Watkins reprised this performance yet again on the question of McCarthy’s alleged incitement to federal workers to violate the law by providing him with information. When Williams and McCarthy tried to show that other members of Congress and committee chairmen had taken the identical stance vis-à-vis gag orders and attempts to cover up wrongdoing, this too was gaveled out of order. Various of the people Williams-McCarthy wanted to cite (including Vice President Nixon), said Watkins, were irrelevant to the hearings, “because they are not under charges here. We are not going to investigate the remarks of every fellow, every member of the Senate and the House, pro and con, on these various matters.”10
In all such cases, the solipsism that we aren’t doing that because that isn’t what we’re doing was hermetically locked and sealed, invulnerable to the legal skills of Williams. At this point, if not before, Williams knew the fix was in, that the outcome of the hearings was going to be decided by factors other than law and logic, and that this outcome had undoubtedly been arrived at before the hearings started. On the evidence of the Watkins rulings, McCarthy was going to be censured, no two ways about it; the only question remaining was exactly how the committee would structure and pronounce its verdict.
At this level, in the political realm where such matters would actually be decided, there were, however, a number of pending issues, and the way they were sorted out would be instructive. While the fact of McCarthy’s censure seemed as certain as such a thing could be given the political vagaries of the process, the way it would be done intensely mattered—not so much to McCarthy himself, but to the people who condemned him. They didn’t want any precedents that could be construed as limiting their own prerogatives as members of the Senate or committee chairmen.
Thus numerous charges that had any such connotation—treatment of witnesses, political speeches, the conduct of hearings, hiring of staff—would die a-borning. Many of the original forty-six counts were so flimsy as to fall immediately by the wayside, but even those of a presumptively serious nature would be discarded also if they contained any hint that they might be applicable to anyone other than McCarthy. All this would be hashed over by the committee, with the result that virtually all the original charges against McCarthy would be jettisoned for one reason or another.
When this winnowing was done, somewhat remarkably, forty-four of the original forty-six charges had been dismissed by the Watkins panel. The only counts remaining were McCarthy’s alleged defiance of the Gillette inquest and his tirade against General Zwicker. The second of these, however, would soon be discarded also, as it came trailing too many problems to make it safely through the Senate. Even Senator Case, who had supported this count in committee, went wobbly after receiving information that Zwicker had behaved in such a way as to provoke McCarthy’s outburst. The Zwicker charge was also unpopular with southern Democrats (many of whom had been committee chairmen and would soon be again as a result of Democratic victories in the 1954 election, and didn’t want any precedents that would affect their powers).
So, in the end, the Zwicker charge was dropped, leaving only the count about the Gillette committee as the basis for McCarthy’s censure. The rather amazing fact that a beginning mass of forty-six charges had now been reduced to exactly one might look like a sort of victory for McCarthy, but this was another angle from which the details were of little interest. The important thing was that McCarthy be censured for something; what it might be was pretty much a matter of indifference. And it was thought important also that this be voted by a substantial margin, providing cover all around for members of both parties, which meant political jockeying to get the lowest common denominator that everyone could agree on.
In the case of the Gillette committee charge, the denominator was low indeed—the weakest of the more serious counts against McCarthy, and the one on which he had reams of data to back his position. In this respect, the fact that the Gillette committee accusation was the last one standing was, to say the least, ironic. But it was in another way quite fitting, as the censure process itself, in both style and substance, was the lineal descendant of the Gillette inquest, as that probe in turn had been the son and heir of Tydings. (With a nice sense of what was proper, the Watkins panel would reprint, in its entirety, the final report of the Gillette committee, including its almost 300 pages dealing with McCarthy’s finances.)
How all this was accomplished was an intriguing story in its own right. In particular, the already noted role of the National Committee for an Effective Congress is testimony to the leverage that can be exerted by a relatively small group that knows the ropes and is totally focused on its object. The NCEC and its “Clearing House” had well learned the lessons of the J. B. Matthews battle, and applied them on an even grander scale in the censure contest. Its role in preparing the thirty-three charges to back up the Flanders motion was but one example of its liaison with McCarthy’s chief accuser.
The files of the NCEC are replete with such items as speech drafts prepared for Flanders, lists of specific accusations against McCarthy, whip counts of Senate votes, talking points on the censure charges, strategy memos advising Flanders on what to do and when to do it, and even a budget for supplying him with staffers whose salaries were to be paid from funds raised by the committee. (See Chapter 45.) From these and other materials in the record there isn’t much doubt that virtually the entire Flanders operation was orchestrated by the NCEC—and thus that an attack on McCarthy made under nominally Republican auspices was in fact directed behind the scenes by the far-left Democrats of the Rosenblatt committee.11
Given the innumerable praises heaped on Flanders for his “independence,” all this puppetry by the NCEC was ironic also, but essential to the process. Had Democrats in the Senate taken the point in the effort to bring down McCarthy, it would have been viewed as a partisan move, undercutting the supposedly moralistic basis of the censure. It was thus critical that a Republican assume the lead, and the apparently limitless capacity of Flanders for accepting outside guidance made him the perfect candidate for the assignment. A further and especially important contact of the NCEC in this regard was liberal Republican businessman Paul Hoffman (sometime head of the Ford Foundation and a prominent Ike supporter).*315 12
Intriguing glimpses of the backstage maneuvers that led to McCarthy’s censure are provided in the archives of the Rosenblatt committee. Among the major players at a series of meetings from April to June 1954, in addition to Rosenblatt himself, were former Senator Tydings, attorney Telford Taylor, Dean Clara Mayer of the New School for Social Research, Dean Francis Sayre of the Washington Cathedral, Benton attorney Gerhard Van Arkel, and former Truman staffer Philleo Nash. Pooling of left-liberal resources against McCarthy, agreement on the central role of the NCEC and fund-raising efforts for it, and the designation of former Senate staffer Laurence Henderson as the key liaison with Flanders were all on the group’s agenda.
