HIT AND RUN--HOW IT WORKS

Lowry, W. McNeil

Hit and Run--How It Works By W. McNEIL LOWRY IT WAS nearly four months ago, on Feb. 9, that Sen. Joseph McCarthy, standing on a platform at Wheeling, West Virginia, waved an arm in the direction...

...The case of McCarthy vs...
...As it turned out, only one, John S, Service, was currently with the State Department...
...Harlow Shapley, distinguished Harvard scientist, had never been employed by the State Department...
...After reporting to his Senate colleagues about what he thought he had said in his swing around the country, the Wisconsin Republican seemed to feel the need to make a fresh start with a new number...
...He did not announce his resignation from the Senate...
...Snapped McCarthy: "Either Tydings hasn't seen the files or he is lying...
...There are "in the State Department," he insisted, "205 who, according to the President's own Security Board, are unsafe risks . . . W. McNEIL LOWRY has covered countless hours of Senate debates and public hearings on Sen...
...30 and said that Lattimore "is a Soviet agent and also that he either is, or at least has been, a member of the Communist Party...
...or even a "Communist...
...Although McCarthy at this point was showing a greater attachment for "57" than for "205," he reverted to the larger figure when pressed for an explanation of its origin...
...The corpse of China," he shouted, "bears mute evidence of how valuable the Lattimores, the Services, and the Jessups have been to Russia...
...7, in McCarthy's second chance to take responsibility for his charges...
...It appeared that the same individual was involved in both cases...
...9, McCarthy said merely that Lattimore's advice to the State Department "compares almost 100% to the Communist party line...
...The debate ended with Republican Minority Leader Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, who had been making himself an authority on homosexuals for the past month, triumphantly informing the Senate that an agency head had just called him to report the man named by McCarthy had "finally resigned...
...I did not," said McCarthy, "and you will notice that I didn't call them Communists, either...
...By Mar...
...Joseph McCarthy's charges against the State Department...
...6, Owen Lattimore made his first public appearance before the Tydings Committee in answer to McCarthy's charges, prompting Tydings to assert that he, Democratic Committee members Mc-Mahon and Green, Republican member Lodge, Atty...
...He got the floor Mar...
...He repeated no charges against individuals, and broke his promise to "resign from the Senate if he failed to say off the floor what he said with immunity on the Senate floor...
...On the day when I take advantage of the security we have on the Senate floor, on that day I will resign from the Senate...
...In a transcribed round-table program not broadcast until Apr...
...The fourth, Dr...
...I know there is a great desire to shift from Communists to homos," Tydings replied...
...It was out of these old records of cases investigated, judged, and settled by the proper agencies during the past four years that McCarthy picked his assortment of numbers and fashioned his charges...
...20 Chairman Tydings announced to McCarthy that he had not yet received the 81 names...
...Prof...
...He did not say how, and said nothing about resigning from the Senate...
...2 and case No...
...I said there were 57 Communists in the State Department," he said in another part of his report...
...On the same day, Mar...
...Frederick L. Schu-man of Williams College, who, along with a number of civilian scholars, once had given a lecture to State Department employes, without any compensation from State...
...Well, it is not only McCarthy, of course, whom McCarthy has put to effort, chagrin, embarrassment, charges, and smear, but many loyal Government employes...
...Pressed by reporters on whether he would, therefore, repeat his charges against Lattimore in an unprivileged place, McCarthy said he would, provided, however, that the Administration would make available the FBI and other Government files on Lattimore...
...The round table immediately dissolved into a shouting match, and it was McCarthy who finally got the microphone, but only to say that Lattimore's "ideas are the same as the Communists'" on Far Eastern matters and that anyone holding such ideas was "extremely dangerous to the American people...
...On Mar...
...Since President Truman, McGrath, and Hoover had already announced this would not be done, reporters understood the Senator from Wisconsin to mean that he would not carry the Lattimore attack outside his Senatorial immunity...
...If the files show that I'm wrong on this case," McCarthy continued, "then I will be considered a discredited witness...
...Secretaries of State Hull, Byrnes, Marshall, and Acheson have gone to some effort to help Lattimore repudiate this point...
...One of the cases I shall very much dislike discussing, in view of the fact that it involves not only Communist activities, but complete and utter degeneracy insofar as sex perversion is concerned...
...Jenner proposed that Tydings "tell the Senator from Wisconsin [McCarthy] who the homos are, if the Senator from Wisconsin will tell the Senator from Maryland about the 57 card-carry* ing Communists...
...McCarthy then mentioned the source of the figure of 205...
...Of these, 57 were employed in the State Department in March, 1948 (the same 57 being screened by the FBI...
...Four years ago the then Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, reported that of 284 Department employes under investigation, 79 were dismissed in the interests of security...
