Senator Joseph McCarthy

Although Joseph McCarthy was one of the most demonized American politicians of the last century, new information -- including half- century-old FBI recordings of Soviet embassy conversations -- are showing that McCarthy was right in nearly all his accusations.

On the evening of May 1, 1957, while convalescing from a bout of hepatitis at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, the courageous Senator was quietly administered poisonous carbon tetrachloride by persons unknown. (Eight years earlier the CIA had murdered Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, in that same hospital. Forrestal had been working on an expose of Soviet espionage rings in the Pentagon and treason in the Truman Administration when he was suddenly silenced in 1949).

Whistlestop
Senator McCarthy with Congressman John W. Byrnes of Green Bay on the Eisenhower train during the 1952 campaign in Wisconsin.

Although Joseph McCarthy was one of the most demonized American politicians of the last century, new information -- including half-century-old FBI recordings of Soviet embassy conversations -- are showing that McCarthy was right in nearly all his accusations.

"With Joe McCarthy it was the losers who've written the history which condemns him," said Dan Flynn, director of Accuracy in Academia's recent national conference on McCarthy, broadcast by C-SPAN.

Using new information obtained from studies of old Soviet files in Moscow and now the famous Vanona Intercepts -- FBI recordings of Soviet embassy communications between 1944-48 -- the record is showing that McCarthy was essentially right. He had many weaknesses, but almost every case he charged has now been proven correct. Whether it was stealing atomic secrets or influencing U.S. foreign policy, communist victories in the 1940s were fed by an incredibly vast spy and influence network.

The conference, a gathering of old McCarthyites and younger scholars, commemorated the senator's first speech, in Wheeling, West Virginia 50 years ago, when he first held up a list of names of employees of the State Department whom, he said, were major security risks. McCarthy questioned how, in six short years after America's winning of World War II, the communist world was triumphant and had expanded to include 800 million people.

Of the lists, a key one consisted of 108 names from a House Appropriations Committee report, of persons declared as "security risks" in the State Department -- the Lee List. The House committee chairman had complained that State wasn't bothering to do anything about the suspects. Details of the list and its accusations were presented at the conference.

Speakers detailed many of the cover-ups used to smear McCarthy. Veteran journalist and teacher Stan Evans, director of National Journalism Center, told of the Tydings Committee, which had investigated McCarthy's charges of communists in government. Its report had exonerated everybody. Among the accused it stated categorically that there was no evidence against Owen Lattimore, a man McCarthy said was a major figure in the communist conspiracy.

Lattimore had been Roosevelt's key advisor on China policy. Yet Evans showed evidence from 5,000 pages of FBI files on him -- files released only a few years ago to the public, although the White House had access to them.

However, evidence before the committee showed that Lattimore had supported Soviet policy at every turn, even declaring that the Stalin purge trials in Russia, "sound like democracy to me." With then-Vice President Henry Wallace in Russia, Lattimore compared concentration camps to the Tennessee Valley Authority, and later urged Washington to abandon China to communism and to withdraw from Japan and Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who had fed information to McCarthy, broke with him afterwards, fearing McCarthy would prejudice FBI sources of information for its criminal prosecutions.

Although most of McCarthy's cases involved actual spies and "security risks," the really important issue was that of communist influence over American foreign policy, argued Evans. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's closest advisor who lived in the White House, had regular contacts with Soviet intelligence. He helped bring about the disastrous Yalta and Pottsdam agreements. The Morganthau Plan, to prevent German reconstruction and starve the Germans to make them desperate enough to go communist, was the product of Laughlin Currie and Harry Dexter White at the Treasury Department. The abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek by denying military support was the product of "China Hands" led by John Stewart Service, John Patton Davies, and Lattimore. Evans described other major spy networks -- in England, the Burgess Maclean group which infiltrated Washington as well as London.

Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, told how he himself had been a leftist in his early career. He had been against McCarthy, but McCarthy's speeches had made him think and start to read "evidence that I had avoided." He described how all during his military career as a Marine officer and later in Japan with the U.S. occupation he had never hidden his leftist views and later had even been offered a job at the CIA. Irvine argued that real communists were only in the hundreds, but that thousands of leftists, such as he, all feared McCarthy and had wanted him discredited.

Pulling all the latest evidence together was luncheon speaker Professor Arthur Herman. His new book, "Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator," and featured in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, shows the vindication of most of McCarthy's charges. Herman, who is also coordinator of the Smithsonian's Western Heritage Program, said that the accuracy of McCarthy's charges "was no longer a matter of debate," that they are "now accepted as fact." However, the term "McCarthyism" still remains in the language.

Asked whether McCarthy had understood all the forces arrayed against him, Herman said no, that McCarthy hadn't realized he'd be fighting against much of the Washington establishment. President Truman was fearful that exposures would reflect on key Democrat officials, he said, and big media and the academic world were very leftist, a heritage of the Depression and World War II. High government officials also feared investigations of their past appointments and associations with people who turned out to be communists or sympathizers.

Joe McCarthy had been a Marine air gunner, an amateur boxer, a county judge and towards his end, under constant attack, he began to drink heavily. Herman said he certainly was over his head and his fall came about after sweeping attacks on General Marshall and the Army. Senator Taft and other key supporters began to draw away from him.

If Robert Kennedy, his competent and well-connected co-counsel, had stayed on, McCarthy might have behaved more carefully, said Herman. An argument with other co-counsel Roy Cohn left Cohn in charge, but Cohn and staffer David Schine were disastrous for McCarthy. Still, McCarthy's original charges helped bring about Eisenhower's electoral victory and the defeat of the Democrats and key leftist Democratic senators such as Tydings of Maryland. Four years after his original charges, Joe McCarthy was censured by the Senate and died shortly thereafter.

There is more evidence to come. Herb Rome Stein, another speaker, who started out with the old House Un-American Activities Committee, is writing a book about the Vanona FBI intercepts and their links to other evidence from his comprehensive study in Russia of Soviet archives, made available to Westerners since the fall of communism. His book, The Vanona Secrets, will be released by Regnery Gateway this fall. © 2000 WorldNetDaily.com.jmc.htm

Committee Hearing
Senator McCarthy speaking during the Army-McCarthy hearings, April 28, 1954.

"Average Americans can do very little insofar as digging Communist espionage agents out of our government is concerned. They must depend upon those of us whom they send down here to man the watch-towers of the nation. The thing that I think we must remember is that this is a war, which a brutalitarian force has won to a greater extent than any brutalitarian force has won a war in the history of the world before.

"You can talk about Communism as though it's something ten thousand miles away. Let me say it's right here with us now. Unless we make sure that there is no infiltration of our government, then just as certain as you sit there, in the period of our lives you will see a Red world.

"Anyone who has followed the Communist conspiracy, even remotely, and can add two and two, will tell you that there is no remote possibility of this war which we are in today--and it's a war, a war which we've been losing--no remote possibility of this ending except by victory or by death for this civilization."

Those words were spoken 40 years ago by U.S. Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, a man who since has been demonized unjustly. Since McCarthy's time the subversion of our nation has proceeded steadily, and his warning to us resonates more and more clearly as truth, now that death for this civilization is in view.

Joseph McCarthy's fame as an anti-Communist began with a speech he delivered on February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he said that there were at least 57 known Communists in the U.S. State Department, and that the State Department knew they were there.

McCarthy's charge was credible, because President Harry Truman's Secretary of State at the time, Dean Acheson, was well known as a man sympathetic to Communism and Communists. As far back as the 1930s Acheson had worked as a lawyer on behalf of Stalin's regime, prior to the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States, and recently he had ignored reports about the Communist Party connections of his protege at the State Department, Alger Hiss. Acheson also had been the chief U.S. advisor at the Yalta Conference, in February 1945, which consigned eastern Europe to Communist rule, and he presided over the drafting of the United Nations Charter. In the State Department Acheson fostered the careers of Communists and stifled the careers of anti-Communists.

Furthermore, as Ohio's Republican Senator Robert Taft said at the time, "Pro-Communist policies of the State Department fully justify Joe McCarthy in his demand for an investigation."

Communist infiltration of the U.S. government had occurred on a grand scale during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt. Congressman Martin Dies, Democrat of Texas and chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities from its inception in 1938 until 1945, had warned Roosevelt in 1940 that there were thousands of Communists and pro-Communists on the government payroll, but FDR refused to take action, saying:

I do not believe in Communism any more than you do, but there is nothing wrong with the Communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists. . . . I do not regard the Communists as any present or future threat to our country; in fact, I look upon Russia as our strongest ally in the years to come. As I told you when you began your investigation, you should confine yourself to Nazis and Fascists. While I do not believe in Communism, Russia is far better off and the world is safer under Communism than under the Czars. Under the circumstances, McCarthy's charge that there were 57 known Communists in the State Department seems very modest.

