Blacklisted By History

by M. Stanton Evans

  CHAPTER 19

  Of Names and Numbers

  ROBERT E. LEE is of course a famous name in American history: the Union officer from Virginia who opted for his native Southland in the Civil War and became the leader of the Confederate armies.

  However, the Robert E. Lee who concerns us here wasn’t a Southerner of the nineteenth century but a twentieth-century Irish Catholic from Chicago.*133 A former FBI special agent (and later a commissioner of the FCC), this Lee had been chief clerk of the House Appropriations Committee in the Republican 80th Congress, some of whose doings have been noted. In the late summer and fall of 1947, he would assign a team of staffers to review security records at the State Department as part of the congressional probe discussed in Chapter 13. He thus became the eponymous father of the much-cited Lee list—108 security cases, identified by numbers only, compiled for the Appropriations panel.

  The Lee list, it should be stressed, wasn’t simply a list of cases but a document of substance. It included elements that made it a uniquely useful guide to loyalty/security operations at State, the nature of the caseload being handled, and problems that had developed in the security setup. The entries capsuled data Lee’s researchers found of interest and provided links to other cases, suggesting a dense web of contacts extending out in all directions. All things considered, the list probably supplied more useful data on State Department security practice than any other such survey before or after.

  THE LEE LIST

  This is the first page of the oft-cited report on 108 security suspects in the State Department, as compiled by staff investigators for the House Appropriations Committee in 1947.

  Source: Walter Judd papers

  To unlock the meaning of all this, however, two sets of keys were needed: the names that went with the numbers, and the identities of sixty-three other people mentioned—each also with a coded symbol—as contacts of the listed cases. The list had attached to it as well a fairly lengthy memo discussing the security drill at State and the officers who ran it. In many ways this candid memo is as informative as the list itself—in some aspects, even more so.*134

  As has been noted, the Lee list would become a central issue in the security wars of Joe McCarthy. It was central to McCarthy himself, as the vast majority of the cases he initially brought before the Senate were unquestionably taken from its entries. And it was also central to his foes, who used his reliance on the list to discredit him and dismiss his charges as warmed-over data irrelevant to the State Department security scene in 1950.

  In his oration to the Senate, McCarthy made several gaffes, but arguably his single biggest miscue was an error of omission—not telling his colleagues he was mining data from this list. The reasons for this aren’t entirely clear, as he would elsewhere freely cite the list as an important source of information. Moreover, there were no immediately obvious reasons he shouldn’t have quoted from it and ways in which this would have strengthened the point he was making—that such problems had long been known to the State Department yet persisted. Whatever the motive, his failure to cite the list in the beginning allowed his critics to make this a salient issue—deflecting notice from what the security information said to the procedural question of where, exactly, it had come from (a tactic used in many later conflicts).

  Though McCarthy didn’t acknowledge the linkage in his speech, that he was borrowing data from the Lee list was apparent to anyone who had a copy of it and could compare it with his cases. This meant, above all others, John Peurifoy and his colleagues at State, who had the records that formed the basis of the list, knew exactly who was on it, and appeared before two House committees that held hearings on it in the winter of 1948. From this store of inside knowledge, State put together what became, and has remained, the canonical treatment of the list and its exploitation by McCarthy—running more or less as follows:

  First and foremost, in this telling, when McCarthy went before the Senate he not only had the Lee list, he had nothing but the Lee list. Accordingly, he had no inside information sources at State (or anywhere else), as he led his colleagues to believe. Also, since the list was at this point two years old, it was out of date when McCarthy used it, its denizens no longer at the posts they held in 1948. Specifically, it’s alleged, McCarthy’s famous “57 cases” were merely a subset of the list, lifted from the congressional hearings of 1948, hence obsolete in 1950. Finally, in this account, the list itself was an innocuous business, so tepid and unimportant the House panels holding hearings on it, plus two others in the 80th Congress, viewed it with supreme indifference.1

  Such is the version of the topic provided in numerous State Department memos, press releases, and backstage communiqués, echoed by the Tydings panel, and repeated in virtually every treatment of McCarthy now in print. In some instances we find variations, including the point hinted at by Tydings, and later made explicit by William Benton and several authors, that since the list consisted only of nameless, numbered cases, McCarthy didn’t even know the identities of his suspects.*135

  Given the wide acceptance of this tale, its accuracy and completeness are obviously questions of importance. However, any attempt to check such matters out runs quickly into roadblocks and blind alleys. Chief among these, as noted, has been the fact that the Lee-McCarthy rosters were both veiled in anonymity, each consisting entirely of numbered, nameless suspects. Researchers dealing with the issue have thus been juggling two sets of unknown people, trying to match one against the other by comparing the contents of the entries.

  While this works up to a point, it has some serious drawbacks. In the absence of the names, for instance, it’s impossible to nail down by independent means such basic facts as whether any given suspect was even in the State Department when McCarthy brought his charges, which was one of the points to be decided. Equally futile is the hope of weighing cases on their merits, seeing who their (also anonymous) associates were, or tracing them in other records.

