Once again we see the simplistic and incorrect labelling of McCarthyism that just aint so: “Basically he treated any viewpoint favorable to communism as treason.”
It relies on a discredited version of history that paints McCarthy as one who hunted for Communists and spies that didnt exist. That view has been dramatically disproven by the release of KGB files and the opening of spy documents (such as the Venona transcripts) that shows that American Communists actively assisted Soviet intelligence efforts in the United States and elsewhere. Senator Joe McCarthy confronted government officials engaging in a concealment of communist involvement, and uncovered an excessively lax security posture with regards to Communists in sensitive U.S. Government posts. We now know that Alger Hiss, a high level State Department official in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, was indeed a Communist and a Soviet spy, and that the Venona files reveal several hundred Soviet agents in the US Govt, so the fears of anti-Communists like McCarthy were well-founded.
Arthur Herman, in his is new book, “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator,”, goes some way in restoring balance to our views on McCarthy from the familar broad-brush phony treatment of him as a bogeyman. He says that the accuracy of McCarthy’s charges “was no longer a matter of debate,” that they are “now accepted as fact.” And The New York Post’s Eric Fettmann has noted: “growing historical evidence underscores that, whatever his rhetorical and investigative excesses — and they were substantial — McCarthy was a lot closer to the truth about Communism than were his foes.”(1)
(1) (source: http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=2386)
Here is a more detailed examination of these points:
1. Were Communists in Government a real security threat? Was Soviet spying and influence a danger? Yes and Yes!
The Venona transcripts prove that many (perhaps in the hundreds) of Communists in the US Government were spies for Stalin’s USSR. Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, which in the 1950s the Left claimed were being falsely accused, were indeed spies for the USSR and gave the atomic bomb and other deadly secrets to the USSR. Alger Hiss was the most senior traitor in the US Government since Benedict Arnold, yet the left defended him and defamed his accusers, for 50 years. The Venona transcripts identified over 300 spies for the USSR that infiltrated the US Government, over 100 of them named. In many cases, the Soviet spies were commited Communists.
Some examples: ” The 1940s Democrat Congressman Sam Dickstein (D-NY) it has been discovered was a Soviet agent (codename was crook). … Harold Glasser, a US Treasury Department official (code-named Ruble) who passed scores of key State Department and Treasury policy documents to Soviet intelligence.”
http://www.boston.com/globe/search/stories/books/weinstein_vassiliev.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dyk.html
http://intellit.muskingum.edu/spycases_folder/venonaa-c.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_hiss.html
“The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors,” (Regnery, 608 pp, $29.95).
2. But did McCarthy help to uncover real security risks to the US? The claims that the targets of McCarthy were innocents or the wrong ones is false.
“Any list of identified communists uncovered by McCarthy would have to include Lauchlin Currie, Gustavo Duran, Theodore Geiger, Mary Jane Keeney, Edward Posniak, Haldore Hanson, John Carter Vincent, Owen Lattimore, Edward Rothschild, Irving Peress, and Annie Lee Moss.
… McCarthy also exposed scores of others who were causing harm to national security from their posts in the State Department, the Pentagon. The McCarthy probe resulted in the removal or further investigation by the FBI of 77 employees and a complete revamping of the security system at the GPO. Of the 110 names that McCarthy gave the Tydings Committee to be investigated, 62 of them were employed by the State Department at the time of the hearings. The committee cleared everyone on McCarthy’s list, but within a year the State Department started proceedings against 49 of the 62. By the end of 1954, 81 of those on McCarthy’s list had left the government either by dismissal or resignation.”
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no18/vo12no18_mccarthy.htm
Take the case of Owen Lattimore: “Lattimore had been Roosevelt’s key advisor on China policy. Yet Evans showed evidence from 5,000 pages of FBI files on him — files released only a few years ago to the public, although the White House had access to them. However, evidence before the committee showed that Lattimore had supported Soviet policy at every turn, even declaring that the Stalin purge trials in Russia, “sound like democracy to me.” With then-Vice President Henry Wallace in Russia, Lattimore compared concentration camps to the Tennessee Valley Authority, and later urged Washington to abandon China to communism and to withdraw from Japan and Korea.”