McCarthy had been a maverick from the beginning. In 1949 he had dared champion the cause of German prisoners of war held in connection with the alleged "Malmédy massacre." In truth, what had happened near the Belgian town of Malmédy in December 1944 was unclear at the time, part of what U.S. General Thomas T. Handy, who in 1949 was the commander in chief of U.S. forces in Europe, called "a confused, mobile, and desperate combat action." It is known now that a number of American soldiers who had surrendered there to the Germans were shortly thereafter killed in cross fire when their captors, who were marching them to a rear area, were engaged by other U.S. units. When their bodies were found by U.S. forces afterward with their hands tied behind their backs, however, it appeared that they might have been deliberately killed.

After the war, Germans who had taken part in the fighting at Malmédy were turned over to U.S. Army Colonel A.H. Rosenfeld and his Jewish underlings for "interrogation." The prisoners were arbitrarily reduced to civilian status so that they would not be protected by the Geneva Convention, and brutal torture was used to extract confessions. When 18-year-old prisoner Arvid Freimuth hanged himself after repeated beatings rather than sign a "confession," the prosecutors were permitted to use as "evidence" the unsigned statement which they themselves had contrived.

McCarthy dared to speak against this officially sanctioned lynching, when almost no one else had the courage to do so. By fearlessly championing the underdogs, the defeated and vilified Germans, and speaking out against the actual atrocities committed by self-righteous aliens in American uniform, the Senator demonstrated the rare moral courage that later propelled him into the forefront of the struggle against Communism.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Raymond Baldwin, Republican of Connecticut, was assigned to investigate the charges of torture, but whitewashed them instead. On July 26, 1949, Senator McCarthy withdrew in disgust from the hearings and announced in a speech on the Senate floor that two members of the Committee, Senator Baldwin and Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee, had law partners among the Army interrogators they were supposedly investigating. This was in several ways a preview of things to come.

The Jews showed instant hostility toward anyone who interfered with their campaign of vengeance against the conquered Germans, and so they began turning their big guns in the media against McCarthy: a December 1949 poll of news correspondents covering the United States Senate already had reporters branding McCarthy "the worst Senator"--a high honor indeed.

When McCarthy had arrived in Washington as a freshman Senator in 1946, he had been invited to lunch by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. McCarthy writes:

Before meeting Jim Forrestal I thought we were losing to international Communism because of incompetence and stupidity on the part of our planners. I mentioned that to Forrestal. I shall forever remember his answer. He said, "McCarthy, consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor." This phrase struck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. Considering the destructive policies that thrived in Washington, McCarthy concluded that to fight Communism effectively it was not enough to denounce Communism in general; anyone--even a Communist--could claim to oppose Communism. The Senator decided that it was necessary to identify those responsible for treasonous policies and then accuse them on the basis of what they actually had done, not on the basis of the ideas to which they paid lip service.

A special investigating subcommittee chaired by Senator Millard Tydings, Democrat of Maryland, was set up purportedly to investigate McCarthy's claim that Communists and pro-Communists were being harbored in the State Department. In reality, as Tydings himself admitted, the purpose was to silence McCarthy. Tydings boasted, "Let me have McCarthy for three days in public hearings, and he will never show his face in the Senate again." Tydings' effort to discredit the upstart patriot would be heavily aided by the major media.

One of the reporters present at the hearings was Elmer Davis, a prominent radio commentator who had been head of the Office of War Information (OWI). McCarthy noted:

Many of the [principals in the] cases I was about to present had once been employees in the OWI under Davis and then had moved into the State Department. As I glanced at Davis I recalled that Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, one of the anti-Communist leaders of Poland, had warned the State Department, while Davis was head of the OWI, that OWI broadcasts were "following the Communist line consistently," and that the broadcasts "might well have emanated from Moscow itself." There could be no doubt how Davis would report the story. . . . At one of the other tables I saw [left-wing, muckraking columnist] Drew Pearson's men. I could not help but remember that Pearson had employed a member of the Communist Party, Andrew Older, to write Pearson's stories on the House Committee on Un-American Activities and that another one of Pearson's limited staff was David Karr, who had previously worked for the Communist Party's official publication, the Daily Worker. No doubt about how Pearson would cover the story. . . . As I waited for the chairman to open the hearing I, of course, knew the left-wing elements of the press would twist and distort the story to protect every Communist whom I exposed, but frankly I had no conception of how far the dishonest news coverage would go. In the case of Owen Lattimore, the testimony of McCarthy's chief witness, ex-Communist Louis Budenz, was widely misrepresented. Lattimore was a scholar on Far Eastern affairs employed by the State Department as a consultant; he had advised the State Department that Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung was merely "a liberal agrarian reformer" at a time when Washington was still unsure how to react to Mao's efforts to overthrow the Chinese government. In McCarthy's words:

[Budenz] . . . testified that . . . [Lattimore], who had been employed by the government, consulted for years by State Department officials on Far Eastern policy, and looked to by newspapermen and magazine editors for news on Far Eastern trends, had been a member of the Communist Party. Many newspapers and wire services so twisted Budenz's testimony about Lattimore, however, that it was not clear to most Americans that Lattimore had indeed been identified positively as a Communist.

One honest reporter, Dave McConnell of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote in the May 16, 1950, edition of his now defunct paper that "you have to use a sieve to strain out the bias in the McCarthy stories published in many papers."

"Tail-gunner Joe," as McCarthy was nicknamed by the press, was seen by many as a national hero. A Gallup poll taken May 21, 1950, showed that among the general public he had four supporters for every three detractors. In a later Gallup poll, taken in January 1954, 50 per cent of the public viewed him favorably, and 29 per cent viewed him unfavorably. McCarthy was the one man in Washington, D.C., who bucked the bipartisan pressure to be polite to America's enemies and to "get along by going along." He was the one man who took anti-Communism seriously and was willing to do something about it.

McCarthy is where he is today because he satisfies the deep national hunger for an affirmative man. In a Washington of vacillating, irresolute, pressure-group-cowed politicians, he stands out in sharp relief as a man sure of himself. His unshaken self-confidence is shown by the opponents he has tackled: they have been Marshall, Acheson, Tydings, Conant--men in the full tide of their authority. And he has never lost a major Washington fight. . . . He sometimes gets too far out in front of public opinion, but so far public opinion has always followed him. . . . Because McCarthy has been willing to act as the shock absorber of the main stream of pro-Communist abuse, the careers of all [other] anti-Communists have been made easier. . . . One far-reaching consequence of [McCarthy's fight] has been its impact upon the American world of ideas. The climate of American public discussion has been amazingly cleared since McCarthy began to fight. . . . The long grip on the nation's communications media exercised by the literary Reds and Pinkos has been broken. . . . This is all very different, of course, from today's popular conception, which was molded by the controlled media. Little is said of McCarthy's popularity, which even Eisenhower dared not challenge directly. Instead, we are led to believe that McCarthy was a brutal tyrant who somehow managed to run roughshod over everyone's civil liberties and give the entire country a very bad case of claustrophobia for several years, all of this as chairman of a Senate subcommittee.

Make no mistake about it: McCarthy did cause considerable discomfort to some people: to the alien subversives and traitors whose ultimate goal was and still is the New World Order. It was these people who, in their effort to silence McCarthy, ironically characterized him as an enemy of free speech. The First Amendment, of course, had been drafted precisely to protect men like McCarthy, who dared to identify treason in high places.

There were undoubtedly, however, some sincere, patriotic Americans who agreed with McCarthy's aim of removing Communists from government, but who found his method, with all of its sensationalism and public-relations gimmickry, distasteful. McCarthy's method was, as he himself explained, a last resort:

I have followed the method of publicly exposing the truth about men who, because of incompetence or treason, were betraying this nation. Another method would be to take the evidence to the President and ask him to discharge those who were serving the Communist cause. A third method would be to give the facts to the proper Senate committee which had the power to hire investigators and subpoena witnesses and records. The second and third methods . . . were tried without success. . . . The only method left to me was to present the truth to the American people. This I did. People who criticized McCarthy's public accusations merely as being in poor taste clearly did not appreciate the gravity of the situation and the necessity for taking action. Also it should be noted that McCarthy had not wanted to read his original list of 57 subversives publicly, but the Tydings Committee required it of him. According to the Congressional Record of Feb 20, 1950, p. 2049, McCarthy protested on the Senate floor:

I think . . . it would be improper to make the names public until the appropriate Senate Committee can meet in executive session and get them. . . . It might leave a wrong impression. Unfortunately, "the wrong impression" was exactly what the Tydings Committee wished to promote. In other words, contrary to the reputation for "recklessness" that was applied to him, McCarthy exercised his First Amendment right with great care.

