Joseph McCarthy

For other people named Joseph McCarthy, see Joseph McCarthy (disambiguation).

Joseph Raymond McCarthy

Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician originally aligned with the United States Democratic Party and later with the United States Republican Party. McCarthy served as a U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957. During his ten years in the Senate, McCarthy and his staff became notorious for aggressive investigations of people in the U.S. government and others suspected of being Soviet agents on grounds of their political beliefs as Communists or Communist sympathizers.

As a result, the term McCarthyism was coined to specifically describe the intense anti-Communist movement that existed in America from 1950 to about 1956, a time which became popularly known as the Red Scare. During this period, people who were suspected of varying degrees of Communist loyalties became the subject of aggressive inquiries, which became known as "witch hunts" to his opponents. People from the media, government, and the military were accused by McCarthy of being suspected Soviet spies or Communist sympathizers. Although McCarthy's activities did not result in any convictions or criminal prosecutions for espionage, intercepted Soviet communications from the now-declassified VENONA Project indicate that some of the individuals he pursued did in fact have hidden Communist associations. The term "McCarthyism" has since become synonymous with any government activity which opponents claim is meant to suppress unfavorable political or social views, often by limiting or suspending civil rights for the alleged purpose of maintaining national security.

Early life and career

McCarthy was born on a farm in the town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin. Although both of his parents had also been born in Wisconsin, his paternal grandmother had been born in Germany, and his three other grandparents in England. McCarthy dropped out of junior high school to help his parents manage their farm, and later returned to school and earned his diploma in one year. McCarthy worked his way through school studying engineering and law, earning a law degree at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from 1930 to 1935, and was admitted to the Bar Association in 1935. While working in a law firm in Shawano, Wisconsin, he launched an unsuccessful campaign to become District Attorney as a Democrat in 1936. In 1939 he successfully vied for the elected post of 10th District judge, becoming the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history.

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McCarthy receives Commendation Ribbon in 1945
Courtesy of a McCarthy family member.

In 1942, shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, although his judicial office exempted him from compulsory service, McCarthy resigned his judgeship and enlisted as a private in the United States Marine Corps. He later took a commission as a Lieutenant and served as an intelligence briefing officer for a bomber squadron in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville. Wartime log entries list eleven missions under McCarthy's name as an aerial photographer and tail gunner, and he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952, although opponents who have investigated McCarthy question the Navy's decision to make the award. McCarthy was commended by Admiral Chester Nimitz for flying despite an injury, but others who served with him told investigators working for his opponents that his injuries (a broken foot) resulted from a shipboard hazing incident.

He campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination in Wisconsin while still on active duty in 1944, but was easily defeated by incumbent Alexander Wiley. After resigning his commission in April 1945 and being re-elected unopposed to his circuit court position, he began a much more systematic campaign for the 1946 Senate election, again challenging a Republican incumbent, four term Senator and United States Progressive Party icon, Robert M. La Follette, Jr.. In his campaign, McCarthy attacked La Follette for not enlisting during the war; he did not mention that La Follette had been forty-six when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and was in fact too old to join the armed services. McCarthy also claimed that La Follette had made huge profits from his investments while he had been away fighting for his country. The suggestion that La Follette had been guilty of war profiteering (his investments had in fact been in a radio station), was deeply damaging and McCarthy won by 207,935 to 202,557.

McCarthy enjoyed the support of the state party organization, and won the nomination narrowly. He easily defeated his Democratic opponent, Howard MacMurray, in the general election by a 2-1 margin, and joined Senator Wiley, whom he had challenged two years earlier, in the Senate. On his first day in the Senate, McCarthy called a press conference where he proposed a solution to a coal strike that was taking place at the time. McCarthy called for John L. Lewis and the striking miners to be drafted into the Army. If the men still refused to mine the coal, McCarthy suggested they should be court-martialed for insubordination and shot.

McCarthy married Jean Kerr, a researcher in his office, on September 29, 1953. He and his wife adopted a baby girl in January 1957.

Senator

McCarthy's first three years in the Senate were unremarkable. While he was considered friendly and likeable, he was not taken seriously. McCarthy was criticized for his defense of a group of Nazis that had been sentenced to death for their role in the Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war in 1944. Their death sentences were commuted to life in part because McCarthy charged that they had been denied due process. Many charged the Senator had been duped or enticed by neo-Nazis.

