Condemning Joe McCarthy
In December 1954, the Senate condemned Joseph McCarthy for behavior unbecoming a U.S. senator. McCarthy’s sensational accusations about Communists infiltrating the U.S. government made national headlines, and he was ultimately disgraced as a paranoid fanatic. But classified documents released after the fall of the Soviet Union have shown that maybe McCarthy wasn’t so wrong after all.
Joseph McCarthy was a Democrat-turned Progressive Republican from Wisconsin who became a U.S. senator in 1946 by attacking his opponents and exaggerating his World War II military record. In the Senate, he was generally disliked because of his hot temper and hard drinking, but he managed to form close friendships with the Kennedys. The Kennedy family patriarch, Joe Kennedy, liked McCarthy’s Irish Catholic heritage and his hatred of Communists, and he sought to use McCarthy to help advance his sons’ political careers.
The Accusations Begin
In the years after World War II, national security was a major issue, as many feared that Communist spies were working within the federal government. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover tried to get officials to act on evidence of Soviet infiltration but was ignored. A confidential Senate report concluded that many State Department employees were either Communists or sympathizers. Classified Soviet documents uncovered in the 1990s revealed that hundreds of Soviet infiltrators worked in sensitive and high-level positions in the U.S. government in the 1940s and 50s.
Based on this evidence, Joseph McCarthy began sounding warnings that went largely unheeded. In many ways, McCarthy was his own worst enemy because his boorish manner and his tendency to claim that unsubstantiated information was the absolute truth caused many to question his credibility. This clouded the general fact that McCarthy had legitimately identified serious breeches in national security.
By 1950, Asia was becoming a Communist continent. China had fallen to communism, the Soviets were arming the North Korean Communists, and communism was threatening Indochina. Moreover, the Soviets were developing an atomic bomb. These events heightened American fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government. At this time, McCarthy was ready to make a startling revelation.
In a Lincoln’s Birthday speech before the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950, Senator McCarthy held up papers and declared, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The list was actually an FBI file that contained information on old investigations of Communists in government jobs. McCarthy later changed the number from 205 to 57, and this changing number damaged his reliability.
On the Senate floor, McCarthy revealed State Department dossiers on suspected Communists. Although the dossiers were over three years old, and most of persons named were no longer State Department employees, they certainly had ties to communism and should not have been working in such sensitive positions in the first place. Nevertheless, opponents claimed that the evidence had no merit because of its age and the fact that many mentioned were no longer employed. And McCarthy’s crude personality and his tendency to exaggerate the truth did not help his cause.
In response to McCarthy’s charges, several fellow Republicans denounced his tactics and the term “McCarthyism” was coined to refer to McCarthy’s abusive manner and reckless accusations. Despite this, McCarthy’s accusations created a sensation and he soon became an extremely popular national figure.
The Tydings Committee
A committee was created in February 1950 to investigate McCarthy’s charges. Many Democrats, including committee chairman Millard Tydings of Maryland, were outraged by McCarthy’s attacks on Democratic President Harry S Truman and thus hoped to discredit him. The committee concluded that those accused by McCarthy were neither Communists nor sympathizers, and McCarthy’s charges were a “fraud and a hoax” intended to “confuse and divide the American people… to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves.”
Later evidence refuted the committee’s findings. In one case being investigated by McCarthy, journalists and government officials had been arrested for divulging classified information to Communist sympathizers, but the Justice Department declined to prosecute them. It was later revealed that Democratic lobbyists had conspired to bury the case. Thus, the Tydings Committee was not created to refute McCarthy as much as it was created to cover up his investigation of a cover-up.
The Tydings Committee’s findings did nothing to stop McCarthy’s hunt for Communists in the government. His approval rating rose, and he gained a powerful national following. McCarthy scored a measure of revenge in the 1950 mid-term elections when he campaigned against Tydings’s reelection and saw him defeated. This gave McCarthy a reputation as a key campaigner, and by 1952 he was one of the most powerful men in the Senate.
McCarthy’s Rise to Power
Senator McCarthy regularly accused President Truman of harboring Communists in his administration. When the Republicans won the presidency and control of Congress in 1952, they hoped that McCarthy would tone down his rhetoric. But he would not.
In 1953, McCarthy changed his “20 years of treason” mantra against preceding Democratic administrations to “21″ to include Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s first year in office. Publicly, Eisenhower stated that he agreed with McCarthy’s goals but disagreed with his methods. Privately, Eisenhower sought to diminish McCarthy’s power and influence.
