The End of Senator Joe McCarthy

...As a target, State was pretty well played out by 1953...

...Did he agree with me that Truman's Executive Orders were still in effect...

...But McCarthy ignored him and bulled ahead...

...There were many dramatic moments, all good for two- and three-column headlines...

...Even these figures did not refer to actual Communists but to people who had been investigated and in most cases cleared...

...Unlike State, its officers included few Eastern establishment liberals and no striped-trousered cookie-pushers, but it had far more employees than State and was an even more obvious target for espionage...

...He was a pariah...

...So I drove across the river to the Justice Department, where I sought the help of the Assistant Attorney General in charge of writing the opinions of the Attorney General, one J. Lee Rankin...

...Reporters then, as now, were generally too busy (and sometimes too lazy) to check the facts...

...He stayed in the Senate until he drank himself to death in 1957, but his power was gone...

...But who would sign it...

...But in my view the worst thing he did was to make anti-Communism disreputable...

...Where the famous figure came from was never made clear, although Adams says he simply blew up some old figures given him by a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and someone in Richard Nixon's office...

...I didn't argue...

...McCarthy resorted to all the tactics he had developed in eight years in politics-bullying witnesses, including the Secretary of the Army, turning purple and bellowing with rage and incredulity when he didn't like an answer...

...He harassed and abused hundreds of honest servants of the government, civilian and military...

...The evidence is to be found in the record in Everett on behalf of Bersin v. Truman, 334 U.S...

...In addition, when McCarthy delivered his Wheeling speech, the evidence on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was just coming to light...

...The conviction of Alger Hiss had just demonstrated that there really were Americans ready and willing to spy for Stalin...

...I do not mean to imply that there is anything wrong with condemning Communism...

...A succession of politicians and assorted rabble-rousers had done well with it in the thirties-Martin Dies, Karl Mundt (who later, as a senator, played a shabby role in the Army-McCarthy hearings), Father Coughlin, J. Parnell Thomas, Gerald L.K...

...is Sam Harris Professor of Law at the Yale Law School...

...I think he sold or gave it to members of his family, with the understanding that it would revert to him when he left government service...

...Thus I learned to know some of the dramatis personae-notably the new Secretary of the Army, Robert T. Stevens, McCarthy, and his closest adviser, a clever and unscrupulous young lawyer named Roy Cohn...

...In December 1954, after hearings by a Select Committee, the Senate voted in effect to censure McCarthy, although only for one of the most venial of his sins, abusing other senators...

...He introduced what purported to be carbon copies of memoranda to him from Cohn and other committee staffers which, had they been genuine, were accounts, made at the time, of the conduct of which he accused Adams...

...He was, to be sure, a graduate of the Harvard Law School, but that institution has always admitted plenty of people who, like me, were by no means aristocratic...

...But Cohn and Schine had leverage besides Cohn's increasing indispensability to the Senator...

...Have you left no sense of decency...

...But only one is really worth chronicling here, the five minutes in which Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer retained to act as counsel to the Army, permanently ended McCarthy's career...

...If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so...

...To this day it is impossible to criticize the far Left without being accused of "McCarthyism...

...The media lost interest in him...

...Adams disclosed the details of Cohn's incessant campaign to obtain special treatment for Dave: Cohn and McCarthy accused Stevens and Adams of holding Schine as a "hostage" to compel the committee to give up its investigation of and revelations about Communist infiltration of the Army...

...The truth is bad enough, although not quite the reign of terror attributed to him by the left-liberal version of the history of the period...

...Certainly when he resigned he promptly became again the company's chief executive, which probably would not have happened if he had really sold his control block to outsiders...

...It was, however, a fact that their confessions had been extracted by third degree methods...

...He did not, of course, spend these contributions on his crusade, but squandered most of the money speculating in soybeans and other commodities...

...You have done enough...

...For the next four years there were few days when Joe didn't make the front page and prime time...

...But it was Joe's way, when asked for substantiation of his charges, simply to leap to new accusations...

...Adams, though repeatedly let down and ultimately fired by Stevens, is generally kind to him...

...Possibly even the President...

...Almost daily Cohn badgered Stevens, Adams, and anyone else he thought had influence to carry out his plans for Dave...

...But on the whole he was reasonably honest and honorable, as much so as most of those who are called "gentlemen...

