McCarthy2

   Voting
           Senator McCarthy at the polling place on the day he was re-elected to the Senate, November 4, 1952.

NOW LET THE TRUTH BE TOLD:
List of Americans in the Venona papers

The Late Senator Joseph R McCarthy

Narrated by Mrs Larry Lawrence Lent, his secretary

Published by The Government Educational Foundation, 1998

I am delighted to talk about Senator McCarthy. This is being recorded in April 1990, and that's about forty years since I was with Senator McCarthy.

It is true; when people learn that I have been secretary to Senator McCarthy, they invariably want to know, "What was he really like?" To me Senator McCarthy was a courageous American hero. His religious convictions and his deep love for his country were topmost in his mind. He believed in our Constitution and the American people. He believed that he could help preserve liberty and justice by ridding the nation of its enemies.

As for the man McCarthy, I liked and admired him tremendously. He was friendly and unassuming, the kind of a man that most people like the first time they meet him. He was generous, he was thoughtful, he had a brilliant mind and a fabulous memory. He was absolutely honest, he was kind and gentle and he loved children. He had a good sense of humor and a positive outlook. He was morally clean, and despite all the malicious attacks on him personally, he was not at all bitter.

This was really extraordinary and I can add one more thought: he was a grand person to work for. Now that is quite a list of attributes which you may doubt, but I assure you I can prove every one of them. Before I go on, let me add that the Senator loved this Nation with such devotion that he actually inspired those around him. It became a real joy working for him and with him for America; it seemed as though we were all part of his crusade.

Now Senator McCarthy had been Judge McCarthy of a circuit court in Wisconsin when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. He had joined the Marines and had fought in the Pacific during WW2. When he returned, he ran for the U.S. Senate and won a surprising victory over LaFollette. So now he was coming to Washington, a decorated Marine, a handsome, fearless patriotic Irish-American. He was the heroic son of God-fearing Christian parents, ready to serve in his government; he had fought and helped win a war, which he thought would assure peace and freedom for the world. You can imagine how he must have felt when he finally realized that his government had negotiated away our victory and we had truly lost the peace.

He soon began to realize that subtle treason had flowered in Washington, and the people did not have a patriotic watchman to warn them what was going on. So, it came as a terrible blow to learn that the Soviets would not only control half of Germany and half of Berlin, but Stalin had convinced our government to sacrifice Poland to the Communists as well as all the nations adjoining Russia, such as Romania, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, and so forth. These had all been free and independent countries, and there was really no good reason to let the Communists take them over. But our President and some of our high officials liked Stalin, and it seemed that they were convinced that by giving in to Soviet demands they would assure peace in our times.

Our surrender of China seemed just as pointless. Today we are seeing the results we saw at Beijing. Once when the Senator was reminiscing about some interesting experiences in the Pacific, he commented, "I came to know the Pacific and the coast of Asia as well as I did my dad's farm when I was a boy, and for the first time I began to fully appreciate the great wisdom of America's long term policy on Asia, the policy of maintaining a free, independent friendly China in order to keep the Pacific, actually the Pacific in fact as well as in name. And now I learn that our wise and long term policy was being 'scuttled." So when Senator McCarthy came to Washington, he realized the situation in the Far East.

When Senator McCarthy, the Senator-elect, arrived in Washington December 1946, about two weeks before being sworn in, three days later he and his administrative assistant were invited to have lunch with James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy. The Senator often wondered why the busy Secretary of the Navy discovered that a freshman Senator had arrived in town and why he took so much time to discuss our nation's problems with him. I think we can see God's hand in this, and the Senator often told us he thanked God many times for Forrestal's time and advice.

Forrestal was fully knowledgeable about Communist penetration and influence in our government. He was able to bring Senator up to date on communist influence in our schools, in all our educational systems, in our news media, and definitely in our government. In the State Department, for instance, Communists had recommended Communists for jobs and then recommended each other for raises until some of them were in policy making positions where our foreign policy was definitely slanted towards Soviet objectives.

Before talking to Jim Forrestal, Senator McCarthy admits he thought we were losing to Communism because of incompetence or stupidity on the part of our national planners; he mentioned that to Forrestal. Senator McCarthy claimed he would never forget Forrestal's answer: "McCarthy," he said, "consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If our State Department boys were merely stupid, they would make a mistake in our favor once in awhile." Forrestal then told the Senator that the FBI had not been asleep; however, all during the thirties and forties they had continued investigations of subversion and had copious files on Communist infiltration into American government, but no way to bring it to the attention of the American people, and no authority to remove the traitors from the government.

At one time the FBI had notified President Truman that a top official in his Treasury Department was favoring Communism. In fact they notified him six or seven times, and Truman gave that suspected Treasurer a more responsible position. This man was Harry Dexter White, and we find him very active in our government and all their decisions. In fact it was he who helped send our money-plates to the Soviet Union so they could charge money to the American people.

Now Secretary Forrestal explained when the House Committee on un-American Activity had held hearings and exposed Alger Hiss as a Communist agent working in our State Department and reported this to President Truman, Truman had ridiculed this report, calling it a "red herring." Secretary of State Dean Acheson proudly declared that he would never turn his back on Alger Hiss, a convicted traitor.

Secretary Forrestal deserves our sincere appreciation: he did his task well. He informed Senator McCarthy of the dangers our Nation faced. He furnished names and places and inspired the young Senator to begin his crusade. It wasn't long before Forestal fell or was pushed to his death from the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The Secretary of the Navy had challenged him, and Senator McCarthy was a fighter.

Let's let Senator McCarthy tell about the beginning of his crusade in his own words. He said, "When I took on my duties as a Senator, I discovered that certain outstanding Senators and Congressmen, for years, had been intelligently trying to alert the American people. Unfortunately, when they clearly and intelligently presented a picture of incompetence or treason, which should have commanded banner headlines in every newspaper, the story was found, if at all, hidden in the want ads. I've witnessed the frustration of those honest, intelligent, loyal Americans who are attempting to expose our suicidal foreign policy. Day after day I came into contact with convincing evidence of treason. Obviously, unless the public was aroused, the downward course upon which we were embarked would continue, and at an accelerated pace."

What puzzled the Senator was how to alert the American people. He became convinced that the American people could not be awakened by merely a discussion of treacherous policies generally. The men who had made those policies, well meaning as they might be, had to be exposed. Foreign policy, after all, does not just happen, it is carefully planned by men with faces and names. Those faces and names had to be exposed. As J. Edgar Hoover had said, "Victory will be assured once Communists are identified and exposed, because the public will take the first step of quarantining them so they can do no harm."

Senator McCarthy decided it did but little good to argue about changing our suicidal foreign policy so long as the men in charge of forming that policy were in the camp of the enemy. The change that had to be made, if this country was to live, was a change of experts, the experts who had so expertly sold out China and Poland without the American people realizing what was happening. Day after day, Senator McCarthy admitted he came into contact with additional evidences of treason. More and more government employees were coming to him reporting suspicious activities in their department; sometimes they had absolute proof of sabotage or espionage. Senator and his staff were spending a great deal of time following the leads they were receiving, and more and more the Senator felt the need to awaken the American people.

His first opportunity came when he was invited to speak at a Lincoln Day dinner in Wheeling, W. Virginia given by the Republican Women of Wheeling. It was on February 9, 1950, that Senator McCarthy finally got his crusade underway. He began his speech with a statement. He said, "Today we are engaged in a final all out battle between Communism and Christianity." He charged the Communists with treason, threatened them all with exposure if they remained in our government. He declared he had the names of fifty-seven Communists working in our State Department. He also showed a copy of a letter written some time ago by Secretary of State Burns stating that there had been 284 unfit persons employed in the State Department, and only seventy-nine had been removed. Senator McCarthy pointed out this left 205 security risks still in our State Department. The Senator did not know any of those 205, but he did have the names of the fifty-seven which he had mentioned before, and would be happy to give them to a loyalty board or some investigative committee for an executive session. All of this information was then sent to the President suggesting that he ask the present Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, to give him the names of those subversives still in the State Department.

