Joe McCarthy and the “Red Scare”

In 1950, a Republican Senator from the state of Wisconsin started a movement of anti-Communism in America. This was during the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union were in complete competition as the two major superpowers of the world. Joseph McCarthy was this Senator from Wisconsin his accusations that large numbers of Communist and Soviet spies inside the United States federal government was eventually censured by the United States Senate. McCarthy started a period in American history that came to be known as the “Red Scare.” Were McCarthy’s accusations true or just the babbling of an alcoholic?

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was born November 14, 1909. At the age of 14, McCarthy dropped out of school, and then crammed six years of high school into one year and was admitted to Marquette University in 1930. At Marquette University he studied Law and received his degree in 1935. He was elected the Wisconsin Circuit Judge in 1939. McCarthy served as a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps during World War II, and in 1944 attempted to run for Senate where he lost. In 1946 McCarthy ran for Senate again and won to become the junior senator from Wisconsin. In Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy made his first claims of “known Communists” who were employed by the State Department. This attracted a lot of attention because this was the era of the Cold War and an anti-communist atmosphere. This started a “witch hunt” that lasted for five years. McCarthy rarely ever provided evidence of his claims, and his accusations ended many careers and ruined the lives of many of the accused.

Joseph McCarthy was re-elected in 1952 as the chairman of the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. While in this position McCarthy launched many investigations on government officials and agencies. He was not afraid to question the integrity of people like President Eisenhower. President Eisenhower was not fond of McCarthy, but refused to ever denounce the senator publicly. By 1953, McCarthy had made many enemies. McCarthy’s downfall came from the investigation of an Army dentist Major Irving Peress. Ironically, the Army countered McCarthy’s investigation; this caused McCarthy’s own subcommittee to hold hearings. These hearings were televised and exposed McCarthy of irresponsible and dishonest. In December 1954, the Senate voted to censor McCarthy. Soon after McCarthy descended into alcoholism and died of a liver ailment in 1957, at the age of 47.

The Cold War was not ever really a war. The term was used to describe the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States from 1945 to 1980. The Soviet Union never fought the United States, but the United States backed South Vietnam, and the Soviet’s supplied Russian weapons for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Though The United States and Soviet Union were united during World War II, they never truly trusted each other. In fact, during the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the only time that an actual war almost broke out between the two. Joseph McCarthy sensed a fear of communism in American society, and with the Cold War being a prevalent topic used it as a way to get in the door and become Senator in Wisconsin. The fact of the matter was McCarthy had been speaking out against Communism for years. “He made Communism an issue in his campaign against Howard McMurray in 1946, charging that McMurray had received the endorsement of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. In April 1947, McCarthy told the Madison Capital Times that his top priority was “to stop the spread of Communism.”¹

The State Department began to get infiltrated by Communists in the 1930s. On September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers gave the names of two dozen Communist spies in the government, including Alger Hiss to Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle. This information was reported to President Roosevelt, who blew it off. Hiss moved up the ladder all the way to the position as Roosevelt’s advisor during the Yalta Conference in 1945. Hiss was also the secretary general of the founding meeting of the United Nations, helped to draft the UN Charter, and later filled positions at the UN with American Communists before he was exposed as a Soviet spy by Whittaker Chambers in 1948. The security problem at the State Department had worsened considerably in 1945 when a merger brought into State thousands of employees from such war agencies as the Office of Strategic Services, the Office of War Information, and the Foreign Economic Administration — all of which were riddled with members of the Communist underground. J. Anthony Panuch, the State Department official charged with supervising the 1945 merger, told a Senate committee in 1953 that “the biggest single thing that contributed to the infiltration of the State Department was the merger of 1945. The effects of that are still being felt.” In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall and Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson engineered the firing of Panuch and the removal of every key member of his security staff.”²

In June 1947, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee addressed a secret memorandum to Secretary Marshall, “it is evident that there is a deliberate, calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity.” On file in the department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States which involves a large number of State Department employees, some in high official positions. This memorandum listed the names of nine State Department officials and said that they were “only a few of the hundreds now employed in varying capacities who are protected and allowed to remain despite the fact that their presence is an obvious hazard to national security.” On June 24, 1947, Assistant Secretary of State John Peurifoy notified the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that ten persons had been dismissed from the department, five of whom had been listed in the memorandum. But from June 1947 until McCarthy’s speech in February 1950, the State Department did not fire one person as a loyalty or security risk. In other branches of the government, more than 300 people were discharged for loyalty reasons alone during the period from 1947 to 1951.