...r\.s Joe became the nation's leading anti-Communist, he didn't always have to rely on his fertile imagination...

...He had not the backbone to take on the likes of Joe McCarthy...

...Back to the Pentagon...

...When I told him about the episode above recounted, I gave him what I still think was excellent advice...

...Adams calls "bizarre" McCarthy's 1949 charge that Army investigators had "tortured" a group of SS men accused of massacring American POWs at Malmedy in Belgium during the German Ardennes offensive of 1944...

...The more people who read Without Precedent, the less likely are we to contract the disease again...

...I like to think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me...

...Robert P. Patterson, the last Under Secretary of War and the first Secretary of the Army, or John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War under Henry L. Stimson, or Stimson himself, could have done it, and without getting down in the gutter with Joe, but Stevens could not...

...and many of them strongly suspected him of taking bribes from large corporations, such as Pepsi-Cola, to push bills they favored...

...McCarthy, who did not immediately realize that he had received a mortal wound, attempted to continue...

...So the Army-McCarthy hearings began on April 22, 1954, and lasted for 36 days...

...was nobody but Congress-his promotion to major after a certain period of active duty was automatic under a statute providing for the drafting of doctors and dentists...

...It is true that he will continue at Hale and Dorr...

...John Adams has as much personal familiarity with that story as anyone alive, and he has done a lot of thorough research...

...But Hoover really had written such a letter, and what McCarthy got was about as close as he ever came to revealing genuine facts...

...Adams says that McCarthy told him and Stevens that he didn't care what happened to Schine, but that Cohn could not be controlled...

...I am, in fact, a neoconservative, and whenever some homme de gauche or other, displeased by one of my pieces, accuses me of having been a McCarthyite-it has happened at least three times-I simply display my medal of honor and shut him up...

...Welch] that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher . . . who has been for a number of years a member of an organization which was named...

...Cohn, who saw what McCarthy was doing to himself, grimaced and shook his head...

...He eventually married a former Miss Universe...

...Looking for a good issue on which to seek re-election in 1952, Joe had hit upon the infiltration *This essay is in large part based on Adams's recent book, Without Precedent: The Story of the Death of McCarthy-ism...

...His basic motives were to be re-elected and to grab as many dishonest dollars as came within his reach...

...Those who knew anything about him, mostly newspapermen, thought very little of him...

...In some ways, Stevens was a gentleman, certainly when compared to McCarthy, a mucker if ever there was one...

...None of those who had not been cleared was still employed by State in 1952...

...824 (1949), a petition for habeas corpus denied for lack of jurisdiction by an evenly divided Supreme Court, and in the report of a Board of Investigation appointed by the Secretary of the Army...

...The answer to the question "Who promoted Peress...

...On June 9, 1954, Welch's subtle mockery aroused McCarthy's wrath, and he started off on one of his characteristic (and entirely gratuitous) smears...

...He turned to the Army...

...Only a clergyman, anxious to flatter a member of the body who paid his salary, could have made so fundamental a misjudgment of McCarthy's character, for his dominant quality was fraudulence...

...Though not patrician, they were far more dangerous spies than Hiss, for the information they gave the Russians confirmed that of Klaus Fuchs (like so many eminent moles, a British subject) and played a key role in the manufacture of the first Soviet atomic bomb...

...This may well have been true...

...Liberals liked to describe him as an American Hitler, but he was nothing of the sort, if only because Hitler was sincere, a true believer in his own propaganda...

...at Cohn's insistence he arranged special privileges for Cohn's dear friend, Private G. David Schine, when the latter had been drafted and was undergoing basic training at Fort Dix...

...It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr...

...He was also very rich, having inherited the J.P...

...When the Quartermaster General hollered for help, I shortly discovered that two Executive Orders of Harry Truman, which had never been revoked by President Eisenhower, forbade turning such files over to Congress without the authority of the President...

...Denouncing Communists (always called "red-baiting" by liberals) had been good politics since the days of Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer...

...I doubt, however, that McCarthy had ever seen these documents...

...I was replaced by John Adams in October 1953...

...His obscurity ended abruptly in February 1952, when he delivered a stump speech to the Ohio Valley Women's Republican Club at a Lincoln Day dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia...