McCarthy made a large number of speeches to many different organizations, covering a wide range of topics. His most notable early campaigns were for housing legislation and against sugar rationing. During the presidency of Harry Truman, his national profile rose meteorically after his Lincoln Day speech on February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.

McCarthy's words in the speech are a matter of some dispute, as they were not reliably recorded at the time, the media presence being minimal. It is generally agreed, however, that he produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known Communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is quoted to have said "I have here in my hand a list of 57 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department."^10 There is a great deal of dispute on whether McCarthy actually said 57 or 205 people in his speach. The confusion may have arisen because in the Wheeling speech, McCarthy referred to a letter that Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph Sabath in 1946. In that letter, Byrnes said that State Department security investigators had declared 284 persons unfit to hold jobs in the department because of Communist connections and other reasons, but that only 79 had been discharged, leaving 205 still on the State Department's payroll. McCarthy told his Wheeling audience that while he did not have the names of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter, he did have the names of 57 who were either members of or loyal to the Communist Party. McCarthy stated that he referred to 57 "known Communists;" the number 205 was referring to the number of people employed by the State Department who, for various security reasons related not merely to loyalty but also issues such as drunkenness and incompetence, should not have been.

The effect of McCarthy's speech, in a nation already worried by the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union in Europe and alarmed by the trial of Alger Hiss then in progress, was electric. McCarthy's accusation was seen as an explanation for the fall of China to the Maoists and the Soviets' development of the atomic bomb the year before. The exact number stated by McCarthy would later become a matter of some importance when the matter was brought before the Tydings Committee.

Tydings Committee

The Tydings Committee was a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that was set up in February 1950 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 chairman of the subcommittee, Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat, set the tone for the hearings on the first day when he told McCarthy: "You are in the position of being the man who occasioned this hearing, and so far as I am concerned in this committee you are going to get one of the most complete investigations ever given in the history of this Republic, so far as my abilities will permit."

McCarthy himself was taken aback by the massive media response to the Wheeling speech, and was accused of continually revising both his charges and his figures. In Salt Lake City, Utah, a few days later, he cited a figure of 57, and in the Senate on February 20 he claimed 81. During a marathon six-hour speech, McCarthy fought Democratic attempts to disclose the actual names of these people. Four times during McCarthy's February 20th speech, Democratic Senator Scott W. Lucas demanded that McCarthy make the 81 names public, but McCarthy refused to do so, responding that "if I were to give all the names involved, it might leave a wrong impression. If we should label one man a communist when he is not a communist, I think it would be too bad." What McCarthy did was to identify the individuals only by case numbers, not by their names.

After 31 days of hearings, during which McCarthy attempted to present public evidence on nine persons (Dorothy Kenyon, Haldore Hanson, Philip Jessup, Esther Brunauer, Frederick Schuman, Harlow Shapley, Gustavo Duran, John Stewart Service, and Owen Lattimore), the Tydings Committee officially labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud" and a "hoax," said that the individuals on his list were neither Communist nor pro-Communist, and concluded that the State Department had run an effective security program.

Three days after the committee dismissed McCarthy's claims, the FBI arrested Julius Rosenberg on charges of espionage for assisting the Soviet Union in obtaining information from the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic weapon. Of the 110 names McCarthy gave to the Tydings subcommittee, 62 were at the time employed by the State Department. The Tydings Committee cleared all the personnel, but within one year the State Department's Loyalty Security Board instigated proceedings against 49 of the 62. By the end of 1954, 81 of those on McCarthy's list had left the government either by dismissal or resignation.

McCarthy attempted to engage in the political destruction of his critics, an aim he achieved when he campaigned against four-term incumbent Millard Tydings in 1950, in a victory that severely intimidated his would-be critics. This election was later called one of the dirtiest in American political history. A doctored photograph of Tydings conjoined with a well-known Communist was widely distributed, effectively ending Tydings' career. McCarthy once assaulted a journalist, Drew Pearson, in a Congressional restroom. McCarthy, who admitted the assault, claimed he merely "slapped" Pearson. Pearson said that McCarthy "kicked me in the groin. Twice."

Anti-Communism

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McCarthy brandishing one of his lists.

