WILLIAM SCHULz: Had They No Sense of Decency?
EVANS, M. STANTON
Had They No Sense of Decency? b o o k s I n R e v I e W n the spring of 1960, as the more or less token con- Yellow Springs, Ohio campus to argue the indefensible: that Joe McCarthy had...
...McCarthy died three years later, a broken man...
...In November, he was defeated for re-election in heavily Democratic Maryland by a little-known Republican, John Marshall Butler...
...In every instance, the officials in charge admitted there had been numerous foul-ups, and moved to take corrective action...
...If there is a God in Heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good...
...He does this to demonstrate, in great detail, the extent of Communist infiltration of the federal government during the 1930s and ’40s...
...Evans devotes more than a quarter of his book to events that took place before McCarthy stepped on the national stage with his February 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia...
...Similar and redundant charges by Sens...
...That somebody could defend McCarthy stunned my schoolmates, who set up “truth squads” to research McCarthy’s squalid record in the college library...
...His moonJournals, 1952-2000 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...
...Repeatedly, Levitsky would invoke the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer McCarthy’s questions: McCARTHY: Were you a member of the Communist conspiracy while handling classified materials for the government...
...In November 1951, Pentagon G-2 had been sufficiently concerned about lax security at Fort Monmouth that it launched a preliminary investigation...
...In 1953, under McCarthy and chief counsel Roy Cohn, the panel would hold 95 days of executive session hearings, with 331 witnesses heard, and 75 days of public hearings...
...In those hearings—in which no proof was offered that Cohn had threatened investigative action against the Army to get favors for Schine—McCarthy would suffer a blow from which he would never really recover...
...Information Service libraries abroad, and, most controversially, security breaches at the Army Signal Corps and related facilities...
...Just in case the meaning of these words was unclear, Tydings & Co...
...LEVITSKY: I decline to answer for the same reasons...
...Edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger (penguin press, 894 pages, $40) faced visage, always framed by the same horn-rimmed glasses and bow tie, glowed from millions of television screens whenever American politics, and very particularly the Kennedy family, were on the agenda...
...He was a master of the scabrous and scatological...
...errors of detail in the presentation of some cases...
...Peurifoy had prepared a memo for Rep...
...of his own Boston law office, because of admitted f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 7 9 Writes Evans: b o o k s I n R e v I e W previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell Jr., the Attorney General, as a Communist front organization...
...that key State Department official John Stewart Service consorted with—even roomed with— Soviet agents, was caught red-handed by the FBI supplying classified documents to the pro-Communist publication Amerasia, and was allowed to walk free in a case “fixed” by the Truman Justice Department...
...Harley Kilgore and Matthew Neely [West Virginia Democrats] would flash affidavits proving McCarthy had lied to the Senate about his Wheeling speech...
...You have brought it out...
...Sheehan and his investigators made their report to their superiors in late 1952 but nothing more happened...
...rose on the Senate floor to call for another investigation of the Wisconsin senator, covering all aspects of his life “since his election to the Senate in 1946...
...As a young reporter, Evans first wrote of McCarthy in the mid-1950s...
...All of them [and others] are missing, with no explanation of what happened to them, no hint that they were ever there, and no withdrawal notice...
...Tydings, to expose McCarthy...
...W. J. Fulbright (D-Ark...
...Gillette’s investigators sought and obtained the financial records of McCarthy’s father, brother, brother-in-law, friends, and staffers dating back to 1935—and in the end could find nothing McCarthy had done illegally...
...But at some point they disappeared—as did numerous Reviewed by William schulz hours, Evans delivered a virtuoso performance, citing chapter and verse on case after case in an effort to bWilliam io Tk schulz is the retired executive editor and long-time Washington bureau chief of Reader’s Digest...
...McCarthy and McCarthyism” were characterized as “vile” and “sinister,” a “fraud and hoax perpetuated on the Senate of the United States and the American people...
...his talk was laced with obscenity...
...Reviewed by Mark falcoff Although he spent a time teaching history at Harvard (and later at the City University of New York) and published books on historical subjects, he was not really a historian at all, but rather a literary provocateur in the English sense—a kind Mark falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Roy Cohn, Adams said, was pressuring the Army to get special treatment for his friend and former investigative colleague, David Schine, recently inducted into the Army and serving at Fort Dix in New Jersey...
...He notes, too, the “remarkable but generally neglected fact that every major McCarthy investigation in the period 1953-54 resulted in some significant change in governmental practice...
