Beyond this, the State Department wasn’t above playing statistical games in whittling down the numbers. A prize example was John T. Fishburn, a sometime coworker of Robert Miller, who was both a Lee case and a McCarthy case twice over.‡172 However, when the McCarthy staff prepared the list of 80 names for Tydings, the typist made a clerical error, entering the name as “John T. Washburn” (one of two such typing errors in the preparation of the McCarthy names). Anyone comparing the entry with the Lee list could see this was the case of Fishburn, and both the FBI and the State Department, in their internal memos, made this correction.
But for the purposes of its public tabulation, the State Department provided a purely deadpan treatment of the typo, tersely noting of the numbered entry keyed to “John T. Washburn”: “Never employed in the Department of State.”11 This was indubitably true of the nonexistent Washburn, but not of the real-life Fishburn, who not only had been employed at State but was on the payroll when these words were written. Thus was another McCarthy case disposed of and the measure of State’s security problem dialed down by yet another calibration. (A virtually identical drill would be conducted in the case of Leander Lovell. See Chapter 25.)
Having threaded through this maze, we return to the original question: How many of McCarthy’s cases were still on the State Department roster in 1950? This is an issue of some moment in view of the historical drubbing he has taken for claiming to have had the names of fifty-seven suspects at work in the department when he made his initial speeches. In the Tydings/State Department treatment, this was yet another Lee list fiction—a false and obsolete statistic: There were fifty-seven such cases on the rolls in 1948, but not in 1950.
If we check out the State Department rosters of the era, we discover McCarthy’s use of the number fifty-seven in referring to then-current security cases in State’s workforce was indeed mistaken—but erring on the side of understatement. In fact, of the people he and Morris named up through the conclusion of the hearings, no fewer than sixty-seven were still at State in 1950 (see Table 4).*173 Moreover, at least thirteen of the people he named were at work that year on other official payrolls, often having moved there from State, precisely as McCarthy contended (Table 5).12 Thus, of the total number of McCarthy/ Morris cases, at least eighty were still serving at official posts in 1950.
The point about all this, again, isn’t simply who was right or wrong about a particular set of numbers but what the numbers reflected. The State Department–Tydings version was that the security problem was over and done with, and it was in support of this thesis that assiduous efforts were made to obscure and downsize the McCarthy caseload. Hence the lack of specific data, verbal fuzzballs, and submersion of even the misleading total forty as far below the public horizon as ingenuity could sink in. Had the fact been trumpeted to the world that eighty of McCarthy’s suspects—double the number acknowledged by State and Tydings—were still in official jobs in 1950, the “total and eternal destruction” ensuing might not have been McCarthy’s.
Postscript
As to McCarthy’s repeated use of the number fifty-seven, all discussions of the topic assume this was derived from House committee hearings in 1948, when John Peurifoy said this many Lee suspects were still on the State Department payroll. From this coincidence of numbers, it’s assumed McCarthy was simply reciting a two-year-old statistic as though it were still valid in 1950.
This would have been a pretty dumb thing to do, had McCarthy actually done it. Given the amount of backtracking he and his staffers did about the cases, they unquestionably would have known—and McCarthy often said—that not all of his suspects were still at their former posts. Why, therefore, make innumerable public statements based on the premise that they were? And if McCarthy were stupid enough to do this, how did he then so shrewdly come up with 67 cases still in the State Department workforce?
In trying to resolve such questions, it’s useful to remember that the Lee suspects were a subset of a much larger group of State Department cases on whom there had been adverse security judgments of one sort or another. That larger set of cases declined over time as the suspects were disposed of, mostly by the resignation method. Thus, at one point in 1946, there had been 341 such cases; this then dropped to 284 as certain suspects were quietly eased out of the department; this in turn was reduced to the famous 205, and so on.*174
Though this constant shifting in the numbers is confusing (the doing of State’s often cryptic mathematical methods), it helps to realize that all such figures referred to the same original pool of suspects. It’s in addition tolerably clear that McCarthy and his staffers were working, not simply from the Lee list, but from this more extensive group of cases. This in part explains the fact that he came up with suspects who weren’t on the Lee list and that the total number of his cases on the payroll in 1950 would be much larger (sixty-seven) than the residue from Lee’s selective roster (forty or forty-one, according to State’s tabulations).
