While all this was going on, as may be imagined, McCarthy himself was not entirely idle. He was hardly the sort to take this kind of thing lying down, and he counterattacked on several fronts. In addition to angry letters to Gillette protesting the thrust of the inquiry, and declining to dignify the ransacking of his finances as a legitimate investigation, McCarthy also trained his sights on Benton. In March 1952, when Benton waived senatorial immunity for having made his multiple charges against McCarthy, McCarthy filed a libel suit for $2 million. Knowing one U.S. senator was unlikely to win such an action against another, McCarthy reasoned, nonetheless, that he would give Benton something to worry about and force him to play goalie for a change instead of simply attacking at his leisure.*246
McCarthy also took the offensive in the Senate. On April 10, he filed his own resolution, S.R. 304, containing several allegations against Benton and asking that these be investigated also. This resolution in its turn was referred to the Gillette committee, so that the panel in the summer of 1952 would have two sets of dueling charges before it—Benton’s charges against McCarthy and now McCarthy’s accusing Benton. The disparate handling of the two cases would reveal a lot about the goals and methods of the committee.
The essence of McCarthy’s charges against Benton was that the Connecticut senator, while in the State Department, had harbored an inordinate number of identified Soviet agents, Communists, and loyalty/security risks in his division, and had made no discernible effort to get rid of these when informed about them by security officials. McCarthy said he would back these charges by going before the Gillette committee and documenting them case by case. This he did on July 3, 1952, in a five-hour presentation (with Benton standing by to answer). It was a tour de force in which McCarthy discussed some cases already noted—William T. Stone, Haldore Hanson, Charles Thomson, Esther Brunauer, Robert T. Miller, and Rowena Rommel. These were all significant security suspects, and all had apparently worked under Benton at one time or another at State.
In the course of this discussion, McCarthy produced a ream of data about the cases—an exercise that, like the Jessup hearings, gave a pretty good glimpse of the documentary sources McCarthy was using. It was here, for instance, that he referred explicitly and repeatedly to the Lee list, but also to reports of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Appendix IX, hearings of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees, and so on. In addition, he had with him photostats of more esoteric records—for instance, the form by which Charles Thomson had vouched for Gustavo Duran when the latter became a U.S. citizen, and the incorporation papers of the American IPR signed by Esther Brunauer and William Stone.8
Likewise, McCarthy traced various interconnections among these former Benton staffers—such as the fact that Rowena Rommel had acknowledged her role in bringing the Bentley-identified Soviet agent Miller to State, or that Haldore Hanson and William Stone both had links to Amerasia. For every such assertion, McCarthy had a document at the ready, which he submitted for the hearing record. All told, he presented more than fifty such items out of a total of sixty-two he said he had brought with him.
McCarthy’s testimony ran to 213 pages of stenographic transcript, and the exhibits he cited (some running to several pages each) would have pushed the total to better than 300; this was followed by Benton’s rebuttal, consuming another 150 pages. There were many twists and turns of testimony, some of a most interesting nature.*247 The whole thing is fascinating to read, as once more we have McCarthy and a chief antagonist, if not quite face-to-face, then back-to-back, and through the multitude of McCarthy exhibits we can see exactly what proofs he had for his assertions. One might suppose this provocative hearing would have spurred some kind of investigation to see what had happened with the cases of Hanson, Miller, Rommel, Thomson, Stone, and others, what Benton’s relationship to them had been, whether his ripostes were on target, whether he or McCarthy was correct when testimony conflicted, and the like. So far as the record discloses, however, no such investigation was ever conducted, or contemplated, by the Gillette committee.
One might also have thought that this hearing, featuring so many security cases, the documentation of these by McCarthy, and the angry retorts of Benton, would have been an informative read for students of such matters. Indeed, given its sensational nature and high-profile combatants, it might well have been, as congressional hearings go, something of a best-seller. Such, however, was not to be, as these remarkable hearings were never printed. Instead, like the staff report from Wheeling, they would be quietly buried—consigned to the oblivion of the archives, there to gather dust and cobwebs for upward of five decades.
