Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Until early 1950, Communism meant little to McCarthy. He had been elected to the Senate over the incumbent, La Follette, in 1946, as a result of Communist-controlled votes in the labor unions of Milwaukee. As senator he collaborated in a joint Nazi and Communist plot to injure the United States and its army by reversing the convictions of German S.S. troops for atrocities committed on American prisoners of war captured in the Battle of the Bulge. But by January 1950, McCarthy was looking for an issue to be used for his reelection in 1952. At dinner with three men, two of them associates of mine, in the Colony Restaurant in Washington (January 7, 1950) he asked what issue he should use. After several suggestions, he seized upon Communism: “That’s it,” he said. “The government is full of Communists. We can hammer away at them.”

To obtain an audience for this hammering, he requested bookings for Lincoln’s Birthday speeches from the Senate Republican Campaign Committee and was given assignments at Wheeling, West Virginia, Salt Lake City, and Reno. Without any real conception of what he was doing, and without any research or knowledge of the subject, at Wheeling on February 9th, McCarthy waved a piece of paper (copy of a four-year-old letter from Byrnes to Representative Adolph Sabath) and said, “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” The letter in fact named no names, had nothing to do with spying or even with Communists, but simply reported that 3,000 employees of abolished war agencies, who were being shifted to the State Department budget, had been screened and 284 had been listed as undesirable (of which 79 had been already separated from service, 26 of these because they were aliens). Every time McCarthy repeated the charge, the numbers and the categories changed; for example, the following night, he told his Salt Lake City audience, “Last night ... I stated that I had the names of 57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party.”

Out of the controversy raised by these charges emerged McCarthy the accuser, known to every American and praised or reviled by millions. He loved it. On February 20th, in an incoherent speech of more than six hours in the Senate, he announced that he had penetrated “Truman’s iron curtain of secrecy” and that he was going to give 81 cases, identified by numbers without names. What ensued in the next six hours was bedlam, as case after case was presented, filled with contradictions and irrelevancies. There were 81 numbers but only 66 cases, for cases were left out, some were repeated with different numbers, many had never been employed by the State Department or even by the government, and one, “primarily a morals case,” had been discharged from it because he was “anti-Communist,” while another, Case 72, was “a high type of man, a Democratic American who . . . opposed Communism.” It was, according to the Senate Republican leader, Senator Taft, “a perfectly reckless performance.” Nevertheless, Taft and his colleagues determined to accept and support these charges, since they would injure the Administration. Accordingly, Taft told McCarthy, “If one case doesn’t work, try another.” The public, informed only of the charges, without the cynical details, gathered from the newspaper headlines that the State Department was full of Communist spies. Even today few people realize that McCarthy, in five years of accusations, never turned up a Communist in the State Department, although undoubtedly there must have been some there.

McCarthy repeated this performance before a Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, a few weeks later. From March 7th through early July, this subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took 1,500 printed pages of testimony plus more than 1,000 pages of documentation. McCarthy’s testimony, it soon developed, was based entirely on evidence turned up by House of Representative committees of the previous Congress. He gave names to the 66 cases (he called it 81 cases) he had mentioned in his Senate speech and 35 new names. In few cases was there any evidence. When asked for evidence, he airily told Senator Tydings that that was his job: the evidence was in the State Department, and it was up to the committee to get it. After the files in question were obtained by the committee and found to contain no evidence to support McCarthy’s charges, McCarthy called them “phony files” and insisted they had been “raped and rifled” of the FBI reports which had been in them. J. Edgar Hoover was called in, had the files examined, and reported that “the State Department files were intact.”

McCarthy ignored this rebuff. New charges followed. Eventually he announced that he would base his whole reputation on one case. For more than a week he tantalized the world and the committee by withholding the name: “the top Russian espionage agent” in the United States, “Alger Hiss’s boss in the espionage ring in the State Department,” “the chief architect of our Far Eastern policy.” At last the name was released: Professor Owen Lattimore, of the Johns Hopkins University, the English-speaking world’s greatest authority on Mongolia. The only trouble was that Lattimore was not a Communist, not a spy, and not employed by the State Department.

The Tydings subcommittee report, issued in July, condemned McCarthy for “a fraud and a hoax” on the Senate: “Starting with nothing, Senator McCarthy plunged headlong forward, desperately seeking to develop some information.” McCarthy should have been finished. He was not. And for a very simple reason: in politics truth is not so important as power, and McCarthy soon showed that he had the power—the power of an inflamed and misled public opinion. In the election of November 1950, several members of the Senate who had been most outspoken against McCarthy, including some of the most influential leaders of that august body, were defeated—by McCarthyism, if not by McCarthy. Tydings was beaten in Maryland in 1950, and Scott Lucas, the Democratic leader in the Senate, who had harassed McCarthy during his performance on February 20th, went down with him. William Benton, senator from Connecticut, who introduced a resolution to expel McCarthy from the Senate in 1951 and whose charges were fully supported by the Senate’s investigation of McCarthy’s private finances, was defeated in 1952. With him went down to defeat Lucas’s successor as Democratic leader, Senator McFarland of Arizona. From 1950 to 1954 most of his fellow senators, and many in the executive branch, were terrorized by McCarthy’s power with the electorate, and opposed him on nothing they could possibly concede. During this period he violated more laws and regulations than any previous senator in history. Thousands of his secret supporters in the Administration sent him information and misinformation, classified secrets, spite letters, anonymous notes. The Eisenhower Administration at one time considered charging McCarthy himself with espionage but did not have the courage. Much of this material was read by McCarthy over nationwide television broadcasts. When a reporter once said to him, “Isn’t that a classified document?” McCarthy said, “It was. I just declassified it.”

It may be doubted that McCarthy’s power to defeat his enemies was as great as they thought, but he encouraged these thoughts. Certainly he defeated Tydings.

Senator Tydings, from an old and wealthy Maryland family, with a brilliant combat record in World War I, was too conservative for Franklin Roosevelt, who tried to “purge” him in the primary campaign of 1938, but had been soundly rebuffed. McCarthy did it differently. Using the large sums of money which came to him from real anti-Communists throughout the country, McCarthy hired a group of shady characters, led by an ex-FBI agent (fired for immorality during enforcement of the Mann “white-slave” Law), and sent them, well equipped with funds, into Maryland to fight Tydings as a “pro-Communist.” The state election laws were violated on a wholesale basis, including excess expenditures, forgery, use of out-of-state paid campaigners, and numerous other violations. The coup de grace was administered to Tydings by wide circulation of a faked photograph of Tydings and Communist leader Earl Browder cozily together, a concoction of McCarthy’s staff. After Tydings was defeated, several of his victorious opponent’s staff, including his campaign manager, were tried and sentenced to jail or to pay fines, for electoral-law violations, but that did not change the result of the election, and few other senators wanted to risk the same ordeal by opposing McCarthy in the Senate.