After disposing of this all-important topic, the report took up the thesis that McCarthy’s 80 anonymous cases were nothing but a recycled version of the Lee list. This, too, followed the game plan of the strategy memo, State Department materials sent to Tydings, and the remarks of Karsten and his congressional teammates. To these were added a clinching argument provided by John Peurifoy of the State Department—that a quartet of committees in the Republican 80th Congress had already looked at these very cases and found nothing to alarm them. And if the cases didn’t amount to much in 1948, they obviously amounted to even less in 1950.
Having dealt with these generic questions of State Department security practice, the report next considered the public cases McCarthy had presented to the Tydings panel. As foretold by the conduct of the hearings, the method used throughout was to take the denials of each and every suspect at face value and adopt these as “findings.” Whether it was Dorothy Kenyon, Philip Jessup, Esther Brunauer, Owen Lattimore, Haldore Hanson, or John Service, the verdict was the same: The accused was free of subversive taint, was indeed an outstanding scholar or public servant, and McCarthy’s charges were baseless slanders.
In fact, Tydings and Co. managed to clear everybody and everything within shouting distance of McCarthy’s charges: the State Department; all of the McCarthy suspects, both named and nameless; the IPR (this in connection with the much-lauded Dr. Jessup, a former IPR official); certain periodicals named by McCarthy as subversive; and the Truman Justice Department in the bargain (this in connection with its handling of the Amerasia case). Thrown in with all these clearances, the report also succeeded, by indirections, in clearing both Gustavo Duran and Stephen Brunauer, two of the McCarthy public cases, through professing not to judge them as they were supposedly irrelevant to the hearings.
When members of the Senate got hold of this report and had a chance to study it a bit, something close to pandemonium erupted. Lodge and Hickenlooper were already incensed, but were soon joined by others, including conservatives such as Taft and Mundt and moderate GOPers more akin to Lodge, including New York’s Irving Ives and New Jersey’s Smith. In these exchanges, McCarthy himself was conspicuously silent, though present for various intervening roll calls. He didn’t, however, need to say too much, as virtually everything he might have said in answer to the Tydings onslaught was expressed by a small army of his Republican colleagues, from every sector of the party.
Among these, the most knowledgeable critic of the Tydings version was Ferguson, an experienced investigator of security cases. In a lengthy speech, Ferguson did a complete demolition of the Tydings wrap-up, along the way providing a good deal of background about loyalty-security issues in general. He in particular noted the omission from the report of significant findings by Congress and security investigators in the past. A prime exhibit, he said, was the “chart” (taken from the Klaus memo) reflecting the number of agents, Communists, and so on, in the State Department as of 1946. The document containing these startling data had been obtained by Tydings and was one of the topics raised by Lodge in his series of unanswered questions. The Tydings report made no reference whatever to the substance of this memo.
Summarizing the Klaus disclosures, Ferguson reprised the questions earlier raised by Lodge: “Who are these Communists and agents and sympathizers and suspects? What are their names? Why are they there?” Getting answers to those questions would have been an obvious starting point for any halfway-competent investigation of security affairs at State. The Tydings majority had shown zero interest in such topics, instead focusing strictly on the procedural question of where the “chart” alluded to by Klaus had come from. (See Chapter 23.)
Ferguson cited other omissions also—for instance, that data on Communist penetration of the State Department assembled by the Senate Appropriations subcommittee were nowhere referred to in the report and, he surmised (correctly), nowhere in the Tydings record. Likewise with concerns expressed by Joe Panuch relating to security suspects, the nature of the Amerasia papers, and the curious State Department reversal of the 1947 suspensions under the McCarran rider. These important items, Ferguson noted, weren’t so much as mentioned in the document now before the Senate.*130 13
Other Republican members would expand on these comments. Senator Ives, a spokesman for the moderate Northeast contingent of the party, recapped the debate about S.R. 231 and what was agreed to in it. He noted that the resolution had been explicitly crafted so as not to be limited to McCarthy’s cases but rather to look into the matter of State Department loyalty practice in general. Ives suggested that “there may be some who find that if a fraud and a hoax have been perpetrated on the Senate of the United States, and the American people, such perpetration is evident in the apparently deliberate action of the subcommittee in disregarding the will of the Senate.”14
There were complaints as well about the tone of the report and its abrasive phrasing. The GOP spokesmen noted that, while all McCarthy targets were given absolution, there were a few alleged villains in the lurid picture sketched by Tydings. Foremost among these was, of course, McCarthy, but there were some lesser culprits also. Remarkably, in what professed to be a report by the subcommittee/committee, two of these malefactors—Lodge and Hickenlooper—were among the subcommittee members.
