III. Committee Chairman (1953-54)
Q. Granted that congressional investigating committees can serve an important purpose, weren’t McCarthy’s methods terrible and didn’t he subject witnesses to awful harassment?
A. Now we’re into an entirely different phase of McCarthy’s career. For three years, he had been one lone Senator crying in the wilderness. With the Republicans taking control of the Senate in January 1953, however, Joe McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. No longer did he have to rely solely upon public speeches to inform the American people of the Communist threat to America. He was now chairman of a Senate committee with a mandate to search out graft, incompetence, and disloyalty inside the vast reaches of the American government.
As for McCarthy’s methods, they were no different from those of other senators who were generally applauded for vigorous cross-examination of organized crime figures, for instance. The question of methods seems to come up only when subversives or spies are on the witness stand. And those who most loudly deplored McCarthy’s methods often resorted to the foulest methods themselves, including the use of lies, half-truths, and innuendos designed to stir up hysteria against him. What some people seemingly do not understand is that Communists are evildoers and that those who give aid and comfort to Communists — whether they are called dupes, fellow travelers, liberals, or progressives — are also evildoers who should be exposed and removed from positions of influence.
Traitors and spies in high places are not easy to identify. They do not wear sweatshirts with the hammer and sickle emblazoned on the front. Only painstaking investigation and exhaustive questioning can reveal them as enemies. So why all the condemnation for those who expose spies and none for the spies themselves? Why didn’t McCarthy’s critics expose a traitor now and then and show everyone how much better they could do it? No, it was much easier to hound out of public life such determined enemies of the Reds as Martin Dies, Parnell Thomas, and Joe McCarthy than to muster the courage to face up to the howling communist wolfpack themselves.
Q. So, McCarthy’s treatment of persons appearing before his committee was not as bad as has been reported?
A. Exactly. Let’s look at the record. During 1953 and the first three months of 1954 (McCarthy was immobilized for the remainder of 1954 by two investigations of him), McCarthy’s committee held 199 days of hearings and examined 653 witnesses. These individuals first appeared in executive session and were told of the evidence against them. If they were able to offer satisfactory explanations — and most of them were — they were dismissed and nobody ever knew they had been summoned.
Those who appeared in public sessions were either hardened Fifth Amendment pleaders or persons about whom there was a reasonably strong presumption of guilt. But even those witnesses who were brazen, insulting, and defiant were afforded their constitutional rights to confer with their counsel before answering a question (something they would not be allowed to do in a courtroom), to confront their accusers or at least have them identified and have questions submitted to them by their counsel, and to invoke the First and Fifth Amendments rather than answer questions about their alleged communist associations.
Of the 653 persons called by the McCarthy Committee during that 15-month period, 83 refused to answer questions about communist or espionage activities on constitutional grounds and their names were made public. Nine additional witnesses invoked the Fifth Amendment in executive session, but their names were not made public. Some of the 83 were working or had worked for the Army, the Navy, the Government Printing Office, the Treasury Department, the Office of War Information, the Office of Strategic Services, the Veterans Administration, and the United Nations. Others were or had been employed at the Federal Telecommunications Laboratories in New Jersey, the secret radar laboratories of the Army Signal Corps in New Jersey, and General Electric defense plants in Massachusetts and New York. Nineteen of the 83, including such well-known communist propagandists as James S. Allen, Herbert Aptheker, and Earl Browder, were summoned because their writings were being carried in U.S. Information Service libraries around the world.
Charles E. Ford, an attorney for Edward Rothschild in the Government Printing Office hearings, was so impressed with McCarthy’s fairness toward his client that he declared: “I think the committee session at this day and in this place is most admirable and most American.” Peter Gragis, who appeared before the McCarthy Committee on March 10, 1954, said that he had come to the hearing terrified because the press “had pointed out that you were very abusive, that you were crucifying people…. My experience has been quite the contrary. I have, I think, been very understandingly treated. I have been, I think, highly respected despite the fact that for some 20 years I had been more or less an active Communist.”