...LEVITSKY: I decline to answer for the reason previously given...
...You have done enough...
...and using vituperative language against his foes (though no more intemperate than that used against him...
...Evans reveals how the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project developing the A-bomb had been identified by Communist Party leaders as a party member...
...Over time—from April to June 1954—the charges For many in the political world and press corps, he became a nonperson to be ignored and shunned, a ghost figure with no relation to the serious business of the Senate...
...a failure to rein in Cohn when his chief counsel was badgering the Army about Schine...
...Had They No Sense of Decency...
...The report identified 33 State Department officials (including Alger Hiss) as Soviet agents or Communist Party members and described more than 90 others as “suspects” or “sympathizers...
...Of the hundreds of books on the McCarthy era, Stan Evans has written the best—a nuanced, incredibly detailed work of scholarship that concludes: “In the end, [McCarthy] perished, politically and otherwise, in the rubble he pulled down around him...
...Full-time research for this book began in 2000 and Evans spent countless hours digging through hundreds of thousands of pages of records, reports, transcripts, and other documents...
...Based on previously secret FBI files, transcripts of closed door congressional hearings available only after a half century, records buried in the archives of the late USSR, decoded Venona messages dispatched by Soviet spymasters to agents in this country, and personal papers of long-dead public figures, Blacklisted by History is meticulously researched and carefully reasoned...
...He had discussed it with the President and advised him that the counterattack was to be launched on the floor of the House and Senate...
...COHN: Did you ask persons who were employed at Fort Monmouth, in the Signal Corps, to commit espionage...
...A week later, Benton wrote the committee saying he would now like to broaden the investigation to include McCarthy’s activities “before his election to the United States Senate...
...Typical are two dozen classified documents supplied by the State Department to the Senate subsequently logged in at the Archives...
...was launched little more than a month after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech and was ostensibly a “full and complete investigation as to whether personnel who are disloyal to the United the public that McCarthy had made false allegations at Wheeling, changed his story, and then lied about it on the Senate floor...
...It was no such thing...
...Just before the censure resolution was to be voted upon, McCarthy assailed the Watkins committee as an “unwitting handmaiden” of the Communists in derailing the work of his own committee...
...Nearly 48 years later, Evans has written what is the definitive history of Joe McCarthy and his times...
...He was a vulgarian by method as well as probably by instinct.… He made little pretense to religiosity or to any species of moral rectitude...
...Investigated were allegations of tax fraud and influence peddling, stockpiling practices of the General Services Administration, State Department security practices, U.S...
...Sheehan uncovered “an extremely critical situation” there and at the Federal Telecommunications Lab, a crucial Signal Corps subcontractor...
...By the time Evans arrived, they were ready with scores of what they Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies By M. Stanton Evans thought were “gotcha” questions that would expose him as (Crown Forum, 663 pages, $29.95) a fraud or know-nothing...
...William Benton (D-Conn...
...Frank Karsten [D-Mo.], who would reveal on the floor of the House the origin of McCarthy’s cases.… Sens...
...As the New York Times reported in a story about the Army filing formal allegations against Cohn and McCarthy: The Army charges were signed by its special counsel, Joseph N. Welch...
...LEVITSKY: I decline for the same reasons… COHN: Since you left the Telecommunications Laboratory, have you asked any persons working at Fort Monmouth to commit espionage...
...Enter McCarthy...
...Reporters who once hung on his every word now observed a tacit compact to treat him as if he were no longer there—which perhaps, in other than a pure political sense, he wasn’t...
...A Senate committee headed by Guy Gillette (D-Iowa) Investigators discovered that the Communist Party had established a special unit in the Monmouth area...
...McCarthy would be the subject of five Senate investigations...
...7 6 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 Roadblocks—many in place since b o o k s I n R e v I e W other documents critical to our understanding of the Cold War and the Soviet threat...
...8 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 Arthur and Writer certainly one author who requires no introduction to readers of this journal...
...his unprovable charge of espionage (later retracted) against Owen Lattimore...
...He was… a prince of hate...
...In short order, 20 million people a day would be watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on live television...
...Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last...
...There was only one problem: Welch himself had “outed” Fisher six weeks earlier...
...that Whittaker Chambers had supplied the White House (through Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle) the names of dozens of Soviet agents and sympathizers, including Alger and Donald Hiss, Solomon Adler, and V. Frank Coe...
...Perhaps The late arthur schlesinger, jr...
...In every case as well, however, the material once enclosed has been stripped from the cover sheet, leaving small wads of paper beneath the staples that held the documents together...
