It was this fear that McCarthy might publicly connect the dots between communists and the globalists that sent the CFR brain trust into full panic mode and sealed the senator’s fate. Their unrelenting demonization of McCarthy has served as an effective deterrent; no congressional efforts to expose the funding of subversion (and perversion) by the tax-exempt foundations has taken place in the nearly three-quarters of a century since the Reece-McCarthy era. Since that time the number of foundations and the size of their subversive grant-making have seen a manifold increase. With remarkable consistency, many of the largest of these foundations have been using their vast resources to fund groups, institutions, and individuals that apply simultaneous pressure from above and below to undermine Christian society and our constitutional order, with the aim of replacing it with a totalitarian “New World Order.”
The Army–McCarthy hearings were a series of hearings held between April and June by the United States Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations to uncover the communist infiltrators of the US Army and government. His attempts were thwarted by the heavy influence and propaganda from the money powers and the controlled CBS media that aired the hearings and demonized the freedom loving patriot to make him look paranoid. This was carried out by Cord Meyer, one of his early targets, who was the mastermind of Operation Mockingbird that would later be exposed by a Congressional committee. Despite many attempts by socialists to demonize McCarthy and “McCarthyism” with revisionist history, McCarthy’s achievements shine through the propaganda. Joseph McCarthy was a champion of capitalism and Democracy, and even when his career was threatened because of his vocal anti-communist speeches, McCarthy did not back down from the cause of freedom. The VENONA Project files, declassified in 1995, provided indisputable evidence that nearly all of those McCarthy accused were traitors to America.
After America was attacked on December 7th, 1941, Joseph McCarthy enlisted in the Marine Corps. He served his country honorably, flying eleven missions and earning a Distinguished Flying Cross award. While on duty, McCarthy made a hasty attempt at a US Senate campaign in 1944 but was defeated by Alexander Wiley. Determined to reverse his fortune, McCarthy again ran for Senate in 1946. This time McCarthy’s campaign was much better planned and he found success, narrowly defeating the Republican incumbent candidate in the primary and going on to easily win the general election.
Appropriately, it was Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal who personally alerted former Marine and freshman Senator McCarthy to the Communist menace and “named names” to him of key persons in our federal government who were consistently shaping our policies and programs to benefit Soviet Russia. It was Forrestal who thus directly inspired McCarthy’s subsequent exposés of Communist influence and subversion in the federal government. James Forrestal would soon after commit a very timely and convenient mysterious ‘suicide’, if you believe that!
When Senator Joseph McCarthy learned of the Russian infiltration of Washington, DC, he was determined to take the evidence public to the American people. In his famous speech on February 9th, 1950, McCarthy brought public a list of 57 known communists working for the state department. These revelations took the American public by storm. Out of all the Senators and public figures in Washington, only McCarthy had the courage to stand up against communist infiltration. It was a deed that McCarthy’s leftist critics would never forgive him for.
For the next four years, Senator Joseph McCarthy stood undeterred against the strong socialist influence in Washington, exposing literally hundreds of anti-American operatives working incognito for the US Government. The American people generally appreciated McCarthy’s brave efforts and he was well-liked all across America.
McCarthy’s enemies also followed his activities with a strong interest. Determined to stop McCarthy from spreading the truth about their communist agenda, many anti-American Hollywood insiders found willing accomplices in the budding liberal media. These propaganda-mongers added a new word to the dictionary, defining “McCarthyism” as a senseless political witch hunt. In fact, McCarthy had exposed scores of known communists in the capital without a single known false accusation. Joseph McCarthy’s critics were never interested in the truth however.
Nevertheless, despite all the heavy-handed left-wing pressure and all the poisonous anti-McCarthy propaganda carried in the nation’s press—and although McCarthy had no organized following at all—in a single week thirteen million Americans all over the nation signed petitions to the U.S. Senate in support of McCarthy! No other public figure ever has received such a spontaneous demonstration of approval from the American people.
