Blacklisted By History Read online

  McCarthy friends and critics would further agree that, as is obvious from his résumé, he was ambitious for success and in a hurry to get it. In this respect, it’s evident that his experience taught him there was little he couldn’t achieve through willpower and sufficient effort. His skill as a quick study in mastering multiple subjects from high school through law courses at Marquette would have reinforced this notion. It’s thus not surprising that when he reached the Senate, rather than being a bashful silent freshman, he plunged into complex issues such as rationing, federal housing programs, and the famous Malmedy episode from World War II*8 —the main topics to draw his notice early on. He was confident there were few subjects he couldn’t handle if he applied himself in diligent fashion.

  A final uncontested point about McCarthy was his sympathy for the little guy and common touch in personal dealings. Stories of his befriending elevator operators, clerks, secretaries, and plain everyday people on the sidewalk are legion, recounted by his critics as well as his admirers (when such existed). One of the more amazing but well-supported tales along these lines is that, during a break in his legislative duties, he worked as a common laborer on a North Dakota wheat farm whose proprietor had no idea he was hiring a member of the U.S. Senate.6

  Such attitudes were reflected in McCarthy’s official as well as in his personal conduct—in ways that even his liberal critics, if pushed hard enough, might recognize as valid. In his young political days, he had been at least nominally a New Deal Democrat, and even when he switched to the Republican Party was viewed as a “progressive”—all this in keeping with the fluid Wisconsin political scene in the age of the La Follettes. McCarthy’s Senate involvements with the issues of low-cost housing and the Malmedy investigation (the latter, contrary to some treatments, a leftward cause célèbre)7 were in keeping with this background. He was also a strong supporter of antidiscrimination measures, and though often called an “isolationist”—no novelty in Wisconsin—his views and voting record in the Senate were anything but.

  Even when McCarthy took his place among more conservative members of the Senate, these early tendencies persisted. Hardly a “progressive” in any accepted meaning of the term, he was first, last, and always a populist in his political leanings. This was indeed the essence of his battle with the State Department and White House, big media outlets, and the establishment in general. Though now portrayed as a public menace and execrated enemy of the people, McCarthy viewed himself, and was viewed by his supporters, as a champion of the average guy against the big elites, self-styled sophisticates, and comfortable interests who usually ran things in the Capital City in whatever way they wanted.

  Consistent with such views, McCarthy didn’t fit in very well with the Washington social scene or its upscale customs. He remained a steak-and-potatoes guy whose idea of a good time was an all-night pokerfest, a day at the track, or a backwoods hunting party. He had no concern about the clothes he wore, where he dined or when, or material possessions for their own sake. The flipside of all this was that he was improvident with money and often had to borrow, but would as gladly lend to others, seldom worrying about repayment. He was down home, grassroots, and blue collar all the way, which of course equated to “vulgarian” at The New Yorker. Had he been from the South and not Wisconsin, he would have been called a “good ol’ boy” and relished the description.

  Predictably, McCarthy’s aversion to Washington power politics as usual wasn’t helpful in the close-knit fraternity of the U.S. Senate and undoubtedly contributed to his later downfall. He was never part of the Senate club that controlled assignments, made the big decisions, and steered the flow of legislation; he showed little deference to its members, and they returned the favor. He went his own way, at his own pace, pursuing subjects that concerned him, and if this put him crossways with the graybeards of the chamber that didn’t seem to bother him unduly. He was a maverick from the start and would still be a maverick at the finish.

  On the other hand, when McCarthy became the head of his own committee, he was by the testimony of the record and of those who served with him a fair and skillful chairman, correct in dealings with his colleagues and, unless pushed to the very limit, patient with the gavel. This of course is about as different from the standard image as can possibly be imagined. It will accordingly be addressed again, but is briefly mentioned here to round out the picture of McCarthy as a living personality, rather than the deranged and villainous creature of the Herblock drawings and word pictures of Rovere.