Q. Weren’t McCarthy and some members of his staff guilty of “book-burning” and causing a ruckus in Europe in 1953?
A. This accusation was made in reference to the committee’s inquiry into communist influences in State Department libraries overseas. In his book McCarthy, Roy Cohn, the committee’s chief counsel, conceded that he and committee staffer David Schine “unwittingly handed Joe McCarthy’s enemies a perfect opportunity to spread the tale that a couple of young, inexperienced clowns were bustling about Europe, ordering State Department officials around, burning books, creating chaos wherever they went, and disrupting foreign relations.” In point of fact, however, the trip and subsequent hearings by the committee provided information that led to the removal of more than 30,000 communist and pro-communist books from U.S. Information Service libraries in foreign countries. The presence of such books was in obvious conflict with the stated purpose of those libraries: “to promote better understanding of America abroad” and “to combat and expose Soviet communistic propaganda.”
Q. But didn’t McCarthy summon to those hearings a man whose major sin was having written a book on college football 21 years before?
A. In March 1953, the McCarthy Committee did hear testimony from Reed Harris, deputy head of the State Department’s International Information Administration and author of King Football. Harris’ book, however, was not confined to football. The author also advocated that Communists and Socialists be allowed to teach in colleges and said that hungry people in America, after “watching gangsters and corrupt politicians gulp joyously from the horn of plenty,” just might “decide that even the horrors of those days of fighting which inaugurated the era of communism in Russia would be preferable to the present state of affairs” in the United States.
The following colloquy between Harris and Senator John McClellan is never quoted by McCarthy’s critics:
McClellan: Here is what I am concerned about. In the first place, I will ask you this: If it should be established that a person entertained the views and philosophies that you expressed in that book, would you consider that person suitable or fit to hold a position in the Voice of America which you now hold?
Harris: I would not.
McClellan: You would not employ such a person, would you?
Harris: I would not, Senator.
McClellan: Now we find you in that position.
Harris: That is correct.
Before shedding any tears for Harris, who resigned his post in April 1953, be advised that when anti-McCarthy hysteric Edward R. Murrow took over the U.S. Information Agency in 1961, he hired Reed Harris as his deputy, proving once again that the only true victim of McCarthyism was Joe McCarthy himself.
Q. But what about that poor old black woman that McCarthy falsely accused of being a Communist?
A. That woman was Annie Lee Moss, who lost her job working with classified messages at the Pentagon after an FBI undercover operative testified that she was a member of the Communist Party. When she appeared before the McCarthy Committee early in 1954, Moss, who lived at 72 R Street, S.W., Washington, D.C., denied she was a Communist. Her defenders accused McCarthy of confusing Moss with another woman with a similar name at a different address. Edward R. Murrow made the woman a heroine on his television program and the anti-McCarthy press trumpeted this episode as typical of McCarthy’s abominations.
And so things stood until September 1958 when the Subversive Activities Control Board reported that copies of the Communist Party’s own records showed that “one Annie Lee Moss, 72 R Street, S.W., Washington, D.C., was a party member in the mid-1940s.” Moss got her Pentagon job back in 1954 and was still working for the Army in December 1958.
Q. Moss might have gotten her job back, but what about all those individuals who lost their jobs in defense plants?
A. During its probe of 13 defense plants whose contracts with the government ran into hundreds of millions of dollars a year, the McCarthy Committee heard 101 witnesses, two of whom — William H. Teto and Herman E. Thomas — provided the committee with information about the Red spy network and the efforts of the Communists to set up cells in the plants. The committee’s exposures led to the dismissal of 32 persons and the tightening of security regulations at the plants. The president of General Electric, for example, issued a policy statement expressing concern about “the possible danger to the safety and security of company property and personnel whenever a General Electric employee admits he is a Communist or when he asserts before a competent investigating government body that he might incriminate himself by giving truthful answers concerning his Communist affiliations or his possible espionage or sabotage activities.”
At the time McCarthy’s investigations were halted early in 1954, his probers had accumulated evidence involving an additional 155 defense workers, but he was never able to question those individuals under oath. On January 12, 1959, Congressman Gordon Scherer, a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, said that he knew of a minimum of 2,000 “potential espionage agents and saboteurs” working in the nation’s defense plants. But there have been no congressional investigations in this vital area since Senator McCarthy was stymied in 1954.
Q. What were the Fort Monmouth hearings all about? Weren’t all of those fired eventually given back their jobs?
A. The Army Signal Corps installation at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, was one of the nation’s most vital security posts since the three research centers housed there were engaged in developing defensive devices designed to protect America from an atomic attack. Julius Rosenberg, who was executed in 1953 for selling U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, worked as an inspector at Fort Monmouth from 1940 to 1945 and maintained his Signal Corps contacts for at least another two years after that. From 1949 to 1953, the FBI had been warning the Army about security risks at Fort Monmouth, but the Army paid little or no attention to the reports of subversion until the McCarthy investigation began in 1953.