The Communists and their camp followers succeeded in impeding McCarthy’s crucial investigations of Communist subversion of the U.S. government—but they were totally unable to defeat him in spirit, or at the polls.
The leftist counter-offensive against McCarthy was beginning to take its toll in late 1953. Many Senators became fed up with McCarthy’s showmanship as the liberal media relentlessly launched baseless attacks against his character. On a dark day in American history in December 1954, American hero and patriot Joseph McCarthy was censured by the US Senate. Following his censure, McCarthy sunk into alcoholism from which he never recovered. He died of hepatitis on May 2nd, 1957 at the age of 49.
Even after his death, McCarthy’s critics continued to crucify him posthumously. Not satisfied with merely ruining a man’s career and driving him to alcoholic suicide, the liberal media courageously dragged McCarthy’s name through the mud for the next fifty years, continuing to this day. Leftists have never forgiven McCarthy for his crime of exposing them for who they truly are, inventing phrases like “The Red Scare” to demean McCarthy’s anti-communist efforts.
The VENONA Project files, declassified in 1995, provided indisputable evidence that nearly all of those McCarthy accused were traitors to America. The amazing Venona Intercepts were the back-and-forth messages between Moscow and their U.S. agents during and after the 1940s. The contents of these messages, known to government officials as they were being transmitted and transcribed for posterity, confirmed the identities of those communist agents inside our country and inside our government. Again, nothing was done to remove the communists, however. Though these Venona documents provided corroboration for what McCarthy would later charge, they weren’t made available to the American public until 1995.
“With Joe McCarthy it was the losers who’ve written the history which condemns him,” said Dan Flynn, director of Accuracy in Academia’s national conference on McCarthy, broadcast by C-SPAN in early 2000.
Not surprisingly, the media ignored these documents completely, instead choosing to run yet another round of anti-McCarthy propaganda. As if that wasn’t enough, in 2005 Hollywood released the greatest propaganda film since “Triumph of the Will“, an anti-McCarthy slander picture known as “Good Night and Good Luck“. Dead for fifty years, McCarthy’s body has now been tarred, feathered, crucified, cremated, and his ashes shot into space by a leftist media who cannot handle the truth of their own miserable existence. The anti-McCarthy media claims the Senator wrongly implicated many. Despite their accusations, no critic has ever brought forth a single documented case of someone being wrongly accused by McCarthy.
In the early 1950s, Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, Samuel Klaus, and several others had already sounded grave and credible warnings about the communist penetration. Elizabeth Bentley had served the Communist Party as a courier carrying messages and data from one spy cell to another in Washington and New York. She gave her information to the FBI in 1945, but nothing was ever done about her revelations until Joe McCarthy emerged. Whittaker Chambers, the former communist who told State Department officials in 1939 that the Roosevelt administration was loaded with communists, and who was the key figure in the exposure of top State Department official Alger Hiss as a communist agent, stated in one of his books that he felt he had left the winning side (the communists) and joined the losing side (those loyal to America). In 1946, State Department official Samuel Klaus delivered his lengthy memo to superiors detailing communist infiltration at the State Department but nothing was done. Bentley, Chambers, Klaus, and others had sacrificed much — even placed themselves in jeopardy — for what seemed to be nothing. McCarthy eventually made their efforts meaningful.
Another treasure trove of information vindicating McCarthy became available during the apparent demise of Soviet communism in the early 1990s. Not only were many Kremlin files opened for inspection by researchers from our country, so too were the records in various former Soviet satellite capitals. Author Stan Evans took the time to avail himself of all of this information, dig more deeply into the files of the FBI and other government agencies, and put all this material together in a single volume to show that Joe McCarthy should be praised, not condemned.
Over the years, scores of books have been written about the Wisconsin senator’s campaign to rid the U.S. government of internal enemies. Almost all of these volumes condemned him as a disreputable rogue. McCarthy was correct and he attempted to do what many other senators and congressmen should have been doing to protect this nation. But those that could have been called pro-McCarthy were scorned.