There were three important results of that speech. First the press gave it some publicity, ridiculing the charges of course, but at least admitting they were made. Second, the Senate appointed a committee to investigate Senator McCarthy's charges. Thirdly the Communist Party lost no time in coining the word "McCarthyism" as they commenced their ferocious attack on the Senator and anyone else who would are join him, or course.

Let's look first at the committee which the Senate had appointed to look into McCarthy's charges. Senator Tydings of Maryland was to be its Chairman. We were disappointed at this choice, for we feared he would not be a friendly chairman. Our fears were correct. The first move of the Tydings committee was to challenge the numbers Senator McCarthy had given; in fact, both the committee and the Communists juggled the numbers and confused everyone. In those days speeches were not taped, and Tydings sent one of his employees, Dan Buckley, to check with people who had heard the Senator. When Dan Buckley returned with affidavits from all the people he could locate who had heard McCarthy's speech, everyone agreed with the numbers given by the Senator in his report. This was definitely not the report the committee wanted. Dan was sent down to Wheeling again, this time accompanied by a senior member of the committee. I had coffee with Dan after his first trip to Wheeling, and he told me that Tydings had been absolutely furious at that report. Tydings was evidently determined to destroy the credibility of Senator McCarthy. When the second visit failed to indicate McCarthy had lied, the committee fired Dan Buckley. At first I couldn't understand why some Senators were so antagonistic towards my Senator. I finally came to the conclusion that they were jealous, and beginning to fear maybe the American people were going to wake up and wonder why their Senator had failed to warn them, sort of sinning by omission it was. I guess I was right because the people of Maryland refused to re-elect Tydings the next time he ran. And several other Senators, like Benton of Connecticut, lost their bids to return to the Senate after attacking Senator McCarthy.

Now to the Communist version of the word "McCarthyism," which they had just coined. It was to be a dirty, hateful, disgusting word meaning frightening attacks on innocent people, destroying their lives, character assassination, a vicious witch hunt. The first time I actually saw the word in print was in the Daily Worker newspaper. This was the Communist Party newspaper published in New York City which carried orders to American Communists from the Soviet Union. They would, of course, follow the instructions which Lenin had given them to use language to sow hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like toward anyone who disagreed with them.

Now the Communist attack on Senator McCarthy came into full swing. Following Lenin's instructions, every effort was being made to smear and discredit his life, his character, his work, and particularly his method. Because some people did not understand what the Communists called his methods and the press continued using the Communist's meaning, Senator McCarthy wrote a book explaining all that he was doing. He named it "McCarthyism, The Fight For America." I will tell you later how you can get a copy of that book, which is very, very interesting. Senator McCarthy did warn the American people to take a long look at what had happened to the Russians when the Communist Bolshevik terrorists took over their country. All of a sudden their freedom was completely gone, millions murdered and many millions of their farmers were starved to death. It was a frightening picture, and McCarthy knew the true aim of the Communists was total world domination. When you think about it, the Communists have never denied that ultimate goal. Back in 1946, one of the Soviet leaders, Dametre Namreleske, told his Communist followers to be patient. He told them that war to the hilt, between Communism and Capitalism, is inevitable. "Today," he told them, "They are too weak to strike; their day will come in thirty to forty years." But first he told them "We must lull the Capitalist countries to sleep with the greatest overtures of peace and disarmament known throughout history. And then when their guard is dropped, we shall smash them with our clenched fists."

I think we need to remember that was in 1946, and nowhere have we seen any indication that they have changed their ultimate aim. Today we can easily recognize their talk of peace and disarmament and what it really means. When the Senator's book "McCarthyism, The Fight For America" was printed, it was sent to libraries and book stores throughout America, but it was hidden and almost never displayed. The news media continued to accept and publicize the communist version of "McCarthyism" again and again. Over the years it is a fact that when a lie is repeated often enough, people tend to believe it. If people would just take time to do a little research, they would discover not McCarthy, the Evil Accuser, but McCarthy, the American Hero. The integrity of his motives, the accuracy of his charges, and the validity of his message are vindicated by the truth. Of course, the truth is now that McCarthy was right.

I do seem to be taking along time before I start describing what it was like working for the Senator, but I believe that unless we understand conditions facing the Nation back in the 1940s and 50s, we will never be able to understand and appreciate the Senator and the importance of his crusade. So, for the moment let's think back to the Tydings Committee which had been instructed to look into Senator McCarthy's charges of Communists working in our State Department and/or influencing the foreign policy of our Nation. One of the first names Senator McCarthy gave the committee was the name of Owen Lattimore. I thought the Senator must have been very sure of his facts as Owen Lattimore was a highly respected Far Eastern authority, to whom our State Department looked for advice on policy decisions. He was known all over the world for the books he had written and the articles in magazines, mostly about China and the Far East. Also he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. The Tydings Committee seemed delighted; surely this was perfect example of a wild man making irresponsible charges, and they promptly cleared Lattimore of having any Communist bias. It was truly amazing to watch the news media join the attack on the Senator and defend Owen Lattimore. Unless Senator McCarthy could be proven right, this looked bad for him, and you can imagine we all sighed a sigh of relief when the Senate at that very moment established the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, a branch of the Judiciary with authority to research and investigate any and all subversive movements or individuals in our Nation. And we all said a prayer of thanks when the new committee, called the SISS, was given the task of investigating any Communist influence in the Institute of Pacific Relations; Owen Lattimore was one of its leaders. Senator Pat McCarran was chosen to be Chairman of the new Subcommittee. This was an excellent choice as McCarran was well known for his anti-Communist leanings. Chief counsel of the committee was to be Robert Morris, formerly with Naval Intelligence, whom I knew well. Ben Mandell was a research director, and I understand he was, at one time or another, a member of the Communist Party and could be a wonderful help to the committee.

There were several secretaries, and I believe they were looking for another secretary, one cleared for Secret. I had Naval clearance for Secret and was working for the Navy at that time. This was a temptation I simply couldn't resist. I asked for release from my job at the Navy, and when they learned why I wanted to be released, they gave it to me and I secured the position with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. This was the same kind of work I had been doing for the Navy, and I was truly thrilled.

When the Second World War started, my children were all in school, so I was free to work. I applied for a job with the Navy. After a most thorough search of my background and my family, even checking on friends I had in school, at last I had a job. It was to work in the Italian, Yugoslav, Croatian section of the Naval counter-intelligence. It was here I had my first introduction into how the Communists move in to take a country and enslave its people. When my husband was transferred to the Navy base in San Diego, I transferred to California until the end of the war, and then went back to Washington and the Navy. This time I was placed in the Pentagon, in the Far East section of Intelligence where I took dictation from six or seven intelligence officers reporting happenings in the Far East to the Admiral. It was here that I heard the names of many of the pro-Communists and the Communists active in the Far East, and much of what they were doing. I had for some time been closely following the charges being made by Senator Joseph McCarthy, particularly because the men he named were ones which I was familiar form Naval Intelligence reports.

Senator McCarthy was not a member of the Internal Security Subcommittee and had no connection with it, with the exception we were going to investigate a man he had charged with being subversive. When the committee learned that some of the back files of the Institute of Pacific Relations had been hidden in a barn in Lee, Masssachusetts, acting on the authority given them, the Subcommittee took possession of those files and moved them to the Senate office building in Washington. All together there were some twenty thousand documents including books, magazine articles, memorandum, letters, minutes and reports, all of which were studied for the next six months. Some two thousand became the preliminary basis for the committee's investigation, and now it was time to hold hearings. These hearings lasted about six months and included many witnesses along with the twenty-eight Institute of Pacific Relations members. It has been conceded that was the most important, careful and productive investigation ever conducted by a committee of Congress. Those hearings became big news followed closely by all the news media.

Indeed those were exciting days. The hearings were held in the Senate Judiciary Room which adjoins our office, so we were in and out of the hearings and often taking dictation from one or more witnesses. There were many pro-American witnesses such as General Albert C. Wedemeyer, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, Igor Bogolepov, former member of the Soviet Foreign Office, Loui Budenz who had been the communist editor of the Daily Worker newspaper and Elizabeth Bentley, who had joined the Communist Party and had later become a Soviet Courier. Now she was working to expose her former party members who still gave their allegiance to the Soviets. A number of the IPR witnesses took the 5th Amendment and refused to answer any questions, and a number of them answered questions but failed to tell the truth.