McCarthy was named chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which allowed him to investigate suspected Communists in government. McCarthy appointed Roy Cohn and Robert F. Kennedy as counsels to the subcommittee (Kennedy served only briefly).
The subcommittee investigated the State Department’s information program, its Voice of America, and its overseas libraries, which panicked the department into banning about 40 books written by suspected Communists. Eisenhower urged, “Don’t join the book burners…”
The Army-McCarthy Hearings
In the fall of 1953, McCarthy began investigating suspected subversion in the U.S. Army. When General Ralph Zwicker refused to answer some of McCarthy’s questions, the senator berated Zwicker and said he was “not fit to wear that uniform.” This attack on Zwicker, a World War II hero, prompted outrage from the military, the press, veterans, politicians of both parties, and the president.
In the press, acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow aired clips of McCarthy’s bluster on his CBS news show See It Now. McCarthy later appeared on Murrow’s show to counter the portrayal, but he further damaged his credibility by accusing Murrow of colluding with the “Russian espionage and propaganda organization” VOKS.
The Army-McCarthy hearings began on April 22, during which McCarthy accused the Secretary of the Army of interfering with McCarthy’s investigation of Communist infiltration in the army. By turning his accusatory temperament against the military, McCarthy suffered a massive public backlash that destroyed his popularity. His crudeness and exaggerated manner of speaking astonished and outraged many of the 20 million Americans who watched the hearings live on national television.
The highlight of the hearings came on June 9 when U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch publicly berated McCarthy by stating, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Lost in many history books was the fact that after the hearings, the committee exonerated McCarthy from any wrongdoing (although it found that McCarthy’s counsel Roy Cohn had engaged in “unduly persistent or aggressive efforts” to uncover evidence). The committee also found that the Secretary of the Army had attempted to block subpoenas by lobbying certain committee members. Despite this, McCarthy’s bullying style prompted many of his fellow Republicans to side with the Democrats in opposing him and his investigations.
McCarthy is Condemned
After two months of hearings and deliberations, a special Senate committee recommended that McCarthy be censured for contempt of a subcommittee that had called him to testify (he had refused to appear), and for his abuse of General Zwicker. The second count was dropped and the censure was downgraded to a “condemnation.”
On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to condemn McCarthy for “conduct… unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate… contrary to senatorial traditions.” Senate Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson led the moves both to pass the measure and to keep it within the bounds of personal conduct. None of McCarthy’s anti-Communist accusations were criticized or refuted.
All Democrats voted to condemn McCarthy, while the Republicans were split. The lone Democrat not voting was John F. Kennedy, who was hospitalized for back surgery. Being McCarthy’s close friend, it is unknown if Kennedy would have defied his party and voted against the condemnation. Kennedy never indicated which way he would have voted and never publicly criticized McCarthy.
Epilogue
While McCarthy’s supporters argued that the Senate resolution was a lesser condemnation, it has been generally regarded as a censure. Following this, most of McCarthy’s supporters turned against him and public support quickly eroded, despite his pledge to continue his anti-Communist inquiries.
With his career ruined, McCarthy continued railing against communism, but few people continued taking heed. His health quickly declined, and he died in 1957 at age 48 from cirrhosis of the liver. It was hinted in the press that he died of alcoholism.
Ironically, even as McCarthy was being condemned, Congress indirectly acted upon the evidence he had produced by introducing a series of anti-Communist bills. Democratic Senator Hubert H. Humphrey even introduced an amendment outlawing the Communist Party.
Classified documents uncovered after the fall of the Soviet Union have proven that McCarthy actually underestimated the number of Communists in government. KGB material has shown that some U.S. officials worked to shape foreign policy to the Soviets’ advantage, and that the KGB regularly debriefed prominent State and Justice Department officials, along with many sympathetic journalists and Hollywood personalities.
Critics have argued that McCarthy conducted a “reign of terror” on freedoms of speech and expression. But even at the peak of McCarthy’s popularity, the Communist Party was never outlawed, Communist publications such as the Daily Worker were never suppressed, and nobody testifying before McCarthy was indicted, tried, or jailed for any crime.
Although Joseph McCarthy intimidated witnesses and behaved miserably, his assertions that Communists were infiltrating the federal government were essentially true. His unethical methods clouded his accusations and made him seem more of a zealot than he actually was. But in the end, perhaps McCarthy was closer to the truth than those who ridiculed and condemned him.