Like some resurrected Paul Revere or latter-day Cicero, it was he who sounded the alarm, who let the American people know that their government had been subverted by alien interests; and it was the shadow government of "globalists" who wished to silence him, so that their power and their pernicious influence would remain hidden from the American people.

International Communism and international finance--the twin thrusts of Jewish power--were both ill-served by the attention McCarthy drew to the issues of loyalty and subversion.

In the 1952 elections the Republicans captured both houses of Congress and the Presidency, largely due to McCarthy's influence. McCarthy became chairman of the Senate's Government Operations Committee and its Subcommittee on Investigations. The new President, however, was a pet of the New World Order clique, and he would succeed where Truman had failed in discrediting McCarthy.

In the discrediting of McCarthy, there is no doubt that there was a conspiracy at work. We know this because men who were privy to the conspiracy later wrote books about it. The activities of the conspirators were, of course, necessarily subtle; Eisenhower himself studiously avoided even mentioning McCarthy's name in public, and the media coverage was almost unbelievably biased. Thus, for the general public, the arrangements which brought down McCarthy were a mystery, though in essence they were very simple: McCarthy was maneuvered into an awkward position, the major media portrayed him as unfavorably as possible, and his colleagues deserted him.

McCarthy's reputation was destroyed chiefly by the feud that two staffers on his Subcommittee on Investigations, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, conducted against the United States Army, contrary to McCarthy's wishes.

Under pressure from influential Jewish columnist George Sokolsky and the Jewish president of the Hearst Corporation, Richard Berlin, both purported anti-Communists, McCarthy announced on January 2, 1953, that 26-year-old Roy Cohn would be the chief counsel of the Investigations Subcommittee. Cohn, the son of New York Supreme Court Judge Albert Cohn, had been well served by his Jewish connections in the past, having been hired as an assistant U.S. attorney immediately after passing the New York bar examination. Cohn himself later admitted that he was hired by McCarthy primarily because he was a Jew:

There was a growing slander abroad in the land . . . that McCarthy was a Jew-hater . . . and he wanted to deflect it. I was the obvious answer, and the alternative--[Robert Kennedy,] the son of the well-known, well-documented anti-Semite Joseph P. Kennedy, the former pro-Hitler ambassador to the Court of St. James--was the last person McCarthy needed to head his committee. It probably need not be stressed that the Jews themselves were the source of this "slander" that McCarthy felt obliged to counter.

Thus, McCarthy was stuck with Cohn; privately he expressed the fear that if Cohn resigned for any reason the charge of "anti-Semitism" immediately would be raised against him again.

Furthermore, with most of the news media already solidly against him, McCarthy was desperate for some favorable press coverage. Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen commented, "Cohn was put on the Committee by the Hearst press, and Joe doesn't dare lose that support."

Cohn, who died of AIDS in 1986, was a homosexual, and rumor of the perversion became widespread after Cohn had brought another young Jew, G. David Schine, onto McCarthy's staff. According to Cohn himself in his autobiography, Cohn and Schine were then rumored to be "Jack and Jill." This rumor was undoubtedly a great embarrassment to McCarthy, since the controlled media had not yet succeeded in making homosexuality fashionable, and homosexuals were among the security risks to be investigated.

At Cohn's insistence, Schine was accepted as an unpaid "chief consultant" on Communism. Schine's credentials for this position were that he had authored a pamphlet, Definition of Communism, which his wealthy parents had allowed him to distribute in their hotel chain. This pamphlet gave incorrect dates for the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Communist Party, confused Marx with Lenin, Stalin with Trotsky, and Kerensky with Prince Lvov, and got Lenin's name wrong. The Jewish millionaire-playboy was thus highly qualified, in Cohn's view, to be a consultant.

McCarthy hoped that he could save himself from accusations of "anti-Semitism" with Roy Cohn, and if necessary, with Dave Schine. But the day McCarthy accepted these two Jews as his assistants was the day his downfall really began.

As the son of a Jewish multi-millionaire, Schine had avoided the draft for the Korean War by getting himself classified 4-F. As soon as he became a staff member of McCarthy's committee, however, at the instigation of left-wing journalist Drew Pearson the Army reclassified Schine 1-A and drafted him. Thus, the stage was set for Roy Cohn to involve McCarthy in a dispute with the United States Army.

It is clear that McCarthy was dragged into this dispute against his will. Army lawyer John Adams relates:

Senator McCarthy spoke out quite freely about his irritation over Schine. He told me that the individual is of absolutely no help to the committee, was interested in nothing but the photographers and getting his picture in the papers, and that things had reached the point where he was a complete pest. McCarthy stated to me quite emphatically that he was anxious to see this individual drafted, and . . . he hoped . . . we would send him as far away as possible "to get him out of [his] hair." . . . "Send him wherever you can, as far away as possible. Korea is too close." Cohn raised hell with the Army, first threatening revenge for the drafting of Schine, then agitating for special treatment for his putative boyfriend. John Adams stated in a January 21, 1954, meeting in Attorney General Herbert Brownell's office that demands for the names of Army loyalty-board members usually were preceded by flare-ups over the reassignment of Schine. McCarthy was not happy about this behavior, and he privately complained that Cohn was indeed carrying out a vendetta against the Army on account of Schine.

McCarthy had instructed Adams on December 17, 1953, that, having learned the extent of the interference Cohn and Schine were causing for the commanding general of Fort Dix, he wished the Army to discontinue all special treatment for Schine. Subsequently, the alleged anti-Communist Jew, columnist George Sokolsky, contacted Adams repeatedly, continuing to urge special treatment for Schine. On February 12, 1954, Sokolsky went so far as to tell Adams that he, Sokolsky, would "get them to drop all this stuff they are planning for the Army [i.e., McCarthy's investigation of Communist subversion in the Army]," if a special assignment were arranged for Schine. It seemed that Sokolsky was more concerned about the comfort and convenience of one fellow Jew than about the national security of the United States--or he was deliberately exacerbating the animosity between the Army and McCarthy.

Meanwhile, in late January 1954 a story in the New York Post featured Fort Dix recruits complaining that Schine lived among them like a visiting dignitary--and Joseph McCarthy was taking the blame.

Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens said that he was wary about "discriminating against" Schine, because Schine was a Jew. Likewise, McCarthy said that he was afraid to fire Cohn, "because [I] might be accused of being anti-Semitic." Here we have the Secretary of the Army and the chairman of a Senate committee, both paralyzed by fear of being called "anti-Semitic," allowing 26-year-old Roy Cohn and the utterly inconsequential G. David Schine to walk all over them.

It was not only the fact that McCarthy had felt the wrath of the Jews when he had spoken out against the barbarous treatment of German prisoners five years earlier that made him wary of offending them again. His investigations into Communist subversion were turning up a vastly disproportionate number of Jewish Communists, and he was afraid that the Jews would believe he was hunting Jews rather than Communists.

By using the threat of investigation as a weapon to coerce the Army into giving special treatment to his friend Schine, Cohn had tainted the legitimacy of McCarthy's patriotic work. Cohn was creating exactly the impression of reckless disregard for fairness and propriety that McCarthy had wished to avoid.

McCarthy had apparently hoped that the alleged anti-Communist Jews with whom he dealt were what they claimed to be. With their involvement, however, all his efforts met with grief. If the Senator had taken account of Jewish traits--especially their bent for deception, which goes far beyond anything encountered in the Gentile world--then perhaps he would have braved the charges of "anti-Semitism" rather than tolerate Jews on his staff.

The anti-Communist credentials of Jewish columnist George Sokolsky, for example, who had recommended Roy Cohn, were invented rather late in life. In 1917, at the age of 24, Sokolsky had gone to Russia with a large number of other Jews, filled with ardor for the prospect of world Communism and hoping to lend a hand to the Bolsheviks in fastening the Communist yoke on the Russians. For a while he edited the English-language Communist newspaper Daily News in Petrograd; then he left for China to practice his journalistic skills on behalf of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen, who was working to set up a Communist government in China and was receiving aid from the Soviets. In 1931, claiming disillusionment with the methods of Bolshevism, he returned to the United States, where he used different methods.