  Faced with these epistemological problems, writers on the subject have usually been content to take the alleged facts about the cases from the report and dicta of Chairman Tydings. However, critical information needed to gauge the meaning of the lists doesn’t appear in the Tydings transcript, appendix, or report, and/or has vanished from the subcommittee archive. What we have instead are the conclusory judgments of Tydings, telling us certain things about the Lee-McCarthy cases, which can be neither disputed nor confirmed without the missing backup data.

  Fortunately for the historical record, sets of these materials have survived in other places and can be consulted. It’s thus possible to construct a reasonably accurate picture of the Lee list, its linkage to McCarthy’s cases, and its significance in general—on all of which the ascertainable facts are markedly different from the standard version. Most obviously, and most to the present point, it doesn’t happen to be true that, when McCarthy went before the Senate, he had nothing but the Lee list. He had other data also, derived from various public (and some not-so-public) sources. That the bulk of his documentation, 80 percent or thereabouts, stemmed from the Lee list is clearly so; that he had “nothing but the Lee list” just as clearly isn’t.

  Perhaps the most self-evident items in the initial McCarthy speeches not borrowed from the Lee list, though seldom mentioned in this context, were the four cases he talked about in Wheeling-Reno and then reprised before the Senate: John Stewart Service, Mary Jane Keeney, Gustavo Duran, and Harlow Shapley. Where his information came from on this foursome is a matter worth discussing. For the moment, what can be said with complete assurance is that they weren’t taken from the Lee list, as none of them is on it.

  Of this original group of cases the most significant by far was the Service/ Amerasia matter, fixed, lied about, and buried five years before this. Though others tried to dig it up in previous sessions of the Congress, it was McCarthy who almost single-handedly exhumed it. Moreover, it was the Service-Amerasia case on which McCarthy demonstrably had inside information sources
and would develop others. His constant hammering on the topic would become a cause of chronic angst for his opponents at the White House, State Department, and Truman Justice. (See Chapter 23.)

  Beyond these initial non-Lee cases, McCarthy added to his mix of suspects seven staffers at the Voice of America in New York (residuary legatee of the OWI), none of whom was on the Lee list. His comments on these people were sketchy, simply lumping the group together, saying they were instances of “Commies, or persons with Communist connections, recommending each other.”2 However, the fact that he did have this group of non-Lee cases indicates he had, either directly or indirectly, a source at VOA.

  In addition, McCarthy in his opening Senate speech brought up the case of William Remington—a very important case indeed in terms of Trumanera security practice. This was another non-Lee case, as Remington worked for Commerce, not for State, and so wasn’t in the House committee lineup. Here, too, McCarthy’s comments were brief and sketchy, but did indicate he was fleshing out the list with information from other sources. (Remington was case 19 on McCarthy’s initial Senate roster.)

  Also, in a sort of Adam’s rib procedure, McCarthy presented as one of his numbered cases Patricia G. Barnett, an OSS transferee and wife of a Lee list subject who was herself a State Department staffer but not given separate status on the list. She was thus not technically a Lee case, though mentioned in her husband’s entry. Finally, when McCarthy gave the subcommittee the list of names that corresponded with his numbers, it included two other non-Lee cases, Philip Jessup and Edward Posniak (neither of whom, however, had been discussed in the speech before the Senate).

  All in all, considering the total roster of cases McCarthy cited in his early speeches, a meager sprinkling of new entries—at the outside about fifteen—not completely insignificant, but also no great number of non-Lee suspects. If that was all he had, he really didn’t add much to the discussion and would deserve at least some of the scorn that’s heaped upon him. However, this leavening of Lee data with further cases was not the only way McCarthy expanded on the list. Far more important in terms of seeing the total security problem at State was his effort to add information to the list itself, by updating it as to the whereabouts of the people on it and the handling of their cases.

  From the internal evidence of McCarthy’s initial talk before the Senate, it’s clear that he and his staffers had for some indefinite time before this been backtracking on the Lee list cases—trying to find out what happened to them, whether they were still in the State Department, if they had been transferred to other official posts, and so on. Judging by the information he then had, this effort had to have been under way during his trip to Wheeling-Reno and probably predated it, but was still a work in progress.*136 In the February 20 speech, his comments on these matters were frequent, including such statements as the following:

  “…this individual still occupies an important position in the State Department.” “…this individual, who is now one of our foreign ministers…” “This man, I know definitely, is in the Office of Information and Education in the State Department.” “This individual is with the division of central services.” “This man is still in that very important position [at VOA].” “…the case of a man who holds a very high position in the State Department.” “This individual is in the biographical information division of the State Department.” And so on in similar vein for a score of other cases.3

  In all, McCarthy made such identifications about thirty times in discussing upward of seventy suspects. As Lee’s researchers and the FBI had learned before him, it wasn’t always easy for an outsider to discover whether someone was in the State Department at any specific moment, given its far-flung global operations, several different employee rosters, and inclination to be less than helpful in supplying information. (See below.) McCarthy in fact erred in certain of these comments, mostly with respect to people who had left the department when he thought they were still in it. However, in instances checkable from the records, he was right in perhaps eight cases out of ten, and would correct and update the others.

