The struggle spilled over into every corner of American politics, and in no state more than in Massachusetts. For there on one side were civil libertarians—some entrenched in academic halls, many of them Democrats—and high-minded Republicans appalled at McCarthy’s destructiveness to their country and party; on the other, “practical” Republicans who saw McCarthyism as a bridge to groups who had been “captive” to the Massachusetts Democracy, and Democrats, particularly the Irish, who seemed to be attracted to McCarthyism. Each party was sharply split over the issue, and so were the press, the clergy, and the bar. Probably in no single area of the country could more open and violent feeling for McCarthy be found than in Boston. It was strongest in areas such as Kennedy’s old congressional district, where it tied in with Catholic hostility to communism; with immigrants’ hatred for Russian control of their countries, as in the case of the Polish-Americans; and with low sensitivity to the civil-liberties tradition.
“How do people feel about McCarthy these days?” Senator Lodge once asked Governor Dever.
“Your people don’t think much of him,” answered the Democratic Dever, “but I’m afraid mine do.”
Kennedy’s mail mirrored the deep rifts among his constituents. “Surely when you received that degree from Notre Dame,” a woman wrote from a western Massachusetts mill city, “the Holy Ghost should have descended upon you and enlightened you! Therefore I cannot understand why you are not completely behind Senator McCarthy and overjoyed at being able to work with him on a committee so vital to our nation’s welfare.”
She mentioned a talk McCarthy had recently given at Smith: “He left that jeering ill-bred group of girls with something to think about.… And believe me not one of the six Sullivan girls will attend Smith College if that’s what they turn out there!!”
From a noted professor at Harvard Law School came an eloquent plea in the wake of a McCarthy foray into Boston: “The issue, as I see it,” he wrote Kennedy, “does not turn upon the morality, the legality, or the wisdom of the position which the two witnesses [before McCarthy] took. It turns rather upon the responsibility of the Senate to see that the processes of government are not abused and degraded by one of its members. What was exhibited to the New England community by television and radio was a spectacle of governmental power being exercised with truculent brutality.…
“When legislation trangresses constitutional limits,” his letter went on, “the courts are authorized to declare it unconstitutional.… The Supreme Court, however, has indicated that it is not vested with extensive powers to control the conduct of legislative investigators. As a consequence the community lacks the usual safeguards by which decency is secured. Those safeguards, accordingly, must be provided by the Congress itself, and if the Senate puts loyalty to one tyrant among its members above its responsibilities to preserve decency in government there will be no security for tradition.
“Surely it is better that two small and misguided radicals who have publicly identified themselves and admitted the folly of their earlier ways should go free than that the Senate, by responding to Senator McCarthy’s wishes, should endorse his indecencies, and thus bring our government into a contempt far larger and more destructive than that of the two witnesses.”
How did Kennedy deal with these competing views? In his correspondence he straddled the fence. McCarthy’s investigation of the trade of certain allies with Red China served a useful purpose, he wrote a Boston newspaperman. (This report on trade by the McCarthy subcommittee, for which his brother Bob was largely responsible, was characterized by Arthur Krock as “an example of Congressional investigation at the highest level.…”) But, said Kennedy, “other inquiries which have been reported in the press would not appear to have produced results of sufficient value to justify the bitter controversies raised by the methods employed.”
“I appreciate knowing of your support of Senator McCarthy,” he wrote a Fitchburg woman. “I have always believed that we must be alert to the menace of Communism within our country as well as its advances on the international front. In so doing, however, we must be careful we maintain our traditional concern that in punishing the guilty we protect the innocent.” To the Harvard Law School professor, he wrote: “Inasmuch as I am a member of the full Committee on Government Operations, I have in the past given some consideration and raised some questions concerning the contempt citations requested by Senator McCarthy. In such cases, however, I have relied upon legal, primarily constitutional grounds. A citation for contempt is in itself a matter largely of legal form, which has little or no relation to our dislike of the methods employed by the committee chairman or our sympathy for the difficulties encountered by the witness. To attempt to take a position whereby contempt citations would be refused against those who had no legal basis for conduct which is contemptuous by definition would be to attempt to overthrow all past precedents of the Senate and raise serious doubts as to the long-range implications of such a stand.” To Kennedy, the problem seemed essentially a legal rather than a moral one, and it was on the legal aspect, he implied politely, that he would especially appreciate the professor’s advice.
When pressed, Kennedy could make a choice. Since the stakes—national security—were so high, he wrote a student at Oberlin, “we must resolve every doubt, in the case of government employees and defense workers, in a manner which will insure the greatest security to our country.” To a Cambridge correspondent, however, he said that he favored Senate Resolution 16, which would permit the Senate under certain circumstances to discharge a committee from further pursuing certain investigations. He also supported Senate Concurrent Resolution 10, he said, which would assure a number of personal rights to committee witnesses and would subject to disciplinary action and to censure any member of Congress failing to observe the requirements.
