The Shame of the Senate
Shelten, Willard
The Shame of the Senate By Willard Shelten Washington ALITTLE after noon on Saturday, Jan. 3, a slight hush settled over the crowded galleries and the floor of the United States Senate as Joseph...
...Kiermas in the same period made deposits of $96,921, and more than $29,000 was in cash—most of it in fairly large deposits of more than $300 each...
...Ar-villa P. Bentley, who left Washington secretly and in a great hurry two days after she was approached (unsuccessfully) by subcommittee investigators...
...The echoes reached Monroney across the Atlantic, and the junior Senator from Oklahoma resigned...
...The evidence also showed that 1) the Pepsi Cola Corp...
...whether his "activities" in regard to housing, sugar and other "special interests" were "motivated by self-interest...
...in fact did) hold their tongues...
...The report did not include a word to indicate whether members of the subcommittee accepted or rejected Benton's detailed bill of particulars charging McCarthy with lying on the Senate floor about his notorious Wheeling, W. Va., speech of Feb...
...But the money found its way into a special bank account from which McCarthy financed speculation in soybean futures for—or through—an associate, Henry J. Van Straten...
...There was not even a peep of protest from any of the bipartisan liberals, none from the Republicans who in 1950 signed a "Declaration of Conscience" repudiating McCarthy's terroristic methods, none from the three-member Senate subcommittee that only the day before had issued a report that by imputation excoriated the Wisconsin Senator's incredibly involved fiscal affairs, cast doubt on his moral stature, and—in a rather whimpering tone—complained that McCarthy had tried to terrorize the subcommittee itself...
...demanded from Gillette the "employment background" of the staff members ("Why, Sen...
...The subcommittee ended: "Files are available to the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Internal Revenue," but "the issue raised is one for the entire Senate . . . transcends partisan politics and goes to the very core of the Senate body's authority, integrity, and the respect" it wants from the country...
...4) McCarthy sold two-thirds of the stock three years later at a profit of $35,614...
...with falsifying the origin of his charges against State Department personnel...
...William Benton of Connecticut Aug...
...By March, 1951, Gillette, goaded by McCarthy's relentless harassment, got Sen...
...McCarthy was a member of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee that controlled the fate of RFC...
...with hiring a spy who was jailed in and expelled from Switzerland for forging "evidence" against the American minister, at that time the bedeviled John Carter Vincent...
...Alexander Wiley, to be sworn for his second six-year term...
...McCarthy's deposits did not include his $10,000 Lustron fee or another $10,000 received from a brokerage house...
...Its personnel seemed adequate at least to do a coordinated presentation of documents and to relate them clearly to the committee findings of fact they were intended to illuminate and sustain...
...with accusing Gen...
...If you want to observe that even Hendrickson, who agreed to the report on the last moment of the last day, specified that it should not be released until 4 p.m...
...2—too late to allow public opinion to work before McCarthy was sworn in again the next day—that is accurate too...
...The exact details of events in the ten days before the quibbling report was released were not altogether clear immediately afterward, but some facts are established...
...9, 1950, when he first launched his campaign against the State Department...
...A. S. Mike Monroney...
...Hennings and Hayden would be obliged to (and...
...The disposition of this $40,000 is obscure...
...Hendrickson, the one remaining Republican member, stayed firmly in New Jersey despite earnest pleas for his presence in the capital...
...Margaret Chase Smith, Maine Republican, resigned Jan...
...Hayden, chairman of the full Rules and Administration Committee, to sponsor a resolution affirming the confidence of the Senate in the integrity of Gillette and his colleagues...
...1952, to take a position on another subcommittee of the full Rules Committee, angrily repudiating any suggestion that she was moved by a desire to escape responsibility for a report on McCarthy...
...George C. Marshall of "conspiracy" against America...
...It asked, again and again, such questions as whether McCarthy's secretive financial maneuvers—with Kiermas, with his brothers, with others—arose from "ulterior motives...
...In the case of McCarthy, the conclusion is missing...
...But there was not even a whisper of objection from any Senator as McCarthy strode confidently down the aisle...
...Any Congressional committee, if it had discovered such a tangled web of financial peculiarities involving an unfortunate executive department employee, could easily have concluded that a "pattern" was revealed justifying the utmost suspicion if not immediate ouster of the wretch...
...The subcommittee showed how, as a co-chairman of the Joint Committee on Housing...
...The subcommittee did not say, but in the closing months of its investigation it had the services of a counsel and a staff, and an accountant labored in its vineyards throughout the inquiry...
...McCarthy would himself come in to give explanations," and anyway why pick on staff members to get testimony and explanations "which Sen...