As a right-wing columnist for the Hearst newspapers, Sokolsky was well-placed to accomplish much for the Jewish obsession with the New World Order by misdirecting the anti-Communist movement into blind alleys, false hopes, and confusion--and away from the truth. Considering these facts, are we justified in believing his claim that he had completely changed his ideals and in the 1950s was fervently against what he had been fervently for earlier in Russia and China? A clue may be provided by Sokolsky's 1935 book, We Jews, in which he lamented the fact that Jews are not even more cohesive than they are. Certainly, no race-conscious Jew could have genuinely supported McCarthy's efforts to root Communists out of positions of influence in American life, since he would have understood that exposing Communism meant exposing Jews.

Similarly, Roy Cohn, who called Sokolsky his "rabbi," was another member of the far left who claimed a miraculous conversion: as late as 1949 he was openly calling anti-Communism a "witch-hunt" and said that Alger Hiss was a victim of a "right-wing conspiracy." Given the legendary cohesiveness of the Jewish people and the Jewishness of Communism, one is justified in viewing these overnight conversions with suspicion.

There is more than Roy Cohn's youthful attachment to leftist causes to make us suspicious of his motives: his father Albert Cohn had been the first judge appointed by Franklin Roosevelt after the latter became governor of New York. Thus, the Cohns were firmly attached to the very clique that had fostered what McCarthy called "twenty years of treason."

It looks very much as if McCarthy, who wished so much to avoid crossing the Jews, allowed himself to be swindled in the age-old game of Good Jew/Bad Jew.

The man whom Eisenhower had appointed Secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, head of the J.P. Stevens textiles business, was staunchly anti-Communist, having witnessed the pernicious influence of Communists in exacerbating labor disputes. Stevens was even distrustful of New Deal supporters. He was thus appointed not as a member of the New World Order clique around Ike, but merely as a valuable (if misguided) Republican booster. Stevens had apparently taken Eisenhower's anti-Communist campaign rhetoric at face value.

Upon assuming office in February 1953, Stevens requested a briefing on the Army's Loyalty and Security Program: "The presentation should set forth what steps are to be taken to prevent disloyal and subversive persons from infiltrating the Army, and what steps have been taken to discover and remove such persons who may have found their way into the Army Establishment." So concerned was Stevens about combatting subversion that he asked advice from J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Finally, when Stevens heard that McCarthy was concerned about security risks in the Army, he rushed a telegram to him, offering his assistance in the investigation.

McCarthy's staff announced on September 10, 1953, that there was very serious evidence of espionage at Fort Monmouth. The evidence was an extract of a report from J. Edgar Hoover to the head of Army Intelligence. The document mentioned 35 Fort Monmouth employees as security risks, most of them Jews of Russian origin who had been in contact with the atom-bomb spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Stevens instructed the commanding general at Fort Monmouth: "Cooperate! See to it that they interview anyone they wish to."

During the investigation at Fort Monmouth, however, attention was diverted to nearby Camp Kilmer. This was the case of the Jewish Communist Irving Peress. Peress, an Army dentist who was proved to be not only a member but an organizer of Communist groups, had sworn a false oath upon receiving his officer's commission. Worse, when the matter was exposed Peress was promoted and later given an honorable discharge, thus escaping the jeopardy of a court-martial. The Peress case was a tremendous embarrassment to the Army, because it showed that security in the Army was a mere formality which was easily circumvented.

McCarthy's confidential informant on the Peress case was General Ralph Zwicker. A hearing in New York City was arranged, and General Zwicker was called to testify as to the identity of the Pentagon official who had ordered Peress' honorable discharge. On the very morning of the hearing, however, Zwicker received an order from John Adams not to reveal the official's name. McCarthy did all he could to persuade Zwicker to talk in spite of the order, but he failed.

Thereafter the press made a great fuss over McCarthy's rough treatment of Zwicker and the "insult to the uniform." It was alleged that McCarthy had without cause accused Zwicker of shielding subversives.

Secretary Stevens decided not to allow General Zwicker or other Army officers to testify further. Says William Ewald, a Department of Defense official at the time: "A cheer went up: from anti-McCarthyites within the Administration itself, from editorial writers far and wide, from liberals coast to coast." Especially noteworthy was a telephone call to Stevens from Marshall Plan administrator Paul Hoffman in California--at whose residence Eisenhower was then vacationing. This congratulation was inferred to represent the attitude of that champion McCarthy-hater, President Ike.

Eisenhower's friend Hoffman was married to Anna Rosenberg, who had been Truman's Jewish Assistant Secretary of Defense in 1950 and had been diligent in promoting liberal programs in the Army and the other armed services. She, more than anyone else, had forced full racial integration on the services.

Unlike Ike, however, Secretary Stevens was not an implacable foe of McCarthy and anti-Communism. Although he thought Roy Cohn was awful, he said he saw McCarthy as a "reasonable" man. In a conference with the majority members of McCarthy's subcommittee, an agreement was reached and Stevens signed a document that stated this accord. The anti-McCarthy interpretation of this event has been that Secretary Stevens did not understand what he was doing. More likely, Stevens did not understand what Eisenhower was doing. Nor did the American people understand!

Stevens said of the media's explosively hostile reaction to his reconciliation with McCarthy, "I think I have been absolutely crucified. . . ." Furthermore, he showed naiveté by saying that he thought the press had "misunderstood" the agreement.

Eisenhower decided to have Secretary Stevens "admit an administrative error" and renege on the agreement. A repudiation of Stevens' agreement with McCarthy was composed, and Stevens was made to read it publicly.

Meanwhile, President Eisenhower's staff, without Stevens' knowledge, had instructed Stevens' subordinate John Adams to compile a written record of Cohn's and Schine's behavior. Adams, a holdover from the Truman administration, apparently was considered more politically reliable than the conservative Stevens.

On March 8, 1954, when Secretary Stevens was asked about the record of improper pressure by Cohn and Schine (which John Adams had leaked to the press a few days earlier) he said, "I personally think that anything in that line would prove to be very much exaggerated. . . . I am the Secretary, and I have had some talks with the committee and the chairman . . . and by and large as far as the treatment of me is concerned, I have no personal complaints . . . ."

On March 10, although Stevens had not even been aware of the Schine chronology two days earlier, he was pressured into approving a version heavily "revised" by Defense Department attorney Struve Hensel. It was called the "Stevens-Adams chronology," although Stevens had only just learned of it. Under pressure, the Secretary of the Army was now lending his name to a document that he had said would be "very much exaggerated."

In late April 1954 the Army-McCarthy hearings began. The Army had accused McCarthy and Roy Cohn of using improper pressure, evidence of this being the so-called "Stevens-Adams chronology." McCarthy counter-charged that the Army was trying to discredit his committee and stop its investigation of the Army.

During the hearings Stevens was the Army's "star witness." He "stonewalled" the subcommittee, giving vague, unresponsive, and often self-contradictory testimony. It became clear to McCarthy that Stevens was acting under orders from Eisenhower's staff. The Army's case, however, already had been blown sky-high, and McCarthy essentially vindicated, when Senator Everett Dirksen, a member of the McCarthy Subcommittee, testified that the Army's counsel John Adams and Eisenhower's administrative assistant Gerald Morgan had approached him on January 22, 1954, seeking to stifle part of McCarthy's investigation of the Army. Dirksen testified that Adams had mentioned the Army's file on Cohn and Schine, dropping a "hint" that these files might be very damaging if they were "issued and ventilated on the front pages" of newspapers.

At this point, John Adams, not wishing to be the lone scapegoat for Eisenhower, and, furthermore, living under the possibility of a prosecution for perjury, revealed that he had been told to compile the chronology on Cohn and Schine by members of Eisenhower's staff in a secret meeting in the Attorney General's office the day before approaching Dirksen.

The White House was now clearly implicated in a conspiracy to shield subversion in the government. On May 17 Eisenhower, in an obvious attempt to prevent his own role from being investigated further, issued what became known as the "iron curtain" order. Eisenhower claimed that it was a Constitutional principle that the President could forbid his subordinates from revealing any information to the Congress.

On May 27, after several more days of vague, unresponsive, and sometimes conflicting testimony from Stevens, McCarthy responded in exasperation to Eisenhower's gag order: "The oath which every person in this government takes, to protect and defend the country against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that oath towers far above any presidential security directive." He urged federal employees to come forward with any information they might have about corruption and subversion in government.

The next day Eisenhower had his press secretary convey to the media a statement that likened McCarthy to Hitler: a comparison that was not meant to flatter McCarthy. Edward R. Murrow and other media figures took their cue and began echoing that line.