During the mid-to-late Forties Communist sympathizers in the State Department had a key role in the subjugation of mainland China by the Reds. “It is my judgment, and I was in the State Department at the time,” said former Ambassador William D. Pawley, “that this whole fiasco, the loss of China and the subsequent difficulties with which the United States has been faced, was the result of mistaken policy of Dean Acheson, Phil Jessup, Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, John Service, John Davies, Clubb, and others.” Asked if he thought the mistaken policy was the result of “sincere mistakes of judgment,” Pawley replied: “No, I don’t.” In 1949, a young congressman from Massachusetts voiced his views of Communism, backing some of McCarthy’s beliefs. This congressman was John F. Kennedy.

Joe McCarthy claimed to have 57 or more names of state department employees who were or supported communism. The thing is McCarthy never or rarely actually directly called anyone a “Communist,” when he did though they were actually communists. McCarthy did make many false accusations of Communism. In fact, he did so the very first time he became a public figure in the anti-communist campaign. McCarthy claimed there were 205 communists working in the State Department on February 9, 1950; then the very next day he claimed there were 57 “card carrying members of the Communist Party” in the State Department. On February 20, he gave the Senate information about 81 individuals. “Thus, Joe McCarthy was receptive in the fall of 1949 when three men brought to his office a 100-page FBI report alleging extensive Communist penetration of the State Department. The trio had asked three other Senators to awaken the American people to this dangerous situation, but only McCarthy was willing to take on this volatile project.”³ When questioned by the Senate Committee this number grew much larger.

When McCarthy made accusations against certain individuals he could not confirm a single one of them were Communists. He could only point out that they were part of organizations that may or may not have had members who were Communists. “So weak were his charges that in one case he could only say: “…there is nothing in his files to disprove his Communist connections.”⁴ McCarthy even refused to give the names during his Wheeling, West Virginia speech, because he didn’t want to wrongfully accuse someone as this could ruin a person’s reputation. When he gave up names to the Senate he did so by case number and not name, and also made it very clear that “some of these individuals whose cases I am giving the Senate are no longer in the State Department. A sizable number of them are not. Some of them have transferred to other government work, work allied with the State Department. Others have been transferred to the United Nations.”⁵

In February 1950, the Tydings Committee was set up. This committee was a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The purpose of this committee was to conduct “a full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State.

The Tydings Committee labeled McCarthy a “fraud” and a “hoax.” The only real fraud in the hearings though was the committee itself. The Tydings Committee did not do a full and complete investigation of the Department of State. The committee did not allow for 20 witnesses, whom were important to the case, to be called to the stand. McCarthy was not even allowed to present his full case against Phillip Jessup and was not even allowed to cross-examine him. During the hearing Senator Lodge read 19 questions which were pertinent and should be answered before the committee threw out the State Department’s case, these questions along with anything that made the Tydings Committee look bad were deleted from the official record, totaling 35 missing typewritten pages. McCarthy was right in his accusations, “of the 110 names that McCarthy gave to the Tydings Committee to be investigated, 62 of them were employed by the State Department at the time of the hearings. The committee cleared everyone on McCarthy’s list, but within a year the State Department started proceedings against 49 of the 62. By the end of 1954, 81 of the names on McCarthy’s list had left the government either by dismissal or resignation.”⁶

One example of espionage in the State Department was John Stewart Service. Service was arrested five years prior to McCarthy accusing him, for giving classified documents to a Communist magazine, Amerasia. This act of espionage was covered up by the Truman Administration and Service was never convicted for his crime. In December 1951, the Civil Service Commission Loyalty Review Board found reasonable doubt to his loyalty and Service was kicked out of the State Department. The Supreme Court reinstated Service in 1956, and he became a consul in England. The Senate must have felt that McCarthy was closer to the truth than the Tydings Committee because in 1951 Jessup was rejected the nomination as a delegate to the United Nations. After the Senate adjourned, President Truman appointed him anyway. Then in 1960, President Eisenhower named Jessup to represent the United States on the International Court of Justice, and Jessup served on the World Court until 1969.