...His false accusations caused emotional distress and some financial hardship to about fifty innocent people, notably the scientists employed at Fort Monmouth, although all were ultimately vindicated...

...Little did I dream you would be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad...

...Nor was there any ground at all for giving him a less than honorable discharge...

...the Senate chamber emptied when he rose to speak...

...This was a singular piece of good fortune, though I was not grateful for it at the time...

...He writes like a good lawyer, not elegantly but clearly and with less bias than would have been excusable...

...I doubt it...

...So I drafted one, calling the Colonel's attention to the Executive Orders and instructing him to refuse, with all possible courtesy, to hand over the files...

...There were many other similar charges, including one that Adams had offered to furnish dirt on homosexuality and subversion in the Navy and Air Force in exchange for immunity for the Army...

...Some people, of course, suggested a homosexual affair, but there was never any evidence of that, and Schine, at least, was clearly heterosexual...

...He got his undergraduate degree at Johns Hopkins, which is academically excellent, but not socially prestigious...

...Mark's or any equivalent prep school of his day...

...Adams thinks, as I have always thought, that Welch, anticipating the Senator's attack on Fisher, had prepared and memorized it well in advance...

...McCarthy did not aspire to become a dictator...

...He also used a doctored photograph, cropped in such a way as to represent Stevens smirking benignly at Schine...

...His attitude toward McCarthy was an odd combination of fear and naive trust, which led him to a course of regular appeasement and surrender...

...McCarthy made his announcements exactly in time to catch the next edition...

...Adams, like almost everybody who writes about Hiss, describes him as "patrician...

...The Senator was triumphantly re-elected in 1952...

...Adams quotes it in full, which it deserves, but a few lines will convey its genius...

...Norton & Co., $17.50...

...as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party...

...Not one in a hundred knows that John Adams is a living lawyer practicing in Washington, D.C...

...I proceeded up the line to the office of the General Counsel of the Department of Defense, who informed me that the White House had let it be known that the problem was one for Defense or the Army to handle, and that the Defense Department preferred it to be the Army...

...In fairness it should be said that on at least one occasion he made an accusation that was substantially true, although he himself was probably indifferent to its truth or falsity...

...The Secretary of Defense...

...Joe hit upon a singularly fortunate time to revive the old fear and hatred of Bolshevism...

...he apologized to Roy Cohn when the latter, having no security clearance, was denied access to classified information...

...I was about ready to sign the letter myself when I wandered into the Secretary's dining room...

...It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you...

...He had, in fact, some years before, when he was in law school, belonged to the National Lawyers' Guild, which, although founded by Jerome Frank and other honest liberals as a counterweight to the American Bar Association, had been infiltrated and finally dominated by Communists...

...Schine was a handsome rich kid, a recent graduate of Harvard although rather lightly furnished in the upper story, with whom Cohn had become infatuated...

...Moreover, professional anti-Communists, up to and including Joe McCarthy, were rarely inclined to draw subtle distinctions between harmless, if idiotic, parlor pinks and genuine Stalinists...

...His smear tactics brought about the defeat of at least two intelligent and honest members of the Senate...

...It is always easier to get the media to broadcast sensational accusations than lackluster facts disproving them...

...Later, however, in April 1954, months after I had left the Pentagon, McCarthy and Cohn included me as Item 17 in their bill of particulars against the Army- I had, they said, covered up for Fifth Amendment Communists...

...For example, Stevens promised to make available for cross-examination (including abuse and insult) by McCarthy's committee- i.e., McCarthy-"everyone involved in the promotion and the honorable discharge of [Major Irving] Peress," an allegedly Communist dentist, including General Ralph Zwicker, the commandant at Camp Kilmer, where Peress had been filling teeth...

...By that time he had laid the State Department waste...

...Adams adduces convincing evidence that they were fakes, concocted for the hearings...

...The Department of Justice was not adapted to his purposes, for its most powerful official, J. Edgar Hoover, and the second most important, Attorney General Brownell, were among his sympathizers...

...The Colonel was armored when he went up to the Hill, and, for a wonder, McCarthy accepted the rebuff without vilifying either me or Johnson...

...of the federal government by thousands of Communist spies...

...I speculated myself that Cohn, until he met Schine, simply did not know how to play...

...All of them are now forgotten, as McCarthy is not, for none of them could match his talents at red-baiting...