During 1953 and 1954, the McCarthy Committee, acting on reports of communist infiltration from civilian employees, Army officers, and enlisted personnel, heard 71 witnesses at executive sessions and 41 at open hearings. The Army responded by suspending or discharging 35 persons as security risks, but when these cases reached the Army Loyalty and Screening Board at the Pentagon, all but two of the suspected security risks were reinstated and given back pay. McCarthy demanded the names of the 20 civilians on the review board and, when he threatened to subpoena them, the Eisenhower administration, at a meeting in Attorney General Herbert Brownell’s office on January 21, 1954, began plotting to stop McCarthy’s investigations once and for all.
Yes, virtually all of those suspended were eventually restored to duty at Fort Monmouth and anti-McCarthyites have cited this as proof that McCarthy had failed once again to substantiate his allegations. But vindication of McCarthy came later, when the Army’s top-secret operations at Fort Monmouth were quietly moved to Arizona. In his 1979 book With No Apologies, Senator Barry Goldwater explained the reason for the move:
Carl Hayden, who in January 1955 became chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee of the United States Senate, told me privately Monmouth had been moved because he and other members of the majority Democratic Party were convinced security at Monmouth had been penetrated. They didn’t want to admit that McCarthy was right in his accusations. Their only alternative was to move the installation from New Jersey to a new location in Arizona.
Q. Speaking of the Army, what was the name of that dentist that McCarthy said was a Communist?
A. His name was Irving Peress, and here is some background information. In December 1953, an Army general alerted Senator McCarthy to the incredible story of this New York dentist who was drafted into the Army as a captain in October 1952; who refused a month later to answer questions on a Defense Department form about membership in subversive organizations; who was recommended for dismissal by the Surgeon General of the Army in April 1953; but who requested and received a promotion to major the following October. Roy Cohn gave the facts on Peress to Army Counsel John G. Adams in December 1953, and Adams promised to do something about it.
When still no action had been taken on Peress a month later, McCarthy subpoenaed him before the committee on January 30, 1954. Peress took the Fifth Amendment 20 times when asked about his membership in the Communist Party, his attendance at a communist training school, and his efforts to recruit military personnel into the party. Two days later, McCarthy sent a letter to Army Secretary Robert Stevens by special messenger, reviewing the testimony of Peress and requesting that he be court-martialed and that the Army find out who promoted Peress, knowing that he was a Communist. On that same day, February 1, Peress asked for an honorable separation from the Army, which he promptly received the next day from his commanding officer at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker.
McCarthy took the next logical step and summoned General Zwicker to a closed session of the committee on February 18. There was no reason at that time for McCarthy to suppose that Zwicker would be anything but a frank and cooperative witness. In separate conversations with two McCarthy staff members, on January 22 and February 13, Zwicker had said that he was familiar with Peress’ communist connections and that he was opposed to giving him an honorable discharge, but that he was ordered to do so by someone at the Pentagon.
When he appeared before McCarthy, however, Zwicker was evasive, hostile, and uncooperative. He changed his story three times when asked if he had known at the time he signed the discharge that Peress had refused to answer questions before the McCarthy Committee. McCarthy became increasingly exasperated and, when Zwicker, in response to a hypothetical question, said that he would not remove from the military a general who originated the order for the honorable discharge of a communist major, knowing that he was a Communist, McCarthy told Zwicker that he was not fit to wear the uniform of a general.
Q. So McCarthy really did “abuse” Zwicker and impugn his patriotism as the critics have charged?
A. Let’s jump ahead three years and get Zwicker’s own assessment of his testimony that took place on February 18, 1954. At a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 21, 1957, the General stated: “I think there are some circumstances … that would certainly tend to give a person the idea that perhaps I was recalcitrant, perhaps I was holding back, and perhaps I wasn’t too cooperative…. I am afraid I was perhaps overcautious and perhaps on the defensive, and that this feeling … may have inclined me to be not as forthright, perhaps, in answering the questions put to me as I might have been otherwise.”