...If he, McCarthy, were permitted to cross-examine the man, the man "would either indict himself or perjure himself...
...Even the wire service reporters, with instantaneous transmission lines to high-speed rotary presses, can not keep up with the junior Senator from Wisconsin...
...I think, without any trouble at all, with sufficient investigation, we can find the 205...
...On Mar...
...The next day, Mar...
...8, the Tydings Committee was ready to go, with McCarthy the first witness in an open session...
...Next day the Senator jumped on to Salt Lake City, where he slashed his "205" to "57...
...He led off not with the "205" or "57" or "81" or "Big Three," but with Judge Dorothy Kenyon of New York, former U. S. representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women...
...This was in lieu of the "205 members of the Communist Party" heard by the Wheeling Republicans...
...there is no alternative...
...I have named or will name four individuals," presumably the Reno four, although only one of these, Service, was in the State Department, and McCarthy at Reno had declined to call him a Communist...
...II Two days later the Senate passed the resolution creating a five-man subcommittee, headed by the elegant Damocrat, Sen...
...He had to go to the Senate floor for the debate on housing, he said...
...8, the junior Senator from Wisconsin received the Marine Corps League's "Americanism Award" at Passaic, N.J...
...The next day began with Chairman Tydings asking McCarthy to straighten out two cases of the "81" presented on the Senate floor Feb...
...20 he rose in the Senate to report what he now claimed he had said between Wheeling and Reno...
...The more sweeping charge against Lattimore was to come later...
...Shortly afterward McCarthy took part in a debate started by Sen...
...14, McCarthy gave Tydings a list, not made public, of 25 employes of the State Department or related agencies who, he said, were poor security risks...
...and Mrs...
...It was at this stage of the proceedings that McCarthy made two promises to his Senate colleagues: "I urge," he said, in making the first promise, "that the proper Senate committee convene [to investigate the 81] and I shall be glad to give the committee the names...
...Promise number two was given to the Senate Majority Leader, Scott W. Lucas of Illinois: "I should like to assure him," said McCarthy, "that I will not say anything on the Senate floor which I will not say off the floor...
...McCarthy refused this request in an open letter to Tydings...
...Back in Washington, McCarthy felt the need for explaining what he had been saying...
...13 arrived, Sen...
...He said that Lattimore was "the architect of our Far Eastern policy—a policy which has sold into Communistic slavery 400 million [Chinese] people...
...Gustava Duran, who resigned from State in 1946 and went to the UN...
...Joseph McCarthy, standing on a platform at Wheeling, West Virginia, waved an arm in the direction of the Republican flock gathered to honor the memory of Abraham Lincoln and exclaimed: "I have here in my hand a list of 205 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 in the State Department...
...On Feb...
...He had called them "card-carrying Communists...
...The fourth man named—and for the first time—was Prof...
...Unless the State Department discharges these people at once, McCarthy shouted, "I shall be forced to discuss both cases in detail on the Senate floor...
...Rep...
...Brunauer was her husband, a civilian Navy scientist, implied by McCarthy to have admitted Communist party membership...
...In putting aside his former allegations and narrowing his campaign to the Lattimore case, McCarthy explained that he now had a "new phrase" for the "57" he had named before...
...The trail that had begun 11 weeks before in Wheeling, West Virginia, with "205 members of the Communist Party still in the State Department" had now reached an individual case of "sex perversion," Sen...
...James Cox in Ohio, Georgia, and Florida...
...14, McCarthy also gave the Tydings Committee one name in private, allegedly the name of a man formerly in the State Department and then in the Central Intelligence Agency who had a "police record" for "homosexuality...
...81 was an "extremely dangerous and active Communist, completely disloyal to the United States, and loyal to Soviet Russia...
...Owen J. Lattimore of Johns Hopkins, an infrequent adviser to the State Department on Far Eastern policy, whose "pro-Communist record," McCarthy said, "goes back many years...
...Even though ex~Communist Louis Budenz had that day testified before the Tydings Committee that he had been "told" by Communists that Lattimore was a Communist, McCarthy did not tell the editors that Lattimore was the "top Soviet espionage agent" in the U.S...
...Mary Jane Keeney, who also went to the UN from State in 1946—none of whom he had cared to call Communists...
...McCarthy did not furnish the names of the "81" and did not finish his testimony...
...the Department of State had now temporarily become the case of McCarthy vs...
...This was what he remembered saying at Salt Lake City, though by now the "57" had lost their Communist Party cards...
...On the same day McCarthy blew into Reno, where he announced that he had been able "to compile a list of 57 Communists" in the State Department, but he was in a mood to mention only four individuals who had been "traitorous...
...He told reporters on Capitol Hill he would give the Tydings Committee a case on which he would "stand or fall," the onetime "boss" of Alger Hiss "in the espionage ring in the State Department...