...No sooner had he indicated in September that hearings would be held on the Benton resolution than McCarthy fired him an intimidating letter saying he understood that Gillette was working on the idea of "whether your subcommittee should recommend that McCarthy be expelled . . . for having exposed Communists in government...
...McCarthy speculate with funds advanced to him for his anti-Communistic drive...
...That left the subcommittee with exactly two members—Hennings of Missouri and Hendrickson of New Jersey—and its business was still unfinished...
...3, a slight hush settled over the crowded galleries and the floor of the United States Senate as Joseph R. McCarthy, reelected from the sovereign state of Wisconsin, walked forward with his senior colleague, Sen...
...McCarthy's total deposits in his Washington bank, from Jan...
...Benton had publicly asserted that the Wisconsin Senator was an "amoral man who used the lie as an instrument of policy," a man of "corruptibility and mendacity," who had followed "a pattern of distortion and deceit...
...What was the reason for this chaos piled on delay...
...Finally the senior Senator from Arizona, the tall, baldheaded, and famously adroit Hayden, chairman of the full Rules Committee, named himself as a third member of the subcommittee, but the report somehow refused to get itself issued...
...McCarthy also got more money from Bentley's former wife, Mrs...
...But then it went all plaintive again and "explained" why it did not force answers to some of its unanswered questions by subpenaing either McCarthy or his aide, Kiermas: "The responsibility placed upon individual members" was known to McCarthy, and if he chose not to respond to repeated invitations to testify, then that "might appear to reflect a disdain and contempt" for the Senate as a whole...
...In short, the subcommittee "although recognizing its authority" to subpena him "did not choose to do so...
...That amiable mediocrity from Iowa, Sen...
...The job was never done...
...12, 1952...
...Ill With two possible exceptions, everyone who served on the subcommittee for various periods showed a nervous chill either at the idea of investigating whether McCarthy was in fact an "amoral" and lying creature unfit for Senate membership or at the idea of investigating any Senator...
...He's a nerveless gambler and a tough guy...
...No one could make much sense from the piled-up agglomeration the Senate subcommittee issued after nearly seventeen months of frittering and twittering...
...Angry members insisted that the vindication was clear-cut and intended as a pointed rebuke to McCarthy—but along about the same time Gillette plaintively allowed it to be known from his home in Iowa —far from the sharp-tongued, cross-examining questions of Washington reporters--that he did not see how the subcommittee could possibly complete its investigation and report before the November election...
...II Consider some of the original Benton charges against McCarthy that the subcommittee report did not even mention...
...342 pages of massed documents —photostats of McCarthy's letters, letters from his banker, bank statements, promissory notes, campaign fiscal reports, deposit slips, checks, orders for reprints of Senate speeches...
...The Wisconsin Senator kept refusing to appear for questioning, kept writing accusations that "hordes of investigators" were hounding him and "tens of thousands of dollars" were being illegally spent...
...1, 1948, to Nov...
...VI McCarthy, one suspects, is not much interested in whether Hen-nings, Hayden, and Hendrickson strongly imply that he is financially irregular...
...McCarthy had refused to give...
...IV Despite the delays, the report when finally issued recounted details of McCarthy's financial affairs that would severely damage any Senator less thiclo-skinned than McCarthy—or one less carefully entrenched behind the earthworks provided by a Republican at the head of the Department of Justice, a friend, Sen...
...Guy Gillette, assumed chairmanship of the subcommittee in 1951 and proceeded to move with the determined deliberation of a sick cow...
...If you want to think that the shellshocked, tattered ranks of "liberals" did not dare run the risk of a shocking defeat or the effect of vicious reprisals, by overt moves against McCarthy, that is the ignominious reality...
...Seven and a half pages castigating Sen...
...It documented McCarthy loans at the Appleton bank, said they clearly violated state law and that they had been severely criticized by state and federal examiners...
...2) McCarthy bought Seaboard stock, told a banker friend not to sell "because I have checked with some of the board of directors...
...So McCarthy was duly sworn in...
...Idaho Republican, who promptly made it clear he thought the investigation was nonsensical and that McCarthy was a true-blue, patriotic American of purest ray serene...
...This meant that in the Democratic Senate caucus earlier on Jan...
...There had been covert talk, and some printed speculation, that a move might be made to bar him at the door, to deny him the right to take his oath, or at the very least to seat him "without prejudice"—a technical method of unseating him later on, if the Senate so decided, by a simple majority vote rather than the two-thirds vote required to expel a member whose oath was not subjected in advance to such a reservation...
...The subcommittee raised a question as to whether, after a secret Department of Agriculture investigation, McCarthy "had confidential information with respect to the trend in the soybean future market...