All the books about McCarthy, both pro and con, must now stand aside. In Blacklisted by History, Stanton Evans has produced a masterful, scholarly, and extremely thorough 664-page compilation of evidence completely exonerating the man whose name has been made a detestable symbol of “unfair accusations” and “rogue investigative techniques.”
Evans supplies the details any critic would need to reverse the popularly held view of the Wisconsin senator. According to Evans, McCarthy began his crusade against the communist penetration of the U.S. government with a February 1950 speech at a Republican gathering in Wheeling, West Virginia. He had been provided with a copy of the Klaus memo, found it credible, and told his audience about its contents. Liberals and pro-communists, using both infuriating and laughable “evidence,” have sought to debunk what McCarthy said on that single occasion. Evans tells the whole story.
The important Klaus memo disappeared from government records, but Evans located a copy and published it in its entirety as an appendix. In the book’s prologue, the widely read author, editor, columnist, and commentator who trained hundreds of young conservatives at the National Journalism Center in Washington over the past 30 years gave a backdrop on his sleuthing and told of unearthing “once secret records of the FBI” that helped to make the case for defending McCarthy. The FBI knew the truth at the time, but as a gatherer of information wasn’t free to publicize what it knew, and many of its personnel waited in vain for government officials to call for airing its information in public sessions.
In his book, Evans details the information the FBI was privy to: “The Bureau knew as early as December 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist then becoming a central figure in the [U.S. government’s top-secret] atomic energy project, was identified by Communist leaders as a secret party member who had to be inactive because of the wartime work that he was doing. Likewise in 1945, the FBI obtained credible information that high-ranking government figures Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, and Harry Dexter White were Soviet agents. Also in 1945, the Bureau knew the espionage case of John Stewart Service and the pro-Red magazine Amerasia had been fixed, lied about, and covered up by a cabal of top officials.”
For readers who know little or nothing about these individuals, consider that Oppenheimer has always been reasonably thought to have been the key individual who supplied the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons technology. Alger Hiss wormed his way into government so ably that he was at President Roosevelt’s side as a key adviser at the 1944 wartime Yalta Conference attended by the “Big Three” — Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. At this summit, it was agreed to betray post-war Eastern Europe and Manchuria into the hands of the communists. Hiss then secured the appointment as secretary-general of the UN founding conference in 1945 where he was able to welcome a score of fellow communists into the U.S. delegation at that gathering. Harry Dexter White, a close associate of Hiss, arranged to deliver engraved plates to print U.S. currency to the Soviet Union, became Secretary of the Treasury, and participated in the formation of the UN’s International Monetary Fund which he later led. And Lauchlin Currie held down an office in the White House where he served as a top adviser to President Roosevelt. Each of these extremely key individuals was loyal to the Soviet Union, not to the United States.
Evans recounts many of the details surrounding the pro-communist State Department official John Stewart Service, one of many government officials targeted by McCarthy. Service was a leader of the infamous Institute of Pacific Relations that played an important role in the sellout of China to Mao Tse-tung and his communist forces during the late 1940s. When McCarthy produced reliable information about Service’s communist background, Truman administration officials weren’t interested in removing Service; they, instead, desperately sought to impede the McCarthy effort. Evans explained: “John Service had been kept on the State Department payroll for five full years after passing papers to Philip Jaffe, confidant of Communist bosses and Soviet agents; but anyone caught passing data to Joe McCarthy concerning Service himself would be out on his ear by sundown.”
Blacklisted by History is surely not a partisan political treatise. Evans is especially hard on Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, even on the president himself and with good reason. But when Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953 and McCarthy thought he might receive the kind of cooperation one would expect from a U.S. president, business as usual continued. Democrat or Republican in high office, it didn’t matter. McCarthy wanted to rid the government of disloyal employees. But, over and over again, McCarthy himself, not the obvious communists and pro-communists, was the target of our nation’s top officials.