Kennedy evaded the issue but he did not contradict himself; he took pains to remind the libertarian of the needs of security and the McCarthyites of the claims of liberty and due process. He was apparently unsure of exactly where he stood between the (ostensibly) competing claims of security and liberty. What he did know was that the controversy was getting out of bounds. The intensity of the struggle offended him; he could not throw himself into the battle as so many Americans and even his fellow senators were doing. He was consistent in his noncommitment, but to many this was just another way of saying that he was shilly-shallying.
“Please explain your inconsistencies, Senator,” a pro-McCarthy Bostonian wrote on the envelope of a letter. Giving the usual pro-and-con answer, Kennedy went on to say a bit sadly, “The storm that has swirled about Senator McCarthy’s head has caused many level-headed individuals to become emotionally upset and violent pro and anti attitudes have been struck.…”
“The Honor and Dignity of the Senate”
The very storm that Kennedy deplored made a showdown inevitable. He could take a compromise position in letters to correspondents, but how would he vote when the showdown came? The Senate record is clear. On almost every policy issue involving McCarthyism, Kennedy voted against McCarthy. Yet on the issue of McCarthy himself, Kennedy took no stand.
During his first year in the Senate, Kennedy’s personal relations with McCarthy were not close, but they were amicable. The Wisconsin Senator had been a friend of Joseph P. Kennedy for some time, visiting him in Hyannisport and talking with him on his yacht, and the son had known him primarily through his father. Although Kennedy was appointed to McCarthy’s Government Operations Committee, the members did not meet as a full unit often enough to bring the two men into frequent contact in the Senate—it was the committee’s subcommittee on investigations that conducted the notorious hearings. Bob Kennedy worked for the subcommittee from January to August 1953, when he resigned following altercations with Roy Cohn; he was re-appointed as counsel for the Democratic minority when it returned in 1954 after boycotting McCarthy. But Bobby was never one of McCarthy’s intimates.
When Irwin Ross, a reporter for the New Yo
rk Post, asked Kennedy in 1953 what he thought of McCarthy, he answered: “Not very much. But I get along with him. When I was in the House, I used to get along with Marcantonio and with Rankin. As long as they don’t step in my way, I don’t want to get into personal fights.”
In his first vote on a McCarthy issue—the appropriation of funds for McCarthy’s investigations, January 1953—Kennedy went along with him, as did virtually every other senator. A year later, the Senate again granted its investigator in chief a substantial sum, with only Senator William Fulbright, of Arkansas, voting “no.” “The truth is,” Richard Rovere has aptly said in reporting this incident, “that everyone in the Senate, or just about everyone, was scared stiff of him. Everyone then believed that McCarthy had the power to destroy those who opposed him, and evidence for this was not lacking. Evidence was not conclusive, either, but politicians cannot afford to deal in finalities and ultimate truths; they abide, by and large, by probabilities and reasonable assumptions and the law of averages.…” And the fact was that McCarthy had campaigned against the re-election of four Democratic senators, and every one had been defeated.
Kennedy was not scared stiff of McCarthy, but he did respect his power to make trouble in Massachusetts if he set his mind to it. Kennedy was not worried about his own re-election, which would not come up until 1958 anyway, but he hated being directly involved in the violent controversy that followed McCarthy wherever he went. As he said later in a speech on the censure motion which was never delivered, “I am not insensitive to the fact that my constituents perhaps contain a greater proportion of devotees on each side of this matter than the constituency of any other Senator.…”
Still, when issues arose that were widely viewed as tests of a senator’s position on McCarthy, Kennedy voted against the Wisconsin Republican. Two such tests that came early in his first year involved Senate confirmation of presidential appointments that McCarthy heartily opposed. One of these was Eisenhower’s nomination of James B. Conant, former president of Harvard, as ambassador to Germany. Kennedy supported the nomination. His position was made easier in that Saltonstall also strongly supported Conant, an old Harvard classmate of his, but harder in that Conant had been accused by John T. Flynn and others of hostility to parochial schools. A few weeks later, Kennedy was one of seventy-four senators who voted to confirm Charles Bohlen—whom McCarthy had fought—as ambassador to Russia.
When it came to voting on plums for McCarthy’s good friends, Kennedy would not go along. At the beginning of the 1954 session, Kennedy was one of a liberal bloc of twenty-five senators to vote against the appointment of McCarthy’s friend Robert E. Lee to the Federal Communications Commission. McCarthy was so committed to this appointment that, according to friends of the Massachusetts Senator, he never spoke to Kennedy again. In June 1954, Kennedy voted with many other Democratic senators in favor of a move, in effect, to declare that R. W. S. McLeod, who had been making pro-McCarthy speeches while running the State Department’s security program, came under the Hatch Act, which regulated political activity by government employees, and hence was not authorized to make political speeches. (In 1957, he voted with the minority of twenty against the appointment of McLeod as ambassador to Ireland.)
The Boston Post and other Massachusetts McCarthyites had been viewing Kennedy’s votes with growing alarm. He “voted with the crew who are out to get R. W. Scott McLeod, who has been cleaning the communist coddlers out of the State Department,” the Post charged. “Senator Kennedy hasn’t discovered that cleaning communists out of government is not a party matter. If he wants to maintain his political viability he ought to consult a few solid and loyal Democrats in Massachusetts who are every bit as determined to clean communism out of government as is Senator McCarthy.” But two months later, Kennedy led the fight in committee against another friend of McCarthy, former Senator Owen Brewster of Maine, whom McCarthy wanted to install as the committee’s chief counsel.