The committee's final report states that Owen Lattimore testified falsely with reference to at least five separate matters that were relevant to the inquiry and substantial in import. The final report of the year's investigation was published in July, 1952. Among other conclusions we find the following: "The effective leadership of the Institute of Pacific Relations views the IPR prestige to promote the interest of the Soviet Union in the United States." And another section read, "During the period of 1945 to 1949, persons associated with the IPR were instrumental in keeping the United States policy on a course favorable to Communist objectives in China." And when it came to reports on Owen Lattimore, they proved beyond any doubt that McCarthy had been right. The committee report stated, "Owen Lattimore was (sometime beginning in the 1930s) a conscious, articulate instrument of the Communist Conspiracy." There are many more conclusions on a similar vein, many of them proving Senator McCarthy's charges of subversion and Communist affiliation were correct.

Now that the hearings were printed, I applied for a position with Senator McCarthy. My interview with him was quite short; he didn't ask me if I were a Republican or a Democrat. In fact, we talked mostly about the sad problems our country was going through and how to solve them. My position was assistant secretary, but shortly his secretary left on a protracted leave and I moved into her position. I'll never forget the first time the Senator called me to come into his office to take dictation. I had heard that he was preparing an answer to letters requesting information, and after a few sentences Senator stopped, turned, and asked, "Larry, am I going too fast?" He wasn't, and I never worried again about taking his dictation. I think I told you that the Senator was thoughtful, and indeed he was. Someone asked me if Senator McCarthy dictated all the letters that went out under his signature; I can assure you he did. He answered every letter which came from Wisconsin and many others. When the Senator's reply would serve for a number of letters, the Senator would dictate a form letter. When it was typed, he would read it carefully and then sign his name across the whole letter which we could then use to answer all letters requesting that same information. Every letter that went out under his name, however was signed by him personally. He even signed every Christmas card he sent. This was unusual, for most Senators had a secretary line their signature.

Now while on the subject of letters, I must mention that no matter how busy he was, the Senator always took time to dictate a letter to each young person writing for information. Sometimes it would take several pages to give the young person a complete answer, but he never failed. Senator McCarthy certainly loved young people, and little children loved him. Every time he was around little children, the first thing you would see would be one of them on his lap, maybe one climbing on his shoulders. They just loved the Senator, and he loved them. I can remember one event that occurred just following his stay in the hospital for a hernia operation. We didn't know he was going back to the office that evening, or we surely would have stopped him from chasing two college boys down the hall. They were trying to pry the brass plate from his Senator's door, and when he heard them he gave chase, and what's more, caught them and brought them back to the office for a friendly chat! Now he told me to order two new name plates with his name on them and send one to each boy with a letter he would write; those boys, I believe, were from Dartmouth College.

While I served as his secretary, all the mail which came into the office came over my desk. It was thrilling to see because such a large percentage of the mail was favorable, I would say 85-90%. Many letters were quite enthusiastic. Quite a few asked if they could help. Here is part of one of the answers which he wrote in reply to that question: "Yes, you can do a tremendous job if you will; you can help alert America to a danger much greater than Communists in the State Department or any other branch of the government, a danger much greater than any threat from Communist Russia. Hitler once said, 'Give me control of the minds of the youth of a country, give me control of the educational system for five years and I shall control that country indefinitely.' The Communists thoroughly recognize the truth of that statement. One of their major efforts, therefore, is to infiltrate the educational system of this country and control school and college publications. Every man and woman in America can appoint himself and herself to undo the damage which is being done by Communist infiltration in our schools and colleges through Communist minded teachers and Communist text books. The educational system of this country cannot be cleansed and swept clean unless the mothers and fathers and the sons and daughters of this nation individually decide to do this job. This can be your greatest contribution to America. This is a job which you can do. This is a job which you must do if America and western Civilization are to live. I warn you, however, that the task will not be a pleasant one. When you detect and start to expose a teacher with a Communist mind, you will be attacked and smeared. You will be accused of endangering academic freedom. Remember, to those Communist minded teachers, academic freedom means their right to force you to hire them to teach your children a philosophy in which you do not believe. We can not win the fight against Communism if Communist minded professors are teaching your children. We cannot lose the fight against Communism if loyal Americans are teaching your children." The Senator sent a similar letter to hundreds of people who wrote and wanted to help.

I believe I mentioned that the Senator was generous; let me give you just a few instances. Priests would write to the Senator from all over the world suggesting that they needed certain books or other supplies. Without hesitation, the Senator would authorize someone to get whatever the priests needed, charge it to his personal account, and send it on to the priests. Because he was so generous, we often tried to handle requests ourselves. Once when a mother from Wisconsin was expecting another baby, her carpenter husband had been hurt and couldn't work and therefore they needed all kinds of supplies. We placed a large box in the corner of our office and were gradually filling it with little gifts. When the Senator saw the box, he wanted to know what it was for, so we had to explain. Right away he suggested we buy her a nice crib and send it to her with a card on it signed by the office secretaries.

There was one thing that had been unusual which I had noticed as soon as I joined the office staff. That was the terrific amount of respect that each one of his staff felt for the Senator. When addressing him, of course, they all said "Senator McCarthy", and when speaking of him they invariably said "the Senator", not because he requested it, but their respect was shown in many ways. His staff knew how dedicated he was and how hard he worked; they also knew that he did not recklessly charge people with being Communist, unless he was sure they were. As a matter of fact, he often warned us not to label anyone a Communist unless we had seen their Communist card. In those days Communists did carry a card.

Now to the Eisenhower-Stevenson elections, most of my friends can't understand how Senator McCarthy could have voted for Eisenhower. The truth was that the news media had kept Eisenhower's dealings with Stalin from the public, and of course the Senator didn't know that Eisenhower would become such a vindictive enemy. We did have information Stevenson stood by the convicted Communist Alger Hiss, declaring how much he admired him and how he was the best informed man in the United Nations. Senator McCarthy was convinced that Stevenson would be a dangerous man if President. The truth is that there really probably wasn't much choice.

Well, to get back to the Senator's speech exposing Stevenson's record. When I went into his office to take dictation for that talk, there were a number of agents giving documents to the Senator and explaining their importance. If Senator McCarthy decided he would use a document, he dictated just what he would say in regard to that particular bit of information and he handed the document to me to be numbered. When the Senator gave his speech in Chicago, he took along all the documents I had numbered and had announced that everything he was to submit was well documented. He invited all members of the press to come back stage as soon as he was finished to get the documentation. Not one reporter came back for his copy, and the next day we all read in the Chicago paper about the vicious, unfounded charges Senator McCarthy had made. It really was a bit frustrating.

For his first two years in the Senate, Senator McCarthy was a one man investigator with one or two men working with him. He exposed eighty-one subversives working in the State Department; all were proven guilty and removed from government work. The Senator also had turned over the names of suspected Communists on other branches of our government. He had also investigated waste and inefficiency in several government departments, which resulted in saving millions of dollars to the taxpayers. He was dedicated, and he was a hard worker. Early one New Year's morning, another secretary and I had decided to work to catch up on a number of things that we had not done the week before. I had taken off my shoes and was comfortably sitting on the Senator's desk while she read times, dates and places to be put into the Senator's desk calendar when all of a sudden, the door flew open and there stood the Senator. I think that was the shock of my life! He looked surprised and asked, "Larry, what on earth are you girls doing here now?" When he realized what we were doing, he laughed and we all worked a full day. That didn't sound like a man who had been celebrating much the night before, did it? Senator McCarthy was being accused of drinking too much. Well, if he did, it wasn't during the day because I sat next to him or across the desk from him every day taking dictation, and I never smelled liquor on his breath. He never offered people a drink in his office, as the news media had charged, because there never was a bottle in his office. Now it is possible that the Senator had cocktails in the evening, maybe one or two. I don't know; I imagine he did. But he didn't go out many evenings and a lot of evenings he would work; so really could not have been an alcoholic. But the attacks on Senator McCarthy continued. Some accused him of wanting to be President, as if that were a crime, but they tried to make it seem like it was a crime. But when they did announce it, hundreds of people reacted differently. We were soon absolutely flooded with hundreds of letters of encouragement and offers containing everything from fifty cents to many dollars. We sent it all back with a gracious letter of appreciation from the Senator saying he really didn't want to run for President. He wanted to remain the Senator from Wisconsin and fight on to rid our Nation of treason. Some of us really wished he could be President; what a difference that would have made? We were all mighty proud of our Senator, I can tell you.

