Chapter Ten
The McCarthy Hearings
For several years the U.S. Congress tried to use its powers under the Constitution to compel the Executive Branch of the Government to clean out the subversives. Under the principle of checks-and-balances, the Congress can have its committees conduct investigations to determine whether or not there is corruption, waste of expenditures or subversion in the executive branch. Three avenues are open to the House and the Senate:
1. Upon learning of an allegation of subversion, refer it to the President or to the Department involved and ask for an investigation and a report.
2. If this doesn’t get results, then subpoena those who are supposed to know about the problem and release the facts to the public so there will be sufficient pressure and embarrassment to bring about a prompt improvement.
3. If neither of the above get results, then subpoena those who are known by other Government employees to be guilty of subversion and ask them under oath whether or not the charges are true. If such persons are innocent, they can say so; but if they plead the Fifth Amendment, then they will be publicly exposed and forced out of Government.
By 1950 the first two approaches had been used repeatedly with no results except contemptuous indifference. This reviewer has a published copy of a letter to the Secretary of State dated June 10, 1947, from the Senate Appropriations Committee, which states:
Dean Acheson
“It becomes necessary due to the gravity of the situation to call your attention to a condition that developed and still flourishes in the State Department under the administration of Dean Acheson.
“It is evident that there is a deliberate, calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places, but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity....
“On file in the Department [of State] is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States, which involves a large number of State Department employees, some in high official positions. This report has been challenged and ignored by those charged with the responsibility of administering the Department with the apparent tacit approval of Mr. Acheson. Should this case break before the State Department acts, it will be a national disgrace.”
Nothing happened. Here was a committee in the Senate with a majority of its members being Democrats, pleading with its own Administration to clean house before there was a public scandal.
It can be readily understood why more and more Congressmen and Senators decided by 1950 that it was high time they started naming names and calling persons accused of wartime subversion before an investigating Committee where they could either clear themselves or plead the Fifth Amendment, thereby indicating that they could not answer to the charges without incriminating themselves. This whole procedure was inaugurated by the Founding Fathers to get the facts without subjecting the accused to imprisonment in case he were guilty. In other words, the guilt of the person was revealed by his plea of the Fifth Amendment; but this could not be used against him in any criminal proceedings.
It was February 9, 1950, that a U.S. Senator decided to demand direct interrogation of alleged subversives. His name was Joseph McCarthy.
Joseph McCarthy
McCarthy was born on a farm near Appleton, Wisconsin, left school at age 14, entered high school at 20, graduated, enrolled in Marquette University and eventually graduated in law. Thereafter he was elected a circuit judge, but when World War II broke out he enlisted in the Marines and spent most of his military career in the South Pacific as an intelligence officer. He flew over 25 missions photographing targets from the back seat of dive-bombers or as a gunner on regular bomber planes.
After the war he ran for the Senate against the most powerful politician in Wisconsin, Senator “Young Bob” Lafallette, who had been in the Senate for 21 years. McCarthy out-campaigned Lafallette and won by a substantial margin in one of the major political upsets of 1946.1
This reviewer has read many volumes on the McCarthy controversy and has discovered that you can learn very little from people like Dr. Quigley who, as we shall see in a moment, practically went into an intellectual spasm because McCarthy ALMOST aroused the American people to action against the Communist-Establishment conspiracy before they could get him politically quarantined.
It turns out that McCarthy was neither the personification of Satan which the Establishment press (and Dr. Quigley) tried to picture him as being, nor was he the knight on a white charger which his defenders sometimes tried to present him as being. Actually, he was a tough, frustrated American ex-Marine who was sick and tired of seeing the enemy in striped pants walking around Washington sabotaging the most basic ingredients of America’s interests both at home and abroad. It was in this spirit that he gave three speeches in 1950.
Joseph McCarthy Launches A One-Man Campaign
At Wheeling, West Virginia, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno, Nevada, McCarthy talked about a letter which Secretary of State Byrnes wrote in 1946 to Congressman Adolph Sabath, stating that there were 284 people in the State Department who were “unfit.” McCarthy had learned from confidential informants who had come to him from the State Department that as of 1950, 205 of these “unfit” persons were still there. He was told the names of 57 who were either Communists or loyal to the Communist Party and an additional group (making the total 81) who were marginal suspects.
The fact that McCarthy had the actual names of 57 identified subversives sent the State Department and the Establishment Press into a frenzy. McCarthy sent a wire to President Truman offering to furnish him the names of the 57, and suggested that the President require Dean Acheson to explain why these and the remainder of the 205 “unfit” persons were still in the State Department. The President never even acknowledged the wire.
The diversionary tactic used by the press and the defenders of the State Department was to accuse McCarthy of not being consistent with his figures. Was he charging the State Department with having 57 Communists, 81 Communists or 205 Communists? He was accused of being reckless and irresponsible in his charges.