That wasn’t the only time that General Zwicker was less than forthright. In testimony before the McClellan Committee (formerly the McCarthy Committee) on March 23, 1955, Zwicker denied giving McCarthy staffer George Anastos derogatory information about Irving Peress in their telephone conversation of January 22, 1954. When Anastos and the secretary who had monitored the conversation both testified under oath and contradicted Zwicker, the McClellan Committee forwarded the transcript of the hearing to the Justice Department for possible prosecution of Zwicker for perjury. After sitting on the matter for 19 months, the Justice Department finally, in December 1956, declined to undertake criminal prosecution of Zwicker for “technical” reasons.
On April 1, 1957, the Senate approved a promotion for Zwicker by a vote of 70 to two, with Senators McCarthy and George Malone opposed. All the members of the Senate had gotten a phone call from the Pentagon or the White House urging them to vote for Zwicker. The recalcitrant general served three more years in the Army before retiring.
Q. Does anyone know who did promote Peress and who told Zwicker to sign the communist major’s honorable discharge?
A. After studying the 1955 McClellan hearings on the Peress case, Lionel Lokos, in his book Who Promoted Peress?, concluded that Colonel H.W. Glattly signed the letter to the adjutant general, recommending the promotion of Irving Peress; and Major James E. Harris, in the name of the adjutant general, signed Peress’ letter of appointment to major. As for Peress’ discharge, Army Counsel John Adams and Lieutenant General Walter L. Weible ordered General Zwicker to sign the honorable separation from the Army. The McClellan Committee sharply rebuked Adams for his action, saying that he “showed disrespect for this subcommittee when he chose to disregard Senator McCarthy’s letter of February 1, 1954, and allowed Peress to be honorably discharged on February 2, 1954.”
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.” That these reforms came about at all was due to the persistence of one Senator, Joe McCarthy, who displayed the courage to expose Peress against the wishes of the Army, the White House, and many of his fellow Republicans.
“No one will ever know,” said Lionel Lokos, “what it cost Senator McCarthy to take the stand he did in the Peress case — what it cost him in terms of popularity and his political future. We only know that the price of asking ‘Who Promoted Peress?’ came high and that Senator McCarthy didn’t hesitate to pay that price.”
IV. Army-McCarthy Hearings
Q. What was the gist of the Army-McCarthy Hearings?
A. On March 11, 1954, the Army accused McCarthy and his staff of using improper means in seeking preferential treatment for G. David Schine, a consultant to McCarthy’s committee, prior to and after Schine was drafted into the Army in November 1953. Senator McCarthy countercharged that these allegations were made in bad faith and were designed to prevent his committee from continuing its probe of communist subversion at Fort Monmouth and from issuing subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board. A special committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Karl Mundt, was appointed to adjudicate these conflicting charges, and the hearings opened on April 22, 1954.
The televised hearings lasted for 36 days and were viewed by an estimated 20 million people. After hearing 32 witnesses and two million words of testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy himself had not exercised any improper influence in behalf of David Schine, but that Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, had engaged in some “unduly persistent or aggressive efforts” in behalf of Schine. The committee also concluded that Army Secretary Robert Stevens and Army Counsel John Adams “made efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth,” and that Adams “made vigorous and diligent efforts” to block subpoenas for members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board “by means of personal appeal to certain members of the [McCarthy] committee.”
In a separate statement that concurred with the special committee report, Senator Everett Dirksen demonstrated the weakness of the Army case by noting that the Army did not make its charges public until eight months after the first allegedly improper effort was made in behalf of Schine (July 1953), and then not until after Senator McCarthy had made it known (January 1954) that he would subpoena members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board. Dirksen also called attention to a telephone conversation between Secretary Stevens and Senator Stuart Symington on March 8, 1954, three days before the Army allegations were made public. In that conversation, Stevens said that any charges of improper influence by McCarthy’s staff “would prove to be very much exaggerated…. I am the Secretary and I have had some talks with the [McCarthy] committee and the chairman, and so on, and by and large as far as the treatment of me is concerned, I have no personal complaint.”
In his 1984 book Who Killed Joe McCarthy?, former Eisenhower White House aide William Bragg Ewald Jr., who had access to many unpublished papers and memos from persons involved in the Army-McCarthy clash, confirms the good relations that existed between McCarthy and Stevens and the lack of pressure from McCarthy in behalf of Schine. In a phone conversation November 7, 1953, the Senator told the Secretary not to give Schine any special treatment, such as putting him in the service and assigning him back to the committee. McCarthy even said that Roy Cohn had been “completely unreasonable” about Schine, that “he thinks Dave should be a general and work from the penthouse of the Waldorf.”