McCarthy, however, was expressing essentially the same idea which Theodore Roosevelt had expressed half a century earlier, when the latter said:

It is patriotic to support [the President] insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. . . . In any event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth--whether about the President or anyone else. And of course, the truth was exactly what Ike feared. Was this not the Eisenhower who had carried out Operation Keelhaul after the Second World War, in which anti-Communist Russians, Hungarians, and others were forcibly repatriated to a certain death under Communism? Was this not the Eisenhower who deliberately starved to death over a million German prisoners of war? And was this not the same Eisenhower who later sent paratroopers into Little Rock to enforce racial integration with bayonets?

Regardless of the legal result, biased media coverage made the Army-McCarthy hearings a propaganda victory for the pro-Communists. Army counsel Joseph Welch, through hyperbole and histrionics, managed to convince a large portion of the public that a few peripheral issues he raised during the hearings were serious embarrassments to McCarthy.

For example, Welch insisted for the television cameras that part of an FBI report listing subversives at Fort Monmouth was "a carbon copy of precisely nothing" and "a perfect phoney," even though FBI Director Hoover said that he had written it. Similarly, Welch dramatically accused McCarthy of introducing a "doctored" photograph into evidence: it was a quite genuine photograph, which merely had been cropped and enlarged for the sake of clarity. The media played up Welch's accusations and ignored McCarthy's explanations.

Welch was much more an actor than a lawyer: later, in 1959, he starred in a major Hollywood production, Anatomy of a Murder, alongside Jimmy Stewart and Lee Remick. In any event, during the Army-McCarthy hearings the Senate hearing room was his stage, and he played his role to the hilt. When McCarthy pointed out that a member of Welch's own law firm, Fred Fischer, had been a member of the National Lawyers' Guild, an organization cited as a Communist front by the Attorney General, Welch waxed maudlin and sobbed the famous line, "Have you no sense of decency at long last?" Later, outside the hearing room, Welch wept again for the benefit of the news photographers.

As reported by the media, Welch was a man of great humanity who was shocked that McCarthy would be so ignoble as to attempt to ruin Fischer's career with his accusation, while McCarthy was a heel for even raising the matter. The fact that McCarthy's charge was perfectly accurate seemed to make no difference at all to the media.

And so it was with other episodes in the hearings. One contemporary observer, Harold Varney, noted in the American Mercury:

Unfortunately, the anti-McCarthy press was not honest enough to admit publicly that the Senator had been vindicated. The smearers continued to parrot the smears, just as if the disproof were not before the country. The masters of the controlled media were determined to "get" McCarthy, and they did. They had not directed as much hatred on any public figure since Adolf Hitler.

By September many of his supporters in the Congress, ever sensitive to the direction of the political wind, had thrown in the towel. McCarthy's Senate colleagues stripped him of his committee chair in November. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to condemn him for "conduct contrary to Senatorial traditions." The condemnation permanently ended his effectiveness as a legislator.

Cohn & McCarthy
Senator McCarthy with his former chief counsel Roy Cohn (right) during a press conference, March 12, 1954.

New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988. Hardcover. 423 pages. Photographs. Index. ISBN: 1-55611-104-5.

Reviewed by John Cobden By any objective standard, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith is one of the most influential organizations in America today. Its ability to cajole, intimidate and pressure politicians, newspapers and broadcasters is legendary. In recent years, it has devoted considerable effort to countering the growing impact of Holocaust Revisionism.

During the last several months, the ADL's nationwide "intelligence gathering" operations have come under critical scrutiny. Although the Gerard/Bullock "ADL spy scandal" is still unfolding, police officials have already charged the ADL with criminal conduct, and some of the ADL's many victims have filed a class action suit against the powerful Zionist organization.

For more than forty years Arnold Forster, the author of this memoir, served as General Counsel and Associate National Director of this misnamed organization. I say misnamed because any unbiased reader of this boastful work cannot help but conclude that defamation has been a hallmark of Forster's career.

He has written a dozen books, most of them polemical attacks against alleged anti-Semites, particularly in the conservative movement. In his work for the ADL, Forster (who changed his name from Fastenberg) has been quick to pin the anti-Semite label on just about anyone suspected of harboring less than total support for Israel and the Jewish people. While his accusations have doubtless often been correct, in many cases his charge of anti-Semitism -- just about the most harmful thing any public figure can be called -- has had little or no basis in reality, except in the tortured logic of a professional anti-anti-Semite.

Praise from Wiesel In his fulsome foreword to Square One, Elie Wiesel makes clear that he, along with Forster, regards any critic of Israel as an enemy of the Jews and, by extension, of humanity. (pp. 17, 18). In praising Forster, Wiesel writes:

What is the anti-Zionist campaign, the anti-Israeli propaganda, if not the same archaic hatred [against Jews] in modern dress?... Here is a fearless man who refuses all compromise when it comes to defending the Jewish people, and through it, all of humanity... He loves Israel, as I do, with all his heart. This arrogant Jews=humanity equation doesn't work in reverse, though. Wiesel would never praise anyone as "a fearless man who refuses all compromise when it comes to defending the Palestinian (or German, or Spanish or ...) people, and through it, all of humanity."

In an effort to justify a belief in Jewish moral superiority, Forster writes: "No other religion, it was pointed out, so celebrated the principle of freedom." (p. 138) Whatever the merits of this view, if the actions of Arnold Forster and the ADL -- as recorded in this book -- are any indication, he has fallen woefully short of this proclaimed ideal.

Suppressing Free Speech Forster tells us that the ADL "was chartered to defend against defamation," and that it has "a reputation for reliability and accuracy." (p. 151) He suggests that his accusations are always based on solid evidence. As he acknowledges here, though, Forster has spent much of life working to suppress the free speech rights of those whose views he does not like. This book establishes that the only evidence Forster needs to accuse someone of anti-Semitism is his own say-so.

Mystical Insight In his foreword, Wiesel warns us that we will break into tears when we read Forster's account of how he responded to an attack against his son, Stubs. Forster's account (pp. 179, 180) may not bring tears, but it does provide an enlightening insight into the workings of the mind of a professional anti-anti-Semite. (For no apparent reason, we are parenthetically told that Stubs is blond, and that he now also has a son who is blond.)

Arnold Forster describes an evening in December 1965 when he learned by telephone that Stubs had been found beaten and unconscious on a roadside, apparently the victim of an attack. The narration continues as he describes the drive to the hospital with his wife and daughter, Jayne:

Leaning forward, straining to see the road, I remember I kept muttering, "the sons of bitches, the sons of bitches. After a long silence, Jayne spoke up. "Dad, why'd they beat up Stubs? Did he do something wrong?"

Thus, without any evidence whatsoever, Arnold Forster claimed to know that his son was attacked because he "defend[s] the Jews." (To this day, no one has ever been charged in the incident.) Forster's instant accusation of anti-Semitic motivation was a reflex assumption based, apparently, on what might be called a mystical revelation.

Violence Against Nazis The casual reader might easily assume that Forster is opposed to violence as a means of silencing political opponents. That would be an error. Early on, Forster recounts an incident in which he and a group of friends encountered some youths who, he says, were marching through the street chanting "Up with Hitler, down with the Jew." (p. 40) Forster tells how he and his buddies responded:

When they got to where we were standing, without a word passing among the five of us we stepped off the sidewalk into their path. Fists, as they say, flew. Five young attorneys, we should probably have known better. But also healthy and outraged, ours was a spontaneous combustion. The sudden brawl turned out to be a short-lived free-for-all. While Forster is outraged because of violence allegedly directed at his son because of his views, he is himself ready to engage in violence against those whose politics he finds offensive. As this memoir makes abundantly clear, this is hardly the only example of Forsters' abiding hypocrisy.

He tells us (p. 43) of his "anti-Nazi street-corner speeches." These presentations were freewheeling, not limited strictly to anti-Semitism; they ranged across the spectrum of what we thought was the broader problem. Any danger signal was worth mentioning, and danger signs were all around. For example, the Smith Act was adopted, making it a crime to advocate or teach the need to overthrow the government, or belong to a group dedicated to such a purpose. Entirely opposed to Communism, we nevertheless had deep misgivings about the outlawing of mere advocacy. Democracy, we argued, was being eroded by methods intended to protect it.

As touching as these words might be, they are not sincere. In Forster's view, the First Amendment protects Communists but not real or imagined Nazis, anti-Semites or other "hate-mongers." While proudly defending, in the name of "democracy," his own right, and that of Communists, to speak freely, he doesn't refrain from dubious legal actions and even fist-fights to squelch the free speech of those he hates.

Forster tells how he made use of the police in fighting his ideological battles. Any "Nazi" who dared speak in public was put under surveillance by Forster and his friends. In each case, at least two of them "were assigned to attend meetings along with one of our attorneys. If a speech or the situation warranted it, one was to make a complaint to a nearby policeman and request the immediate arrest of the speaker. The other layman would be a witness." (p. 42) The only crime committed by these individuals was to make a speech of which Forster did not approve. "We got convictions ..." he brags.

