wasting the afternoon on Theodore Geiger, and other such contentious topics. These items indicated rather clearly that the subcommittee ha
dn’t done a thorough investigation or even made a fair beginning. And now all these items themselves were missing.
The usually mild-mannered Lodge came as close to strong invective as his patrician genes permitted. “I shall not attempt,” he said, “to characterize these methods of leaving out of the printed text parts of the testimony and proceedings….I shall not characterize such methods because I think they speak for themselves.”†127 His view of the matter was endorsed by Senators Ferguson, Karl Mundt, and Robert Taft (who likewise noted that the omission couldn’t have been accidental). Ferguson was especially vocal, urging that the Tydings panel be reconvened to “undertake an investigation of its own staff, an investigation of who prepared this volume, to determine who is responsible for omitting from the record these vital pages.”2
That obviously would have been a good idea, but no such determination was made, nor was any clear explanation offered. Tydings apparently was absent from the floor when the protest erupted, leaving it to Brien McMahon to make an awkward effort at amends—saying he thought the printed transcript was complete, but if not the missing pages should be separately printed as an adjunct to the hearings. Lodge was not appeased. “Having had this experience,” he said, “I would rather not take a chance. I would prefer to have the portion I have referred to printed in the Congressional Record.”‡128 3
In the event, both remedies were adopted. The missing pages were inserted by Ferguson in the Record at the conclusion of his remarks and thereafter published also as an addendum to the printed transcript. This resulted in what has to be the most physically peculiar hearing record ever to roll off the government presses: Part I, the original printed transcript, totaling 1,484 pages; Part II, the appendix containing various exhibits, amounting to 1,024 pages; and, bringing up the rear, Part III, the formerly missing section, running to all of 14 printed pages—a forlorn caboose attached to a gigantic freight train. The asymmetry of the three-volume set makes it something of a collector’s item and well represents the weirdness of the whole proceeding.
Nor was that all that would develop on the missing pages. It further happened that the deleted portion contained exchanges on the question of issuing a report of the subcommittee, which helped make that document controversial in its own right. Here were recorded not only the complaints of Republican members about things left undone but the replies of Tydings, McMahon, and Green as to why a summary memo on the inquest should nonetheless be drafted.
In trying to overcome GOP objections to doing such a wrap-up, Tydings and Co. had rung the changes on the tentative character of what was being asked for. Green: “A draft to date of the work we have accomplished…. It doesn’t have to be a conclusion…just a basis…” McMahon: Such a draft “doesn’t commit us to anything except seeing a memorandum of what we have got….I shouldn’t call it a report. I would call it a memorandum of work that has been done.” On that tranquilizing note, Tydings suggested that counsel Morgan “prepare a tentative report to be submitted to the members of the committee”—a basis, in Green’s phrasing, “for discussion.”4
Tydings then pushed through a motion to have such a provisional memo drafted. Lodge and Hickenlooper, despite all entreaties, still said no, Green and McMahon voted aye, and Tydings turned to his counsel and said, “Go ahead, Mr. Morgan, and draft your report.”*129 These comments about the nature of what was being voted were among the items that vanished with the missing transcript. This became the more suggestive when it developed that the tentative, no-big-deal memo would in fact be the final report of the subcommittee—seen by neither Lodge nor Hickenlooper before it was printed.