Ewald also reported a phone conversation between Stevens and Assistant Secretary of Defense Fred Seaton on January 8, 1954, in which Stevens admitted that Schine might not have been drafted if he hadn’t worked for the McCarthy Committee. “Of course, the kid was taken at the very last minute before he would have been ineligible for age,” said Stevens. “He is 26, you know. My guess would be that if he hadn’t been working for McCarthy, he probably never would have been drafted.”
Another thing confirmed by Ewald was the secret meeting at the Justice Department on January 21, 1954, when a group of anti-McCarthyites came up with a plan to stop McCarthy either by asking the Republican members of his committee to talk him out of subpoenaing members of the Army Loyalty and Screening Board or, if that didn’t work, by drawing up a list of alleged efforts in behalf of David Schine and threatening to make the list public unless McCarthy backed off.
Those at the January 21 meeting were Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge, Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, White House chief of staff Sherman Adams, White House aide Gerald Morgan, and John Adams. When John Adams inadvertently mentioned this meeting during the Army-McCarthy Hearings, and McCarthy wanted to find out more about it, President Eisenhower, on May 17, 1954, issued an executive order forbidding any employee of the Defense Department “to testify to any such conversations or communications or to produce any such documents or reproductions.”
Q. Did the Army-McCarthy Hearings serve any good purpose?
A. Yes. Despite the inordinate focus on trivia and the clever distractions introduced by counsel for the Army Joseph Welch, the hearings alerted the American people as never before to the dangers of Communism. McCarthy’s popularity in opinion polls had declined from 50 percent approval in January 1954 to 35 percent in May, but tens of millions still supported him. You would never know this from reading summaries of the hearings or from watching Point of Order, a 97-minute “documentary” (taken from 188 hours of television footage) that omitted virtually every incident favorable to McCarthy — and there were many of them — and included only those segments where McCarthy did not come across well. By showing McCarthy mainly when he was irritated or expressing his many “points of order,” the film presents a distorted view of him.
Q. How about some examples of clever distractions?
A. Let’s consider three tricks pulled by Joe Welch to divert people’s attention away from the central issue of communist subversion:
(1) The “Cropped” Photograph. On April 26, a photo was introduced showing Secretary Stevens posing willingly for a smiling photograph with Private Schine at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on November 17, 1953, a time when Stevens was supposed to be upset with Schine for seeking special treatment from the Army. Welch produced another photo the next day showing the base commander in the picture with Stevens and Schine and said that the first one was “a shamefully cut-down version.” But the innocent deletion of the base commander from the photograph did not change its basic meaning — that Stevens was not angry with Schine at a time that the Army said he was.
(2) The “Purloined” Document. On May 4, Senator McCarthy produced a 2 1/4-page document with the names of 34 subversives at Fort Monmouth, half of whom were still there. The document, which had been given to McCarthy by an intelligence officer in 1953, was a summary of a 15-page report that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had sent on January 26, 1951, to Major General A. R. Bolling, chief of Army Intelligence. Instead of being concerned that the Army had not acted on the FBI report and had not tried to root out the subversives at Fort Monmouth, Welch kept harping on how McCarthy got the summary and where it came from. McCarthy refused to tell him. Welch ascertained that Hoover had not written the 2 1/4-page document in McCarthy’s possession and termed it “a carbon copy of precisely nothing.” In point of fact, however, the document was an accurate summary of Hoover’s original report, but Welch made it appear that McCarthy was presenting phony evidence.
(3) The Fred Fisher Episode. On June 9, the 30th day of the hearings, Welch was engaged in baiting Roy Cohn, challenging him to get 130 Communists or subversives out of defense plants “before the sun goes down.” The treatment of Cohn angered McCarthy and he said that if Welch were so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, which Attorney General Brownell had called “the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party.” Welch then delivered the most famous lines from the Army-McCarthy Hearings, accusing McCarthy of “reckless cruelty” and concluding: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”
The fact of the matter was that Fred Fisher’s connection with the National Lawyers Guild had been widely publicized two months earlier. Page 12 of the April 16 New York Times had carried a picture of Fisher and a story about his removal from Welch’s team because of his past association with the NLG. If Welch was so worried that McCarthy’s remarks might inflict a lifelong “scar” on Fisher’s reputation, why did he dramatize the incident in such histrionic fashion? The reason, of course, was that McCarthy had fallen into a trap in raising the Fisher issue, and Welch, superb showman that he was, played the scene for all it was worth. Was Fred Fisher hurt by the incident? Not at all. He became a partner in Welch’s Boston law firm, Hale & Dorr, and was elected president of the Massachusetts Bar Association in the mid-1970s.