...But most of the millions who saw the scene realized that McCarthy was finished...

...all work was making him a dull boy...

...There, eating a plate of ham and eggs, was Under Secretary Earl Johnson, also a holdover from the Truman Administration, with a good job in private industry waiting for him, and no fear of Senator McCarthy...

...McCarthy subpoenaed a Quartermaster Colonel commanding a depot in Brooklyn, demanding that he produce the loyalty-security files of several low-level civilian employees...

...Indeed, I fought in what was, to the best of my recollection, the opening skirmish of the Army-McCarthy war...

...It almost chased soap opera off the screen.* On the other hand, most Americans in 1983 have at least a vague idea who Joe McCarthy was and what "McCarthyism" means, for the liberals and left-wingers will not let his memory die...

...Welch finished him off: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator...

...Stevens, however, was conspicuously lacking in one essential characteristic of a gentleman: courage...

...I saw it myself, along with uncounted millions of other watchers, and I saw it, of all places, in John Adams's office...

...It is not often that one can pinpoint the precise moment at which a political career comes to a crashing end...

...He used, in fact, his whole capacious bag of dirty tricks...

...Would he or the Attorney General sign an opinion to that effect...

...Their presence helped to dispel an anti-Semitic taint in McCarthy's record...

...There were in those days far-Right newspapers, such as the Chicago Tribune and the various Hearst papers, which enthusiastically supported McCarthy's crusade, but even liberal or leftish journals like the New York Times and the Washington Post printed uncritically his wildest charges...

...But thirty years ago any citizen who could read a newspaper or owned a TV set knew who he was...

...his financial acumen was much less than his greed...

...He was dropped from Who's Who many years ago, so I haven't been able to check him out, but I'm pretty confident he is not an alumnus of Groton or St...

...He got headlines beyond the dreams of political avarice...

...At least 30,000,000 of them had seen and heard him on television and would have recognized him in the street...

...Some of this was due to the active cooperation of the press...

...Since Stevens was "out of town," Johnson was the Acting Secretary of the Army, and as such he signed the letter...

...Stevens gave me a disapproving, owlish stare and said in effect that he regarded McCarthy as playing on the same team as himself and intended to cooperate with him...

...The basis of the infatuation was never clear...

...Smith...

...I believe that his goals were as simple as that...

...The only participants to emerge with credit were Welch and Adams, who had for the first time told the truth about McCarthy's dealings with the Army...

...Secretary Stevens was officially out of town: I always thought he was really in Washington but unanxious to tangle with the Senator...

...If there had been a significant Communist vote in Wisconsin he would have said flattering things about Marx, Lenin, and Stalin...

...I gave him a brief and probably inadequate account of my experience, but I doubt that he perceived its applicability to himself...

...Schine, with his good looks and money, had an entre'e to one sort of cafe society, which Cohn enjoyed...

...Whatever the reason, Cohn got Schine a job with McCarthy's committee, constantly praised his talents at ferreting out Communists, and was genuinely outraged when Schine was drafted and threatened with basic training and even kitchen police...

...Communism, of course, really was and is an evil thing, but in those days most American Communists were more naive than vicious...

...After McCarthy finished, Welch stood up and delivered a short philippic which I regarded then and still regard as a masterpiece...

...So the public was ready to take seriously a good red scare...

...For example, the "purloined letter," which purported to be a letter from J. Edgar Hoover to the Chief of Army Intelligence listing more than thirty suspected subversives employed at Fort Monmouth, was slipped to McCarthy by a member of what he called his "Loyal American Underground...

...Most of those named had already been investigated and cleared by the Army...

...Adams says that, in order to avoid conflict of interest, "At a huge personal sacrifice, Stevens sold all his stock in the company...

...He describes the Secretary's meek acceptance of McCarthy's chicanery, lies, and abuse as "gentlemanly forebear-ance...

...Adams had had a TV set installed in his office and there, not being much burdened by my military duties, I watched the hearings...

...Adams thinks that even so McCarthy might have abandoned his assault on the Army-there were tougher men than Stevens among the generals and in the Department of Defense-in favor of, say, Communist infiltration of defense industry, if it had not been for Roy Cohn and Dave Schine...

...I also discovered, as Adams was to discover by more painful experience than mine, that Secretary Stevens could not be counted on either...

...Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last...