...William E. Jenner, Indiana Republe can, in which Jenner took up a sub ject whispered in Washington for two months previously and already out in the open in the House—the subject of alleged homosexuality in the Government service...
...In Case 14, McCarthy had said he was a "high official" who had attempted to "doctor" the records of a "bad security risk," but in Case 41 had hailed him as an anti-Red crusader sacked by "underlings" for his crusading efforts...
...He is chief Washington correspondent for four dailies owned by former Gov...
...On Apr...
...20, one month later, but now he wanted "all the information," in other words the files McCarthy had said he had on the "81," but he did not care to have "any of your sources [for the files] unless you feel you can give them to us...
...Before going to Washington, he was associate editor of the Dayton, (O...
...Anyway, he insisted, there were "vast numbers of . . . Communists with whom we must be concerned...
...and Mrs...
...Esther Caukin Brunauer, on the UNESCO staff of State, whose "Communist front activities," McCarthy said, "are sufficient to seriously question her security status...
...Millard Tydings of Maryland, to investigate any evidence of disloyal or subversive persons now or in the past employed by the Department of State...
...When Mar...
...For an hour and a half McCarthy repeated that he could not "identify" the two-headed individual...
...He had, he said, one witness and five affidavits to support these charges, and he would give this evidence to the FBI but would not give it to the Tydings Committee...
...27, the day after columnist Drew Pearson and other newspapermen had identified "the man" as Owen Lattimore, McCarthy announced he would take the Senate floor to develop his case and asked that an FBI agent be present so he could turn over to him documents "I consider of some importance...
...He should, he said, have called them "specific cases of people with Communist connections...
...Wherry's summation of Apr...
...And as if to confirm the statement at once, McCarthy informed the Senate that one name he had given in secret to the Tydings Committee—presumably the one on Mar...
...He again declined to give the Committee, publicly or privately, the names of the "81...
...If we can get rid of those big three," he cried, "we will have done something to break the back of the espionage ring within the State Department...
...Named with Mrs...
...A day later, the Senator from Wisconsin again promised that he would "reluctantly" give the Committee the names of his "81 cases" and set Mar...
...Chance number one had occurred with the NBC television program Mar...
...Of the 51 not employed, 23 never had worked for State and the other 28 had quit or were fired some time between 1946 and 1948...
...McGrath, FBI Director Hoover, and Assistant Atty...
...Daily News, and served a stint on the faculty of the University of Illinois...
...It was later the same day that McCarthy announced he would telescope his wholesale charges into a a single case...
...By Page 51 Lattimore himself had lost importance: "In my opinion," McCarthy said at that point, "the all important thing to be determined is not so much the question of whether Lattimore was a Russian agent . . . but rather, to determine to what extent our Far Eastern policy has paralleled the Communist party objectives...
...McCarthy showed him a registered mail slip dated the night of Mar...
...27 seems a good place to leave McCarthy, particularly in writing for a monthly magazine...
...At this meeting, McCarthy named four persons as "pro-Communists...
...McCarthy merely subtracted the number dismissed from the original number investigated, and concluded that the difference, 205, must be Communists or bad risks, although the 205 have since been either cleared or dismissed...
...Tydings had finally received the names on Mar...
...On the next day, Apr...
...In his speech on that occasion, McCarthy did not repeat his charges that Owen Lattimore was a "top Soviet espionage agent" and a "Communist...
...Nor, he added, did he have any "way of knowing definitely which of these persons are still in the employ of the State Department...
...And he brought to nine the total number of individuals publicly cited before the Tydings Committee by referring back to his Reno speech of Feb...
...14—was a "homosexual" with a police record, formerly in the State Department, now in the Central Intelligence Agency...
...1, case No...
...On May 1, Rep...
...18, and handed Tydings a copy of what he said had been mailed him...
...When he was told consideration of the housing measure had been postponed, McCarthy said he had to leave anyway because he needed time for his constituents' affairs...
...Then on Mar...
...McCarthy's fifth chance followed two days later, Apr, 22, on a "Meet the Press" broadcast, where McCarthy said that Budenz had "proved" his case against Lattimore...
...There are at least 57 Communists in the State Department...
...On Page 15 of his text, he said: "I may have perhaps placed too much stress on the question of whether or not he (Lattimore) has been a paid espionage agent...
...Presumably to support this theory, McCarthy, on Apr...
...20 the Senator from Wisconsin had told the Senate he would be "willing, happy, and eager to go before any Committee and give the names and all the information available" on the "81" cases...
...The more important aspect of his case deals with his aims and what he advocates...
...Dingell was rougher on McCarthy than were some segments of the population...
...He is," he continued, "one of their top advisers on Far Eastern affairs, or was until three or four weeks ago...
