Joseph McCarthy

Joseph Raymond McCarthy (November 14 1908 – May 2 1957) was an American politician of the Democratic Party and later of the Republican Party. McCarthy served as a U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957. During his ten years in the Senate, McCarthy and his staff became notorious for aggressive campaigns against people in the U.S. government and others who were suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers.

As a result of these controversial actions the term McCarthyism was coined to specifically describe the intense anti-Communist movement that existed in America from 1950 to about 1956, a time which became popularly known as the Second Red Scare. During this period, people from all walks of life who were suspected of Communist sympathies became the subject of aggressive witch-hunts, often based on inconclusive or questionable evidence. People from the media, the motion picture industry, politics, and the military often became the targets of McCarthyism. The term has since become synonymous with any government activity which seeks to suppress unfavorable political or social views, often by limiting or suspending civil rights under the pretext of maintaining national security.

Early life and career

McCarthy was born on a farm in the town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin. Although both of his parents had also been born in Wisconsin, Joseph's paternal grandmother had been born in Germany, and his three other grandparents in Ireland. McCarthy dropped out of junior high school to help his parents manage their farm, and later returned to school and earned his diploma in one year. No one else in the history of his high school had ever done this. McCarthy worked his way through school studying engineering and law, and earning a law degree at Marquette University in Milwaukee from 1930 to 1935, and was admitted to the Bar association in 1935. While working in a law firm in the town of Shawano, he launched an unsuccessful campaign to become District Attorney as a Democrat in 1936. In 1939, after which he successfully vied for the elected post of 10th District judge, becoming the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history.

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McCarthy recieves Commendation Ribbon in 1945
(Courtesty of a McCarthy family member).

In 1942, shortly after the U.S. entered World War II, McCarthy resigned his judgeship and enlisted as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps, and later took a commission as a Lieutenant. His judicial office would have exempted him from compulsory service. He served as an intelligence briefing officer for a bomber squadron in the Solomon Islands and Bouganville. Wartime log entries list 11 missions under McCarthy's name as an aerial photographer and tail gunner, and he was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952, although opponents who have investigated McCarthy question the Navy's decision to make the award. McCarthy was commended by Admiral Chester Nimitz for flying despite an injury, but others who served with him told investigators working for his opponents that his injuries (a broken foot) resulted from a shipboard hazing incident.

He campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination in Wisconsin while still on active duty in 1944, but was easily defeated by incumbent Alexander Wiley. After resigning his commission in April 1945 and being re-elected unopposed to his circuit court position, he began a much more systematic campaign for the 1946 Senate election, again challenging a Republican incumbent, four term Senator and Progressive Party icon, Robert M. La Follette, Jr.. McCarthy enjoyed the support of the state party organization, and won the nomination narrowly. He easily defeated his Democratic Party opponent, Howard MacMurray, in the general election by a 2-1 margin, and joined Senator Wiley, whom he challenged two years earlier, in the United States Senate.

Senator

McCarthy's first three years in the Senate were unremarkable. While he was considered friendly and likeable, he was not taken seriously. McCarthy was criticized for his defense of a group of Nazis that had been sentenced to death for their role in the Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war in 1944. Their death sentences were commuted to life in part because of McCarthy's charges that they had been denied due process. Many charged the Senator had been duped by neo-Nazis.

McCarthy was hungry for popular and media attention, however, and made a large number of speeches to many different organizations, covering a wide range of topics. His most notable early campaigns were for housing legislation and against sugar rationing. During the presidency of Harry Truman his national profile rose meteorically after his Lincoln Day speech of February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.

McCarthy's words in the speech are a matter of some dispute, as they were not reliably recorded at the time, the media presence being minimal. It is generally agreed, however, that he produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is quoted to have said "I have here in my hand a list of 205 people 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 of the State Department". McCarthy stated that he referred to 57 "known Communists," the number 205 referring to the number of people employed by the State Department who, for various security reasons, should not be. The exact number stated later became a matter of some importance when it was used as the basis of an accusation of perjury against McCarthy.

There was indeed a State Department document which listed employees over whom there were various concerns, not merely related to loyalty but also including issues such as drunkenness and incompetence. The effect of McCarthy's speech, however, in a nation already worried by the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union in Europe and alarmed by the trial of Alger Hiss, which was in progress as McCarthy made his speech, was electric. Many Americans believed McCarthy's accusation because it seemed to explain fall of China to the Maoists and the Soviets' development the atomic bomb the year before.