I trust I haven't given you the impression that I think all reporters are evil, today one just doesn't know how the news is being slanted and why... One time Senator McCarthy did sue a newspaper for slander. That was the Syracuse Standard Times, of Syracuse, N.Y. It was great to have that newspaper retract all the vicious lies they had printed. Now I had hoped the Senator would sue the Washington Post, he could have easily won, but he refused to take the time. He felt that would please the Communists because it would keep him from exposing more traitors and getting them removed. About that time Louie Budenz, who had been editor of the Communist Daily Worker had turned over the names of four hundred Communist party members all employed in the newspaper and radio field. All these would require research and hearings. It would take the Senator's staff a great deal of time to handle this.

One day the Marine Corps called from the Pentagon and wanted an appointment with the Senator; they suggested one day the following week. I told the Senator and he asked me what they wanted. I really didn't know if I should have asked them, so I hadn't. Senator said never mind. Of course, he would be glad to see them. When they arrived, there were a number of them and a man with a camera. They had come to present the Flying Cross with four or five medals, I forgot which, but it was a very nice ceremony. However, it seemed to spark another attack on the Senator. Some reporters wrote that he had seen McCarthy's Navy record and that McCarthy had never even seen active duty. This was so ridiculous! Senator Cain of the state of Washington was furious. He knew McCarthy's record and because he knew Senator McCarthy would never publicize it, Senator Cain secured a copy and read it into the Congressional Record where it is available to anyone who can read. Senator McCarthy was humble, I said he was and he was.

Here is the Marine record: "The Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet, takes pleasure in commending CAPTAIN JOSEPH R. MCCARTHY, UNITED STATES MARINE CORP RESERVE for service as set forth in the following CITATION: 'For meritorious and efficient performance of duty as an observer and rear gunner of a dive bomber attached to a marine scout bombing squadron operating in the Solomon Islands area from September 1, to December 31, 1943. He participated in a large number of combat missions, and in addition to his regular duties, acted as aerial photographer. He obtained excellent photographs of enemy gun positions, despite intense anti-aircraft fire, thereby gaining valuable information which contributed materially to the success of subsequent strikes in the area. Although suffering from a severe leg injury, he refused to be hospitalized and continued to carry out his duties as Intelligence Officer in a highly efficient manner. His courageous devotion to duty was in keeping with the highest traditions of the naval service.' ~ C.W.NIMITZ, Admiral, U.S. Navy, Commendation Ribbon Authorized".

I read that entire commendation because I believe some of you saw NBC's film entitled "Tail-Gunner Joe", supposedly portraying the life and character of Senator McCarthy. It was undoubtedly one of the most monstrous diabolical distortions that has ever been my misfortune to see. One must wonder why they are still trying to destroy the memory of the great anti-Communist Senator. Do they want to make certain that another pro-Christian anti-Communist fighter doesn't begin another crusade? "Tail- Gunner Joe", not only ridiculed Senator McCarty shooting down coconuts, but they portrayed one untruthful act after another in an obvious attempt to make the Senator look irresponsible. They enacted a complete scene of him as a boy wrecking a truckload of chickens and then abandoning the truck, chickens and all in a ditch. If these producers of the show had been interested in the truth, it was all printed in the Wisconsin State Journal on July 16, 1946. Let's look at a few quotes from the Journal. It said, "Joe's youth wasn't much different from that of other Wisconsin farm youngsters. He worked on his dad's farm and with $65.00, earned by working for an uncle in his spare time, Joe started a chicken farm. He had built his business to two thousand laying hens and ten thousand broilers when influenza put him to bed for several weeks. Neighborhood boys who attended the flock didn't display the same enthusiasm that Joe did. Result: thousands of dead chickens and Joe out of business." Joe moved to a neighboring town and got a job. He later got two jobs and then decided he should go back to school. At nineteen, he entered the local high school and according to the Wisconsin State Journal, he crammed four years of high school into one. He passed the final exams with flying colors and ended on the honor roll. Principal L.D. Hershberger, in passing out the diplomas, described the boy who completed the four year high school course in one year, while working at two jobs as "the irresistible force who over came the immovable object."

I believe I told you before that when the Second World War started, Joe McCarthy was a judge and couldn't let his country fight a war without him; so he turned his judgeship over to another and volunteered in the Marines.

Now let's go back to the crusade in the Senate. There were times when it was rather tense in our office and we couldn't help but wonder if some radical might toss a bomb in our door instead of spitting on it as they sometimes had. Not only were we hated by the Communist traitors, but there were Americans who supported the Communists because they honestly believed Communism, or what they thought Communism was, would be far better for the working man than Capitalism. They hated us, too. It would help our mood sometimes to have a good laugh, and I told you that Senator McCarthy had a good sense of humor. Once the Senator learned that a con-man was claiming he had access to our office and would report what went on for a price. Several groups started paying him. We learned that the A.D.A., Americans for Democratic Action, some members of the Democratic Party, the Washington Post and probably some other newspaper representatives were paying. I think the con-man was Paul Huse, I'm not sure. Anyway, this man furnished some fabulous tales of events in our office, and never even opened our front door and came in. Some of the stories drifted back to us, and they were hilarious. A taxi driver supplied more laughs. One afternoon the Senator took a taxi home. When he stepped into the cab the driver began telling him stories he had heard about what McCarthy was doing to hurt people. He evidently hadn't recognized the Senator who kept encouraging him to tell another story and then another story. When they finally drove up to the Senator's home and the Senator's car was out in front, the driver couldn't apologize enough and they had a good laugh together.

When Roy Cohn died of A.I.D.S. a year or so ago, a lot of people remembered that he had worked for Senator McCarthy; they asked me how the Senator could have hired such a person. In order to explain that, I must go back to the time Republican Eisenhower won the Presidency and all Republican Senators took over the Chairmanship of the Senate Committees. Senator McCarthy became Chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. This gave him a tremendous boost, and as a matter of fact, I believe he held many more hearings than had ever been held by that committee. He had planned on Bob Morris coming over from SISS to be his Chief Counsel. Bob had asked me to be his secretary, and the Senator had finally agreed to let me go. We were all excited, and that was a sad time for the Senator and me, but Senator Jenner, who was taking over the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, was about to investigate some cases of subversion in the United Nations and he needed Bob Morris. We were then without a Chief Counsel, and anti-Communist lawyers were scarce. A number of people suggested Roy Cohn; Senator realized he was very young. He was also known as a liberal, but recently he had done a fine job prosecuting Communists in New York, so Senator hired him, and I found myself Roy Cohn's secretary.

From the beginning there was a serious friction between Roy and Bobby Kennedy, who was Minority Counsel. They used the same office spaces and the same secretaries. The first order that Roy gave me was to set up his office space, but the next was to never let Bobby have our best secretary, Ruth. So from then on when Bobby asked for Ruth, I had to tell him she was too busy or something and sent him another girl from our pool of secretaries. In a couple of days a friend of Roy, David Schine, arrived to work and we set him up in the office too. As soon as he got his phone, he called the Pentagon trying to get the address of a soldier. I heard him having some trouble and I heard him use Senator McCarthy's name. So I called Don Surene, Senator's top investigator; Don called the Army and apologized and straightened it out with that officer. This was the first brush those two young fellows had with the Army, but it was not the last, I'm sorry to say. Senator never criticized Roy; he always defended his employees, but I believe those two boys were the reason other Senators turned away from our committee, and I feel they did more harm than good in our crusade.