From 1950 to 1953, McCarthy continued to press his accusations that the government was failing to deal with Communism within its ranks, which increased his approval rating and gained him a powerful national following. During a speech in Milwaukee in 1952, Senator McCarthy dated the public phase of his fight against communists to May 22, 1949, the night that former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was found dead on the ground outside Bethesda Naval Hospital. "The communists hounded Forrestal to his death," said McCarthy. "They killed him just as definitely as if they had thrown him from that sixteenth-story window in Bethesda Naval Hospital." McCarthy said that "while I am not a sentimental man, I was touched deeply and left numb by the news of Forrestal's murder. But I was affected much more deeply when I heard of the communist celebration when they heard of Forrestal's murder. On that night, I dedicated part of this fight to Jim Forrestal." His finances were investigated by a Senate panel in 1952; its report cited questionable behavior in his campaigns and irregularities in his finances, but found no grounds for legal action.

The Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee

McCarthy's charges of "Communist influences" within the government probably aided the Republican Party's fortunes in the 1952 elections; it is probable that the defeat of more than one Democratic candidate for national office in 1952 was due at least in part to accusations against him by McCarthy. The party leadership, recognizing his immense popularity and his value as a stick with which to beat liberal Democrats, appointed him chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. His unreliability and evasiveness, however, meant he was never completely trusted by the party (and particularly by President Dwight Eisenhower, who once said privately that he didn't "want to get into a pissing contest with that skunk!") One of McCarthy's higher-profile targets was General George C. Marshall. McCarthy and Senator William Jenner of Indiana accused Marshall of treason. Eisenhower wrote a speech in which he included a spirited defense of General Marshall, but he was later convinced to remove this passage. Truman turned bitterly against Eisenhower because of this, calling Eisenhower a coward because he owed his career to General Marshall.

McCarthy's committee, unlike the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, focused on government institutions. It first made an investigation into bureaucracy at Voice of America, then forced the withdrawal of supposedly pro-Communist literature from the State Department's overseas information library. Meanwhile, McCarthy continued to make accusations of Communist influence within the government. This angered Eisenhower, who, while not criticizing the popular Senator publicly, began behind-the-scenes work to remove him from his position of influence.

Several noted persons resigned from the committee fairly early into McCarthy's administration of it. These resignations led to the appointment of one "B. Matthews" as executive director of the board. Matthews was a former member of several "Communist-front" organizations, in which he claimed to have joined more than any other American. However, when he fell out of favor with the radical groups of the 1930s, he became a fervent anti-Communist. Matthews was an ordained Methodist minister and was therefore often referred to as a "Dr. Matthews," although he held no degree. Matthews later resigned due to his portrayal of Communist sympathies among the nation's Protestant clergy in a paper called "Reds in Our Churches," which outraged several Senators. Through this critical period, however, McCarthy maintained control of the subcommittee and of whom it employed or chose not to. This course of action resulted in several more resignations.

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 people who had invoked their Fifth Amendment rights during private questioning or persons about whom more public questioning was desired. Those witnesses were still afforded their rights to confer with their counsel before answering a question, to confront their accusers or at least have them identified and have questions submitted to them by their counsel, and to further invoke their First and Fifth Amendment rights rather than answer questions about any alleged 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.

One of the witnessess called before McCarthy's committee was an elderly black woman named 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, Mrs. Moss, who lived at 72 R Street, SW, Washington, DC, denied she was a communist. Her defenders accused McCarthy of confusing Mrs. 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 press trumpeted this episode as typical of McCarthy's abominations. In September 1958, 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." Mrs. Moss got her Pentagon job back in 1954, although in a different department that did not hav access to classfied documents, and was still working for the Army in December 1958.

Despite widespread accustions of abuse and browbeating of witnesses, 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."

McCarthy and Truman

President Truman drafted a scathing response to a telegram McCarthy had sent him.

McCarthy sought to characterize President Truman and the Democratic party as soft on or even in league with the Communists. Truman, in turn, once referred to McCarthy as "the best asset the Kremlin has."

In 1947, evidence of considerable Soviet espionage activities within the U.S. government was accumulating. An FBI counterintelligence investigation impanelled a grand jury in New York, and meanwhile the Army Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall was gathering evidence in the form of Soviet cipher decrypts. The evidence from these two sources was not consolidated within the government until some time later. So when McCarthy later made charges that the Truman administration knowingly protected Soviet agents, this appeared to large sectors of the American public to be true.

After the defections of Elizabeth Bentley and Igor Guzenko, and the gathering evidence of a "serious attack on American security by the Soviet Union", Truman tried to contain the subversion issue within the Executive Branch with Executive Order 9835 of 21 March 1947, and prevent congressional investigations, by instituting loyalty and security checks in the government.