The report criticized both Republicans by name, referring to their allegedly slack performance in viewing State Department security records. “Amazingly,” said the report, “despite Senator McCarthy’s insistence that the loyalty files would prove his case…Senator Hickenlooper read only 9 of the files and Senator Lodge only 12.”15 Criticism of members of a committee in a report of that very committee was, to say the least, unusual. Of course, Lodge and Hickenlooper could take care of themselves, and did. The situation was quite different with private individuals attacked in the report but given no chance to answer its aspersions.
Among the targets of such attack were journalists Isaac Don Levine and Ralph de Toledano, editors of the anti-Communist journal Plain Talk, which specialized in security matters and Cold War issues. In covering the Amerasia case, Plain Talk had run an article by the mercurial Emmanuel Larsen depicting Philip Jaffe, John Service, and others as part of a cabal to promote the Communist cause in China. This matched with what Larsen told the Hobbs committee in 1946, but he had in large part reversed his field with Tydings, saying the article didn’t represent his views and that Levine and/or Toledano had changed its meaning.
Though Hickenlooper urged that the journalists be called to answer these accusations, neither Levine nor Toledano was brought before the panel. Instead, Tydings and Co. not only let the Larsen charges go unanswered but gratuitously reinforced them, saying: “The fact that these persons have been reported to us as professional anti-Communists, whose income and reputation depend on the developing and maintaining of new Communist fears…while not deemed necessarily significant, has not been entirely overlooked by the committee.” And: “if true, this action of Levine and his associates in connection with the Plain Talk article is one of the most despicable instances of a deliberate effort to deceive and hoodwink the American people in our history.”*131 16 (Emphasis added.)
(These comments were noteworthy in themselves but would become the more so when coupled with the Tydings verdict in the case of Owen Lattimore, who like all other McCarthy suspects was cleared in the subcommittee wrap-up. McCarthy’s critique of Lattimore, said the Tydings panel, revealed “the danger of promiscuous and specious attacks on private citizens and their views.”17 [Emphasis added.] What was construed as unfair treatment of a McCarthy target who had ample chance to state his case was apparently okay when done to Toledano and Levine, neither of whom was given an opportunity in the hearings to answer the Tydings onslaught.)
A further episode in which the Tydings panel took the unsupported word of Larsen involved Nebraska Republican Kenneth Wherry, minority leader of the Senate. In its sustained criticism of McCarthy, the majority report asserted: “His [McCarthy’s]
irresponsible statements called for emergency measures [i.e., by his Republican colleagues]. As Senator Wherry told Emmanuel S. Larsen: ‘Oh, Mac got himself out on a limb and kind of made a fool of himself and we have to back him up now.’”18 On reading this, Wherry exploded, categorically denied he had said it, and blasted the Tydings report for repeating as supposed fact a comment by Larsen—whose credibility wasn’t the greatest—without even asking Wherry about the matter.
“I was not given an opportunity,” said Wherry, “to confront the man who is alleged to have made this statement…the statement of this man, whose honor is now being questioned, is being taken at face value, and it is going to be broadcast to the American people.”19 (In this Wherry was more prescient than he imagined, as the statement is often featured, without qualification or mention of his denial, in purported histories of the era.)