McCarthy next went to the Senate and gave a speech offering to turn these 57 names—which he already had in his possession over to a Senate Committee. McCarthy said he could furnish the names of witnesses who could positively identify these people as participating in subversive activities. The Senate appointed the Tydings Committee to hear McCarthy’s charges.
The Committee ended up investigating McCarthy. McCarthy went to the hearings prepared to present his “facts” and during the first day’s session he was allowed barely 8 minutes of direct testimony. The next day he had 9 1/2 minutes. Senator Tydings harangued the press and engaged in polemics which frustrated the entire proceedings. Tydings finally issued a “report” declaring McCarthy’s charges a complete fake. McCarthy was beginning to learn what it meant to take on the Establishment.
The storm signals were up and the liberal press, radio and TV immediately prepared to launch an all-out campaign to smash the senator from Wisconsin. Meanwhile, the 57 “identified” people inside the State Department were brought up before a Loyalty Board so the cases against them could be heard. 54 promptly resigned. By November 1954, not only had the original 57 been dismissed or resigned, but the same thing had happened to the 24 marginal cases which McCarthy had named in his figure of 81. (Dr. Quigley elected not to mention this in his book.)
In 1953 McCarthy Becomes Chairman of His Own Committee
As a result of the Republican victory in 1952, Joseph McCarthy became chairman of the Senate’s permanent Investigations Subcommittee. The Committee had a statutory mandate to investigate graft, incompetence and disloyalty cases. McCarthy took this assignment seriously. In 1953 he conducted 169 executive and public hearings and interrogated more than five hundred witnesses. Here is a summary of the findings:
1. That security laws and procedures in the State Department had become a farce.
2. That Establi
shment people at the White House and the top level of the State Department were continually employing people in spite of the fact that they came under the ban of “security risks.”
3. That administrators and security officers who were demanding strict enforcement of security measures had been removed or transferred.
4. That “security risk” people who were either known Communists or Communist sympathizers were being made commissioned officers.
5. That people known to be Communist activists were advanced in the military even though the U.S. was fighting a Communist foe in Korea.
6. That the political pressures on the military resulted in people being commissioned and promoted even though these people had written “Fifth Amendment” on their loyalty oath form.
7. That an investigation of the Voice of America exposed waste, corruption and incompetence resulting in an immediate saving to the American people of some 18 million dollars.
8. That an investigation of the overseas libraries of the U.S. Information Service resulted in the removal of more than 30,000 Communist and Left-wing books.
9. That the hearings uncovered widespread Communist infiltration of the Government Printing Office and resulted in the removal—or referral—to the FBI of more than 75 persons, and a complete reorganizing of the GPO security system.
10. That the investigation of Communist infiltration in key defense plants resulted in the suspension or discharge of more than 20 Fifth-Amendment security risk cases.
11. That the investigation exposed the existence of powerful Communist espionage cells operating in the secret radar laboratories of the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. (Although the FBI had been warning the Army about this situation since 1949, it was not until 1953 that McCarthy provided the ammunition which allowed a courageous commanding officer, Major General Kirke Lawton, to risk the wrath of top political brass by suspending 35 security risks. Amazingly, the Loyalty Review Board at the Pentagon reinstated all but two of these exposed security risks and gave them back-pay! McCarthy then demanded the names of the twenty civilians on this review board, and soon found himself sawing on a raw nerve of the most powerful Establishment team in Washington—the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon.)
The Famous Zwicker Case
Nothing so outraged McCarthy in the Monmouth investigation as his discovery that an identified member of a Communist cell had been knowingly promoted from captain to major and had then been hurriedly given an honorable “separation” on orders of the White House after McCarthy had called the seriousness of this case to the attention of top military leaders. The man who had been promoted was Irving Peress of the dental corps at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. The man who signed his “honorable separation” was General Ralph W. Zwicker.
It all began on January 30, 1954, when McCarthy called Major Peress to answer questions about his Communist affiliations. Peress invoked the Fifth Amendment 20 different times. It even turned out that Peress had written “Fifth Amendment” across his Loyalty Oath form and still had been promoted. It was unbelievable.
Finally McCarthy was ready for General Zwicker. This turned out to be a game of charades. The General was evasive and on occasion defiant. He changed his testimony three times under oath when asked if he knew who had ordered the general to give Peress his honorable separation.
But the general soon found, as other hostile witnesses had discovered in other hearings, that McCarthy was no “genteel Senatorial sophisticate.” He was primarily an ex-Marine who had seen enough of subversion and corruption in certain military-White House-State Department policies to alert him to the fact that there are some very real enemies in the American camp. He didn’t care whether they wore striped pants or army uniforms. If they were covering up for known Communists in the U.S. Military services, they were serving the enemy.