McCarthy's Support from the Kennedy Family

McCarthy was the nation's most prominent Irish-American along with the Kennedy family. Even before he became famous he became close friends with Joseph P. Kennedy, who contributed thousands of dollars to McCarthy, and became one of his major supporters. Joseph Kennedy often brought him to Hyannis Port as a weekend house guest in the late 1940s. 1949. McCarthy at one point dated Patricia Kennedy. In the Senate race of 1952, Joseph apparently worked a deal so that McCarthy, a Republican, would not not make campaign speeches for the GOP ticket in Massachusetts. In return, Senator John F. Kennedy would not give any anti-McCarthy speeches that his liberal supporters wanted to hear. In 1953 at the father's urging McCarthy hired Robert Kennedy (age 27) as a senior staff member. In 1954 when the Senate was threatening to condemn McCarthy, Senator John Kennedy faced a dilemma. "How could I demand that Joe McCarthy be censured for things he did when my own brother was on his staff?" asked JFK. By 1954, however, Robert Kennedy and McCarthy's chief aide, Roy Cohn, had had a falling out and Robert no longer worked for McCarthy. John Kennedy had a speech drafted calling for the censure of McCarthy but he never delivered it. When the Senate voted to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, Senator Kennedy was in the hospital and never indicated then or later how he would vote.

McCarthy and Eisenhower

Eisenhower, a candidate for the presidency in the 1952 election, disagreed with McCarthy's tactics, but on one occasion was required to make a campaign stop with him in Wisconsin. There, he intended to make a comment denouncing McCarthy's agenda, but under the advice of a conservative colleague, cut that part from his speech. He was widely criticized during his campaign for "selling out" to pressure and giving up his personal convictions because of party pressures. After being elected president, he made it clear to those close to him that he did not approve of McCarthy or his proceedings and he worked actively to shut down his operation. At the same time, not directly confronting McCarthy may have prolonged his power by showing that even the President was afraid to criticize him directly.

Investigating the Army

In the fall of 1953, McCarthy's committee began its ill-fated inquiry into the United States Army. The investigation began when an Army general alerted Senator McCarthy to the story of a New York dentist, Irving Peress, 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 discharge 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 investigate.

When no action had been taken on Peress a month later, McCarthy subpoenaed Peress 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 Ten Broeck 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 1st, Peress asked for an honorable separation from the Army, which he promptly received the next day from Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, his commanding officer at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.

McCarthy summoned General Zwicker to a closed session of the committee on February 18th. In separate conversations with two McCarthy staff members, on January 22nd and February 13th, 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, 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 lashed out. Among other things, McCarthy compared Zwicker's intelligence to that of a "five-year-old child," and stated that Zwicker was "not fit to wear the uniform of a General." Years later, at a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 21, 1957, Zwicker would state: "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." Charles Potter was one of the few Republican Senators to speak out against McCarthy. He later wrote a book called Days Of Shame in which he lambasted his fellow Senator.

In its report on the Peress case, the McClellan Committee (McClellan replaced McCarthy as Committee head in 1954) 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."

The declassified Venona papers later proved that Peress was in fact running a Soviet Spy ring within the US Army.

The Army-McCarthy Hearings

Early in 1954, the Army accused McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, of pressuring the Army to give favorable treatment to another former aide and friend of Cohn's, G. David Schine. McCarthy claimed that the accusation was made in bad faith, in retaliation for his questioning of Zwicker the previous year. 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.

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McCarthy and Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy Hearings

The Senate convened the Army-McCarthy Hearings into the matter, which was broadcast live and on television. 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 one memorable interchange, McCarthy responded to aggressive questioning from the Army's attorney general Joseph Welch. On June 9th, 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 (NLG), 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, have you left no sense of decency?" These proceedings have been recorded in the documentary film Point of Order!

The Watkins Committee

Several members of the U.S. Senate opposed McCarthy well before 1953. One example is U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican (and the only woman in the Senate at the time) who delivered her "Declaration of Conscience" on June 1, 1950, criticizing both the Executive and Legislative branches' use of smear tactics without mentioning McCarthy or anyone else by name. Smith also said "The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of Communism and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democratic administration." [1] Six other Republican Senators, Wayne Morse, Irving M. Ives, Charles W. Tobey, Edward John Thye, George Aiken and Robert C. Hendrickson joined her in condemning McCarthy's tactics. Vermont Senator Ralph E. Flanders also condemned McCarthy on the floor of the Senate and he introduced the resolution to censure him. McCarthy referred to Smith and her fellow Senators as "Snow White and the 6 dwarves."