Wherry then confronted Edward Morgan, who was on the floor of the Senate as an aide to Tydings, and asked if Morgan had drafted the passage in question. When Morgan accepted responsibility for the language, Wherry became even more enraged and demanded that Morgan be banished from the Senate floor for impugning the honor of a member. This, too, was put to a vote, and also defeated on a party-line division. Subsequently, a still-furious Wherry took a swing at Morgan—a raucous episode that shows up in several books about McCarthy.*132
While Wherry was the most irate, other senators weren’t far behind. Lodge, already angry, would become still more so when he read the comments on his conduct. “It is this type of petty sniping,” he said, “these attempts to hit below the belt, which has made the work of the subcommittee so difficult. If the other statements in the majority’s report are no more accurate than these statements about myself, the report will be chiefly valuable as fiction and special pleading. Indeed this makes the whole document suspect…. They must be desperatemen indeed to use these personal methods to divert attention from the main issue which is, of course, the total inadequacy of the investigation.”20
Finally, the GOPers raised some questions as to where the alleged information in the report had come from and who had actually drafted its offending phrases. “Mr. President,” said Hickenlooper, “this document is a mysterious and mysteriously prepared document. It is a document whose antecedents, paternity and maternity, might be open to some serious and revealing facets. It is a document whose generation raises questions in the minds of any who has followed this matter rather carefully.”21
Ferguson voiced the same suspicions, saying: “I am wondering who did write this report. Who is the actual author of the words of the report?…Who drew the conclusions in the report? Who helped to write it? Who read it before it was actually put before the Senate?” And further: “I ask again, and I shall continue to ask until I can find out, who wrote this report? Whose words are these strange words in the report? It is a strange document. It is alien and foreign to this body.”22
In view of matters already noted, these doubts were obviously well founded. Virtually everything in the report pertaining to the McCarthy cases, the Wheeling affidavits, the Lee list suspects, and all the rest had been gift-wrapped and handed to Tydings by the State Department and uncritically accepted by the majority members of the panel. The questions raised by the GOP lawmakers suggest they had some inkling of this, and if not had extremely sensitive antennae for backstage conniving.
This firestorm raged for several days, fed mostly by Republican members. There were some Democratic responses by such as Tom Connally and Sen. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.)—for instance, defending on procedural grounds the decision to attribute the report to the full Committee on Foreign Relations—but the main Democratic innings belonged to Tydings. On July 20, midway in the week-long donnybrook, the chairman took the floor to make a defense of his report, expound its meaning, and offer his own brand of documentation for its contents.
This Tydings presentation, by all accounts, was among the more memorable speeches ever given in the Senate. He recapped the main points of the report—some several times—but did so in histrionic manner, replete with dramatic images, flights of fancy, and physical props of unusual nature. Among these was a series of charts illustrating the Peurifoy thesis that McCarthy’s cases had been viewed and dismissed out of hand by four committees of the 80th Congress. Another prop, even more novel in the Senate chamber, was a portable record player—which would prove to be the most remarkable item in the whole performance.
A further striking aspect of this speech was that Tydings, trying to revive his early game plan, repeatedly cited Cabot Lodge as concurring in the report’s conclusions. (Lodge would sharply counter that these comments were a mis-statement of his position.) Conversely, Tydings launched a slashing attack on Sen. William Jenner of Indiana, who had criticized the Tydings inquest as a “whitewash.” Tydings accused the anti-Communist stalwart Jenner of following the Moscow line in his foreign policy voting. “I find,” said Tydings, “that Joseph Stalin and the Daily Worker and the senator all vote the same way…. I looked up the senator’s…votes, and here they are, one after the other, always, always, always following the same thing that Stalin is saying, that the Daily Worker is saying and the junior senator from Indiana is saying.”23
All this was certainly high drama for the Senate, but the pièce de résistance was yet to come—the portable record player Tydings had before him and a phonograph record he flourished as he spoke. These props were part of his denunciation of the speech at Wheeling and the supposed McCarthy claim there to a list of 205 Communists in the State Department. After running through the alleged proofs of McCarthy’s lying about the Wheeling numbers—the Desmond story, the affidavits—Tydings said: “Mr. President, I wonder if I could get unanimous consent to play a radio recording of the senator’s own voice on one of these occasions. I ask unanimous consent that I may play a record of the senator’s own words. I am not asking senators to take my word, but to hear the senator’s own voice, who says he has not made such a statement of that character.”