FUNDING FOR FLANDERS
This budget of the National Committee for an Effective Congress shows the organization’s plans to provide staffers and other support to Senator Ralph Flanders in the campaign to censure McCarthy.
Source: Maurice Rosenblatt papers, Library of Congress
Among the highlights of these records are scenes in which Dean Sayre, at a June meeting in Van Arkel’s home, exhorted a group of twenty-five lobby-ists, labor officials, and Hill functionaries to get behind the anti-McCarthy drive, this accompanied by a Rosenblatt pitch for funding of the NCEC as coordinator of the project. Revealing also are entries referring to Rosenblatt’s “numerous conferences with [the] Democratic leadership,” and the statement that on June 21, “Flanders received assurances of support from the highest administration leadership.” We thus have a clear snapshot of leftward Democratic forces working in backchannel concert with the White House to push the censure effort forward.
Given its liberal Democratic tilt, the NCEC not surprisingly had its best public entrée with members of the Democratic Party. Foremost
among these was Arkansas senator Fulbright, an archliberal who despised McCarthy a priori and had directly tangled with him, most notably in the Jessup hearings. Fulbright was in essence the floor leader of the censure effort. He also provided guidance to the censure forces on how to bring around his conservative Arkansas colleague, John McClellan. Others with whom the NCEC had contact, either directly or at staff levels, were Sens. Mike Monroney, Thomas Hennings, and Herbert Lehman.
From this modest but solid foundation the campaign would be expanded outward to others in the Democratic ranks, including senators a good deal more conservative than Fulbright. Then–minority leader Lyndon Johnson would eventually put things together, as was his wont, on the basis of party-line requirements. In one way this would have been an easy sell, as the Democratic Party had suffered greatly from McCarthy. Once the southern Democrats were assured on matters that concerned them, an unbroken phalanx of Democratic votes would be arrayed against him.
It was, however, the lineup of Republican votes that was most crucial, as with the original leadership role of Flanders. In this respect, there is no doubt that the influence of the Eisenhower White House was decisive. Many White House connections to the censure effort were discreetly veiled, both then and later, but there are enough items in the record to tell the story rather plainly. The most obvious of these was the activity of Paul Hoffman, who not only aided the Rosenblatt group in numerous ways but had direct access to Ike himself and worked in tandem with White House adviser C. D. Jackson.
Behind the scenes, Hoffman had supported the Rosenblatt effort with financial contributions. In the midst of the censure battle, however, he would make the connection overt, underscoring the political links between the NCEC and the White House. Shortly after Flanders presented his resolution against McCarthy, the NCEC drafted, and Hoffman signed, a well-publicized telegram urging support of the censure motion. Like Hoffman himself, various of the twenty-plus other signers had been backers of Ike in the 1952 election. (The NCEC authorship of this Hoffman missive is not in doubt, as Rosenblatt would later brag about it in an exultant letter to Benton aide John Howe.)14
In the background of the struggle, as he had been in the battles over J. B. Matthews and between McCarthy and the Army, was Sherman Adams. While he would later portray himself in almost clinical terms as a technician trying to moderate this and facilitate that, he made no secret of his aversion to McCarthy, and his known performance in the Matthews and Army conflicts belied his claim to purely procedural involvement with the censure.
Eisenhower himself, while professing a hands-off position, took pains to give special encouragement to Flanders when the accuser began his onslaught. Later, once the censure had been completed, Ike met with and congratulated Arthur Watkins on the fine service he had rendered. On leaving the President’s office, Watkins was met by reporters who questioned him about the meeting. After filling in the press corps, Watkins also happily announced that the President had reconfirmed to him support for an important water project Watkins was pushing. Some cynics thought this looked suspiciously like a quid pro quo for McCarthy’s censure.