Shylockian Legal Pretexts To this his one-sided interpretation of the Constitutional right of freedom of speech, Forster provides an unusual legal theory. After describing a stern lecture by a judge who chastised him for his opportunistic construction of the First Amendment (p. 45), Forster relates:

The magistrate may have been well grounded in his interpretation of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech and assembly. But my research has persuaded me that the Constitution does not protect "fighting words" that incite immediate violence, even if the violence is immediately prevented by the attending police. "Fighting words," in Forster's arrogant view, are only words that provoke violence by him and his ideological friends. As Forster interprets the Constitution, an individual's First Amendment rights depend on the subjective, emotional reactions of his opponents. (As we have repeatedly seen, professional anti-anti-Semites need little to provoke them to violence. For example, the mere presence of Ernst Zündel as walked into a Toronto courtroom in 1985 to stand trial was enough to rouse a mob to fury enough to begin beating him.)

Forster's view of the First Amendment is dangerous because much language that is quite acceptable to most people can incite violence in a few. If his view were ever to became the prevailing legal norm, there would be no First Amendment left.

Forster tells of another special First Amendment legal theory, this one dealing with broadcasters. Some decades ago, a member of the Ku Klux Klan named Lycergus Spinks ran for governor of Mississippi. A campaign speech by Spinks delivered over a Mississippi radio station so enraged Forster and his ADL colleagues (p. 84) that they responded with open legal action along with press releases and refusal to sit still in the face of a klansman advocating his own election by defaming Jews. But the legal action was not directed at Spinks. I proceeded against the radio station that was involved, interpreting existing laws to mean that because broadcasters were licensed by federal authorities they were not in the same category as newspapers, which were entitled to First Amendment protection.

In Forster's view, government licensing removes First Amendment rights for radio (and presumably television) stations. So pleased was he with his unique interpretation of the Constitution (p. 84) that he brought similar suits against other radio stations:

Additional complaints were filed with the FCC about other stations that permitted the Spinks style of inflammatory comment. We won a number of cases, lost more. In some situations station owners backed away from giving their microphones to professional bigots after we complained to the FCC. At other times they fought us even while learning that allowing hatemongers the use of their facilities was to risk their licenses. What Forster calls a victory here was, in reality, a dangerous defeat for the First Amendment rights of all Americans.

Unfortunately, such shenanigans are not just unsavory episodes from the distant past. Just a few years ago the Anti-Defamation League, with Forster's active participation, successfully intimidated numerous radio stations into canceling their broadcasts of allegedly anti-Israel commentaries of Liberty Lobby -- the populist organization based in Washington, DC. In addition to the tactics that had proven their worth in the Mississippi case, the ADL pressured businesses into withdrawing advertising from the offending stations.

Other Measures One such station, WVOX of New Rochelle, New York, pointed out that while Liberty Lobby paid for its air time, Forster's own radio program, "Dateline Israel," was carried free of charge. Station president William O'Shaughnessy told The New York Times that he and his station took pride in presenting a diverse range of opinions. Forster responded by insisting that the Liberty Lobby broadcast "is outside the spectrum of legitimate discussion and cannot be balanced by an equal number of programs on the 'pro' side." The only side of this issue that deserves First Amendment protection, Forster implicitly asserts, is the one that supports Israel. In Forster's view, the only legitimate "debate" about US support for Israel should be over how much aid American taxpayers should be giving. (For a fascinating narration of the ADL campaign to ban Liberty Lobby from the airwaves, read Conspiracy Against Freedom. This book includes many of the actual letters and internal documents used by the ADL in this campaign.)

Forster approvingly recounts other attacks against First Amendment rights. During the war, the Roosevelt administration charged 28 right-wing and isolationist leaders with "conspiracy to promote revolution in the US armed forces." (p. 81) After eight months the trial was suspended, and two years later the indictment was dismissed and the case closed. But Forster expresses no disapproval of this blatant attempt to suppress political opposition. To the contrary. "If the litigation did nothing else," he writes, "it as least interrupted some of the most divisive activities this nation has ever known." (pp. 81-82)

Another pernicious action that Forster finds entirely laudable was Franklin Roosevelt's shutting down of Social Justice, the magazine of the popular "radio priest," Father Charles Coughlin. (p. 82) As Forster notes:

Federal authorities revoked the paper's second-class mailing privilege, barred it from the U.S. mails and charged it with being in violation of the 1917 Espionage Act for "aiding the enemy" by disseminating Nazi propaganda. President Roosevelt's making clear his attitude to cabinet members undoubtedly was the reason for the Post Office Department's action. Anti-Anti-Communism Further pointing up his own shameless hypocrisy, just a few years later Forster was hard at work defending Communists and other left-wingers from investigation by the US Congress. In the case of such "innocent people," he stridently argues, a person's political opinions must not be a factor in employment.

Forster claims (p. 170) the existence of a secret right-wing conspiracy of unnamed individuals who allegedly used a "blacklist" to keep Communists from getting jobs:

I said the blacklist, to my knowledge, was the creation of a cabal of extremist self-styled anti-communists using their cause to deny their victims the right to earn a living for having allegedly radical political views. Forster reluctantly admits that some of those he defended did, in fact, work with Communist front groups. He concedes, for example, that John Garfield (originally Julius Garfinkel), a boyhood friend who was a popular movie actor during the 1940s, "had without question time and again, joined paths with some undoubted Communists." (p. 151) In his defense, Forster writes that Garfield "was an extraordinarily gullible liberal or at worst, a political fool" who "unwittingly allowed his name to be used by politically sophisticated, camouflaged Communist sharpshooters." (p. 154)

Forster devotes an entire chapter of this book to defending the "tragic" Garfield case. The ADL official has a special motive here because Garfield was a key speaker at the May 1948 ADL Annual Dinner. (p. 109)

Forster approvingly notes an attack in the ADL bulletin against anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy that expressed alarm at "the disturbing tendency sweeping across our country toward blind and indiscriminate hatred for those with whom one disagreed." (p. 160) This trend toward conformity, the ADL bulletin went on, was "stultifying" and could be "murderous." So upset was Forster that Communists were being investigated that he wrote an entire book to vent his outrage. Published in 1956, Cross-Currents is an attack against McCarthy.

A good clue to understanding Forster's mindset is his astonishing statement that "The civilized world was more revolted by McCarthyism than by Communism." (p. 171) In Forster's view, the millions of victims of Communism cannot compare to the trauma caused by asking a few dozen people if they had ever supported the Communist Party. What rational person, one must wonder, could really believe that the "civilized world" found the McCarthy hearings to be worse than several decades of mass murder! What can explain such a mentality?

Blacklisting Whatever the reality of Forster's complaint of blacklisting by an unspecified group of un-named anti-Communists, it's worth noting that others have been victims of this practice.

Lillian Gish, one of America's most acclaimed actresses, reported that she was blacklisted for a time from both screen and stage because of her support for the anti-interventionist America First Committee. She also related that she was promised a $65,000 film contract if she would resign from the Committee (without, of course, revealing that she was being bribed to do so).

Ayn Rand, the libertarian novelist who had also worked in Hollywood as a script writer, pointed out that during the Congressional investigations of Communists in the motion picture industry:

Everyone who has testified for the [Congressional] Committee -- not the big stars, but the lesser-known actors and writers who were considered dispensable, and those who were free-lancing and were not under contract to a major studio -- lost their jobs. Morrie Ryskind had more work than he could handle; he never again worked in Hollywood. Adolph Menjou, who was also free-lancing, got fewer and fewer jobs; after about a year, he could find no work at all. I was not victimized, because of The Fountainhead, and because I had a contract with Hal Wallis. Interestingly, Rand (who was Jewish) used some of her time before the House Committee to lecture the lawmakers about why America should have avoided getting involved in war on the side of the Soviet Union, the regime she had fled. Forster, of course, is utterly unconcerned about the blacklisting of people like Gish, Ryskind or Menjou, apparently because they held views different than his own.

Hatred of Peace Activists Forster reserves his most venomous words for the Americans who opposed US involvement in the Second World War. His portrayal of this mass movement is vicious and inaccurate. However much one might disagree with their view on this issue, the millions of Americans who opposed US intervention in the European war were unquestionably sincere in their conviction that this policy served the best interests of both the United States and humanity. Non-interventionists upheld a tradition that has a long and venerable place in American history.

By far the largest and most prominent anti-war group was the America First Committee. During its 15 months of life in 1940 and 1941, it enrolled more than 800,000 members, attracted thousands to mass rallies, and distributed millions of pamphlets and leaflets. Its broad-based membership included conservatives, liberals like Chester Bowles, and socialists of the stature of Norman Thomas.