On July 30, 1954, Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of conduct "unbecoming a member of the United States Senate." Flanders was no fan of McCarthy, as exampled by a statement to the Senate two months earlier that said McCarthy's "anti-Communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority."

McCarthy's was initially accused of 46 different counts of allegedly improper conduct and a special committee was set up, under the chairmanship of Senator Arthur V. 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.

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 18th was at least partially justified. So the Zwicker count was dropped at the last minute and was replaced with 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. However, 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.

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 Fall of McCarthy

One of the most prominent attacks on McCarthy's methods, dramatized in the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck, was an episode of the TV documentary series See It Now, hosted by respected journalist Edward R. Murrow, which was broadcast on March 9, 1954. The show consisted mostly of carefully edited clips of McCarthy speaking, so any negative reaction would be mostly from McCarthy's own words. In the clips, McCarthy accuses the Democratic party of "twenty years of treason" (1933-1953, in his estimation, the Administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman), and berates witnesses, including an Army general.

The Murrow report sparked a nationwide popular opinion backlash against McCarthy, in large part due to the fact that he was now seen, for the first time by many Americans, to be a flesh-and-blood, moving, speaking figure whose statements were immediately and publicly challenged, rather than a name in a newspaper story and sometimes an accompanying photograph. To counter the negative publicity, McCarthy appeared on See It Now about three weeks after the original episode and made a number of personal attacks and charges against Murrow. However, his method of delivery had been designed for a live audience, not a nationwide broadcast one; the result of this appearance was a further decline in his popularity. President Eisenhower, now free of McCarthy's political intimidation and the always potential threat of American Catholic electoral displeasure, referred to "McCarthywasm" to a reporter.

McCarthy's Final Years

After his censure, McCarthy continued to work in his senatorial duties for another two and a half years. Some contend that he was a changed man during this time, but "to insist, as some have, that McCarthy was a shattered man after the censure is sheer nonsense," said Brent Bozell, one of his aides at the time. "His intellect was as sharp as ever. When he addressed himself to a problem, he was perfectly capable of dealing with it."

A member of the minority party in the Senate again, McCarthy continued to rail against the dangers of Communism. He warned against attendance at summit conferences with the Reds, saying that "you cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers … without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder." He declared that "coexistence with communists is neither possible nor honorable nor desirable. Our longterm objective must be the eradication of communism from the face of the earth."

Senator McCarthy was one of the few that warned against the dangers of the Soviet Union advancing guided-missile program. He urged the Eisenhower Administration to let "the free Asiatic peoples" fight to free their countrymen from communist slavery in Red China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. "In justice to them, and in justice to the millions of American boys who will otherwise be called upon to sacrifice their lives in a total war against communism," said McCarthy, "we must permit our fighting allies, with our material and technical assistance, to carry the fight to the enemy." A decade later more than half a million American servicemen were fighting in South Vietnam.

Some believe McCarthy, a regular social drinker, became a full-scale alcoholic after his censure. While certainly battling bouts of depression, there is not enough evidence that he died a broken man. William A. 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."

He finally died of acute hepatitis in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, at the age of 48, and was given a state funeral attended by 70 Senators. St. Matthew's Cathedral performed a Solemn Pontifical Requiem before over a hundred priests and 2,000 others. Thousands of people viewed the body in Washington, and McCarthy was the first senator in 17 years to have funeral services in the Senate chamber. He was buried in St. Mary's Parish Cemetery, Appleton, Wisconsin. More than 30,000 Wisconsinites filed through St. Mary's Church to pay their last respects to him. Three senators - George Malone, William Jenner, and Herman Welker - had flown from Washington to Appleton on the plane carrying McCarthy's casket. "They had gone this far with Joe McCarthy," said William Rusher. "They would go the rest of the way." He was survived by his wife, Jean, and their adopted daughter, Tierney.