This failure to print McCarthy’s testimony is of interest when we note that the Benton forces feared his appearance before the panel and fervently wished it could be avoided. As the ever-candid John Howe wrote to Benton in April of 1952: “I think you’re very right that we don’t want McCarthy testifying before the Gillette Subcommittee on his charges against you—with you replying—because that is the most dramatic setting McCarthy could get. At the same time, I feel we’ll have to demolish these charges, rather than ignore them. And the sooner we do it the sooner we’ll be fully on the attack.”9 (Emphasis added.)
In the upshot, McCarthy’s testimony couldn’t very well be prevented. However, the alternative arrived at, from the standpoint of tailoring the historical record, would turn out even better: have McCarthy testify, producing a oneday press story necessarily meager on details (and this on the Fourth of July, not a great day for newspaper reading), but thereafter simply fail to print the hearing. It thus became, like other items mentioned, a non-event in history. Journalists, historians, and biographers of the future would have no ready access to what McCarthy said, the specifics he presented on the cases, or the documentation he provided by way of backup.10
A small but indicative detail—the number of exhibits McCarthy brought with him to the hearing—suggests the nature of this historical problem. He and members of the panel referred several times to “62 exhibits” with which he sought to document his charges. Biographer-critics of McCarthy tell us, however, that this number was phony—that McCarthy had no such number of exhibits. Anti-McCarthy author Robert Griffith says, for instance: “In reality, there were only twenty-four exhibits, hopefully numbered from one to sixty-one.” Likewise, David Oshinsky writes: “He presented the committee with twenty-four exhibits, artfully numbered from 1 to 62.”11
Scanning the hearing record, one wonders what these authors could be thinking. In fact, the stenographic transcript and accompanying photostats clearly show McCarthy presenting some 47 numbered exhibits, plus half a dozen others that were discussed without a particular number being cited. These weren’t all given in exact order, as digressions and interruptions caused him to jump around a bit, but a total of well over 50 exhibits is plainly evident from the transcript. So there is no particular reason to doubt McCarthy actually had 62 such exhibits, the obvious inference being that the remaining handful were skipped over in the cut and thrust of a contentious session.
Why, then, do Griffith and Oshinsky say McCarthy had only 24 exhibits? And why say these were “hopefully” or “artfully” numbered? What is that all about? The likely answer appears to be that, in the William Benton papers, there repose a memo by Benton attorney Gerhard Van Arkel and a draft letter by Benton supposedly setting straight misstatements by McCarthy in these hearings. This memo and Benton letter say McCarthy had only 24 exhibits, “deceptively numbered, however, from 1 to 61.” This statement, as it happened, was dead wrong and suggests Benton and Van Arkel hadn’t checked the transcript on this with any care.*248 From the near identity of phrasing and of misinformation, it would appear that, directly or indirectly, Griffith-Oshinsky picked up this wildly inaccurate statement from the Benton papers.12
The point itself is relatively minor but illustrative of the larger problem. From the casual but caustic asides of our historians, the reader can conclude only that McCarthy w
as such a pathological liar he would falsify something so petty as the number of exhibits he happened to have with him at a hearing. In fact, the falsification is the other way around, but thanks to the suppression of the hearing record, the information that goes to show this isn’t readily accessible to researchers, much less the average reader. From such shoddy materials has the fabric of our standard histories been woven.