McCarthy himself was taken aback at the massive media response to the speech, and continually revised both his charges and his figures over the following days, a characteristic feature of his method of operation. In Salt Lake City a few days later he cited a figure of 57, and in the Senate on February 20 he claimed 81. He made a marathon speech discussing all these cases in detail, but the evidence for many was tenuous or non-existent; nevertheless, the impact of the speech was considerable. The Senate convened the Tydings committee to examine the charges, which eventually found them to be groundless. Three days after the Tydings Committee dismissed McCarthy's claims, the FBI arrested Julius Rosenberg on charges of espionage for assisting the Soviet Union obtain information from the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic weapon.

Against an effective demagogue such as McCarthy, however, this was ineffective; he simply reformulated his charges slightly and continued making them both in the Senate and to the press. McCarthy was very skillful in using the press. In fact, they were later condemned by many for helping McCarthy. The newspapers always covered the emerging of his new charges and not the collapse of the old. The American public at the time simply believed what they read.

McCarthy also attempted political destruction of his critics, which he achieved when he campaigned against four-term incumbent Millard Tydings in 1950, a victory that severely intimidated his would-be critics. This election was later called one of the dirtiest in American politics. McCarthy's henchmen joined a photograph of Tydings and one of a well known Communist. This was widely distributed, ending Tyding's career.

Anti-Communist crusade

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McCarthy brandishing one of his lists.

From 1950 to 1953 McCarthy continued to press his accusations that the government was failing to deal with Communism within its ranks, while his overnight stardom gave him a powerful national following and a source of considerable income. His finances were investigated by a Senate panel in 1952; its report cited questionable behavior in his campaigns and irregularities in his finances, but found no grounds for legal action. He married Jean Kerr, a researcher in his office, on September 29, 1953.

After the Republican electoral triumph of 1952 - a triumph his exposure of Communist influences within the government aided; it is probable that the defeat of more than one Democratic candidate for national office in 1952 was due at least in part to accusations against him by McCarthy. The party leadership, recognizing his immense popularity and his value as a stick with which to beat liberal Democrats, appointed him chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. His unreliability and evasiveness, however, meant he was never completely trusted by the party (and particularly by President Dwight Eisenhower, who once stated privately that he didn't "want to get into a pissing contest with that skunk!") One of McCarthy's favorite targets was General George C. Marshall. McCarthy and a friend of his Senator William Jenner of Indiana often called this man a liar and a traitor. Eisenhower wrote a speech in which he included a spirited defense of General Marshall. However, McCarthy's henchman convinced him to remove this passage. Harry Truman turned bitterly against Eisenhower because of this. He said Eisenhower was a coward because he owed his career to General Marshall. Truman considered Marshall to be one of the greatest Americans of all time.

McCarthy's committee, unlike the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, focused on government institutions. It first made an investigation into bureaucracy at Voice of America, then forced the withdrawal of supposedly pro-Communist literature from the State Department's overseas information library. Meanwhile, McCarthy continued to make accusations of Communist influence within the government, notwithstanding the fact that it was now a Republican government. This angered Eisenhower. He was not willing to oppose McCarthy publicly due to his continuing popularity, but he now considered McCarthy a dangerous loose cannon and began behind-the-scenes work to remove him from his position of influence.

Several noted persons resigned from the committee fairly early into McCarthy's administration of it, including Robert F. Kennedy, who literally came to blows with McCarthy's chief counsel Roy Cohn. These resignations led to the appointment of B. Matthews as executive director. Matthews was a former member of several "Communist-front" organizations, in which he claimed to have joined more than any other American. However, when he fell out of favor with the radical groups of the 1930s, he became a fervent anti-Communist. Matthews was an ordained Methodist Minister and was therefore often referred to as a "Doctor Matthews" though he held no degree. Matthews later resigned due to his portrayal of Communist sympathies among the nation's Protestant clergy in a paper called "Reds in Our Churches" which outraged several senators. Through this critical period, however, McCarthy maintained control of the subcommittee and of whom it employed or chose not to. This course of action resulted in several more resignations.