VENONA files

In 1995, when the VENONA transcripts were declassified, further detailed information was revealed about Soviet espionage in the U.S. VENONA specifically references at least 349 people in the U.S.—including citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents—whom the NSA identified engaged in clandestine activities with Soviet intelligence agencies. It is generally believed that McCarthy had no access to VENONA intelligence, but VENONA supports the view that some of the individuals accused by McCarthy were indeed Soviet agents. These are several prominent examples:

• Mary Jane Keeney, a United Nations employee, and her husband Philip, who worked in the Office of Strategic Services;
• Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to President Roosevelt;
• Virginius Frank Coe, Director of Division of Monetary Research, U.S. Treasury; Technical Secretary at the Bretton Woods Conference; International Monetary Fund
• William Ludwig Ullman, delegate to the United Nations Charter Conference and Bretton Woods Conference;
• Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Chief Planning Technician, Procurement Division, U.S. Treasury and head of the Silvermaster network of spies;
• Harold Glasser, U.S. Treasury Representative to the Allied High Commission in Italy;
• Four staff members of the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee, a Senate subcommittee on labor rights chaired by Senator Robert La Follette, Jr., whom McCarthy defeated for election in 1946;
• Allan Rosenberg, Chief of the Economic Institution Staff, Foreign Economic Administration; Counsel to the National Labor Relations Board; argued cases before the United States Supreme Court.
• Cedric Belfrage journalist; British Security Coordination

However, McCarthy himself was consistently unable to provide any evidence for his allegations. On one particular occasion, he declared in a floor speech that he would happily turn over evidence of subversive activities by government employees, whereupon Senator Herbert Lehman approached him and held out his hand. McCarthy, having no evidence, ignored Lehman, as did the rest of the Senate, testifying to other Senators' fear of McCarthy's political attacks.

Many of the people McCarthy accused of Communist party membership were not later identified in VENONA intellegence as being Soviet espionage agents.

HUAC

McCarthy is often incorrectly described as part of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (technically, HCUA, but generally known as HUAC), best known for the investigation of Alger Hiss which helped bring Richard Nixon into prominence. HUAC was established in May of 1938 as the "Dies Committee" before McCarthy was elected to the Federal office, and, being a House committee, had no connection with McCarthy, who served in the Senate.

Additional reading

Scholarly Secondary Sources

• Bayley, Edwin R. Joe McCarthy and the Press (University of Wisconsin Press, 1981)
• Donald F. Crosby, Donald F. God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957 (1978)
• Daynes, Gary Making Villains, Making Heroes: Joseph R. McCarthy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Politics of American Memory (Garland Pub., 1997)
• Freeland, Richard M. The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946-1948 (1972)
• Fried, Richard M. Men against McCarthy (Columbia University Press, 1976)
• Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1990)
• Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (2nd ed 1097)
• Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Free Press, 1999) pro-McCarthy
• Latham, Earl. Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (1969)
• O'Brien, Michael. McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin (1981)
• Oshinsky, David. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (University of Missouri Press, 1976)
• Oshinsky, David. Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1985)
• Rosteck, Thomas See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation (University of Alabama Press, 1994)
• Reeves, Thomas C. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (1982)
• Rovere, Richard Halworth Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt Brace, 1959)

Other Secondary Sources

• Belfrage, Cedric The American Inquisition, 1945-1960: A Profile of the "McCarthy Era" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989)
• Coulter, Ann Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism" (Crown Forum, 2003)
• Ranville, Michael To Strike at a King: The Turning Point in the McCarthy Witch Hunts (Momentum Books, 1997)

Primary Sources

• Fried, Albert McCarthyism, The Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History (1996)
• McCarthy, Joseph America's Retreat from Victory (Western Islands Publishing, 1952)
• McCarthy, Joseph McCarthyism, the Fight for America (Devin-Adair Co., 1952)
• Rabinowitz, Victor Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer's Memoir (University of Illinois Press, 1996)
• Watkins, Arthur Vivian. Enough rope; the inside story of the censure of Senator Joe McCarthy by his colleagues, the controversial hearings that signaled the end of a turbulent career and a fearsome era in American public life (Prentice Hall, 1969)

References

• US Government declassified sealed documents of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations - used in article
• NPR Talk Of The Nation - used in article
• 11 February 1950 McCarthy to Truman telegram; "We have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department. This list is available to you."
• Truman Draft reply to McCarthy, Truman Library
• Radio Conference with Truman, Truman Library
• InfoUSA, Basic Readings in US Democracy, Censure of Joeseph McCarthy
• University of Virginia's American Presidency site on Eisenhower