But Forster, official of a supposed anti-defamation organization, slanderously equates such people with anti-Semites and Nazis. Opposition to Roosevelt's campaign for war, which included secret and plainly illegal measures, is castigated by Foster in the most vicious and simplistic way. "The pro-Nazi, anti-British, Roosevelt-hating, anti-Jewish propaganda was the same," he writes. (p. 47) America First "was ultimately an anti-British, pro-German, anti-Soviet, anti-Semitic" movement that "had become the central propaganda weapon for isolationists, pro-Nazis and anti-Semites." (pp. 75, 76).

Forster's characterization is a lie. The America First Committee included many who were pro-British and pro-Jewish, but who simply opposed direct United States involvement in war. The America First leadership scrupulously strove to keep out anyone who obviously pro-Nazi or anti-Jewish. Members had to sign a pledge that they did not belong to a pro-Nazi or a Communist group. There is no evidence that the Committee, which counted Jews as members, was anti-Semitic. So scrupulous was the Committee that it refused a $250,000 donation from Henry Ford because of his previous association with anti-Jewish publications, even though Ford had publicly repudiated those works.

After writing that "bigots often were found in high places" (p. 56), Forster mentions as examples prominent anti-interventionists, including Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye, and New York Congressman Hamilton Fish.

Charles Lindbergh In his hateful attack against the anti-war movement, Forster takes special aim at Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who was the America First Committee's most popular speaker and prominent spokesperson. (pp. 75-76). Writes Forster:

Lindbergh blamed the Jews for most of America's foreign problems and described Franklin D. Roosevelt, the British and the Jews as enemy confederates in an international conspiracy. By his attack in a September 1941 Des Moines speech on Roosevelt, Jews, the British and internationalists for allegedly bringing on World War II, Lindbergh revealed the platform of the America First Committee. If there were a contest for distorting as many facts as possible in a single paragraph, this one would be a top contender. Lindbergh never blamed "the Jews" for "most of America's foreign problems," nor did he claim that Roosevelt, the British and the Jews were "enemy confederates in a international conspiracy." To show how Forster distorts historical truth for his own polemical purposes, it is worth recalling Lindbergh's precise words in that speech of September 11, 1941:

The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration. Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, anglophiles, and intellectuals, who believe that their future, and the future of mankind, depend upon the domination of the British Empire. Add to these the Communistic groups who were opposed to intervention until a few weeks ago, and I believe I have named the major war agitators in this country. Not a single word of the statement is untrue, and not a word is anti-Jewish. While it is true that Jews did, as a whole, strongly support American involvement in the European conflict, Lindbergh made no mention of any "conspiracy." He never claimed that Roosevelt, the British or the Jews had started the war. Indeed, he made no mention whatsoever of the war's origins.

Further remarks by Lindbergh in this same speech that show admiration for the Jews, and sympathy for their plight, are invariably ignored by anti-anti-Semites such as Forster. Because they are essential to understanding the larger context, they are worth quoting here:

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups on this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this, and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government. I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. Although these are hardly the words of a Jew-hating Nazi, the propagandists of the pro-war movement immediately seized upon a small (and factual) portion of this speech, twisting what Lindbergh actually said, and distorting the truth so badly that much of the public was mislead. Using techniques that Forster and his colleagues at the ADL have mastered, numerous newspapers and politicians lashed out at Lindbergh, largely succeeding in blackening his reputation.

Lindbergh actually anticipated the smear campaign that would come as a result of his words in this speech. He had prepared a paragraph concerning the attacks, but decided to delete it from the final speech:

I realize that tomorrow morning's headlines will say "Lindbergh attacks Jews." The ugly cry of anti-Semitism will be eagerly joyfully pounded upon and waved about my name. It is so much simpler to brand someone with a bad label than to take the trouble to read what he says. I call you people before me tonight to witness that I am not anti-Semitic nor have I attacked the Jews. Lindbergh's remark about those who find it "so much simpler to brand someone with a bad label than to take the trouble to read what he says" might well refer to Forster and the ADL crowd.

The Eichmann Case More than ten percent of this book is devoted to a chapter on the Eichmann case. Forster takes pains to defend Israel's handling of the case, and to stoking the Holocaust flames.

During the Second World War, Adolf Eichmann had served as the SS officer responsible for coordinating the deportation of European Jews. He avoided capture at the end of the war, and escaped to Argentina. He lived quietly there until May 1960, when Israeli agents kidnapped him and took him to Israel where, after a highly-publicized trial, he was executed in 1962.

Even though Israel had an extradition treaty with Argentina, it made no effort to have Eichmann legally apprehended. Instead, Israeli secret agents seized him on the street, drugged him, and dispatched him to Israel in a waiting airplane. Eichmann had not committed any crimes in Israel, a country that did not exist when the acts for which he was tried took place. Consequently it had no legal jurisdiction in the case. But Israel claimed (and still claims) jurisdiction in such matters because it appropriates for itself the right to speak and act in the name of "the Jewish people," wherever they live.

In most civilized countries, a person is put on trial to determine his guilt or innocence. Not in this case. Forster explains (pp. 200, 211) the reason for this highly-publicized trial:

The purpose of the trial? Israel stated the trial's purpose was to alert the world's conscience to the fearful consequences of totalitarianism. The most terrible, Israel said, is genocide. Its chief victims in modern history -- although not the only ones -- have been Jews... The hope is that the trial will serve as an effective educational weapon to assure that it never happens again. One of the main reasons for this trial, which inevitably is tearing open so many deep wounds for so many people in Israel, is the government's wish to teach its own young and the youth of the world the evil of Nazism and to remind the rest of us what an incredible price has to be paid by humanity to rid the earth of Hitlerism...

Serving as judges in the trial (which is similar in some ways to the trial, many years later, of John Demjanjuk) were three Israelis "of German-Jewish background." As Forster admits, these men were "not, in the deepest recesses of their hearts, neutral. Impossible. Who can be neutral about the bestial murder of six million innocents?" (pp. 208, 209)

Forster responds (p. 203) to the accusation that Eichmann was tried and executed on ex post facto charges:

Wasn't Israel trying Eichmann under an ex post facto law? An ex post facto statute is a law that makes an act criminal after the act itself was committed. True, it is outlawed in American jurisprudence. But the ex post facto concept is American, based on the idea that it is unfair to compel a man to stand trial for a deed which he could not have known was a violation of law when he committed it. Obviously, this concept cannot apply to murder; no one needs formal notice it is morally, legally and ethnically wrong to kill another person without justification. There are several problems with Forster's glib explanation. For one thing, ex post facto is not merely an American concept; it was a principle, for example, of Roman law: No crime without a law.

Furthermore, Eichmann was not (at least not specifically) ever charged with murder. Of the 15 counts brought against him by the Israelis, "four [were] based upon crimes against the Jewish people, seven for crimes against humanity, one for a war crime, and three for belonging to Nazi organizations." (p. 205) Does Forster seriously ask us to believe that being tried in Israel in 1961 for belonging to an organization in Europe during the 1940s is not an ex post facto case?

In a murder charge the defendant is normally accused of killing a specific person or persons, who are usually named (unless the victim cannot be identified). Evidence is then presented to directly link the defendant to the murder of the specified person. In the Eichmann case, this was not done.

Mossad 'Source' One of Forster's most startling revelations is his acknowledgment (p. 187), that in the Eichmann case he served as a "source" for Israel's foreign espionage agency:

Among other Israeli intelligence operations, the Mossad -- an acronym for the Hebrew name of the undercover service assigned to operate abroad -- constantly sought leads from reliable governments and from other contracts and sources. I was a source. Unfortunately, that's all Forster tells us about this. He doesn't reveal the extent or the duration of his service to the Mossad, or if (or how much) he was paid. Still, the bit he does acknowledge here may already be enough to confirm that he acted in violation of US federal law.

Illegal Activities Forster acknowledges with some pride that the ADL, with his approval, has used illegal and unethical methods to gain information about political enemies. One ADL target of such activities, Forster relates, was Joseph Kamp (who died in June 1993, at the age of 93). A well-to-do man with important "connections," Kamp's work as head of the "Constitutional Education League" and as editor of The Awakener newsletter greatly annoyed Forster and the ADL. Kamp's great sin, Forster charges, was to endlessly repeat that America was threatened by Communists and foreigners, "especially those with Jewish names." He also sinned by calling the ADL a "low racket which promotes hate and breeds intolerance." (pp. 62, 63)

As a result, the ADL was eager to know as much as possible about his work. Our investigator was adept enough to make himself a good "friend" of Kamp. He had worked for both British and French intelligence and at the outset of the World War Two had served as an instructor in an American intelligence school. One day, while Kamp was away, the ADL agent illegally entered Kamp's Connecticut home, and made photographic copies of his files, particularly "material that divulged the identity of his financial contributors, network operations, and domestic and foreign connections utilized in his propaganda work." (p. 63).