In the end, these various overt and backstage efforts produced an even split among Republicans in the Senate: Twenty-two of the GOP contingent there—primarily from the northern and eastern sections of the country—voted in favor of the censure, while twenty-two others—mostly from the Midwest and West—opposed it. In addition, two GOP members, Homer Capehart of Indiana and John Bricker of Ohio, were paired in opposition, while McCarthy and his Wisconsin GOP colleague Alexander Wiley abstained from voting. Thus, while the recorded Republican votes were exactly equal, there were actually more GOP senators aligned with McCarthy than with the White House. The twenty-two Republican votes for censure nonetheless provided adequate basis for saying the condemnation was of bipartisan nature.*316
While the censure battle was going down, McCarthy, William Jenner, Herman Welker, and a small band of others bitterly denounced what was occurring, and some McCarthy friends, including Everett Dirksen and Barry Goldwater, tried to broker a compromise that would avert an outright vote of condemnation. This would have involved some kind of apology by McCarthy, and a vote in the Senate that was something short of censure. According to Goldwater, McCarthy would have none of this and had thrown the pen he was asked to sign with across the room. He wouldn’t crawl but would go down fighting.15
In this spirit, McCarthy presented a final defiant speech in which he criticized the methods of the Watkins inquest, calling it, among other things, the “unwitting handmaiden” of the Communists in derailing the work of his own committee. At the last moment, a completely new censure charge would be drafted for this further assault on the dignity of a Senate panel. This was duly added to the indictment—without any hearings or formal committee action—and adopted in the final tally of 67 to 22 in favor of McCarthy’s condemnation. Of course, what McCarthy said about the Watkins panel was no worse, indeed was less severe, than what Flanders had said about McCarthy. But then, as Watkins had correctly noted, they weren’t censuring Ralph Flanders.
CONCLUSION
Samson in the Heathen Temple
SO, FINALLY, they got him. How they did it is fairly plain, and instructive when the methods are considered. Why they did it is less apparent, as there were many “they” s involved, and a mélange of motives converging at the point of censure. Least clear of all is what the whole thing meant when it was over.
To all appearances, then and later, a crushing defeat was inflicted on McCarthy when his colleagues voted to condemn him. The defeat wasn’t merely the three-to-one division in favor of the formal verdict but the informal penalties that followed. For many in the political world and press corps, he became a nonperson to be ignored and shunned, a ghost figure with no relation to the serious business of the Senate. Reporters who once hung on his every word now observed a tacit compact to treat him as if he were no longer there—which perhaps, in other than a purely physical sense, he wasn’t.
Even worse for McCarthy was what happened to his name, record, and reputation in the ensuing decades. He died on May 2, 1957, just thirty months after the censure vote, and was taken back home to Appleton to be buried on a quiet hillside by the Fox River. He was only forty-eight when he died, an incredibly young age even then for one once physically so strong, albeit with his share of ailments.*317 Many observers thought he drank himself to death, others theorized foul play, still others that the censure and the ostracism had robbed him of the will to live.
Whatever the specific medical causes, it seems likely the terrific bouts of unremitting struggle and incessant pressure had taken their toll for some time before this. For most of the five years that his doings transfixed the nation, McCarthy was locked in mortal combat with the most powerful forces in the land, including two presidents of the United States, vast bureaucratic empires, formidable adversaries in Congress, relentless leftward lobby groups, and a horde of press, TV, and radio critics who made him their daily target.
Even more to the point, he had been put through the wringer of endless, back-to-back investigations and repetitive charges that drained time and energy, sapped his strength, and blocked him from pursuing the mission to which he was devoted. The psychological stress resulting from it all, while he was being portrayed to the American public as a monster, is hard to imagine. That it led him to drink, as many anecdotes allege, seems plausible indeed. So does the notion that the combined, unbearable burden finally broke his health and killed him.
However that may be, his early death, and the scattering of his staffers and records, put an end to whatever nucleus there was of pro-McCarthy information or expertise remaining after the censure was voted. Some, such as J. B. Matthews, still kept their files on cases, some like journalist Ralph de Toledano and committee staffer Jim Juliana squirreled away remnants of McCarthy’s papers, some carried on the struggle in other venues. But there was no successor or political keeper of the flame, nobody in particular beyond
his widow who would try to salvage his name or some kind of honorable place in history for him.†318
Indeed, as time went on, the trend was all the other way around: McCarthy was dead and gone, his reputation in ruins after the Army hearings and the censure. Why bother trying to defend the indefensible? There were other things to do, other battles to be fought. No point in wasting time and resources on a cause so totally lost as that. And, perhaps more compelling, no desire to link other causes to the name of one thus reviled and battered, and now in death past caring.
For these reasons and some others, the field of McCarthy studies and related Cold War history was left mostly to his political foes, dominant in intellectual circles when he lived and virtually unchallenged in academic and media precincts since. With a handful of exceptions, what purport to be histories of the era or biographies of McCarthy have been written by his severest critics. The views of his opponents are thus presented as the “facts,” while significant data to the contrary have been denied, distorted, and in many cases suppressed entirely.
It was precisely here, of course, that the “total and eternal destruction” of McCarthy—or what appears to be such—was accomplished. Five decades of vilification, each new version heaped on and compounding those that went before it, scores of books and essays, countless media recaps driving home the message, spreading the villainous image to the widest possible public. And over this same span of fifty years, little or nothing of countervailing import.
Blacklisted By History Page 75