This discrepancy provided a strong motive for the State Department, Tydings, and the Truman White House to focus only on the Lee list cases, ignoring as much as possible the larger group of suspects hovering in the background. This kept the numbers down to more manageable dimensions, a major goal of State Department striving. However, occasionally the department did make note of this larger group of people, as in the following fine-print statement to the Tydings panel:
“Investigation by the [State Department] screening committee, including those spotchecked and those reviewed after further investigation, resulted in 341 ‘disapprovals.’ Of these 341 cases, 58, after receiving full clearance, are still employed by the department [i.e., in 1950]. Of the remaining 283 cases two were discharged under the McCarran rider. The remaining 281 persons were removed through various types of personnel action.”13 (Emphasis added.)
So, by State’s own math, 58 of the original group of disapproved cases were still on the payroll in 1950 when McCarthy made his charges. This doesn’t necessarily mean these 58 were coterminous with his 57, or included in his ultimate total of 67, though there must have been many overlaps, since everyone was talking about the same group of people. It’s also possible that State’s total of 58, like McCarthy’s 57, was an understatement of the problem.
Evidence of this was provided by journalist Alfred Friendly, writing in Harper’s (August 1950), setting forth the Lee-list-only thesis and obviously using information (and disinformation) supplied by State. In this oft-quoted essay, Friendly wrote that, “had McCarthy inquired of the State Department,” he would have discovered that “of the 284 employees [mentioned in the James Byrnes letter to Sabath] only about 65 were still on the Department’s payroll” in February 1950. (Emphasis added.) Friendly would have had no way of acquiring such esoteric knowledge about these nameless cases except through his contacts at State (which were undoubtedly quite good). It would thus appear somebody at State came up with a statistic quite close to that appearing in our rosters (Table 4).
This Friendly article also appears to have been the source for various authors holding forth about the supposedly innocuous nature of the Lee list—contending that, based on an examination of its data: “No committee [of the 80th Congress] presented any adverse report or demanded further action. Republicans rose on the House floor to declare that the State Department’s loyalty program was being handled in a satisfactory manner, and that that department, at least, was completely free of subversives.”14 The truth of these assertions will be considered in the following chapter.
CHAPTER 20
The Four Committees
IN ITSELF, the fact that Joe McCarthy had the names of fifty-seven, sixty-seven, eighty, or any other number of suspects on State Department or other official payrolls in 1950 meant little. Naming suspects is one thing; knowing the facts about them is quite another. The true significance of the McCarthy–State Department battle lay, not in lists of names and dueling numbers, but in the substance of the cases. That was the point that really ma
ttered.
It’s precisely here, of course, that McCarthy’s guilt is said to be the greatest: allegedly smearing innocent people, bringing charges of subversion, security risk, or Communist taint, contrary to the facts of record. So said the State Department and Senator Tydings, and so say all the standard histories. But what exactly was—or is—the basis for these statements? How do we know if McCarthy’s charges were true or false? How do the standard histories know it? How did Senator Tydings and the State Department know it then, if in fact they did?
One obvious way of answering such questions would have been a close examination of the State Department loyalty files, but for reasons to be noted such a survey never happened, or at least was handled in such clandestine fashion as to raise grave doubts about the outcome. (See Chapter 21.) Certainly, there was no information available to the public showing McCarthy was either right or wrong about his cases. That being so, a substitute answer was invented—an answer that is repeated, ad infinitum, in virtually every study we have about the subject.