As Evans shows, McCarthy became the subject of investigations by other Senate committees and their pro-communist leaders. His extremely valuable research assistant, J.B. Matthews, was driven out of staff service by a combined attack led by the left-wing media and pro-communist forces in government. And when the senator aimed his efforts at rooting out pro-communist influence at the Army’s sensitive Signal Corps facility at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the anti-McCarthy forces converted a proper investigation into a carnival designed to make McCarthy look like a clown or a vicious cutthroat willing to smear innocent people with false charges. If you want the proof, read Evans’ book!
The conference, a gathering of old McCarthyites and younger scholars, commemorated the senator’s first speech, in Wheeling, W. Va., 50 years ago, when he first held up a list of names of employees of the State Department whom, he said, were major security risks. McCarthy questioned how, in six short years after America’s winning of World War II, the communist world was triumphant and had expanded to include 800 million people.
Of the lists, a key one consisted of 108 names from a House Appropriations Committee report, of persons declared as “security risks” in the State Department — the Lee List. The House committee chairman had complained that State wasn’t bothering to do anything about the suspects. Details of the list and its accusations were presented at the conference.
Speakers detailed many of the cover-ups used to smear McCarthy. Veteran journalist and teacher Stan Evans, director of National Journalism Center, told of the Tydings Committee, which had investigated McCarthy’s charges of communists in government. Its report had exonerated everybody. Among the accused it stated categorically that there was no evidence against Owen Lattimore, a man McCarthy said was a major figure in the communist conspiracy. Lattimore had been Roosevelt’s key advisor on China policy. Yet Evans showed evidence from 5,000 pages of FBI files on him — files released only a few years ago to the public, although the White House had access to them.
However, evidence before the committee showed that Lattimore had supported Soviet policy at every turn, even declaring that the Stalin purge trials in Russia, “sound like democracy to me.” With then-Vice President Henry Wallace in Russia, Lattimore compared concentration camps to the Tennessee Valley Authority, and later urged Washington to abandon China to communism and to withdraw from Japan and Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who had fed information to McCarthy, broke with him afterwards, fearing McCarthy would prejudice FBI sources of information for its criminal prosecutions.
Although most of McCarthy’s cases involved actual spies and “security risks,” the really important issue was that of communist influence over American foreign policy, argued Evans. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest advisor who lived in the White House, had regular contacts with Soviet intelligence. He helped bring about the disastrous Yalta and Pottsdam agreements. The Morganthau Plan, to prevent German reconstruction and starve the Germans to make them desperate enough to go communist, was the product of Laughlin Currie and Harry Dexter White at the Treasury Department. The abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek by denying military support was the product of “China Hands” led by John Stewart Service, John Patton Davies, and Lattimore. Evans described other major spy networks — in England, the Burgess Maclean group which infiltrated Washington as well as London.
Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, told how he himself had been a leftist in his early career. He had been against McCarthy, but McCarthy’s speeches had made him think and start to read “evidence that I had avoided.” He described how all during his military career as a Marine officer and later in Japan with the U.S. occupation he had never hidden his leftist views and later had even been offered a job at the CIA. Irvine argued that real communists were only in the hundreds, but that thousands of leftists, such as he, all feared McCarthy and had wanted him discredited.
Pulling all the latest evidence together was luncheon speaker Professor Arthur Herman. His new book, “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator,” and featured in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, shows the vindication of most of McCarthy’s charges. Herman, who is also coordinator of the Smithsonian’s Western Heritage Program, said that the accuracy of McCarthy’s charges “was no longer a matter of debate,” that they are “now accepted as fact.” However, the term “McCarthyism” still remains in the language.
Asked whether McCarthy had understood all the forces arrayed against him, Herman said no, that McCarthy hadn’t realized he’d be fighting against much of the Washington establishment. President Truman was fearful that exposures would reflect on key Democrat officials, he said, and big media and the academic world were very leftist, a heritage of the Depression and World War II. High government officials also feared investigations of their past appointments and associations with people who turned out to be communists or sympathizers.