  In this bundle of McCarthy traits, there are some tentative clues to what he did and why, and the way he did it. Simply noting the highlights, his religious faith, service with the Marines, good ol’ boy persona, and status as a self-made man all combined to form a hard-charging political figure who saw Cold War issues in vivid terms of right and wrong, black and white, with little by way of ambiguity (a word seldom used in talking about McCarthy). Nothing could have been further from the temporizing and studied languor that had for so long marked official attitudes on the issue of Communist infiltration and other aspects of the Cold War.

  Most histories of the time suggest that McCarthy’s vision of the struggle with Moscow was simplistic, paranoid, and Manichaean; based on now-ample records, it might more justly be described as an accurate understanding of the problem. That said, his straight-ahead, take-no-prisoners views and methods did lead him to make mistakes of facts and judgment. In particular, his penchant for multitasking, impromptu statement, and handling quantities of information on the fly caused him to commit errors of detail, a number of which will be noted in these pages. He was a quick starter and free swinger, with some of the ills that this is heir to, though by no means guilty of the many alleged horrors imputed to him.

  The impulsive, lone-wolf side of McCarthy’s nature would make him a problem in other ways as well—at least for some of his opponents, and occasionally even for his allies. Most notably, and central to the story, he simply couldn’t be controlled. Considerations of political prudence, to the point of backing off from a cause he considered right, were alien to his nature. Nor was he willing to go along to get along, even within his own political party, if he believed fundamental issues were at stake. This made him in Washington terms the worst kind of loose cannon, worrisome to establishmentarian forces in both parties.

  Finally, McCarthy also engaged, on some well-known occasions, in harsh political invective against his foes—though scarcely more so, as our Rovere quotes suggest, than the invective used against him. Typically, his toughest political rhetoric was deployed against those who had attacked him, the premier examples being Senators William Benton of Connecticut and Ralph Flanders of Vermont. As Benton was trying to have McCarthy kicked out of the Senate, and Flanders leading the charge for McCarthy’s censure, McCarthy in these cases gave as good as he got, though only he would pay a price in the historical record for such exchanges.

  Fittingly, given their joint status as villains to forces of the left, one of the best brief descriptions of McCarthy’s personality and methods would be offered by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In a 1953 statement to the press, after observing McCarthy in action for better than three years, Hoover put it this way: “McCarthy is a former Marine. He was an amateur boxer. He’s Irish. Combine those and you’re going to have a vigorous individual, who won’t be pushed around…Certainly, he is a controversial man. He is earnest and he is honest. He has enemies. Whenever you attack subversives of any kind,…you are going to be the victim of the most extremely vicious criticism that can be made.”8

  All this, however, is merely prelude. Again, what matters isn’t the kind of person McCarthy was, whether he was quick or slow, drunk or sober, or even what Richard Rovere or J. Edgar Hoover thought about him. What matters in the end is whether he was right or wrong about the cases. And thereby hangs the tale that follows.

  CHAPTER 3

  He Had in His Hand

  UNDOUBTEDLY the most common challenge made in any c
ritique of Joe McCarthy is: Name one Communist (or Soviet agent) ever identified by him in his sensational speeches and investigations. That challenge has been posed for fifty years and more—always on the premise that nobody could come up with even one such person. Sometimes, the point is made the other way around, as a flatfooted statement: McCarthy never exposed a single Communist mole, or Soviet spy, despite all his anti-Communist bluster. Such comments appear often in bios of McCarthy and books about the Cold War.

  Embedded in these gibes are certain assumptions and ambiguities that need to be cleared up and made explicit. What would it take, for instance, to prove somebody was a Communist or Soviet agent? When we note that there are people around these days who still say Alger Hiss was neither, the answer isn’t instantly apparent. Hiss, it will be recalled, was convicted in a court of law for having lied about such matters, as were Carl Marzani and William Remington (the latter one of McCarthy’s cases before the Senate). And even if such legal verdicts are thought decisive, these are rare exceptions. If conviction in a court of law is to be the standard, we may conclude there were virtually no secret Reds in the U.S. government spotted by Joe McCarthy or anyone else, including FBI Director Hoover and his G-men.