Although the agent was almost caught when Kamp returned home briefly to retrieve a few items, this mission in what Forster calls "the business of espionage" (p. 64) was a success. "... The Kamp caper was repeated by still another [ADL] field investigator under only slightly different circumstances," Forster reports.

Forster tells about another ADL agent named Marjorie Lane (p. 64), who had lied to obtain a job working for a right-wing women's organization. One night she and another ADL operative spent several hours in the office busy photographing all the documents they could lay hands on from the private files.

As revelations from the still-unfolding Gerard/Bullock case suggest, criminal "capers" are a long-standing tradition with the ADL. One is justified in assuming that the cases that have come to light are only the tip of the iceberg.

Valuable Exposé This memoir concludes with a solemn observation that, in spite of prodigious efforts, anti-Semitism can still be found everywhere. (This is hardly surprising, because Forster "finds" anti-Semitism even where it does not exist.) But there is a silver lining in the cloud. "We may be back to Square One. Except for one player -- Israel." (p. 412). Arguably, though, a major generator of anti-Jewish sentiment during the last four decades has been Israel itself -- or rather the Zionist state's often outrageous activities.

Contrary to what the author intended, this revealing book by a high-ranking ADL official serves as valuable exposé of the moral character of a man who sanctions violence against political opponents, who spits on the First Amendment, uses illegal methods to obtain information about adversaries, and who served as an agent for a foreign spy agency.

Over the years, I have read several tracts and articles designed to discredit the Anti-Defamation League. None was able to persuade me of the illicit nature of this organization; it took the memoir of Arnold Forster to do that.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the author John Cobden is the pen name of an American writer whose essays on political issues have appeared in nationally-circulated magazines and major daily newspapers, including the Hartford Courant and the Orange County Register. His writings on aspects of the Holocaust issue have appeared in The Journal of Historical Review and, in translation, in the French journal Revue d'Histoire Revisionniste.

Reproduced from: Institute for Historical Review

Homestead
Senator McCarthy, with his wife Jean and nephew Kelly Kornely, inspect the McCarthy homestead in the Town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin, in February, 1955. McCarthy purchased the house and 140-acre farm from his brother Howard, saying that he intended to make the farm his home.

Capitol Steps
The flag-draped coffin containing the body of Senator McCarthy is carried up the steps of the U.S. Capitol for funeral services in the Senate chamber after an earlier service at St. Matthew's Cathedral, May 6, 1957.

Outside Church
A large crowd stood outside St. Mary Catholic Church, Appleton, Wisconsin, as the casket of Senator McCarthy is removed from the church and placed in a hearse to begin the journey to the parish cemetery, May 7, 1957.

Unveiling
Jean McCarthy, the widow of Senator McCarthy, looks on as two honor Marine Corps guards unveil a bust of her husband in the Outagamie County Courthouse, May 2, 1959. Next to Mrs. McCarthy is Senator Styles Bridges (R-New Hampshire), who gave the dedication address to about 400 people gathered on the Courthouse lawn. Circuit Judge Andrew W. Parnell (right) served as chairman of the event. The Marines are Captain R. E. Jones (left) and First Sergeant Lawrence Sepulveda, both of Oshkosh.

Tombstone
The tombstone of Senator McCarthy, St. Mary Catholic Cemetery, Appleton, Wisconsin. (Photo dated March 9, 1989.)

Campaign Postcard
These photos were sent together as a postcard to voters during McCarthy's successful 1946 campaign for the Republican nomination to the U. S. Senate. The photos show (top) McCarthy as a Marine during World War II, (center) as a Circuit Court Judge, and (bottom) as a Marine intelligence officer. The back of the postcard carried the slogan "McCarthy for Senator."

Boys
Joseph McCarthy (right) with his brothers William (left) and Howard (center)
on the family farm in the Town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin. (Date unknown.)

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Originally declassified by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Chairman of the bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, the Venona project and its associated documentation, contains codenames of several hundred individuals said to be involved on differing levels with the KGB and the GRU.^[1]^[2] Many of the codenames have been identified by the FBI, CIA, NSA and other academics and historians by using a combination of circumstantial evidence, corroborating testimony from Eastern Bloc defectors, direct surveillance, informants and a number of other means.^[3] Many academics and historians believe that most of the following individuals were either clandestine assets and/or contacts of the KGB, GRU and Soviet Naval GRU.^[4]^[5].

The following list of individuals is extracted in part from the work of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr^[2]; as well as others listed in the references below.

To what extent any given individual named below was clandestinely involved with Soviet intelligence is a topic of dispute, with a few scholars, most notably Victor Navasky, skeptical of attempts to identify individuals from codenames found in Venona.

Twenty-four persons targeted for recruitment remain uncorroborated as to it being accomplished. These individuals are marked with an asterisk (*).

John Abt United States Department of Agriculture; Works Progress Administration; Civil Liberties Subcommittee, Senate Committee on Education and Labor; special assistant to the United States Attorney General, United States Department of Justice
Solomon Adler, United States Department of the Treasury, supplied info to Silvermaster group, went to China after communist revolution and joined government of Mao Zedong
Lydia Altschuler
Thomas Babin, Yugoslavia Section Office of Strategic Services
Marion Bachrach, (*) congressional office manager of Congressman John Bernard of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party
Rudy Baker
Vladimir Barash
Joel Barr, United States Army Signal Corps Laboratories
Alice Barrows, United States Office of Education
Theodore Bayer, President, Russky Golos Publishing
George Beiser, National Research Establishment, Research and Development Board; engineer Bell Aircraft
Aleksandr Belenky, General Electric
Cedric Belfrage, journalist; British Security Coordination
Elizabeth Bentley, companion of Jacob Golos of Sound/Myrna group; turned herself in to FBI in 1945 leading to unraveling of many Soviet spy rings
Marion Davis Berdecio, Office of Naval Intelligence; Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; United States Department of State
Josef Berger, (*) Democratic National Committee
Joseph Milton Bernstein, Board of Economic Warfare
Walter Sol Bernstein, Hollywood Screenwriter, listed on the MPAA's Hollywood blacklist
T.A. Bisson, Board of Economic Warfare
Thomas Lessing Black, Bureau of Standards United States Department of Commerce
Samuel Bloomfield, (*) Eastern European Division, Research and Analysis Division, Office of Strategic Services
Robinson Bobrow
Ralph Bowen, (*) United States Department of State
Abraham Brothman, chemist convicted for his role in the Rosenberg ring
Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the United States
Rose Browder
William Browder
Michael Burd, Head of Midland Export Corporation
Paul Burns, employee of TASS
Norman Bursler, United States Department of Justice Anti-Trust Division
James Michael Callahan
Sylvia Callen
Frank Coe, Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury; Special Assistant to the United States Ambassador in London; Assistant to the Executive Director, Board of Economic Warfare; Assistant Administrator, Foreign Economic Administration, went to China and joined government of Mao Zedong
Lona Cohen, sentenced to 20 years; subject of Hugh Whitemore's drama for stage and TV Pack of Lies
Morris Cohen (Soviet spy) sentenced to 25 years; subject of Hugh Whitemore's drama for stage and TV Pack of Lies
Eugene Franklin Coleman, RCA electrical engineer
Anna Colloms, New York City schoolteacher
Judith Coplon, Foreign Agents Registration section, United States Department of Justice; her convictions for espionage were overturned on technicalities
Lauchlin Currie, Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt; Deputy Administrator of Foreign Economic Administration; Special Representative to China
Byron Darling, United States Rubber Company; United States Office of Scientific Research & Development
Eugene Dennis, General Secretary Communist Party USA sentenced to 5 years for advocating overthrow of U.S. government
Samuel Dickstein, United States Congressman from New York known to be paid by Soviets; New York State Supreme Court Justice; Vice Chair of HUAC during hearings into the Business Plot against FDR
Martha Dodd, daughter of United States Ambassador to Germany William Dodd, Popular Front
William Dodd Jr., son of William Dodd, United States Ambassador to Germany; Democratic Congressional candidate
Laurence Duggan, head of United States Department of State Division of American Republics
Demetrius Dvoichenko-Markov, U.S. Army
Eufrosina Dvoichenko-Markov
Frank Dziedzik, National Oil Products Company