This, too, became an object of dispute when the report was brought before the Senate. Lodge was as angry as he would be about the missing pages. “I never saw the majority report,” he said, “until this afternoon….I never had achance to see what the majority had to say until the thing was in print….[T]here has never been a vote in the subcommittee on this report, because the senator from Iowa has never seen it at all and I saw it just this afternoon at 2 o’clock.” Hickenlooper would reinforce and amplify these comments, saying, “I never saw this proposed report until after it had been printed, and after it had been given to the press…”5
This seemed bad enough, but other curious revelations were soon to follow. Having been wafted through subcommittee, the report had been passed on to the full Committee on Foreign Relations, where still other odd mutations had further transformed the harmless memo. As Sen. H. Alexander Smith of New Jersey, a ranking Republican on the full committee, explained, members of the committee had no time to read the report or weigh its merits. Accordingly, said Smith, “It was moved that the Committee on Foreign Relations transmit to the Senate…the report of the subcommittee without comment one way or another…I doubt that anyone except the chairman of the subcommittee [Tydings] had read the report.” So it was decided, Smith concluded, to say the report had been “received” rather than “accepted” by the full committee, “without comment,” and thereafter “transmitted to the Senate.”6
This seemingly technical issue would be discussed at length by other Republican members who knew something of the matter, seconding Smith’s recollection of what had happened and his insistence that “the report is not a report of the Foreign Relations Committee” but of the subcommittee only. Senators Brewster, Ferguson, Lodge, and others addressed the point, summed up by Lodge as follows: “I understood that the full committee merely transmitted the report, just the same as the Post Office Department transmits a letter from one person to another. That is clear from the record.”7
Against that backdrop, when the report came to the floor, Sens. Kenneth Wherry (R-Neb.) and Forrest Donnell (R-Mo.) sought to make it a matter of official record that this indeed wasn’t a report of the full committee but only of the subcommittee, which in turn meant, of course, only its three Democratic members. These objections were summarily overridden by Truman’s vice president, Alben Barkley, in the chair, and this ruling was sustained in a straight party-line division; the report would thus be attributed in Senate records to the full committee, not simply to the Tydings panel. Meanwhile, Ferguson and Donnell flagged yet another strange development to the attention of their colleagues: The cover sheet of the document, which originally said it was a report of the subcommittee, had already been replaced—again by some hidden hand—with a brand-new cover reading, “Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations.”8
Thus did a document that started out as an innocuous, tentative memo—“just a basis” for discussion—wind up as an official Senate report with the imprimatur of the full parent Committee on Foreign Relations, with all the authority this was presumably heir to. In the larger scheme of things, these procedural monkeyshines hardly seem significant enough to justify the considerable effort that was obviously devoted to them. However, the stages by which the metamorphosis occurred are worth noting as indicative of the methods being used to steer the matter through the Senate.
More important than this parliamentary shuffle, though obviously connected to it, was what the report had to say in terms of substance. The document was about as one-sided as Edward Morgan, or whoever actually did the drafting, could contrive to make it. The opening sections concerned, not loyalty problems in the State Department, the security setup there, or the merits of specific cases, but the transcendent evil of Joe McCarthy. The essence of it, stated early and repeated often, was that McCarthy had made false allegations, changed his story, and then lied about it to the Senate. McCarthy, not subversives in the Federal workforce or security practice in the State Department, was depicted as the most pressing danger before the nation.
These charges were not only harsh in content but made in the most violent language. The humdrum, provisional memo had somehow evolved into a mass of scathing accusations. “Hoax,” “fraud,” “deception,” “nefarious,” “vile,” “big lie,” “distortion,” “half-truth,” “untruth,” “despicable,” “bias,” “sinister,” and “t
otalitarian” were among the epithets used—terms seldom seen in any Senate report whatever, much less about a member of that body.9 Here are a couple of nontentative, unprovisional comments included in its pages:
Starting with nothing, Senator McCarthy plunged headlong forward, desperately seeking to develop some information, which colored with distortion and fanned by a blaze of bias would forestall a day of reckoning. Certain elements rallied to his support, particularly those who ostensibly fight communism by adopting the vile methods of the Communists themselves. Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism have been exposed for what they are—and the sight is not a pretty one.10
And further:
…we are constrained fearlessly and frankly to call the [McCarthy] charges, and the methods employed to give them ostensible validity, what they are: A fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the Senate of the United States and the American people. They represent perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truth and untruth in the history of the Republic. For the first time in our history, we have seen the totalitarian technique of the big lie employed on a sustained basis.11
In seeking to prove these grim assertions, the report tracked closely with the strategy memo Tydings had sent to Morgan back in April, the 168-page “Confidential Memorandum” that showed up a few days later, and the remarks of Karsten-Kilgore and others who attacked McCarthy on the floor of Congress. As in these prior incarnations, the chief indictment was McCarthy’s alleged lying about the Wheeling numbers, the main evidence cited in support of this the Desmond Intelligencer story and the radio affidavits. No glimmer of doubt appeared about the authenticity of these items. Based on these supposed proofs, the report treated the “205” quote as fact and made an official finding that McCarthy said it. His use of the number 57, therefore, simply attested to the “ever-shrinking character of the charges” and “constituted misrepresentation of the true facts to the Senate.”12
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