  The point about such courtroom verdicts has some other relevance also, as on occasion this too is part of the denunciation of McCarthy: that none of his suspects went to prison for their allegedly subversive doings. But of course McCarthy had neither the duty nor the power to put such people in prison (though he certainly thought some of them should have been there), so this is an obvious red herring dragged across the path to confuse the issue. His main goal, oft-stated and sanctioned by the law, was to get his suspects out of the federal government and its policy-making system; all the battles in which he was engaged revolved around this central purpose.*9

  In any event, this way of looking at McCarthy and his cases is a distraction from the critical mass of data we now have about the subject. Most of what we know in life hasn’t been filtered through a courtroom, and if we waited until it had been we would be incapable of timely action on countless important matters. That Adolf Hitler circa 1940 was a genocidal tyrant who meant to take over Europe wasn’t a juridical verdict but one based on real-world evidence in the public record. In like fashion, we know there were Soviet spies and Communist agents in and around the federal government who meant to do us harm, not because a judge and jury said so, but because we have multiple interlocking sources of credible information that reveal this.

  A further distinction that needs making concerns the meaning of exposure or identification of Communists or Soviet agents. In no case did McCarthy suggest, nor could he have, that he personally knew so-and-so to be a Red, or that he could prove such an accusation through personal sleuthing. Rather, his contention was that there was sworn testimony in the record, or data in security files, indicating somebody was a Communist, had worked for the Soviet embassy, or hung out with Soviet agents (such information usually coming by one route or another from the FBI). When McCarthy said someone was identified as a Communist or henchman of the Kremlin, he meant something of this nature.

  All this said, we now consider the rhetorical challenge more directly, on its own less-nuanced merits. Can we in fact name one certifiable Communist McCarthy ever came up with in all his speeches and contentious hearings? The answer is that it’s indeed hard to cite one such person—just as it’s hard to eat one potato chip or salted peanut. Once the process starts, the temptation is to keep going, which would result in a long string of names that would be unintelligible without further context, and wouldn’t make for lively reading. However, a few examples in this genre, viewed against the backdrop of Venona, may help set the stage for things to come. Here, for instance, is a list of ten McCarthy suspects, taken from his Senate speeches and/or hearings in which he figured:

  Solomon Adler

  Harold Glasser

  Cedric Belfrage

  David Karr

  T. A. Bisson

  Mary Jane Keeney

  V. Frank Coe

  Leonard Mins

  Lauchlin Currie

  Franz Neumann

  This is, to be sure, a heterogeneous group. While all of them came under McCarthy’s lens, they did so in different measures and in different settings. Some were in the original bloc of cases he brought before the Senate and Tydings panel (Keeney, Neumann), some were otherwise named in public statements (Bisson, Karr), some later appeared before his subcommittee (Belfrage, Mins), and so on. However, all were McCarthy targets in one fashion or another, and thus per the standard teaching must have been mere innocent victims of his midcentury reign of terror.

  Except, when the Venona file was published in 1995, all these McCarthy cases were right there in the decrypts, each named significantly in the Soviet cables. From these identifications (and collateral data from the Kremlin archives) it’s apparent that, rather than being blameless martyrs, all were indeed Communists, Soviet agents, or assets of the KGB, just as McCarthy had suggested and generally speaking even more so. Thus—apart from people who disbelieve Venona (roughly the same people who still believe in Hiss)—we would here seem to have a conclusive answer to the challenge: Can you name one Communist or Soviet mole ever unearthed by Joe McCarthy?