V. The Watkins Committee
Q. So the Senate finally censured Joe McCarthy for his conduct during the Army-McCarthy Hearings, right?
A. Wrong. McCarthy was not censured for his conduct in the Army-McCarthy Hearings or for anything he had ever said or done in any hearings in which he had participated. Here are the facts: After McCarthy emerged unscathed from his bout with the Army, the Left launched a new campaign to discredit and destroy him. The campaign began on July 30, 1954, when Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of conduct “unbecoming a member of the United States Senate.” Flanders, who two months earlier had told the Senate that McCarthy’s “anti-Communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority,” had gotten his list of charges against McCarthy from a left-wing group called the National Committee for an Effective Congress.
McCarthy’s enemies ultimately accused him of 46 different counts of allegedly improper conduct and another special committee was set up, under the chairmanship of Senator Arthur Watkins, to study and evaluate the charges. Thus began the fifth investigation of Joe McCarthy in five years! After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on only two of the 46 counts. So when a special session of the Senate convened on November 8, 1954, these were the two charges to be debated and voted on:
(1) That Senator McCarthy had “failed to cooperate” in 1952 with the Senate Subcommitee 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 18 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.
Q. Was the Senate justified in condemning McCarthy on these counts?
A. No, it was not. Regarding the first count, failure to cooperate with the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, the subcommittee never subpoenaed McCarthy but only “invited” him to testify; one Senator and two staff members resigned from the subcommittee because of its dishonesty towards McCarthy; and the subcommittee, in its final report, dated January 2, 1953, said that the matters under consideration “have become moot by reason of the 1952 election.” No Senator had ever been punished for something that had happened in a previous Congress or for declining an “invitation” to testify. By the way, the Justice Department and the Bureau of Internal Revenue investigated McCarthy’s finances and taxes for the period 1946 to 1952 and found no violations of the law. On April 19, 1955, the Internal Revenue awarded him a refund of $1,046.75 for overpayment of taxes.
As for the second count, criticism of the Watkins Committee and the special Senate session, McCarthy was condemned for opinions he had expressed outside the Senate. As David Lawrence pointed out in an editorial in the June 7, 1957 issue of U.S. News & World Report, other senators had accused McCarthy of lying under oath, accepting influence money, engaging in election fraud, making libelous and false statements, practicing blackmail, doing the work of the Communists for them, and engaging in a questionable “personal relationship” with Roy Cohn and David Schine, but they were not censured for acting “contrary to senatorial ethics” or for impairing the “dignity” of the Senate.
The chief beneficiary of the Senate destruction of Joe McCarthy was the communist conspiracy (the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker had called the recommendations of the Watkins Committee “good news for America”). Former Communist Louis Budenz, who knew the inner workings of that conspiracy as well as anyone, said that the condemnation of McCarthy leaves the way open “to intimidate any person of consequence who moves against the conspiracy. The Communists made him their chief target because they wanted to make him a symbol to remind political leaders in America not to harm the conspiracy or its world conquest designs.” The history of the past 30 years confirms the tragic truth of Budenz’s statement.
Q. Who were the 22 Republican Senators who voted against the condemnation of Joe McCarthy?
A. More than a dozen Senators told McCarthy that they did not want to vote against him but had to because of the tremendous pressure being put on them by the White House and by leaders of both political parties. The 22 men who did put principle above politics were Senators Frank Barrett (Wyoming), Styles Bridges (New Hampshire), Ernest Brown (Nevada), John Marshall Butler (Maryland), Guy Cordon (Oregon), Everett Dirksen (Illinois), Henry Dworshak (Idaho), Barry Goldwater (Arizona), Bourke Hickenlooper (Iowa), Roman Hruska (Nebraska), William Jenner (Indiana), William Knowland (California), Thomas Kuchel (California), William Langer (North Dakota), George Malone (Nevada), Edward Martin (Pennsylvania), Eugene Millikin (Colorado), Karl Mundt (South Dakota), William Purtell (Connecticut), Andrew Schoeppel (Kansas), Herman Welker (Idaho), and Milton Young (North Dakota).
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