...In 1950 Joseph R. McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, was about as obscure as a United States senator can be...

...One picture is worth a thousand words, and Herb-lock drew it: Stevens handing his sword to McCarthy, with the caption, "Okay, bud, when I want you again I'll send for you...

...Unlike Nixon, he never caught a Communist, but he brought about the early retirement of several distinguished foreign service officers and demoralized other top men in the Department to the point where they simply avoided doing or saying anything that might attract his attention...

...Hiss was well-groomed and well-mannered, but I am not aware that his background was more than middle class...

...He was courteous, well dressed, a product of Andover and Yale, a member of good clubs...

...This has always been something of a mystery to me...

...Stevens, otherwise so minor a figure in history as to be imperceptible, will be long remembered for his capitulation at the Chicken Lunch...

...He demanded that Schine be commissioned and assigned to work with McCarthy's committee, perhaps sniffing out Communist propaganda in the textbooks used at West Point...

...My possession of the McCarthy medal has always graveled my left-liberal colleagues, for I am the only member of the Yale Law School faculty who was ever denounced by Joe McCarthy, though many of my colleagues were far more deserving than I.) So I discovered, as John Adams was to discover by more painful experience (I was not surprised or disappointed, for I was only a holdover Democrat), that the Army would have to face McCarthy without support from any other part of the Administration...

...At any rate, to tell McCarthy's story to people who never knew or have forgotten it, although they have heard of him, is to render a public service...

...To most Americans today the name John Adams, if it means anything at all, means the second and sixth Presidents of the United States...

...But the underlying causes of the Senator's immense success went deeper...

...He felt no personal animosity against his victims or even the Communist Party...

...Even Eisenhower, though he indicated his dislike of the Senator in private, had no stomach for an open confrontation...

...I thought he was headed for trouble, but there was nothing more I could do...

...Specifically, he informed the ladies that there were no less than 205 Communists in the State Department alone, waving a sheet of paper which he said listed them by name...

...Usually my practice kept me too busy to watch the hearings, but this time I was serving in the Office of the General Counsel the annual two weeks of active duty required of me as an Army reservist...

...1 think we should tell [Mr...

...Actually it was an inaccurate two-and-a-half-page summary of a fifteen-page letter which did, in fact, list the names but furnished no real evidence against them-only the raw contents of FBI files, including hearsay, anonymous letters, and the like...

...Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...

...He received very large sums of money, in amounts ranging from one to six figures, from his admirers...

...For John Adams, the General Counsel of the Army, had starred in the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, to this day the biggest TV spectacular in history, watched daily by 20 or 30 million people...

...As it happened, I had been the Deputy General Counsel of the Army since 1952, and the Acting General Counsel since early 1953: when the administration changed I lined up a job with a Wall Street law firm, but agreed to stay with the Army until a Republican successor could be found...

...He would tell any lie, assassinate any character, to get a headline...

...He ordered the general commanding Fort Monmouth to "cooperate" with Joe in investigating the alleged subversives there...

...The laws of statistical probability suggest that there were a few spies in the military establishment, but McCarthy and his assiduous aides never detected one...

...In any event, the battle over Schine was the principal and immediate cause of the final confrontation between McCarthy and the Army...

...He had his own corps of Daniel Ellsbergs, and occasionally the information they leaked to him was at least embarrassing to the government...

...The sole result-and it was an important one-of the hearings was the destruction of Joe McCarthy...

...Cohn shrugged his shoulders and sat back resignedly...

...Stevens Company, one of the country's largest textile manufacturers...

...Joe's rise to fame and power was meteoric...

...The culmination was Stevens's abject surrender at the "Chicken Lunch" on February 24, 1954, when he signed a "Memo of Understanding" in which in effect he agreed to all McCarthy's demands that he had previously balked at, no matter how outrageous...

...When he died the Chaplain of the Senate praised his "sincerity...

...so far as possible to conduct his relations with the Senator in writing and to let his lawyer draft the correspondence...

...In order to spare the Colonel from McCarthy's abuse and browbeating, I thought he ought to be furnished with an order from the highest possible authority to reject the Senator's demand...

...Fred Fisher was an associate, and is now a senior partner, in Welch's firm, specializing in securities law...

...From the perspective of thirty years later, how much harm did Senator McCarthy do...