  These cases are cited here for ready reference simply because they happen to show up in Venona, which though of great importance is but one subset of the huge database now available on such matters. If we look to other information sources—reports of the FBI, dossiers from counterintelligence archives, sworn testimony by credible witnesses—it would be possible to identify twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or more McCarthy targets in like manner. Nonetheless, this particular group provides a good cross section of his cases and the facts he had about them and is thus worth a bit of further notice.

  SOLOMON ADLER was an official of the U.S. Treasury Department who served for several years in China during World War II and the early postwar era and came on the McCarthy radar screen on at least two public occasions we know of, suggesting he had been an object of study and discussion in more private sessions. The first such episode was in the Tydings hearings of 1950, triggered by McCarthy’s original charges of subversion. Assistant committee counsel Robert Morris, who worked closely with McCarthy in these hearings, was questioning diplomat John Stewart Service, one of McCarthy’s foremost targets, about his contacts in Chungking, China, in the 1940s.

  It was in this context that Solomon Adler was mentioned, as Morris quizzed Service on his linkage to the Treasury staffer. This line of interrogation, and other questions posed to Service, indicated that McCarthy-Morris at this point had good insight into the bigger picture of events in China, in which Service and Sol Adler both played crucial roles. (There were also indications that the McCarthy forces were privy to wiretap information from the FBI concerning Service, including ties to Adler.)1

  Adler’s name would surface again in 1953, when McCarthy as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations questioned former Treasury employee William Taylor about his relationship to Adler—specifically, if Taylor and Adler had by any chance lived together at a house in Chungking. McCarthy in this session also brought up the name of the Chinese national Chi Chao-ting, yet another Adler contact. Again, these questions showed knowledge on McCarthy’s part of a larger network in which Sol Adler was a member. Thus Adler was in the sights of Joe McCarthy from a fairly early date and would remain there.2

  This focus on Sol Adler would be of additional interest when the Venona decrypts were published. There we find him duly making his appearance, under the cover name “Sachs,” passing information to the comrades about the state of things in China. This fits with other official data that show him to have been part of a Treasury Red combine that included Harry Dexter White, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Harold Glasser, V. Frank Coe, and a sizable crew of others. (As indicated by our alphabetical roster, both Coe and Glasser would become McCarthy committee cases also.) Thus, as
shall be shown hereafter, Joe McCarthy did not err in targeting Adler, his ties to Service, or his living arrangements while in China.

  ADLER was of British birth, and so coincidentally was the second suspect in our lineup—Cedric Belfrage. Unlike Adler, who became a U.S. citizen in 1940, Belfrage never did, though he lived and worked in the United States off and on for something like two decades. In the early days of World War II, he was employed by the British Security Coordinator in New York, the famous Canadian spy chief Sir William Stephenson (the man called “Intrepid” by Winston Churchill), who worked in tandem with the ultrasecret American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In this job, Belfrage had access to U.S. as well as British intelligence data.

  At war’s end, Belfrage obtained a post with the military government of occupied Germany as a press control officer, supposedly to help advance the cause of “de-Nazification” in the defeated country. In this role he was involved with the licensing of publications, including some of notorious Communist bent (official Allied policy at the time). It was this background that brought him to the notice of McCarthy, looking into U.S. information programs in Europe and possible subversive influence in their operations.

  Questioned by McCarthy counsel Roy Cohn as to whether he had been a Communist while carrying out his postwar duties, or if he were a CP member at that very moment, Belfrage declined to answer, seeking shelter in the Fifth Amendment. He refused to answer similar questions concerning fellow journalist James Aronson, his sidekick in this and other ventures. Whereupon the committee called on the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport Belfrage, and the chairman gave the witness a taste of McCarthyite invective, denouncing “those who come up like you do, especially as an alien, and refuse to answer the questions of the committee—I hope you leave the shores of our country as soon as possible.”*10 After a lot of legal bickering, this in fact occurred, and Belfrage at last left the United States to go back to England.3