...The subcommittee report did not say whether it even considered this bill of particulars, or whether it pursued some charges and dropped them as unfounded, and if so what the standards were by which it made its judgments...
...2) McCarthy helped end sugar rationing...
...The subcommittee report was unanimous...
...It was signed by Sen...
...Oklahoma Democrat, a "/ Have Here In My Hand—Oops" member of the subcommittee, went to Europe...
...Even when the report was finally issued it consisted of: ' • Eleven and a half pages of almost whines and certainly disingenuous "explanations" of its tenderness toward McCarthy and the "reasons for the long delay" in the inquiry...
...If you want to put it that members of the Senate are historically and traditionally reluctant to investigate each other, for fear of the embarrassing precedents it will set, you have yourself one explanation of this pallid report which fizzled and sputtered like a wet firecracker, and sounded like one instead of the clarion call to action for which so many decent Americans had hoped...
...1952—again from the shelter of the old homestead in Iowa- Gillette resigned from the subcommittee, before a report was issued...
...And it did not subpena Kiermas and other staff members because "until very recently there was always the chance that Sen...
...Carl Hayden, Arizona, Democrats, and Sen...
...McCarthy is tougher than any other bruiser the Gentlemen's Club in Washington has clasped to its bosom since the late Huey Long—and the subcommittee probably arouses no emotion in him except supreme contempt...
...There were complaints that the effect of Monroney's absence, no matter how justified by the pressure of other business, might delay the McCarthy report until the 82nd Congress expired...
...why would Sen...
...The report also documented an inexplicable 1944 Republican primary campaign fund reported by "The Committee to elect Joseph R. McCarthy to the U. S. Senate," which listed large gifts from non-prosperous members of the McCarthy family just after the aspiring politician had personally cleared $40,000 in market speculation...
...A promise to introduce "remedial" legislation...
...The report documented large untraced cash deposits in the Senator's bank account —the total deposits adding up to more than twice as much as his Senatorial salary for five years...
...And on Sept...
...In paying off heavy loans to the Appleton (Wisconsin) State Bank, McCarthy used $39,900.89 in funds the committee was unable to trace and another $14,644.66 lent him by (and later repaid to) "friends" of the bank president...
...The huge budget of documents was arranged in such confused and uncoordinated form that to relate individual items to specific items in the thirty-three pages of report would have required an accountant and a researcher laboring for many days...
...If you prefer to say that Republicans, including the official leadership, refused pointblank to give any assurances that they would support a "strong" report making drastic recommendations about McCarthy, that is also correct...
...He browbeat them so successfully that four out of six one-time members quit before the report was issued...
...In the fall of 1952, Sen...
...Benton mildly for one $600 financial transaction...
...2, 1953, late in the very last day of the dying Congress...
...McCarthy's colleagues despise him but fear him even more —fear the violence of his accusing tongue, his utter unscrupulousness, his proved capacity to endanger anyone who challenges him—that is merely one more ugly fact of life in the Senate of the United States...
...In 1950 McCarthy received a $3,000 check from one Alvin M. Bentley, a character in his own right and now a member of Congress from Michigan, to aid the Senator's "fight against communism...
...his five-year Senatorial salary and expense allowance was $75,000...
...Van Straten in about two months made more than $17,000 in soybean speculation—this after a previously losing record as a market plunger—and sent $10,000 back to McCarthy...
...Millard Tydings of Maryland...
...2, 1953...
...Herman Welker...
...He is today a member in good standing of the Senate and is ready to go hunting headlines again by investigating what he calls "Communist thinking" in the schools...
...3) Russell M. Arundel, Washington spokesman for Pepsi, endorsed a $20,000 bank note for McCarthy at a time he was heavily involved in market speculation and overdue bank loans...
...William Jcnncr, as new head of the Rules and Administration Committee, and his own Wisconsin re-election...
...For decent citizens everywhere, the report, for all its quibbling and indecision, is still a powerful indictment of a Senator and a Senate that tolerates him...
...with participation in the "back street" campaign of 1950 against former Sen...
...Robert C. Hendrickson of New Jersey, Republican...
...It was sarcastic in its treatment of McCarthy, and his bumptious references to himself by WILLARD SHELTON, a Washington correspondent, has watched Congress in action from his peat ir the press gallery for more than a decade...
...Hendrickson signed the Declaration of Conscience against McCarthy in 1950 and signed the report criticizing the Wisconsin Senator's part in the Tydings election campaign, but honesty and aggressive integrity are not always easy burdens...
...Bentley told the subcommittee later that he had agreed with McCarthy that the $3,000 should be "considered a loan rather than a gift" and took a five-year note from the Senator...