I've also had many questions about the Army-McCarthy hearings. The first thing we need to remember is that this T.V. extravaganza was a trumped up affair to stop McCarthy and his investigations of Communists and traitors in our government; he was stepping on too many toes. Actually the charges against Senator McCarthy were so falsely manufactured that even the Secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, confessed that they were without "substantial foundations." Those were his exact words.

Millions of Americans who watched the hearings realized that the Senator was being harassed, and reports were that most listeners liked our Senator and what he stood for. It was true that Roy Cohn had requested the Army allow his friend to remain near Washington after he was drafted so he could work with the committee, but I'm not at all sure the Senator even agreed to it.

And then there was the Peress case. Senator had evidence proving Dr. Irving Peress, then Capt. Peress in the Army of the United States, was a Communist and was soliciting for the Communist party. Senator McCarthy so advised the Army. Instead of investigating or turning the case over to a loyalty board, the Army had given Peress a raise to Major and an Honorable Discharge. Now this did infuriate the Senator. However, none of this was worthy of such a waste of taxpayers' money, time, and men who could have spent their days better serving our Nation than in ridiculous hearings.

I think those hearings were a disgrace to our country. I've really only touched the surface of all the treason and stupidity that Senator McCarthy exposed. As a result of these investigations many subversives were removed from our government, and I believe the Communist timetable was set back many years.

On Washington's birthday 1956, arrangements were made for Senator McCarthy and Senator Jenner to speak at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It was reported that they had an overflow audience, but it was much more than that. We had arrived an hour in advance and the hall was practically full already. Shortly, buses filled with cheering people waving American flags and McCarthy banners began to pull up at the entrance, so we had hundreds of patriots from Connecticut, upper New York state, New Jersey, and I even noticed one from Rhode Island and other states. Hurriedly, loud speakers were secured and put in place so that those that were out front could at least hear what was being said. It brought tears to many eyes to hear those cheers of approval not only from those inside, but from all the buses parked along the curbs outside. For a couple of Senators who were taking so much slander and abuse it surely must have been an encouragement. I will never forget that afternoon, and I don't believe any of those that were there will either.

...Senator McCarthy explained fourteen mistakes our government had made in dealing with the Far East problem, mistakes which seriously injured our prestige and leadership. He offered suggestions of how they should have been and now could be handled. I think you will be very interested in all of them, but I will only take time to read two or three. 1) In December 1945, he explained, the American Government instructed the Chinese people that the only way to keep American friendship was to take Communists into their government. George C. Marshall, General Marshall, went to China for our Government and presented this ultimatum to them. 2) In January 1947, our Government made good on the ultimatum. Chiang Kieshek, the leader of the anti-Communist forces, had refused to take Communists into his Government, and Truman had cut off all their supplies; the Communists then took over China. When I saw the tragic slaughter at Beijing, I couldn't help but feel ashamed for my country. As Lattimore had suggested, we should let China fall, but don't let it look like we pushed them. But we did.

Then on November 3, 1950, Senator McCarthy explained, the American Armies were fighting in Korea when they were attacked by Chinese Communist troops. The American Government ordered the military commanders not to bomb Chinese bases or supply lines, even though American troops were in danger of destruction. The reason given: this might bring China into the war, and believe it or not, our country had turned down the Chinese anti-Communist forces offer of 33,000 troops to help defeat the Chinese and Korean Communists. Also, and I don't suppose you've read this in many history books, American forces were protecting the Communist-Chinese coasts. The American fleet was ordered to protect Red China against the anti-Communist Nationalist raid, and our seventh fleet was ordered to protect shipments of military supplies for the Red Chinese forces killing American boys.

Senator McCarthy continued to explain all fourteen errors he felt our government had made. At the last case, he told them, quoting from his report given as late as May, 1955: "The Senate Subcommittee on Investigations reported on the questioning of top State Department/Defense Department officials that 481 American prisoners of war were still unacounted for and were believed to be in Chinese prisons. Last year, with great fanfare and by making who knows what concessions to the Reds, we obtained the release of fifteen, which leaves 466 American fighting men whom the mightiest Nation of earth is evidently not lifting a finger to protect. I say the world will never respect us, will never acknowledge us as a worthy leader in the anti-Communist cause until it learns that when an American soldier goes overseas, he packs on his shoulders the entire strength of the United States of America. The Nation owes the same duty to the soldier as the soldier owes to the Nation."

"Therefore I repeat what I have urged a hundred times before, that we put Red China in an economic straight jacket, that so long as an American boy remains in Communist control that no American money go to nations that trade with Red China in strategic supplies or otherwise. One of the results of the Geneva Friendship meeting is that we are permitting our alleged allies to ship highly strategic war supplies to the Soviet Union. This policy affects the Far East as well as other parts of the world since Communist China gets what she needs from Communist Russia."

This was a subject the Senator stressed in press releases. I can't remember that there were any more boys released after that.

I won't take tome to go into all the mistakes Senator McCarthy explained, but I should mention the suppression of the Wedemeyer Report. General Wedemeyer was one of our top Intelligence officers who had prepared a special report to Congress on how China could be saved from Communist conquest. This special, important report has been withheld from the Congress. When the Armed Services Committee of the United States Senate learned of this, they asked General Marshall why he had joined in the suppression of that report. "I did not join in the suppression of that report; I personally suppressed it." Congress did not have that report to use in their making of a decision.

Senator McCarthy kept finding more and more references to General Marshall as he continued his research into the reasons China fell to the Communists. When he heard that the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House had been requested to approve the arming of, by America, ten Chinese Communist Divisions he could hardly believe it. And then he learned that Secretary of State Dean Acheson reported that General Marshall had agreed to assign sixty-nine United states officers and 400 tons of American equipment to train ten Communist Chinese armies. This was incredible, and when Senator McCarthy had completed his research, he gave a report of General Marshall's record to the Congress and printed his book "America's Retreat From Victory" a story of George Catlett Marshall. General Marshall had been built up as such a great General and hero by the press that most people had a hard time believing the truth, but his book was completely documented. I'll tell you how to get a copy if you really want to know the truth, and I hope you want to get one.

Before I finish, remember in describing Senator McCarthy that I used the word "gentle". Now that does sound a bit strange for such a masculine man, but he was gentle. The author, Brent Bozell, who was known as a good judge of character, wrote, "I studied Senator McCarthy's work, and I helped write a book about it; and in the course of professional interviews I caught glimpses of the bouncy, the strength of will, the awesome single mindedness, the gentleness of this man." So Brent Bozell saw what I saw.

Another character witness I'd like to quote is William Rusher, publisher of National Review. After the Senator had been censored, Rusher thought perhaps this would be a good time to find out if the Senator were ever bitter. After his interviews, Rusher commented that bitterness was just not in Senator McCarthy's character and then he added, "We might interject here that surprising as it may sound, the dominate quality in Senator McCarthy was a singular sweetness in his character; this was once the key to his success, just as in its purity depended his courage, and it was courage that put him in the forefront of anti-communism. Many of whom were more knowledgeable than he, and the cause of his down fall. For valiant, though he was, in fighting for his country or for principal, he could not be ruthless in fighting for himself."

I almost forgot to tell you about the Senator's marriage to Jean Kerr, and it was a very important and a really beautiful part of his life. Jean had worked for the Senator and had helped write his book "McCarthyism, The Fight For America." Jean was a beautiful, very smart girl; we all loved her dearly. She joined the Catholic Church and they were married in the huge Washington D. C. Catholic Church with both political and social friends in attendance. It was a beautiful wedding. This marriage was a very happy marriage. After awhile they adopted a baby girl whom they both adored. Jean has since died and I don't know where to find her daughter; I'd love to meet her. I'm sure that all the vicious smears against that great Patriot who adopted her must bother her very much, and I wonder if she knew that in 1954, the Gallop Poll listed Senator Joseph R. McCarthy as the fourth most admired man in the whole United States.