There was a tightening of security procedures for a while, and the State Department and other sensitive federal agencies dismissed nearly 4,000 employees in 1953 and 1954. Many of those dismissed shifted to nonsensitive departments though. Some of these security risks returned to their old agencies when security was virtually scrapped during the Kennedy Administration. In the mid-1950s Otto Otepka reviewed the files of all department personnel and found some derogatory information on 1,943 persons, almost 20 percent of the total payroll. He told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee years later that of the 1,943 employees, 722 “left the department for various reasons, but mostly by transfer to other agencies, before a final security determination was made.” Otepka took off names and the remaining number on the list dropped to 858 and in December of 1955. He sent their names to his boss, Scott McLeod, as persons to be watched because of Communist associations, homosexuality, habitual drunkenness, or mental illness. McLeod and his staff reviewed this list and trimmed it down to 258 people who were deemed “serious” security risks. Approximately 150 were in high-level posts where they could in one way or another influence the formulation of United States foreign policy,” said William J. Gill, author of TheOrdeal of Otto Otepka. “And fully half of these 258 serious cases were officials in either crucial Intelligence assignments or serving on top-secret committees reaching all the way up and into the National Security Council.”⁷ By the mid-1960s no one had tackled this problem and Otto Otepka was kicked out of the State Department. There is no record of anyone since Otepka keeping track of these security risks.

In 1952, Elizabeth Bentley, a former Soviet courier, testified and identified 37 Soviet agents within the U.S. government, she also said that, “to her knowledge there were four Soviet espionage rings operating within our government and that only two of these have been exposed.”8 Then in October 1953, a Soviet defector, Colonel Ege estimated that at minimum there were 20 operating spy networks in the United States between 1941 and 1942. During that time he was the chief of the Fourth Section of Soviet General Staff Intelligence. Even thirty-four years after Ege’s testimony those rings still had not been exposed. In 1954, Annie Lee Moss appeared before the McCarthy Committee and denied she was a Communist. Then in September 1958, the Subversive Activities Control Board reported that the Communist’s Parties own records showed that Annie Lee Moss was a member of the Communist Party in the mid-1940s. Strangely enough not only did the innocent get their jobs back, if they were a high ranking official, even some that were found guilty were able to get another high ranking job within the government. A good example of that was Reed Harris who resigned his position as deputy head of the State Department’s International Information Administration. He was later hired as the deputy of the U.S. Information Agency.

McCarthy subpoenaed Army General Irving Peress to sit before the committee in January 1954. Peress pled the 5^th Amendment twenty times when asked about being a member of the Communist Party, attendance at a Communist training school, and efforts to recruit military personnel into the party. McCarthy sent a letter to the Secretary of the Army asking that Peress by court-martialed and that the Army find out who promoted Peress, with knowledge that he was a Communist. That same day, Peress requested to be honorably separated from the Army and was granted this the next day. General Zwicker, whom honorably separated Peress, claimed to be against an honorable discharge, but claimed he was ordered to do so by someone at the Pentagon. In its report on the Peress case, the McClellan Committee said that “some 48 errors of more than minor importance were committed by the Army in connection with the commissioning, transfer, promotion, and honorable discharge of Irving Peress.” As a result, the Army made some sweeping changes in its security program, including a policy statement that said “the taking of the Fifth Amendment by an individual queried about his Communist affiliations is sufficient to warrant the issuance of a general discharge rather than an honorable discharge.”‘9

The reason McCarthy was finally censured by the Senate had nothing to do with the Army-McCarthy Hearing. He was censured due to acts from the Army creating a campaign to discredit and destroy him. Senator Ralph Flanders accused McCarthy of conduct unbecoming of a member of the United States Senate. Flanders got a list of charges from a leftwing group called the National Committee for an Effective Congress. McCarthy was accused of 46 charges, after two months of hearings the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy only be censured on two charges. “(1) That Senator McCarthy had “failed to cooperate” in 1952 with the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a resolution for his expulsion from the Senate; and

(2) That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had “intemperately abused” General Ralph Zwicker.

Many Senators were uneasy about the Zwicker count, particularly since the Army had shown contempt for committee chairman McCarthy by disregarding his letter of February 1, 1954, and honorably discharging Irving Peress the next day. For this reason, these Senators felt that McCarthy’s conduct toward Zwicker on February 18th was at least partially justified. So the Zwicker count was dropped at the last minute and in its place was this substitute charge:

(2) That Senator McCarthy, by characterizing the Watkins Committee as the “unwitting handmaiden” of the Communist Party and by describing the special Senate session as a “lynch party” and a “lynch bee,” had “acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity.”