...He browbeat them so successfully that they found it more comfortable to raise rather than answer questions on whether or not his election campaign fund reports were falsified...
...They could not—and did not—tell their colleagues what was in the forthcoming report...
...For a man of McCarthy's morals, the Senate subcommittee report is doubtless vindication—a green light to go his marauding way...
...The subcommittee was plagued throughout its inquiry by shifts and changes in membership, all of them individually understandable but in their total effect mounting up to something quite extraordinary in Senate history...
...applying both his well-known charm and his other devices to suggest that the Republican should not make unanimous any report critical in even a limited degree...
...Bentley voluntarily confessed to the subcommittee that he would be disappointed if he learned that McCarthy had used his $3,000 "for gambling or to advance his personal financial condition...
...Apparently McCarthy flew to New Jersey to see Hendrickson early in the last week of 1952...
...To read the report, no one would know that Benton had called McCarthy an "amoral man who used the lie as an instrument of policy" and was therefore unfit for Senate membership...
...The anti-McCarthy Democrats in the Senate quit cold...
...3) at the time he was checking with the directors, the Senator was a member of the Banking and Currency Committee...
...were $172,623.18...
...There is another curious episode...
...Gillette replied mildly, refusing McCarthy's request for the right to cross-examine witnesses, but by Dec...
...bought it for $10,000—at a time it needed no pamphlet but did need more RFC money...
...6, 1951, was not issued until 4 p.m...
...his surname, and it flatly reported as an "inescapable conclusion" a belief that the Wisconsin Senator "deliberately set out to thwart any investigation of him by obscuring the real issue and the responsibility of the subcommittee by charges of lack of jurisdiction, smear, and Communist-inspired persecution...
...2, when the question arose of whether as a party the Democrats should move to bar McCarthy...
...It did not explain why none of these questions was considered, if in fact they were not...
...But she, an eloquent critic of McCarthyism, was succeeded by a McCarthy apologist...
...about his fabulous bank loans and receipts from friends and his complicated financial relations with his administrative assistant, one Ray Kiermas...
...There were New Year's Day conferences, long-distance telephone calls, modification of language, and finally the agreement of Hennings, Hayden, and Hendrickson that the report would be issued—subject to the Hendrickson-dictated deadline of 4 p.m...
...But the smirking McCarthy, apparently confident that his little drops of poison were working powerfully on Gillette's nervous system, cheerfully voted for the resolution himself and blandly announced that in no sense did this mean that the subcommittee was vindicated...
...Shelton has written for The Nation, The Reporter, The Rotarian, and The New Republic Earlier, he worked for a number of daily newspapers, in t lulling the Chicago Sun, the St...
...He was re-elected in November, he forced modification of one of Eisenhower's campaign speeches, he was not barred at the door in January, and he is sitting in the Senate while his enemy, Benton of Connecticut, was thrown out by the voters...
...But the Lustron Corp., manufacturers of pre-fabricated housing then heavily indebted to the Reconstruction Finance Corp...
...But the report did not recommend that the door be shut to a second term or even that McCarthy's oath be administered "without prejudice" pending further inquiry...
...And in the fullness of time, Welker resigned after the subcommittee had worried for several months about how it might phrase a report which, no matter how weak and quibbling, could claim the virtue of unanimous bipartisan endorsement...
...Thirty-three pages on the Senator's financial affairs...
...V Another curious combination of events turned up by Senate investigators went like this: 1) the Seaboard Airline Railroad owed RFC $15,000,000...
...He is free to go his own curious way because he actually succeeded in intimidating the members of the Senate subcommittee...
...And if you want to assume that most of Sen...
...Louis Star-Times, and PM...
...In any case...
...About Bentley's $3,000 "gift" which later became a "loan," the report asked: "Was not this money in a sense A trust fund...
...was lobbying for more sugar...
...Thomas C. Hennings, Jr., Missouri, and Sen...
...He browbeat them so successfully that the report, although initiated in a resolution by former Sen...
...about whether he had mixed funds given him to "fight communism" with other funds for personal market speculation...
...6, 1951, McCarthy was warning Gillette, not too subtly, that his subcommittee was labeling itself "as even more dishonest than was the Tydings Committee" of 1950...
...More than $59,000 of deposits, reported the investigators "has not been identified as to source," and more than $19,000 was in currency...
...McCarthy had tried to peddle a pamphlet on housing to a number of publishers, none of whom showed the slightest interest...
...Gillette*, do you refuse to give me the employment background of those individuals...
...Friday, Jan...
Vol. 17 • February 1953 • No. 2