To all of which there is an instructive coda. In December 1951, Daniel Buckley, a New York attorney who had been one of the congressional investigators sent up to Wheeling, issued a scathing statement saying, in so many words, the Gillette committee was indeed suppressing the facts about the Benton-McCarthy conflict. Buckley said he had made not one but two trips to Wheeling to interview people who heard the McCarthy speech, and that his findings were supportive of McCarthy’s version of the numbers. As Buckley put it:
The information I developed on the second Wheeling trip did more than merely cast grave doubt and suspicion on Senator Benton’s story. The newly unearthed evidence demolished Senator Benton’s charges in all material respects and thoroughly proved Senator McCarthy’s account of the facts to be truthful. Following this experience in Wheeling I was never again assigned to any task of consequence concerning the Benton charges…*249 13
But to conclude: The Gillette committee, exercising its plenary powers to do pretty much anything it wanted, suppressed not one but two highly significant documents needed to understand the McCarthy story: the investigative memo from Wheeling relative to the famous numbers, and McCarthy’s testimony-cum-exhibits that spelled out his accusations of Communist and pro-Communist penetration of Benton’s State Department office. In both cases, fortunately, the documents do still exist and can be obtained with a bit of effort, so we can figure out what the standard histories are omitting, or distorting.
There is a great deal of other evidence in the record suggesting the Gillette committee was intent on bringing down McCarthy—including the switch in the scope and purpose of the investigation, the ransacking of his finances, the huge disproportion in the final report between the number of exhibit pages devoted to Benton (13) and the number devoted to McCarthy (266), a similar disproportion in the archival records (21 McCarthy boxes, three pertaining to Benton) and so on. However, the suppressions of the Wheeling report and the McCarthy testimony, in and of themselves, are dispositive of the bias question, both indicating a settled purpose to stack the deck against McCarthy through concealment of official records.
Oh, one more thing: McCarthy’s failure to cooperate with, accept invitations to appear in the dock as a defendant for his pre-senatorial personal doings, or otherwise pay proper deference to this committee, was the only count subsequently brought against him in the Watkins hearings for which he would be censured by the Senate.
CHAPTER 33
The Perils of Power
FOR Joe McCarthy, the early days of 1953 should have been, and appeared to be, the best of times. He had just been sworn in for his second term in the Senate after racking up a comfortable reelection margin in Wisconsin. He was also the new chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee (formerly the Expenditures Committee) and of its main subcommittee, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).*250 In these roles, he would have power to look into a wide range of government functions seeking out malfeasance of all types, power he would waste no time in using.
McCarthy held these posts of influence because, in the 1952 elections, the Republicans had elected majorities in both House and Senate, while capturing the presidency for the first time since 1928, in a national landslide for the popular military leader of World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The congressional margins were slim, especially in the Senate, but enough to install Republican chairmen of committees in both chambers. And among these new chairmen, few were potentially as powerful, or already as famous, as the junior senator from Wisconsin.
Considering that just three years before McCarthy had been an obscure backbencher, and then the target of massed opposition from the White House, State Department, and leading members of the Congress—plus indefatigable lobby groups and major sectors of the press corps—he had come a long way in a hurry. In the process, he had the satisfaction of seeing some of his bitterest enemies bite the dust. In 1950, both Millard Tydings and Scott Lucas had been upended, beaten by McCarthy allies John Marshall Butler and Everett Dirksen. In 1952, the roster of the vanquished included his most tenacious foe, William Benton of Connecticut. Also of interest in that election, Senate Democratic leader Ernest McFarland of Arizona was defeated by an unheralded Phoenix city councilman and department store executive named Barry Goldwater, yet another McCarthy ally replacing yet another critic.
Beyond this, in a kind of reverse-English outcome, McCarthy’s influence was apparent even in a campaign where he did nothing. This was the much-publicized Massachusetts Senate race between Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, who had served on the Tydings panel, and a young Democratic congressman named John F. Kennedy, scion of a wealthy and politically ambitious family. McCarthy was a hero in heavily Catholic Massachusetts and the GOP had wanted him to campaign for Lodge. But according to several accounts of the affair, Lodge was reluctant to stump in person with McCarthy, which the latter made a precondition for appearing.