Notes

• ^1 NSA Archives, National Cyptological Museum, Venona Chronology; "~September 1: Col. Carter Clarke briefs the FBI's liaison officer Robert J. Lamphere on the break into Soviet diplomatic traffic. September: Carter W. Clarke of G-2 advises S. Wesley Reynolds, FBI, of successes at Arlington Hall on KGB espionage messages."
• ^2 Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, Appendix A, 7. The Cold War; "In November 1945 Elizabeth Bentley informed the FBI of her activities as a Soviet courier, which in turn led to renewed interest in Chambers. In late August or early September 1947, the FBI was informed that the Army Security Agency had begun to break into Soviet espionage messages".
• ^3 National Security Agency, Venona Archives, Robert L. Benson, Introductory History of VENONA and Guide to the Translations,The VENONA Breakthroughs; " An Arlington Hall report on 22 July 1947 showed that the Soviet message traffic contained dozens, probably hundreds, of covernames, many of KGB agents, including ANTENNA and LIBERAL (later identified as Julius Rosenberg). One message mentioned that LIBERAL's wife was named "Ethel." General Carter W. Clarke, the assistant G-2, called the FBI liaison officer to G-2 and told him that the Army had begun to break into Soviet intelligence service traffic, and that the traffic indicated a massive Soviet espionage effort in the U.S."
• ^4 Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, Counterintelligence Reader, Vol. 3, Chap. 1, pg.47, "Polls taken at the time revealed that a majority of Americans believed that Communism at home and abroad was a serious threat to US security".
• ^5 Margareet Chase Smith, Declaration of Conscience, pg. 2, 1 June 1950, U.S. Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 81st Congress, 2nd sess., pp. 7894-95. "The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of communism here at home and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democtaric administration. There are enough proved cases to make this point without diluting our criticism with unproved charges"; "..there have been enough proved cases, such as the Amerasia case, the Hiss case, the Coplon case, the Gold case, to cause nationwide distrust and strong suspicion that there may be something to the unproved, sensational accusations".
• ^6 Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy, Appendix A, 7. The Cold War; "proof that there had been a serious attack on American security by the Soviet Union, with considerable assistance from what was, indeed, an 'enemy within.' The fact that we knew this was now known to, or sufficiently surmised by, the Soviet authorities. Only the American public was denied this information."
• ^7 National Archives and Records Administration, Harry S. Truman, Executive Order 9835, Prescribing Procedures for the Administration of an Employees Loyalty Program in the Executive Branch of the Government [2]
• ^8 Commission on Secrecy Report, Appendix A, 3. Loyalty
• ^9 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Chap. 16, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980; "Though Truman would later complain of the 'great wave of hysteria' sweeping the nation, his commitment to victory over communism, to completely safeguarding the United States from external and internal threats, was in large measure responsible for creating that very hysteria. "
• ^10 11 February 1950 McCarthy to Truman telegram; "We have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department. This list is available to you."

External links

• Digital Classroom information on McCarthy "helping to shape our foreign policy"
• The History Net page on McCarthy
• The McCarthy-Welch exchange
• Joseph McCarthy Papers, Marquette University Library
• FBI Memo Referencing 206 Communists in Government
• FBI Belmont to Boardman memo, 26 November 1957 (PDF pgs. 74-75; also pg. 20) referencing "206" Soviet espionage agents
• [3] Information on McCarthy's investigations of the Signal Corps, including transcripts of the hearings and more recent interviews.

Defenses of McCarthy

• Joe McCarthy Was Right
• By Human Events Online, a conservative weekly:
  • Editor Taints Recently Published Hearings: How Senate Historian Botched Data on McCarthy
  • Levin and Collins Trigger Disinformation: Senate Historian Clams Up When Queried On McCarthy
• By The New American, John Birch Society:
  • McCarthy's "Witches"
  • The Real McCarthy Record
• By Opinion Editorials, a conservative website:
  • The 1950's Reign Of Terror Was AGAINST McCarthy - Not By Him!

Critics of McCarthy

• Critical book links
  • Excerpt from Richard H. Rovere's book ' Senator Joe McCarthy'
  • Paper from 'From Seeds of Repression; Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism' by Athan Theoharis, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1971; 'McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin', Michael O'Brien, University of Missouri Press, Columbia and London, 1980; Blacklist: 'Hollywood on Trial', AMC, broadcast Feb 28, 1996
• Student Paper on McCarthy
  • Essay by 8th grader Jesse Friedman called 'The Fight for America' which calls McCarthy 'greatest demagogue in the history of America'