Many thousands of people were alerted to the Communist menace and were aware that Senator McCarthy was fighting a good fight. He had challenged us to be very sure our young people knew the truth that International Communism has but one goal, and that is to place the free people of the world under complete and dictatorial control of the Soviet Government. This truth was published by the House Committee on un-American activities in the 1950s. That Committee had endeavored to wake up America and published a pamphlet entitled, "The Shameful Years, 30 Years of Soviet Espionage In The United States". I do wish I had a copy of this pamphlet to give each of you. It explains so well how our Federal Government was gradually brought under foreign control, which had so shocked Senator McCarthy. Then in 1956, the United States Senate published a handbook for Americans entitled, "The Communist Party Of The United States Of America, What It Does And How It Works". The Senate Committee explains that the Communist Party of America is in fact a Russian-inspired, Moscow-dominated, anti-American, quasi-military conspiracy against our Government, our ideals, and our freedoms. Now, most books that contain this truth are out of print or have mysteriously disappeared from the shelves of our libraries.

Before I finish, perhaps I should answer a number of questions from my friends. For instance, I have been asked, "What did Senator McCarthy think of the United Nations?" For one thing, he was well aware that the U.N. Charter had been drawn up by the Communists, pro-Communists, Socialists and the like. He knew the Charter did not guarantee protection of private property, nor religious freedom, and in fact under the United Nations there is no God. Senator McCarthy suggested that we give Red China our seat in the United Nations, and that would get us out from under the jurisdiction of that dangerous organization.

I wonder how many people today realize that our school history books are filled with vicious attacks on Senator McCarthy. What a pity that we are not able to stop this false reporting to the youth of our Nation; they need to know the truth.

...Another point I would like to bring out at this time is the question often asked: "How many peoples' lives have been ruined by the Senator's false accusations?" Actually, there was never one, not even one. But because some people confused McCarthy's investigations with the Hollywood investigation of Myron Fagan, you need to know that Senator McCarthy never investigated the Hollywood film industry at all.

This brings us to Senator McCarthy's death. He was in his 40s when he died on May 2, 1957. He died at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the same hospital from which that other great Patriot, Secretary of the Navy, Forrestal, fell or was thrown to his death. Senator McCarthy's death certificate reads "Hepatitis Unknown." There were so many conflicting reports concerning his death that it is very confusing. Medford Evans, the man who wrote "The Assassination of Joseph R. McCarthy" was convinced that the Senator had been murdered, and I'm inclined to agree with him. But I hope his life will encourage others to learn the truth, and I pray that the truth will lead America back to a Christian government. Joseph McCarthy was buried at Appleton, W.I., where every Spring there is a Memorial Service. These Memorial Services are held under the auspices of the McCarthy Educational Foundation, which has been doing an excellent job of keeping his memory alive... The Foundation would like to continue the placement of the Senator's two books in high schools and colleges... Both Senator McCarthy's "McCarthyism, The Fight For America" and "America's Retreat From Victory," the story of George Catlett Marshall, are available from the Joseph R. McCarthy Educational Foundation, Inc, 2219 South 65th Street, Milwaukee, WI, 53219... Thank you so much for listening, and thank you for helping to bring some truth back to America. May God bless the memory of a great Christian Patriot, Joseph R. McCarthy.

Formal Portrait
Judge McCarthy in June, 1942, shortly before he took a leave of absence from
his judicial post and joined the U. S. Marine Corps as a First Lieutenant.

For generations of American students, the name Joe McCarthy and not Joe Stalin has been synonymous with evil. A practitioner of “black arts,” a “demon,” “ogreish,” and a “seditionist” are a few of the descriptions of him handed down to us from his first major biographer. The passage of time hasn’t tempered these hysterical reactions.
The late senator, the story goes, created a climate of fear in the early 1950s by conducting a witchhunt that called liberals “Communists” and Communists “spies.” We now know better. The witches were real. Today, even many of McCarthy’s most extreme and ridiculed statements—alleging “a conspiracy on a scale so immense” or lambasting “twenty years of treason” in Democratic administrations—seem, if anything, to understate the pervasiveness of Communist infiltration of the U.S. government and the enormity of its damage.
Documents from the Soviet Union’s archives, USSR spy messages deciphered by the U.S. government’s Venona program, and declassified FBI files and wiretaps all prove that hundreds of U.S. officials were agents of an international Communist conspiracy. If these previously inaccessible documents shed light on only a few of McCarthy’s specific charges, they certainly vindicate his general charge that security in the U.S. government was lax and that large numbers of Communists penetrated positions of great importance.
Alger Hiss, Roosevelt foreign policy advisor and first secretary general of the United Nations; Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and Truman’s appointee as director of the International Monetary Fund; and Lauchlin Currie, administrative assistant to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, have all been confirmed, among hundreds of others, to have been agents of the USSR. In addition to the multitudes of executive branch agents, we also know of at least three Congressmen working clandestinely for the Soviet Union during this time period.
Government was hardly the only domain targeted by Soviet espionage. Influential media figures like I.F. Stone of The Nation, Michael Straight, editor of The New Republic, and Pulitzer Prize Winner Walter Duranty of The New York Times were actually agents of the Soviet Union. Prominent unions like the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the Screen Actors Guild were dominated by Communists. Even major industrialists like Armand Hammer did their part by laundering Soviet money to domestic U.S. Communists.
Despite many of these new revelations, academic opinion of “tail-gunner Joe,” the central enemy of domestic subversion in the early 1950s, has remained static. This consensus had gone unchallenged within academic circles until the release of Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator by George Mason University History Professor Arthur Herman.
In Joseph McCarthy, Arthur Herman writes that the “standard claim that McCarthy had never exposed a real Communist in the government” is “demonstrably false.” A perusal of the major books on McCarthy reveals that this statement itself sets Herman’s work apart.
McCarthy’s “critics were right,” Rutgers Professor David Oshinsky remarks in A Conspiracy So Immense, “he never uncovered a Communist.” Thomas Reeves of the University of Wisconsin opines in The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy that “McCarthy did not have a single name.” Robert Griffith maintains in The Politics of Fear, “Each of McCarthy’s charges was fraudulent.” “It happened to be a fact,” boasted Richard Rovere in Senator Joe McCarthy, “that not one certifiable Communist had been disclosed as working for the government” as a result of the junior senator from Wisconsin’s efforts.
Herman dissents and offers up Owen Lattimore, Edward Posniak, Mary Jane Keeney, Gustavo Duran, and John Carter Vincent as among the cases in which McCarthy had things essentially right.
Among one of the first names McCarthy named was that of Mary Jane Keeney. Mrs. Keeney worked in various sensitive overseas State Department jobs during the 1940s before settling in at the United Nations. Intercepted Venona cables, as well as her own diaries, prove that Keeney and her husband were Soviet agents. In February of 1950 McCarthy understated matters by labeling this agent of a foreign power merely a Communist. By the end of that year she was forced out of her post at the United Nations.
For anti-anticommunists, McCarthy’s charges against Gustavo Duran stood as “proof of the insanity of the red scare.” Michael Straight, Duran’s brother-in-law and editor of The New Republic, would use the pages of his magazine to promote Duran’s supposed innocence and McCarthy’s assumed recklessness. Testimony by many attesting to Duran’s Stalinism and work for the Spanish Communist secret police during the Spanish Civil War—even a picture of him in a Communist uniform—was dismissed as Francoist propaganda. One would think that Straight’s later admission to being a Soviet agent should have at least sparked a second look into this McCarthy allegation by historians.
Besides Herman, there haven’t been any takers. Herman asserts that Duran was “not only a Communist but a central figure in Stalin’s cold-blooded purge of his Trotskyite and anarchist allies during the Spanish Civil War.” Later, Duran’s supporters would lamely point out that Duran, like Mrs. Keeney, was technically no longer a State Department employee since he worked at the United Nations. The fact that he, like Keeney, was paid by the State Department and was definitely a Communist didn’t factor into their passage of judgement on McCarthy’s charges against Duran.
More so than any other witness, Annie Lee Moss purportedly exposed the cruelty and recklessness of Joseph McCarthy. Moss, who somehow jumped from an Army cafeteria worker to a clerk in the Pentagon code room, was labeled by McCarthy to be a loyalty risk. A middle-aged African American woman who walked to give her testimony with an elderly gait, Moss quickly gained the sympathy of Democrats on McCarthy’s committee. When asked about her knowledge of Karl Marx, Moss asked, “Who’s that?” The copies of The Daily Worker that arrived at her house were sent to the wrong address, she maintained. There were three Annie Lee Mosses in Washington, DC, her defenders intoned, so perhaps McCarthy had gotten the wrong woman.
McCarthy-haters seized on the Moss case as a club with which to beat anti-Communists. Edward R. Murrow devoted his weekly “See It Now” program to Mrs. Moss’s plight, while Missouri Senator Stu Symington told the witness that if she lost her job with the Army she could always come work for him. Just a year after McCarthy’s death it was revealed that he had indeed got the right woman. There was only one Annie Lee Moss in Washington, DC and it was the same Annie Lee Moss whose name and address appeared on the rolls of the local Communist Party. A former FBI agent even attested to seeing her actual Communist Party membership card from years earlier. If one U.S. Senator should be destroyed for allegedly making false accusations of Communism, what should the penalty be for another who announces to the world his willingness to give a Communist a job in his office?
If a dishonest characterization of McCarthy is the largest common denominator among anti-anticommunists, then hypocrisy is a close second.
So-called McCarthyite devices, such as the Smith Act and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, were creations not of Cold Warriors, but of New Deal Democrats. When they were used against fascists or even Trotskyites, Herman reminds readers, the Communists applauded and at times even aided and abetted the government. Only years later when the tables were turned did liberals change their tune about the methods they created. All that mattered was whose ox was being gored.
After McCarthy first made his charges public in February of 1950, Senate Democrats demanded that he stop hiding behind closed-door sessions and name names. Once McCarthy did what they asked, these very same Senate Democrats pounced on him for making charges without giving the accused the opportunity to defend themselves.
McCarthy’s enemies—supposed champions of civil liberties—tapped his phone, intercepted his incoming personal mail, placed a paid spy in his office, and illegally released his tax returns to the press (resulting in a large refund!). Herman recounts the amusing story of Paul Hughes, one that has been curiously forgotten by most McCarthy biographers. Hughes, a confidence man, convinced members of the Democratic National Committee, famous labor lawyer Joseph Rauh, and the Washington Post that he was a spy in McCarthy’s office and that he had evidence of major lawbreaking by the Senator. Rauh and a DNC leader paid more than $10,000 for the information, and the Post prepared a twelve-part series on the allegations, which included a bizarre tale about McCarthy stockpiling weapons in the basement of the Capitol, with an obvious implication of a coup. After nine-months of feeding absurd stories about McCarthy to liberals hungry for anything that would defame their enemy, Hughes was revealed as a fraud. The massive Post series was killed at the last minute.
“McCarthy opponents liked to claim that what made McCarthy reek in the nostrils of American democracy was not what McCarthy was doing but how he did it: the public airing of unsubstantiated charges, the use of smear and innuendo, and ‘confidential informants, dossiers, political spies,’ as Joseph Rauh himself had written,” Herman observes. “The Hughes case proves that some of them were willing to do at least the same to him.”
Although McCarthy is charged with a failure to distinguish between liberals and Communists, it was generally liberals, Herman points out, who couldn’t recognize the differences. It was Franklin Roosevelt, after all, who brought Alger Hiss to Yalta and Harry Truman who promoted Harry Dexter White to head the International Monetary Fund. Both Truman and Roosevelt entrusted these Soviet agents with top positions long after they had been told that Hiss and White were involved in espionage.
During the time that the Senate was debating whether to condemn McCarthy, Andrei Vishinsky, prosecutor for Stalin’s show trials, passed away after having sent scores of people to their deaths for crimes they didn’t commit. “McCarthy had not sent one person to jail. Yet by a terrible irony of fate,” Herman notes, “it is his name, not Vishinsky’s, that has been universally remembered and reviled as the symbol of an error of terror and suspicion.”
This February 9, marks the 50th anniversary of McCarthy’s famous Wheeling, West Virginia, address. The five decades that have passed since this earthshattering speech have seen an unending academic assault not just on McCarthy, but on just about any figure who took the view that Communism was inherently evil. Arthur Herman’s Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of Americas Most Hated Senator is a much needed antidote to the many propagandistic screeds that have made McCarthy a bogeyman in academic circles and beyond. Willing to point out McCarthy’s flaws and his strengths, Herman offers up a view of McCarthy detached from the hysteria surrounding so many other works on the subject.
It is folly to think that Joe McCarthy, like J. Parnell Thomas, Martin Dies, and A. Mitchell Palmer before him, was attacked because he smeared innocents. Joe McCarthy’s real crime was calling Communists precisely what they were: Communists.