  Indeed, despite occasional miscues, McCarthy’s backtracking methods were fairly good, suggesting due diligence had been exerted by him and/or his researchers. To pick an instance previously cited (case 28), he said of one suspect, “He is still holding a high salaried job with the government, and to the best of my knowledge is now stationed at Frankfurt, Germany.”4 This information, as shown by State Department records, was quite correct and wasn’t derivative from the Lee list, which didn’t say anything concerning Frankfurt. In another case (No. 65), McCarthy said, “This individual is still in the State Department today in the Office of Information and Education.”5 The State Department (hence, inevitably, Tydings) would in effect deny this in its tabulations, but McCarthy’s version would be confirmed twice over when checked against official rosters. (See Chapter 25.)

  As to former Foggy Bottom staffers who went elsewhere, McCarthy made another valid and important point, already stressed in several places: Thanks to the subliminal tactic of separating suspect employees by resignations, such people were often able to relocate with relative ease at other official postings, including various global bodies created in the postwar era. In particular, McCarthy noted, some of his suspects had turned up at the United Nations. (Thus McCarthy cases Gustavo Duran, Stanley Graze, and Mary Jane Keeney, all formerly at State, got jobs with the U.N. and would be found working there in 1950.)

  McCarthy’s updates were also suggestive as to the nature and accuracy of his sources. In one instance—his case No. 11—he said, “This individual is not in the State Department at this time, but has a job in the CIA today.”6 This was an interesting thing for McCarthy to have known if he was simply flying blind and bluffing. In another instance, case No. 53, he said the suspect had been named by a “confessed Communist spy” as a member of his spy ring.7 These statements, as will be shown, were impeccably correct, weren’t taken from the Lee list, and thus clearly indicated other sources. And, of course, to track such data in the first place, McCarthy had to know the names that matched the numbers.

  All this was in the speech of February 20. McCarthy’s appearance before the Tydings panel, beginning on March 8, should have ended speculation as to whether, at least as of that date, he knew the identities of his suspects. To begin with there were his public cases, all named in open sessions of the hearings. These were nine in number, and in tabulations compiled by State, the FBI, and Civil Service, Mary Jane Keeney was added to the mix to make the total of such cases ten. (Why she was considered a McCarthy case, while some others mentioned in his various speeches weren’t, is an anomaly in the record, albeit one of many.)

  In addition to the public cases, McCarthy would provide to Tydings, in writing, the list of names that went with the dossiers capsuled before the Senate. By registered letter dated March 18, McCarthy gave the panel the names of his eighty suspects, including those skipped over in the Congressional Record. (One individual’s name was still omitted, because in McCarthy’s view he wasn’t a suspect but a victim.) This same week (March 14), McCarthy also gave Tydings a list of twenty-five additional people he said were questionable security risks and needed looking into. As three of these overlapped the eighty, McCarthy thus supplied to Tydings in writing a total of 102 names as possible subjects for investigation.8 (See the Appendix for the written lists McCarthy supplied to Tydings.)

  There were other overlaps as well, causing some confusion in the numbers. Two of the names on McCarthy’s written list of eighty—Esther Brunauer and Philip Jessup—were also among the ten public cases, meaning only eight people from that further roster were new additions to the lineup. Also, in public statements and in the hearings, and in contacts with the FBI, McCarthy and/or Robert Morris in his behalf brought up the names of (at least) fourteen other suspects: Solomon Adler, Joseph Barnes, T. A. Bisson, Stephen Brunauer, Chew Hong, Chi Chao-ting, Chi Kung Chuan, O. Edmund Clubb, Theodore Geiger, Leander Lovell
,*137 Andrew Roth, Charles W. Thayer, David Weintraub, and George S. Wheeler.

  As with the Venona cases earlier noted, this was a mixed lot, decked out in several guises. These ranged from fairly extensive comment (Bisson, Stephen Brunauer), to references in Morris’s cross-examination (Adler), to brief notice in McCarthy speeches (Barnes, Chi Chao-ting), to private contacts with the Bureau (Thayer, Weintraub). However, as the subject is names and whether McCarthy actually had them, all are worth recording. Also, it’s evident McCarthy-Morris at this point had in their grasp fragments of the Chi-Adler-Service puzzle and were putting this together.

  In sum, McCarthy-Morris brought to the attention of the public, the Senate, and the FBI a total of 124 names of potential security cases past and present, up through the conclusion of the Tydings hearings. (And, considering the incompleteness and/or redaction of the records, this probably isn’t the full roster.)†138 Consequently, it’s hard to see how Benton, or any reasonably well-informed observer, could possibly say McCarthy “had no names.” Part of the explanation, no doubt, is the matter of the disappearing data—including the McCarthy letter of March 18, accompanying roster of eighty names, and further list of twenty-two net potential cases. Researchers who look for these items in the official public records aren’t apt to find them.