...V Two days later, McCarthy told the Senate that he had given the Committee two more names of individuals who are, he said, "extremely dangerous to this nation . . . who are perverting the purpose for which the "Voice of America' was originally established...
...On that occasion he had named John Stewart Service, State Department consular officer in Calcutta...
...III On Mar...
...Even in the course of the attack on Lattimore, McCarthy had some difficulty in agreeing with himself...
...The next day he said that at the Committee session scheduled for Mar...
...10, McCarthy announced that he would not try to present "complete details" on the "81," but again promised to give "all the names" to the Tydings Committee and base his charge against the State Department on a few "thoroughly documented" cases...
...VI One postscript may be worth adding, since it contains the only public statement of what Congressmen had long surmised as to the source of McCarthy's "57" and "81...
...The record would show, he solemnly assured the Senate, that there were "81" involved, but he did not make it clear how these were added to the "57" or subtracted from the "205...
...McCarthy's fourth chance to make good on his promises came at a dinner meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr...
...Two were in the State Department— Haldore Hanson, working on the "Point Four" program, whom Sen...
...Owen Lattimore...
...Finding none, they referred back to the Senator from Wisconsin, who said the man named "has a desk in the State Department, or at least he did until three or four months ago...
...Wherry has said that "had the Senator from Wisconsin accomplished nothing more" than the alleged forced resignation of one homosexual in CIA, "it would be worth the effort, the chagrin, the embarrassment, the charges, and all the smear to which he has been subjected...
...Reporters who had been given Lattimore's name "off the record" by McCarthy, began checking on the Johns Hopkins professor's position in State...
...But, as if to make up for this shrinkage in size, McCarthy promoted what was left not only from the "bad risk" class of Denver, but from the "Communist" category of Wheeling...
...But in the course of a four-hour speech he shook his case down to "three big Communists involved . . . case No...
...Twenty-four hours later McCarthy was in Denver, where he substituted the language, "205 bad risks" for the "205 members of the Communist Party" he had used in the Wheeling speech...
...McCarthy likewise did not repeat that Ambassador Philip Jessup had an "unusual affinity for Communist causes," but said that "Jessup's organization," the Institute for Pacific Relations, was the originator of the "myth" that the Chinese Communists were merely democratic agrarian reformers and the pioneer of the "smear campaign" against Chiang Kai-shek...
...20 as the final deadline for that action...
...19, a month after his privileged speech on the floor of the Senate, McCarthy had an opportunity to repeat in an unprivi-ledged place his charges against "9" or "81" or "Big Three" or "57" or "205," on an NBC television program...
...Senators would also note, said the junior Senator from Wisconsin, "that I have not named any of the 57...
...Peyton Ford had agreed there was "nothing in the FBI files as of this moment" to support any of the McCarthy allegations...
...The result has been a creeping chaos in Washington—without a single Communist yet exposed in the State Department...
...3, while in the Bethesda Naval Hospital for a sinus operation, dared the State Department to release a memorandum on our Far Eastern policy submitted by Lattimore, among many others, in in time for the afternoon papers...
...Frank M. Karsten, Democrat of Missouri, said that House committees in 1948 began investigating some of 57 alleged security risks in the State Department, but dropped the action when they found that all had been previously referred to the FBI by the department loyalty board...
...contrary to his practice of talking about Service in the Senate, he now carefully noted that Service was not indicted for any offense...
...Two others were employed by the United Nations...
...McCarthy called the author of a "pro-Communist" book in 1939...
...Had he really called the four traitors...
...Dingell, Michigan Democrat, asked McCarthy to "shed his toga of Congressional immunity and tell this audience right now that Lattimore is a Communist or a spy...
...They were now, he said, "bad policy risks" and it was "sometimes relatively unimportant" whether they were so out of "disloyalty" or out of "stupidity...
...Keeney and substituted Dr...
...The "57" now were "card-carrying Communists...
...The next day Tydings wrote to McCarthy reminding him that on Feb...
...The next day the Tydings Committee got the name in a closed session, allegedly that of "the top Soviet espionage agent" in this country and "now connected with the State Department...
...Of the three, McCarthy said, case No...
...IV The conclusion was confirmed the next day, Apr...
...At Wheeling, he now recalled, he had charged there was "presently in the State Department a very sizable group of active Communists...
...Harlow Shapley, never in State...
...He did not repeat, finally, that John S. Service's "Communist affiliations are well known" but said he was one of six persons arrested in the Amerasia case...
...13 he would finish his testimony and would name a man now occupying "an important post" in State...
...After the Reno speech, newspaper men checked their notes with the Senator...
...Now he dropped Mrs...
...The FBI had (in 1948) already cleared 35 of the 57 and were awaiting reports on 22...
...As for the "81," Karsten said, these were apparently among 108 cases considered two years ago by two House subcommittees...

Vol. 14 • June 1950 • No. 6


 
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