When Wherry objected to this as unseemly, Tydings withdrew his request, saying: “I will play this recording off the floor in due time…but admission will be by card only.” He nonetheless continued holding forth about the phonograph record, saying McCarthy had “told us under oath that was not what he said, but the record stands there to challenge that statement…we have a voice here which can speak louder than these other five exhibits I have already shown the Senate [about the Wheeling numbers].” And further:
One simply cannot beat the sound of a man’s voice…. All one has to do is read McCarthy’s statement in the Congressional Record and listen to this recording in order to know that there is not truth in both these statements…. What is there other than a fraud and a hoax and a deceit about this whole matter? It ought to make the blood of Americans boil, that they have been told these foul and vile charges—and here is a recording to prove it. And if that is broken, I have duplicates. [Laughter]24
This show-and-tell by Tydings was by common consent the forensic highlight of the entire proceedings. Subsequently, he would pose for a smiling picture with the record player and recording, obviously pleased with the effect created. (See Chapter 19.) The press would then report that Tydings had a recording of the Wheeling speech proving McCarthy had falsified the numbers, but that Tydings had been prevented from playing the recording for the Senate. Still more cogent proof, it seemed, of Joe McCarthy’s outrageous lying.
TYDINGS’S PROP
Senator Millard Tydings poses with the phonograph record he led the Senate to believe would prove that McCarthy lied about his speech at Wheeling. Tydings never played the record—with good reason, as he had no recording of the Wheeling speech, a fact he later admitted under oath.
AP/World Wide Photos
Except, of course, there was no such recording of McCarthy’s speech at Wheeling, the only recording anyone ever knew of having been erased the following day or a few days later by the radio station that made it. From which it followed
that Tydings could not have had such a recording, and didn’t. The whole thing was an imposture, as the McCarthy forces would prove when they were eventually able to corner Tydings, in a legal setting under oath, allowing no evasion (after demanding, unsuccessfully, that he play the recording as was promised).
The occasion for this definitive proof was a deposition Tydings was called to give in a libel suit between McCarthy and Sen. William Benton of Connecticut. In this face-off McCarthy’s attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, closely questioned Tydings about the recording of which he had made such a production. After numerous twists and turns that inched Tydings inexorably toward an answer, Williams finally pinned him down as follows: Williams: “Now, we have established this morning, I think pretty conclusively, that you didn’t have a recording of the Wheeling speech, Senator Tydings?” Tydings: “I did not have a radio recording. I had the verbatim copy of his speech, which McCarthy took to West Virginia and which he read.”25 (Emphasis added.)
So it wasn’t McCarthy who falsified the matter, but Tydings, who ostentatiously led his colleagues and the world to think he had a recording of the Wheeling speech when in fact he didn’t. What, then, was the record he offered to play before the Senate? The answer, as he acknowledged to Williams, was a recording of the McCarthy radio interview with Dan Valentine in Salt Lake City. But in that broadcast, as seen, McCarthy never laid claim to a list of 205, but instead claimed a list of 57—precisely as he elsewhere contended. So playing that recording would in no wise have proved that McCarthy lied about the Wheeling numbers, but rather the reverse.
Taken all in all, the story of the Tydings hearing/report and their uproarious reception by the Senate was among the wildest episodes in the history of Congress. From the thirty-five omitted pages, to the bait and switch whereby a “tentative” subcommittee memo became the official report of a full committee, to the recording Tydings professed to have but didn’t, it was a breathtaking venture in deception. As Tydings himself so aptly phrased it, “What is there other than a fraud and a hoax and a deceit about this whole matter?” What, indeed? Which is as good a segue as any to the elaborate tale, oft told by Tydings and the State Department, of the McCarthy/Lee list cases and their supposed clearance by four committees of the Congress.
Blacklisted By History Page 30