...Senate in that election, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and for the first time could launch official probes of his own...
...His eyes reportedly filling with tears, Welch wound up: Mr...
...In 1952, With republicans gaining control of the under Democratic leadership, the subcommittee held only six days of closed-door hearings in which eight witnesses were called, and 20 days of open hearings...
...One of the witnesses called by McCarthy was Joseph Levitsky, who had worked for the Signal Corps and thereafter at the Telecommunications Lab handling classified Army projects, and had used Julius Rosenberg as a 7 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 b o o k s I n R e v I e W reference in applying for that position...
...Evans does not whitewash his subject, cataloguing sins of commission and omission, all of which contributed to his demise...
...I will not discuss it with you further...
...Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad.… I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you...
...For nearly three educate undergraduates who until a few days earlier had known no more than that McCarthy was a lout at best and probably a monster...
...b o o k s I n R e v I e W n the spring of 1960, as the more or less token conYellow Springs, Ohio campus to argue the indefensible: that Joe McCarthy had been right...
...Outraged senators then added a second indictment for slandering the Watkins panel and McCarthy was censured by his colleagues 67 to 22...
...Arthur Watkins (R-Utah...
...Likening McCarthy to Hitler, Flanders listed 33 items for which McCarthy should be censured —a list, he admitted candidly, which had been drawn up by the left-wing National Committee for an Effective Congress, spearhead of what it called “Operation Nut-Cutting...
...The result was what Evans calls “an unlimited fishing expedition into McCarthy’s earnings, bank statements, loan records, stock market activities, taxes and anything else of a financial nature the probers could think of...
...His investigators discovered that the Communist Party had established a special unit in the Monmouth area, called the Shore Club, whose members were tasked with ferreting information out of Fort Monmouth...
...For the first time in our history, we have seen the totalitarian technique of the big lie employed on a sustained basis...
...brought the items of censure to 46 and the resolution was referred to a special committee headed by Sen...
...The following exchange is instructive: McCARTHY: Over that 13-year period of time [since 1940] have you repeatedly furnished information on individuals who you considered to be very dangerous to the security of this country, and discovered that they were kept on year after year even after you had supplied the complete facts on them...
...Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator...
...This includes McCarthy’s attack on Secretary of State George Marshall, “a huge error of judgment and to some degree as well of fact...
...With the Gillette committee unable to pin any wrongdoing on McCarthy, Sen...
...Ralph Flanders, a dotty Republican from Vermont...
...McCarthy and McCarthyism” were characterized as “vile” and “sinister,” a “fraud and hoax perpetuated on the Senate of the United States and the American people...
...It didn’t work out that way...
...Harry Vaughan, with the names of such Soviet apparatchiks as Gregory Silvermaster, Victor Perlo, and FDR’s own administrative assistant, Lauchlin Currie...
...Records show that the reports were officially received and filed by the Archives...
...Writes Evans: In [all] these cases handsomely embossed cover sheets, signed by Dean Acheson, Secretary of State in 1950, are still there in the folders...
...In a scene that has been played and replayed countless times in the ensuing five-plus decades, Welch delivered an Oscar-worthy performance: Until this moment, Senator, I think I never fully grasped your cruelty or your recklessness...
...and Mike Monroney (D-Okla...
...concluded that McCarthy’s charges “represent perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truth and untruth in the history of the Republic...
...After all, McCarthy had been censured by his Senate colleagues in 1954 and for seven years before his death in 1957 had been vilified as a liar, a bully, a tormentor of honorable men and women...
...The first, directed by Sen...
...REID: Yes, sir...
...Yet when the final chapter in the conflict with Moscow was written, amid yet another pile of rubble, he was not without his triumph...
...Today, that document should be available in at least two sections of the National Archives—the legislative archive of the Senate subcommittee and in the papers of Sam Klaus, located in another section of the agency...
...he would continue the Fort Monmouth probe, and call members of the board that had been In january 1954, when McCarthy made clear that reviewing security suspensions at the facility, the Army and the Eisenhower White House decided to counterattack...
...Have you left no sense of decency...
...The conventional wisdom had been summed up a Iservative at Antioch College, I invited M. Stanton Evans of the Indianapolis News to come to the year before Evans’s Antioch appearance in the biography, Senator Joe McCarthy, written by the New Yorker’s Richard Rovere: Like Hitler, McCarthy was a screamer, a political thug, a master of the mob, an exploiter of popular fears...