When Zwicker turned hostile and treated the Committee with evasive contempt, McCarthy went after him like a prosecuting attorney. Strategically, it was a mistake. It gave McCarthy’s enemies the ammunition they had been looking for. The payoff came after Zwicker refused to answer questions about Peress on the grounds that President Eisenhower had issued the same kind of restrictive order that President Truman had issued: no government employee could answer questions or supply Congressional committees with files relating to the loyalty of another government employee. Naturally, this short-circuited the whole checks-and-balance relationship between the legislative and executive branches of government, but there it stood.
McCarthy then asked General Zwicker if he thought a general who had knowingly covered up for a Communist should be removed from his command. General Zwicker said he didn’t think that was sufficient reason to remove a general. Ex-Marine McCarthy was quick to react to that one. He immediately said: “Then, General, you should be removed from any command. Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says ‘I will protect another general who protected Communists’ is not fit to wear that uniform, General.”
That did it. McCarthy’s enemies had their ammunition.
McCarthy was never allowed to continue his investigation. A whole series of charges were hurled against both McCarthy and the members of his staff. Time and energy were all absorbed in explaining or refuting a continuous avalanche of allegations. He was investigated five times in four years.
Finally the tidal wave of propaganda had reached a crescendo and the whole Establishment press as well as the Establishment hard-core in the Senate began to clamor for a censure. The Communist Daily Worker published an instruction kit on how to get McCarthy. It was advertised as “Four full pages on Sen. Joe Low-Blow McCarthy, his record and what you can do about him.”
Two graduate students from Yale decided to take a cold, hard look at the various McCarthy hearings and then examine the charges one by one. They found a variety of things for which they criticized Senator McCarthy but decided that without a doubt there was a concerted campaign to deceive the American people as to the actual issues. They wrote a book entitled, McCarthy And His Enemies.2 The authors were William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell. This book contains an excellent analysis of each of the charges against McCarthy. It even gives a case-by-case report on the people who were supposed to be smeared or improperly treated. Later an excellent analysis of the Zwicker case was written by Lionel Lokos entitled, Who Promoted Peress?.3
The Campaign To Censure McCarthy
It was not just the hearings of the McCarthy committee that got the Senator into trouble. He had also given a speech in which he documented what he called “Twenty Years of Treason” by Democratic administrations. Then he took on President Eisenhower’s administration and charged it with continuing along similar if not identical lines. He had also put into the Congressional Record of June 14, 1951, a devastating attack on the State Department which was later published as America’s Retreat From Victory.4 The text relied upon published records to explain to the American people what the Communist-Establishment had done to the United States and her allies during the post-war years. It was a hard-hitting factual exposure of many top political, military and diplomatic personalities who had been surreptitiously carrying out the very policies which Dr. Carroll Quigley says the secret Establishment powers were using to gradually move humanity toward a global collectivist society.
And, of course, from the Establishment’s point of view it was difficult if not impossible to refute McCarthy’s charges against top Democrats and top Republicans who had been involved in these subversive activities. So they didn’t try. Both groups simply combined in an all-out campaign to get McCarthy censured so that his charges could be discredited. That was the real tragedy of the McCarthy censure. It successfully distracted the American people from the real issues which could have turned the tide of history against the Communist-Establishment coalition.
Senator McCarthy was a bombastic type of personality and had his faults, but even his faults had to be inflated and exaggerated out of all reasonable di
mensions before the heat of resentment could be generated to a level where the Senate would officially censure him. In fact, when the campaign against McCarthy first began, the Senator was confronted by the anomaly of seeing many of those who spoke out against him publicly, later apologizing to him privately and commending him for doing a good job. The Establishment press had created such a climate of “hate McCarthy” that even those who felt he was doing a good job found it politically expedient to denounce him.
When the Senate censure committee was appointed, it contained some questionable ingredients. One member had publicly stated even before he had heard the facts that he would vote to censure McCarthy. McCarthy attempted to object to that Senator’s participation on the Committee, but was gavelled down by the Chairman. The Liberal press practically fell all over itself trying to applaud the chairman for having the manifest courage to “stand up” to McCarthy. Because the chairman was a friend of this reviewer, it was greatly disturbing to see him being “set up and trapped”, in a historical sense, by the same people who were trying to discredit McCarthy.
Altogether, 46 charges were brought against McCarthy. They all dissolved into thin air except two. It was found that Senator McCarthy had “failed to cooperate” with a Senate subcommittee on Privileges and Elections in 1952 and that McCarthy had “intemperately abused” General Ralph W. Zwicker.
On the first count McCarthy offered an explanation which was not accepted, but which a subsequent investigation verified as being true. His attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, wrote a book in 1962 called One Man’s Freedom in which he demonstrated that if McCarthy had been able to dig up certain information in time, the first count would have died along with the other 44 “dismissed” charges.