Courthouse Office
Judge McCarthy in his office at the Outagamie County Courthouse, May 18, 1946.

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
and The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—
The Stalin Era

Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 93 (May 1999): 53-57.

Old Ghosts
Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Yale University Press. 475 pp. $30.

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era. By Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. Random House. 402 pp. $30.

Reviewed by Andrew J. Bacevich

To label the period after 1945 "The Cold War" is to misconstrue the ideological contours of our times. In the decades following the Second World War, Americans found themselves embroiled in not one but at least two cold wars. The seemingly more dangerous of the two—the political and military struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union—ended abruptly in 1989. With amazingly little fuss, the Soviets simply gave up. They abandoned their empire. When in short order their country began to disintegrate, they could barely rouse themselves to protest. It soon became apparent that this cold war—the contest between democratic capitalism and Marxism–Leninism—had effectively resolved itself years earlier. Somewhere along the line, the long–suffering peoples of the Soviet Union had concluded that their revolution had been a cruel hoax not worth defending.

The second cold war, a conflict within the United States and throughout the West generally, has proven to be more durable. Already by the 1930s, belief that the antidote to capitalist repression and exploitation could be found only on the radical left had become an article of faith for leading members of the intelligentsia. For these self–styled progressives, the Bolshevik experiment in utopia provided both inspiration and model. In the West, revolution acquired an allure that persisted long after it had lost its appeal among those who actually lived under regimes erected on its principles.

Waged in highbrow journals or behind the scenes in labor unions, editorial offices, movie studios, and faculty clubs, this internal cold war has not attracted as much public attention as its external counterpart. There was, however, one exception: from the late 1940s to the early 1950s, a succession of exposés, spectacular trials, and headline–grabbing congressional investigations of domestic communism convulsed the nation and transformed the American political scene. The individuals raised to prominence by these events—Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to name only a few—almost immediately assumed iconic status. As individuals, they might be heroes, villains, or simply unlucky bystanders, depending upon one’s political point of view. Yet it was as protagonist in a drama of surpassing moral and political significance that each would henceforth be remembered.

According to the left, the essence of that drama went like this: ambitious, unscrupulous politicians (like Nixon and McCarthy) abetted by neurotic and duplicitous informers (like Chambers and Bentley) victimized innocent citizens (like Hiss and the Rosenbergs) whose only "crime" lay in their commitment to working for a more humane and genuinely democratic order. The result was national hysteria and the de facto suspension of civil liberties for anyone hesitating to enlist in the anti–Communist crusade.

An odd collection of bedfellows—conservatives, Cold War liberals, and a few anti–Stalinist radicals—offered a different and more sinister interpretation. In their eyes, the "victims" of the anti–Communist crusade were not innocents. They were instead agents of Joseph Stalin, engaged in a conspiracy to subvert the existing constitutional order while promoting, by whatever means, the interests of the Soviet Union, even, and perhaps especially, at the expense of the United States. In this interpretation, the story was one of deception, treason, and betrayal.

These controversies of the forties and fifties remained contested terrain for years afterward. Yet with no small amount of skill, the left succeeded in setting the terms of the ensuing debate. In the literature, this became the period of the "Second Red Scare," a label implying paranoia and intolerance. The term McCarthyism, initially a reference to witch hunts and smear tactics, became an all–purpose code word used to place out of bounds questions about the implications of being a Communist Party member or fellow traveler. Despite the efforts by a few historians to show that some Americans actually were complicit in Soviet espionage, the impression prevailed that the controversies of the period had unnecessarily and irreparably harmed the American political system. In sophisticated quarters, at least, the anti–anti–Communists had secured the moral high ground.