McCarthy and Truman

In 1947 no single individual in the US Government realized that evidence of massive Soviet espionage in the U.S. government was developing on twin tracks. There was an FBI counterintelligence investigation which empanelled a grand jury in New York, and the Army Signal Intelligence Service at Arlington Hall reading Soviet cipher decrypts. It was a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing. So when McCarthy later made charges that the Truman administration knowingly protected Soviet agents, on the surface, this appeared to large sectors of the American public as true.

McCarthy and McCarthyism was in part a matter of electoral politics. McCarthy sought to characterize President Truman and the Democratic party as soft on or even in league with the Communists. McCarthy's allegations fell flat with Truman who, unaware of Venona project decrypts which corroborated Elizabeth Bentley's debriefing, considered McCarthy a poor representative of the people of Wisconsin and "the best asset the Kremlin has" for his divisive effect.

McCarthy and Eisenhower

Part of McCarthy's fall (see below) was his overreaching direct attack on President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower detested McCarthy and worked behind the scenes to limit his power. At the same time, not directly confronting McCarthy may have prolonged his power by showing that even a powerful icon such as Eisenhower was afraid to directly criticize McCarthy.

Fall of McCarthy

In the fall of 1953, McCarthy's committee began its ill-fated inquiry into the United States Army. It attempted to uncover a spy ring in the Army Signal Corps, but failed. The committee came to focus its attention on an Army dentist, Irving Peress, who took the Fifth Amendment twenty times under sustained questioning. Peress was accused of recruiting military personnel into the Communist Party. It is known for certain that Peress refused to answer questions on Defense Department forms concerning membership in "subversive organizations", and that the Army Surgeon General had recommended his dismissal early in 1953. McCarthy expressed serious concerns that Peress had not been discharged after that recommendation, but instead had been promoted to the rank of Major.

In examining this latter question, McCarthy brought hostile media attention upon himself concerning his treatment of General Ralph W. Zwicker. Among other things, McCarthy compared Zwicker's intelligence to that of a "five-year-old child", and stated that Zwicker was "not fit to wear the uniform of a General." Charles Potter was one of the few Republican Senators to speak out against McCarthy. He later wrote a book called Days Of Shame in which he lambasted his fellow Senator. He said that McCarthy was nothing but a bully. He was enraged by his treatment of General Zwicker. He pointed out that Zwicker was a decorated hero. Early in 1954, the Army accused McCarthy and Cohn of pressuring the Army to give favorable treatment to another former aide and friend of Cohn's, G. David Schine. McCarthy claimed that the accusation was made in bad faith, in retaliation for his questioning of Zwicker the previous year.

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McCarthy and Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy Hearings

The Senate convened an investigation into the matter, which was broadcast live and on television. In one memorable interchange, McCarthy revealed that the Army's attorney general, Joseph Welch, had hired a lawyer who had previously worked for a Communist-linked group. (This revelation was explicitly in retaliation for Welch's combative questioning.) This led to Welch's famous rebuke: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" These proceedings have been recorded in the documentary film Point of Order! The Senate voted 67 to 22 on December 2, 1954 to condemn Joseph McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute", the first time a senator was censured for actions in a past session of Congress.

Although it is certainly true that the ultimate downfall of McCarthy was his investigations into the Army, it is worth noting that several members of the U.S. Senate opposed McCarthy well before 1953. One example is U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican (and the only woman in the Senate at the time) who delivered her "Declaration of Conscience" on June 1, 1950, criticized both the Executive and Legislative branches use of smear tactics without mentioning McCarthy or anyone else by name. In her Declaration of Concsience, Smith said, "The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of communism and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democratic administration." [1] Six other Republican senators, Wayne Morse, Irving M. Ives, Charles W. Tobey, Edward Thye, George Aiken and Robert C. Hendrickson joined her in condemning McCarthy's tactics. Vermont Senator Ralph E. Flanders also condemned McCarthy on the floor of the Senate and he introduced the resolution to censure him.

One of the most prominent attacks on McCarthy's methods came in an episode of the TV documentary series See It Now, by respected journalist Edward R. Murrow, which was broadcast on March 9, 1954. The show consisted mostly of clips of McCarthy speaking, so any negative reaction would be mostly from McCarthy hanging himself, as it were. In the clips McCarthy does such things as accusing the Democratic party of "twenty years of treason" (1933-1953, in his estimation), and berating witnesses including an Army general.