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to “condemn” Senator Joseph McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22, with the Democrats unanimously in favor of condemnation and the Republicans split evenly.”¹⁰

With all these “Communists” resigning or being kicked out of their position and then being rehired it’s apparent that McCarthy was the only victim of McCarthyism and was making no progress. Newspapers and media slandered McCarthy. Society saw him as mean and harassing because of what the media said, but even those who sat on the stand and were questioned by him say that he was respectful and kind. Strangely McCarthy was wrongly sentenced by the Watkins Committee, the fact of the matter was that McCarthy was not subpoenaed to Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, he was invited to testify. Also no Senator had ever been punished for being declining an invitation to testify, or for something that happened in a previous Congress. The IRS investigated McCarthy’s taxes and finances and found that he was not in violation of the law for tax fraud and in fact the IRS owed him $1,046.75 for overpayment of his taxes. The second count McCarthy was condemned for involved opinions that were made outside the Senate. McCarthy still made speeches about the fight against Communism for the last 29 months between his condemnation and his death. He fought harder than ever in fact. McCarthy was an avid drinker but it is proven that he never drank during working hours, and he did not drink if it distracted him from his work when fighting Communism. In the remaining two years of his life, McCarthy was extremely disappointed over the wrong his Senate colleagues had done to him, and at times became somewhat depressed. “William Rusher was counsel to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee during 1956 and 1957 and met McCarthy repeatedly on social occasions.”He had at one time been a heavy drinker,” said Rusher of the Senator, “but in his last years was cautiously moderate; he died of a severe attack of hepatitis. He kept right on with a Senator’s usual chores up almost until the end.”’11 McCarthy’s death came on May 2, 1957; he was the first Senator in 17 years to have funeral services in the Senate Chamber. Any list of identified Communists uncovered by McCarthy would have to include Lauchlin Currie, Gustavo Duran, Theodore Geiger, Mary Jane Keeney, Edward Posniak, Haldore Hanson, John Carter Vincent, Owen Lattimore, Edward Rothschild, Irving Peress, and Annie Lee Moss. But that’s not the whole story. McCarthy also exposed scores of others who may not have been identified as Communists, but who certainly were causing harm to national security from their posts in the State Department, the Pentagon, the Army, key defense plants, and the Government Printing Office.”¹² The House Intelligence Committee uncovered “dangerous laxity” and serious “security failures” in the government’s system of catching spies, in 1987. According to the New York Times, “the investigation found ‘faulty hiring practices, poor management of probationary employees, thoughtless firing practices, lax security practices, inadequate interagency cooperation — even bungled surveillance of a prime espionage suspect.’

Joe McCarthy was right in every aspect, and was only trying to make the American government stronger by not allowing those who didn’t support it to impede it. He was betrayed by those close to him in the Senate in the end, and slander from the media. Everyone was against McCarthy save for a few. McCarthy made his voice heard and gave the government the keys to success or failure, it was their choice. McCarthy lived a very productive life, enduring many hardships along the way. Overall, Joe McCarthy was a great man and just wanted to make a difference in American foreign policy and government.

FOOTNOTES

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Fuentez, Anthony, “What Bill O’Reilly Should Have Told Ann Coulter”, (August 11, 2003); http://hnn.us/articles/1622.html

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

2. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Adams, John G., Without Precedent,(1983), W.W. Norton and Co., INC.

1. Callahan, Harry, “Forty questions and answers about Senator Joe McCarthy;” (February 5, 2001); http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

1. CNN, “Joseph McCarthy”, http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kbank/profiles/mccarthy/

1. Crozier, Barney, “Vermont Senator’s Speech Heralded McCarthy’s End”, (August 29, 1979); http://members.localnet.com/~jeflan/evf/rflandersmccarthy.html

1. Digital History, “Tail-Gunner Joe”, (March 27, 2008), http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=494

1. Evans, Stanton M., Blacklisted by History: The Untold story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his Fight Against America’s Enemies, (2007), Crown Forum.

1. Fuentez, Anthony, “What Bill O’Reilly Should Have Told Ann Coulter”, (August 11, 2003); http://hnn.us/articles/1622.html

1. History Learning Site, “What was the Cold War?”, (200-2008); http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/what%20was%20the%20cold%20war.htm

1. Jeffrey, Terrence P., “Stan Evans has Produced “Masterpiece of Truth” About Joe McCarthy”, (November 11, 2007); http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=23388

10. Oshinsky, David M., A Conspiracy So Immense, (1983), The Free Press.

11. Reeves, Thomas C., The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, (1982), Stein and Day.

1. Spartacus Educational, “Joseph McCarthy”, http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmccarthy.htm

1. United States Senate, “Joe McCarthy: A Featured Biography”, http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Featured_Bio_McCarthy.htm