...Con sider the classified report drafted in August 1946 by State Department security official Sam Klaus...
...The Army-McCarthy hearings would be followed immediately by a resolution of censure introduced by Sen...
...In subsequent testimony before the Gillette committee, Benton rehashed the Tydings report of the year before, along with various items that had appeared in the press...
...In his first months as chairman, McCarthy received a phone call from an Army intelligence officer who said he had important data to provide...
...Evans spells out the victories won by McCarthy, including the driving from the government and the public square of scores of loyalty risks, Communist sympathizers, and worse...
...that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1945 provided President Harry Truman’s top aide, Gen...
...Newsweek reported an April 30, 1950 session at Tydings’s Washington apartment where the senator, subcommittee counsel Edward Morgan, and top State Department official John Peurifoy plotted what one participant called the “total and eternal destruction” of McCarthy...
...At a meeting in Attorney General Herbert Brownell’s office, Army counsel John Adams gave White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams, Deputy Attorney General William Rogers, and other key officials a briefing on the Fort Monmouth investigation —and then dropped the bombshell...
...and Wayne Morse (R-Ore...
...Three months later, a five-man team headed by Captain Benjamin Sheehan, a G-2 counterintelligence specialist from First Army headquarters in New York, was dispatched to Fort Monmouth...
...Like Tydings, Benton would pay a price for his anti- McCarthy vendetta—defeat at the hands of Connecticut voters when he sought re-election in 1952...
...Instead it was a carefully coordinated effort by the Senate Democratic leadership and the Truman State Department to convince f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 7 7 b o o k s I n R e v I e W Tydings paid dearly for his role in the campaign to destroy McCarthy...
...States are or have been employed by the State Department...
...It was a historical maze not easily navigated...
...McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further...
...the fifties—were everywhere...
...It was delivered by the sanctimonious Army special counsel Joseph Welch, who baited McCarthy into blurting out that one of Welch’s law firm associates, Fred Fisher, had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, a Communist front...
...A fluid, prolific, glib, and versatile writer, he produced more than a dozen books and was a frequent contributor to the public prints, most notably the New York Times and, even more characteristically, the New York Review of Books...
...were winnowed from 46 to one (that McCarthy defied the Gillette committee when it sought financial records from his pre-Senate days...
...You have been within six feet of me, and could have asked me about Fred Fisher...
...The whole strategy was to be kept strictly secret… In the end, the Tydings subcommittee report, adopted on a 3-2 party line vote, was based largely on a 168-page “Confidential Memorandum” that originated, quite obviously, from somewhere in the State Department...
...1917-2007) is no public intellectual has cast so large or at least so continuous a shadow on our cultural landscape this past half-century...
...then launched an in a C i p r e l y t d l tab ves oi tigation circula into ed b McCarth the But y’s role cam in a an gn anti. (Mc Tydings rthy would actually win a libel judgment and apology from the Syracuse Post-Standard, which accused him of “framing” Tydings with a doctored photograph that appeared in the tabloid...
...The Fort Monmouth operations included “an immensely large number of employees of questionable loyalty”— many of them pilfering classified documents, some of which apparently wound up in enemy hands during the Korean War...
...As the magazine related: The time had come, said Sen...
...Fred Fisher is a young man who went to Harvard Law School and came with my firm and is starting what looks like a brilliant career with us...
...McCarthy called Fort Monmouth’s security chief, Andrew Reid, who had sought for more than a decade to rid the labs of security risks...
...We had finally gotten the word to the Pentagon,” said Sheehan, “and there our investigation for all intent and purposes died...
...Four years later, as a Senate subcommittee looked into McCarthy’s charges of a dangerous breakdown in State Department security, McCarthy learned of the report and demanded that the subcommittee obtain a copy...
...The next day, at the behest of Sherman Adams, John Adams began compiling what would be known as the Army’s “Chronology of Events,” concerning the alleged threats by Cohn, the treatment of Schine, and the role of McCarthy...
...The officer turned over a two-and-a-quarter page précis of a 15-page FBI report, dated January 1951, on security lapses at Fort Monmouth, a sprawling network of labs in New Jersey and other locations in which super-secret research was conducted vital to the national security...
...Welch today [April 15] confirmed news reports that he had relieved from duty his second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher Jr...
...Millard Tydings (D-Md...
...He sought to manipulate only the most barbaric symbols of America—the slippery elm club, the knee in the groin, and the brass knuckles...
Vol. 41 • February 2008 • No. 1