That answer, like many others in the record, was concocted by John Peurifoy and his researchers at the State Department. As set forth in the “Confidential Memorandum” discussed in Chapter 17 and numerous State Department memos and press releases, the key elements to be weighed concerning McCarthy’s anonymous cases were (a) their complete identity with the Lee list on the one hand, and (b) the innocuous, outdated nature of that roster on the other. Between them, supposedly, these factors showed that McCarthy’s charges were baseless. Since the Lee cases proved nothing bad about security goings-on at State, it followed that McCarthy’s didn’t either.
The innocent nature of the Lee list thus became a kind of proxy for the elusive State Department files as proof that McCarthy lied about the substance of his cases. The clinching argument for this view, much repeated by his critics, was that the list had already been examined by no fewer than four committees of the 80th Congress and dismissed as being of no importance. That verdict was the more compelling as the 80th was a Republican Congress, so the committees that screened the list were all headed by Republican members. McCarthy was thus allegedly in the embarrassing spot of making stale, warmed-over charges already laid to rest by members of his own party.*175
This State Department thesis was, in the usual manner, adopted wholesale by Tydings. In his version, the Lee list was a ho-hum affair that refuted McCarthy’s Senate speech twice over. It hadn’t amounted to much to start with—the entries “do not appear in any instance to be concerned with the merits of the cases” (a comment lifted directly from the “Confidential Memorandum”); and by 1950 it was obsolete—the people involved “are not necessarily now in the State Department.” McCarthy, hyping these innocent data, had “twisted, colored or perverted” the House material to make something bland seem evil (another pickup, verbatim, from the “Confidential Memorandum”).1
To prove the harmless nature of the Lee list, Tydings played the trump card dealt by State: Republicans of the 80th Congress had viewed these very cases and reached no McCarthy-like conclusions. On the contrary, said Tydings, “the material was considered by four separate committees of the Republican controlled 80th Congress and was not regarded as justifying a report concerning the matter or the citation of a single State Department employee as disloyal.”2 This version of the topic was repeated at least seven times in his report and ten times or so in his show-and-tell oration to the Senate. It has been repeated often since.
McCarthy biographer David Oshinsky, for example, informs us at some length that the Lee list was a tepid affair of no great moment. In support of this, he provides a number of innocuous-sounding excerpts, says some Lee list suspects were described by the House investigators as “a bit leftist” or “somewhat left of center,” and quotes the file on case 104 as saying “she entertains Negroes and whites, both men and women, in her apartment.” From such insipid stuff, in the Oshinsky treatment, did McCarthy fashion horrific charges.3
Thomas Reeves provides a similar wrap-up, offering innocuous-sounding snippets from the Lee list, plus some longer quotes that seem even more so. Also, Reeves repeats the clinching argument of Tydings and the State Department—that Republicans of the 80th Congress had viewed these very cases and found nothing to alarm them. In the House Appropriations drill, says Reeves, “no Communists had been discovered, but of the 108 Lee personally questioned the loyalty of 45 or 50. Hearings were held in 1948, and the State Department defended itself sufficiently to satisfy House Republicans, who declared it free of subversives.”4 (Emphasis added.)
As these dismissive treatments of the Lee list are based chiefly on the say-so of Tydings and the State Department, it would appear that those who flog McCarthy for repeating stale, warmed over charges are themselves engaged in the identical practice. The irony rates a note in passing but is a relatively minor issue. Far more significant, of course, is whether these recycled statements on the Lee-McCarthy cases, and hence security affairs at State, are truth or fiction. And if we delve into this a bit, we soon discover that the whole complicated tale of an insipid, harmless roster cleared by Congress is a preposterous fable.