By all rights, these two invaluable books should change all that. Venona, the product of two American historians, and The Haunted Wood, a collaboration of an American historian and a Russian KGB operative–turned–journalist, provide crushingly authoritative answers to questions that have lingered since the days when the charges and countercharges hurled by ex–Communists and alleged Communists riveted the nation’s attention. How prevalent was the treason committed by Americans on behalf of Stalinist totalitarianism? How pervasive was Communist influence in American government? Above all, who told the truth and who lied? In putting these issues to rest, the authors of these two volumes make it possible at long last to move on to new questions more relevant to the age in which we now live.

The two accounts cover much the same ground but in ways that complement rather than duplicate. The Venona project, subject of the study by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, was a highly classified government effort to decrypt messages between the Kremlin and Soviet agents in the U.S. during the Second World War. During the period 1942–1946, as a result of production shortcuts undertaken due to the duress of war, Soviet codes, theoretically unbreakable, contained a fatal flaw. In 1943 American analysts identified this flaw. Through painstaking work, they managed by 1946 to decipher portions of transmissions that American intelligence had intercepted. That endeavor continued into the 1970s, by which time the National Security Agency (NSA) had deciphered in whole or in part nearly three thousand Soviet messages.

The Venona project did not by any means provide a complete picture of Soviet espionage in the United States. Despite the best efforts of the NSA code–breakers, many intercepts from the 1942–1946 period remain unbroken. Even during that period, U.S. military intelligence managed to intercept only a fraction of the encoded message traffic between Moscow and its intelligence operatives in Washington and New York. Above all, Soviet encryption procedures used before 1942 and after 1946 avoided the defect that Venona had exploited. Such caveats notwithstanding, Venona produced an intelligence bonanza, as was immediately evident when the project, long a closely held secret, and its findings were finally declassified in 1995.

The material gathered by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, if acquired by less exotic means, is no less compelling. As a result of a 1993 agreement between Random House, SVR (Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the successor to the KGB), and a cash–hungry association of retired KGB agents, Weinstein and Vassiliev paid for access to KGB operational files from the 1930s and 1940s. Yevgeny Primakov, now Russia’s prime minister but then its intelligence chief, instructed the SVR archivists to provide only selected files; despite this limitation, The Haunted Wood tells a devastating story.

A too brief summary of the findings offered by the two books would include the following points. Prior to and during World War II, the Soviet Union orchestrated a sustained campaign of espionage and subversion directed against the United States. Several hundred Americans, variously motivated by revolutionary romanticism, ideological fervor, or sheer venality, enlisted in that campaign. Some served the Soviet Union as spies, others as controllers, couriers, mail drops, or talent–spotters. Beginning with the New Deal, members of this Soviet–controlled apparatus infiltrated deep into the agencies of the federal bureaucracy. Entrance of the United States into World War II only increased the opportunities for espionage so that, for example, even the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA, had well over a dozen Soviet agents on its payroll.

Stalin’s agents rose to positions of prominence in the U.S. government: Alger Hiss, Laurence Duggan, and Noel Field (all State Department), Harry Dexter White (Treasury), Lauchlin Currie (assistant to President Franklin Roosevelt) routinely passed highly sensitive information to the Soviet Union. So too did many other lesser known or still unidentified figures scattered about from the War Department to defense industries. (Indeed, by 1944, a well–placed Soviet agent in the U.S. government had already tipped off his handlers as to the existence of the Venona project.) Internal security for the Manhattan Project was particularly lax. With Julius Rosenberg playing a vital role, American spies provided crucial technical information that accelerated Stalin’s program to acquire the atomic bomb. For its part, the Communist Party USA routinely aided and abetted these efforts and accepted covert financial subsidies from the Kremlin in return. The party’s assertion that it was independent of Soviet control was fraudulent.

As with periodic allegations of presidential infidelities, it might be argued that none of this is really new. In fact, the findings contained in Venona and The Haunted Wood qualify as genuinely significant on several counts. First, they suggest that Stalin never viewed his wartime partnership with the United States as other than a temporary marriage of convenience. Given the scope and intensity of Soviet covert offensive, it becomes evident that the Cold War began not in postwar disputes over Germany and Eastern Europe but, as Haynes and Klehr write, as "a guerrilla action that Stalin had secretly started years before." The belief that more generous or forthcoming American policies, informed by a sympathetic understanding of Stalin’s security concerns, might have averted the Cold War is an illusion.

Second, these two accounts establish beyond any reasonable doubt that witnesses such as Chambers testified truthfully when sounding the alarm about Communist subversion. Diehards will still contend that Hiss was innocent or that Julius Rosenberg was framed, much as some adamantly insist that Oswald did not act alone or that James Earl Ray did not assassinate Martin Luther King. At some point, the accumulation of evidence permits us to dismiss such people as crackpots. We are now well past that point with regard to the most controversial spy cases of the 1940s and 1950s.

Third, Venona and The Haunted Wood show that espionage at the behest of the Soviet Union was much more extensive than previously recognized. To dismiss it as the handiwork of a few misguided souls is to understate the problem by an order of magnitude. The existence of a network on such a vast scale effectively demolishes the notion of "McCarthyism before McCarthy"—the thesis advanced by some scholars that internal security reforms instituted by the Truman Administration after World War II were irrational, unnecessary, and motivated by political expediency. The gist of this argument is that Truman ignited the anti–Communist mania that McCarthy himself exploited shortly thereafter. In fact, Truman was responding to a serious threat that his predecessor had allowed to fester. That response was prudent and necessary, just as the larger American effort to contain the Soviet Union was prudent and necessary.

These conclusions do not justify or excuse the demagoguery of Senator McCarthy and his acolytes. They do not constitute a defense for every action taken under the rubric of eliminating subversion. (Ethel Rosenberg offers a case in point. That she was complicit in her husband’s spying is beyond dispute; her offenses did not justify execution, however.) Nor should Venona and The Haunted Wood be read as suggesting that every American who flirted with communism or fell prey to an infatuation with the Soviet Union was guilty of treason. Indeed, these accounts deserve attention not because they offer an opportunity to settle old scores but because they provide a vehicle for moving beyond a debate that has long since outlived its usefulness.

Only by exorcising the ideological ghosts that have haunted national politics for the past half century will Americans rediscover the nexus of the issue that gave the domestic cold war significance in the first place: the threat posed by a radically materialist philosophy that in the name of "liberation" would snuff out even the possibility of authentic freedom. As was the case when the United States faced off against the Soviet Union, the ultimate question today turns on whether and how man relates to God. "At every point," observes Whittaker Chambers in Witness, "religion and politics interlace, and must do so more acutely as the conflict between the two great camps of men, those who reject and those who worship God, becomes irrepressible." By exorcising old ghosts, these two histories permit us to redirect our attention to the new fields on which that conflict continues.

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations at Boston University.

NOW LET THE TRUTH BE TOLD:

List of Americans in the Venona papers

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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
Nathan Einhorn, Executive Secretary of American Newspaper Guild
Max Elitcher, (*) Naval Ordinance Section, National Bureau of Standards
Jacob Epstein, International Brigades
Jack Fahy, Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs; Board of Economic Warfare; United States Department of the Interior
Linn Markley Farish, Liaison Officer with Tito's Yugoslav Partisan forces, Office of Strategic Services
Edward Fitzgerald, War Production Board
Charles Flato, Board of Economic Warfare; Civil Liberties Subcommittee, Senate Committee on Education and Labor
Isaac Folkoff
Jane Foster, Board of Economic Warfare; Office of Strategic Services; Netherlands Study Unit
Zalmond Franklin
Isabel Gallardo
Boleslaw Gebert, National Officer of Polonia Society of International Workers Order
Harrison George, senior CPUSA leadership, editor of

NOW LET THE TRUTH BE TOLD: List of Americans in the Venona papers

NOW LET THE TRUTH BE TOLD:

List of Americans in the Venona papers

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NOW LET THE TRUTH BE TOLD:
List of Americans in the Venona papers