That was the reason McCarthy was so demonized, he said.
Joe McCarthy had been a Marine air gunner, an amateur boxer, a county judge and towards his end, under constant attack, he began to drink heavily. Herman said he certainly was over his head and his fall came about after sweeping attacks on General Marshall and the Army. Senator Taft and other key supporters began to draw away from him.
If Robert Kennedy, his competent and well-connected co-counsel, had stayed on, McCarthy might have behaved more carefully, said Herman. An argument with other co-counsel Roy Cohn left Cohn in charge, but Cohn and staffer David Schine were disastrous for McCarthy. Still, McCarthy’s original charges helped bring about Eisenhower’s electoral victory and the defeat of the Democrats and key leftist Democratic senators such as Tydings of Maryland. Four years after his original charges, Joe McCarthy was censured by the Senate and died shortly thereafter.
There is more evidence to come. Herb Romerstein, another speaker, who started out with the old House Un-American Activities Committee, is writing a book about the Venona FBI intercepts and their links to other evidence from his comprehensive study in Russia of Soviet archives, made available to Westerners since the fall of communism. His book, The Venona Secrets, will be released by Regnery Gateway this fall.
Although Joseph McCarthy was one of the most demonized American politicians of the last century, new information shows that McCarthy was right in nearly all his accusations. McCarthy’s achievements to America are undeniable to those that view history with an unbiased eye. At a time when America was being infiltrated by agents of the most murderous empire in human history, McCarthy was the lone voice who stood against tyranny. He exposed hundreds of agents determined to destroy America. Had McCarthy not had the courage to speak up, it seems possible that the USSR might still exist today. Hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans who once lived under the Soviet fist today owe their freedom to Senator McCarthy. McCarthy’s patriotism cost him his job and eventually his life. For his determination in protecting American freedom, Joseph McCarthy is undoubtedly an American hero and patriot.
After listing the various accomplishments attributable to McCarthy’s efforts — the many pro-communists who fled government service, the tighter security procedures, and the admission by officials that there had been foul-ups followed by corrective measures — Evans recounts the true circumstances behind, and actual language of, the Senate vote to condemn the senator. (Hint: it was not a repudiation of his allegations.) Then, in obvious sadness, he relates that McCarthy “became a non-person to be ignored and shunned, a ghost figure with no relation to the serious business of the Senate.” But, according to Evans, Joe McCarthy “was a good man and true — better and truer by far than the tag teams of cover-up artists and backstage plotters who connived unceasingly to destroy him.”
No serious scholar of the McCarthy era will be able to avoid this compelling and factual account of the valiant senator from Wisconsin. Senator McCarthy died May 2, 1957, at the age of forty-seven [sic], ostensibly of natural causes. He had been hospitalized with hepatitis, a disease that normally has a low fatality rate. His death was unexpected and sudden, occurring about an hour after he had taken a turn for the worse on the fourth day after he entered the hospital.
Senator McCarthy was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital on Sunday, April 28, 1957. His sudden illness apparently came as a surprise to his closest friends and colleagues. His wife reportedly said that he had gone to the hospital for treatment of a knee, but the newspapers on Monday said that he was being treated for “acute hepatitis” and had been placed in an oxygen tent. On Tuesday they reported that he had been taken out of the tent, that he had improved and was resting comfortably, but that his condition was still serious. At some point, though, his health took a dramatic turn for the worse and he died on Thursday, May 2. The official medical report left serious questions as to the precise cause of death, but, incredibly, no autopsy was performed. See more on his death HERE
Like Jim Forrestal, Joe McCarthy walked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital as its most controversial patient and as the one man in America most hated by the Communists. And, like Forrestal, he left in a hearse, as a man whose valiant fight against Communism was ended forever.
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