Consider in this respect the Tydings claim that the Lee list entries “do not appear in any instance to be concerned with the merits of the cases,” or the tame fragments and soporific quotes supplied by our historians to prove the cases of no importance. Recall also that the list detailed roughly 100 other cases from which the McCarthy critics might have quoted. If we examine these, we find they are radically different from the ones they deign to give us. Following are some Lee list excerpts that the State Department, Senator Tydings, and our historians forgot to mention:
• Consideration is still being given this applicant, although he is a known Communist Party member, and a recommendation has been made that his brother, who is now employed in the department, be dismissed for security reasons.
• The records in the industrial detail, Chicago police department, list him as a Communist in 1930.
• Both the subject and her husband are known contacts of two suspects in an investigation of Soviet espionage activities in the United States.
• This is a case of failure to closely follow and supervise an important case…[an] investigative agency advised that a reliable informant said in November 1944 that a well-known Communist in Newark, N.J., advised him that the subject was a Communist Party member.
• This is a case of appointment to an important position from a security standpoint without prior security clearance…[Soviet defector] Victor Kravchenko stated that the applicant had to be a Communist Party member, or a strong sympathizer, in order to hold a position with the Soviet Purchasing Commission as long as he did.
• There are no indications in the file that any investigation has been conducted regarding her background; however, information was received on October 9, 1947, from a former supervisor in the War Department to the effect that she was a Communist.
• In her form 57 she gave as references the names of two employees of the Soviet Embassy…A memorandum dated November 17, 1945, from the Office of Controls…stated that for the subject to have been an employee of the Soviet Embassy she must have been accepted politically by them.5
This is but a brief selection from numerous Lee list entries of similar astounding import. A few cases are comparatively bland and/or concern such non-Communist-related problems as drinking or finances, but these are a small fraction of the total—and, generally speaking, not cases picked up by McCarthy. (For instance, innocuous-sounding No. 104, so helpfully highlighted by Oshinsky, was not one of McCarthy’s cases.)*176 The predominant, unrelenting theme is the sheer number of individuals in some way identified as known or suspected Communists, pro-Communists, or fellow travelers; contacts of suspected Communists or targets of espionage inquiries; members of Communist-front groups; people formerly employed by pro-Communist (or Soviet) organizations; and the like.
To be sure, our excerpts don’t include such poss
ibly mitigating factors as the denials of the people named, the accuracy and/or motives of their accusers, or other countervailing data—factors that proved of riveting interest to State Department spokesmen. The point is otherwise—namely, what the Lee list was about, the matters security agents were addressing, and the items that would have caught the notice of McCarthy. This was emphatically not an innocuous lineup of New Dealers, people who were “a bit leftist,” or enlightened friends of racial integration, as our historians would have it.
Consider now the Republican 80th Congress to which the Lee list was presented. How plausible is it that the Old Guard, anti-Communist stalwarts of this Congress, looking at such entries, would have summarily “cleared” the State Department, expressed their “satisfaction” with it, or done anything remotely like this? Or, to pick up the State Department–Tydings trump card, that no fewer than four committees of this Congress, viewing these sensational data, would have been so content with what they saw that they declined to file reports about it?
If none of this seems likely to have occurred, rest assured it didn’t. All these statements are stunning falsehoods—a bold invention of the State Department and Senator Tydings, who apparently banked (with some success) on gulling readers who couldn’t or wouldn’t go back and check the record. In fact, the Republican legislators who viewed the list, and such related data as they could get their hands on, were appalled by the security drill at State and made innumerable comments that revealed this.
We need go no further to see the point than the committee that compiled the list, whose conduct was in all respects the opposite of that described by Tydings. The relevant hearings of the House Appropriations subcommittee on the State Department, chaired by Rep. Karl Stefan (with full committee chairman John Taber sitting in), were held in January of 1948. At these sessions, members reviewed various entries of the Lee list and questioned State Department officials Peurifoy and Hamilton Robinson about them. These exchanges show quite clearly the charitable/legalistic view of personnel security that prevailed at State (though nominally disavowed from time to time): that suspect employees should receive the benefit of doubt, much as in a court of law.
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