If that weren’t enough to keep McCarthy out of Massachusetts, there was another factor in the mix. Young Kennedy’s father, millionaire tycoon, stock market guru and former ambassador to England Joseph P. Kennedy, was an admirer and backer of McCarthy and didn’t want the senator he supported campaigning against his son. In the event, McCarthy steered clear of Massachusetts, young Kennedy survived the Ike landslide, and a political dynasty had taken a giant step toward national power. McCarthy thus cemented his friendship with the Kennedy clan but also made an implacable foe of Lodge. Both outcomes would be significant for McCarthy’s future.
Some political analysts would later argue that McCarthy’s influence in these elections was overrated, and that the 1952 results in particular owed more to the appeal of Eisenhower than to the polarizing figure of McCarthy. Without bothering to crunch the numbers that make the point, this seems a no-brainer, recalling that McCarthy was subject to a nonstop political/media blitz that Ike as transpartisan national idol never had to weather. Even so, it was hard to overlook the fact that the electoral landscape was littered with the political corpses of those who had gone head-to-head against McCarthy. Liberal Democrats in the Senate could hardly help wondering who among them might be next.
These electoral victories, not to be forgotten, came in the wake of numerous McCarthy triumphs in his loyalty/security battles. There, too, the list of defeated foes was long and would get longer. Philip Jessup, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, O. Edmund Clubb, Esther Brunauer, William Stone, Edward Posniak, Peveril Meigs, and other such McCarthy targets had been bested in one fashion or another, and there would be still more scalps dangling from his belt before the run was over. And now the main sponsor and protector of such people, Dean Acheson himself, was gone as well—McCarthy’s most detested foe swept out of office with the Ike tsunami.
Accordingly, McCarthy was now viewed as a significant force, not just in Wisconsin but across the country. Despite the battering he had taken in his fight with the Truman-Acheson State Department and its many powerful allies, he was seen as one of the most potent political figures in the land. This was recorded with concern, and even a little awe, by commentators in the press corps. William S. White of the New York Times, for one, opined that McCarthy’s “strange, half-hidden power in the Senate, in the country, and in the world” was “not diminishing as many thought it might after Dwight Eisenhower took office…it is still growing.”1
That verdict would be confirmed, in even more emphatic language, by Jack Anderson, at the time still toiling for Drew Pearson. Pearson/Anderson had done all they could to derail McCarthy, running countless columns trying to debunk his charges, tie him to scandals, and discredit hi
m in general. They had also been in close contact with Benton, the National Committee for an Effective Congress, and staffers of the Gillette committee in their probe of McCarthy’s finances. None of it, however, had worked. Looking back on these attempts to do McCarthy in, Anderson ruefully recalled: “By the advent of 1953, we had used up almost our entire bag of tricks against McCarthy, without marked effect. We could comfort ourselves that all the blows we had landed were bound to take their toll in the late rounds, but, Lord, three years had passed since Wheeling, and he was still coming on stronger.”2
While things thus looked discouraging for his foes and upbeat for McCarthy, there was trouble in the making for the new chairman, and had been for some time before this. By far the biggest cloud on his horizon, and it was a huge one, was that the Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, disliked him intensely, and the feeling would grow more so as the events of 1953 unfolded. For this dislike, Eisenhower had from his standpoint ample reasons, and there were people in his entourage who did all they could to reinforce them.3
In proximate terms, the main cause of Ike’s aversion was the George Marshall speech, which had outraged the new President—along with many other people—and figured as a backstage issue in the 1952 election. Eisenhower and Marshall were long-serving military brothers, and an attack on Marshall was tantamount to an attack on Ike as well. Indeed, there was no “tantamount” about it, as Ike himself had come in for criticism in the Marshall speech. Several items discussed in that oration, such as the decision to pull up short in Europe during World War II, allowing the Soviets to take Berlin and Prague, were Eisenhower’s doing as much as and by most accounts considerably more than Marshall’s.4
Blacklisted By History Page 55