The Murrow report sparked a nationwide popular opinion backlash against McCarthy, which the Senator tried to counter by appearing on the show himself. McCarthy appeared on See It Now about three weeks after the original episode, where he made a number of personal attacks and charges against Murrow. However, his method of delivery had been designed for a live audience, not a nationwide broadcast one; the result of this appearance was a further decline in his popularity.

McCarthy had always been a heavy drinker, one of the things that had helped him develop amicable relationships with many members of the press. His being censured by the Senate caused anger and depression in McCarthy which turned his heavy drinking into full-scale alcoholism. This aggravated his existing weak health, and caused serious diseases. He finally died of acute hepatitis in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, and was given a state funeral attended by 70 senators, and St. Matthews Cathedral performed a Solemn Pontifical Requiem Mass before over a hundred priests and 2000 others. He was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery, Appleton, Wisconsin. He was survived by his wife Jean and their adopted daughter Tierney.

In addition to being a heavy drinker, Senator McCarthy may have been addicted to morphine. In his 1961 memoir "The Murderers," Harry Anslinger, U.S. Commission of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, admitted to regularly supplying morphine to "one of the most influential members of the Congress of the United States." Although Anslinger's depiction is melodramatic at best, the story strongly suggests that the senator was Joseph McCarthy. This theory was supported by Anslinger's biographer John C. McWilliams in "The Protectors."

Venona Files

In 1995, when the VENONA transcripts were declassified, further detailed information was revealed about Soviet Union espionage in the United States. VENONA specifically references at least 349 people in the United States - including citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents - who cooperated in various ways with Soviet intelligence agencies.

It is generally believed that McCarthy had no access to VENONA intelligence. VENONA confirms that some individuals investigated by McCarthy were indeed Soviet agents. For example, Mary Jane Keeney, a United Nations employee, was identified as a Communist, and her husband Philip Keeney, who worked in the Office of Strategic Services, both Soviet agents. Another individual named by McCarthy was Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to President Roosevelt. He was confirmed by VENONA to be a Soviet Agent.

Venona transcripts confirm the Senate Civil Liberties Subcommittee, chaired by former Senator Robert LaFollette, Jr., whom McCarthy defeated for election in 1946, had at least four staff members working on behalf of Soviet intelligence. Chief Councel of the Committee John Abt; Charles Kramer, who served on three other Congressional Committees; Allen Rosenberg, who also served on the National Labor Relations Board, Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), and the Foreign Economic Administration (FEA); and Charles Flato, who served on the BEW and FEA, all were Communist Party members and associated with the Comintern.

HUAC

McCarthy is often incorrectly described as part of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which is well known for the investigation of Alger Hiss which helped bring Richard Nixon into prominence. HUAC was established in May of 1938 as the "Dies Committee" before McCarthy was elected to the Federal office, and, being a House committee, had no connection with McCarthy who served in the Senate. In 1953, playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, an allegory for McCarthyism. This was probably the primary cause for Miller being brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956.

Additional reading

Bayley, Edwin R. Joe McCarthy and the Press (University of Wisconsin Press, 1981)
Belfrage, Cedric The American Inquisition, 1945-1960: A Profile of the "McCarthy Era" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989)
Coulter, Ann Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown Forum, 2003)
Daynes, Gary Making Villains, Making Heroes: Joseph R. McCarthy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Politics of American Memory (Garland Pub., 1997)
Feldstein, Richard. "Political Correctness: A response from the cultural Left" (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) (linking McCarthyite tactics with neoconservative attacks on 'politically correct' academics)
Fried, Richard M. Men against McCarthy (Columbia University Press, 1976)
Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1990)
McCarthy, Joseph America's Retreat from Victory (Western Islands Publishing, 1952)
McCarthy, Joseph McCarthyism, the Fight for America (Devin-Adair Co., 1952)
Oshinsky, David Senator Joseph McCarthy and the American Labor Movement (University of Missouri Press, 1976)
Ranville, Michael To Strike at a King: The Turning Point in the McCarthy Witch Hunts (Momentum Books, 1997)
Rosteck, Thomas See It Now Confronts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation (University of Alabama Press, 1994)
Rovere, Richard Halworth Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt Brace, 1959)
Watkins, Arthur Vivian. Enough rope; the inside story of the censure of Senator Joe McCarthy by his colleagues, the controversial hearings that signaled the end of a turbulent career and a fearsome era in American public life (Prentice Hall, 1969)
Herman, Arthur. Joseph McCarthy : Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Free Press, 1999)