All these issues swirling around McCarthy came to a head in August 1954. Kennedy voted against an immunity bill designed to compel waiver of a witness’s rights under the Fifth Amendment, as he had also voted against a similar bill the year before. In neither case, however, was the vote recorded, and Kennedy was not one of the ten senators to stand up to, be recorded against the bill. A week after opposing the immunity bill a second time, Kennedy voted to cite Corliss Lamont for contempt of Congress. In committee, however, Kennedy had fought the citation; he charged that McCarthy was attacking Lamont on the basis of his writings and that this was unconstitutional. McCarthy was disconcerted for a moment. At this point, a Democratic senator said: “When somebody walks like a duck, flies like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s pretty certain he is a duck.” While the press waited outside the door, Kennedy stood his ground; finally the committee agreed to ask the Justice Department to comment on the constitutionality of citing Lamont. Eventually, that agency adjudged it constitutional, and then Kennedy voted for it in the Senate. Among the Senate liberals Senators Hubert Humphrey and Stuart Symington, for example, also approved the Lamont citation.
At this time, the Senate was considering measures to strengthen efforts against domestic communists. Kennedy voted for an amendment to the Subversive Activities Control Act to establish a commission to recommend a co-ordinated program for security screening of persons in defense activities, and to eliminate duplication in existing programs. Designed as a substitute for harsher anticommunist measures that were pending, the amendment failed. A few days later, Senator Humphrey, who had voted for the substitute, took the floor with a speech that surprised many present.
“I am tired of reading headlines about being ‘soft’ toward communism,” the Minnesota liberal exclaimed. “I am tired of reading headlines about being a leftist.” It was time, he said, “to come to grips with the Communist issue.” He favored a simple proposal—to outlaw the Communist party. This proposal passed with the support of every senator on the floor, including Kennedy. McCarthy watched the proceedings sardonically. When he lived on a farm as a boy, he told the Senate a few days later, he had to dig out skunks that were killing chicks. “It was a very unpleasant job. It could not be done by passing a resolution against skunks. The nice little boys could pass a resolution against skunks, but the nice little boys did not help us dig them out. It was an unpleasant task; and sometimes after we got through, we were not too welcome sitting next to our friends in church.…”
When McCarthy said this he was already on the run. The Senate had had about enough. On July 31, after the electric drama of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Ralph Flanders had brought in a resolution of censure: “Resolved, That the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin is unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate, is contrary to senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned.” Kennedy sat through most of the tempestuous debate in the Senate but spoke only once. This was to correct a mis-statement by a pro-McCarthy senator about the Annie Lee Moss case; Kennedy remarked parenthetically that he felt that there were “no adequate grounds for censure in the Annie Lee Moss case because of the questions asked by the junior Senator from Wisconsin” but that some of the committee counsel’s interrogation was not adequately based.
Kennedy decided to vote for the censure resolution but not on Flanders’ terms. In a speech prepared for delivery but never given, Kennedy carefully distinguished his position from that taken by the liberal bloc. The issue involved “neither the motives nor sincerity of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin,” he said. “We are not asked to vote for or against Senator McCarthy.” Kennedy did not feel free, he said, to base his vote on the “long-past misconduct” of McCarthy, to which neither he nor Flanders had publicly objected at the time. Nor could he vote for censure in order to conciliate foreign opinion.
“The hostility showed to Senator McCarthy by those outside the United States is not, in my opinion, altogether the result of his own actions, however serious they
may be, but rather because he offers an easy mark to those who wish to attack the prestige and power of the United States. Even if Senator McCarthy were removed from public life, those same forces would speedily fill the void left by his passing.… It is because we are the leaders of the Free World that we receive this ceaseless hostility, rather than because of any single man or any single action.” Kennedy did not agree either that McCarthy had split the country wide apart. “Indeed, I think the action we are about to take, precipitated as it has been by the Senator from Vermont, will have serious repercussions upon the social fabric of this country and must be so recognized.”
Still he would vote for censure. Why? Because McCarthy had attacked the honor and dignity of the Senate. Kennedy described in detail the abusive language and threats of reprisal used against the Army by Roy Cohn and acquiesced in by McCarthy. As chairman, McCarthy must take responsibility for a staff member’s acts, even though the censure motion “is more concerned with the dignity and honor of this body than with the personal characteristics of any individual Senator.”
“Thus the Senate is again faced with the necessity of reasserting its honor and dignity in the face of any abuse of those privileges affirmed by one of its members,” Kennedy went on. But he insisted again that this was the only basis of his decision, that broader issues were not involved. “Our action today, as in the previous motions of censure adopted by this body, does not involve the vindication or condemnation of an individual Senator. It does not involve his views and objectives in years gone by”—only the dignity and the honor of the Senate.
John Kennedy Page 17