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/jmc.htm
Owen Lattimore was rightly accused of “losing China” for his actions. The loss of China led to the loss of over 50,000 Americans defending the Korean peninsula against the million-strong Red Chinese Army fighting with the North Koreans, so to say his actions were did not unmine America and had benign consequences would be very foolish.
“It was also during the mid-to-late 1940s that communist sympathizers in the State Department played a key role in the subjugation of mainland China by the Reds. “It is my judgment, and I was in the State Department at the time,” said former Ambassador William D. Pawley, “that this whole fiasco, the loss of China and the subsequent difficulties with which the United States has been faced, was the result of mistaken policy of Dean Acheson, Phil Jessup, [Owen] Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, John Service, John Davies, [O.E.] Clubb, and others.” Asked if he thought the mistaken policy was the result of “sincere mistakes of judgment,” Pawley replied: “No, I don’t.”
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no18/vo12no18_mccarthy.htm
3. The US State Department had been compromised by Communist infiltration in the 1940s, and McCarthy brought that serious problem to light:
“Communist infiltration of the State Department began in the 1930s. On September 2, 1939, former communist Whittaker Chambers provided Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle with the names and communist connections of two dozen spies in the government, including Alger Hiss. Berle took the information to President Roosevelt, but FDR laughed it off. Hiss moved rapidly up the State Department ladder and served as an adviser to Roosevelt at the disastrous 1945 Yalta Conference that paved the way for the Soviet conquest of Central and Eastern Europe. Hiss also functioned as secretary-general of the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, helped to draft the UN Charter, and later filled dozens of positions at the UN with American communists before he was publicly exposed as a Soviet spy by Whittaker Chambers in 1948.
The security problem at the State Department had worsened considerably in 1945 when a merger brought into State thousands of employees from such war agencies as the Office of Strategic Services, the Office of War Information, and the Foreign Economic Administration - all of which were riddled with members of the communist underground. J. Anthony Panuch, the State Department official charged with supervising the 1945 merger, told a Senate committee in 1953 that “the biggest single thing that contributed to the infiltration of the State Department was the merger of 1945. The effects of that are still being felt.” In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall and Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson engineered the firing of Panuch and the removal of every key member of his security staff.
In June 1947, a Senate Appropriations subcommittee addressed a secret memorandum to Marshall, calling to his attentiom a condition that developed and still flourishes in the State Department under the administration of Dean Acheson. It is evident that there is a deliberate, calculated program being carried out not only to protect communist personnel in high places but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. On file in the department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States which involves a large number of State Department employees, some in high official positions.
The memorandum listed the names of nine of these State Department officials and said that they were “only a few of the hundreds now employed in varying capacities who are protected and allowed to remain despite the fact that their presence is an obvious hazard to national security.” On June 24, 1947, Assistant Secretary of State John Peurifoy notified the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that ten persons had been dismissed from the department, five of whom had been listed in the memorandum. But from June 1947 until McCarthy’s Wheeling speech in February 1950, the State Department did not fire one person as a loyalty or security risk. In other branches of the government, however, more than 300 persons were discharged for loyalty reasons alone during the period from 1947 to 1951.”
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no18/vo12no18_mccarthy.htm
4. What about the abuses of “McCarthyism”? Communists in Government posed real security risks, and as Sen McCarthy pointed out: “There is no reason why men who chum with communists, who refuse to turn their backs on traitors, and who are consistently found at the time and place where disaster strikes America and success comes to international communism, should be given positions of power in government.”
Here is what some Government workers who were faced with :
TESTIMONY OF HOWARD FAST (ACCOMPANIED BY HIS COUNSEL, BENEDICT WOLF)
Mr. Cohn. Mr. Fast, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?
Mr. Fast. I must refuse to answer that question, claiming my rights and protection under the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.\9\
Is this an unfair question to ask a US Government employee? Was it an unfair question to ask during the Korean war, when American
soldiers were fighting and dying in a war against a Communist military from China, North Korea and the USSR? Well, some Communists seemed to think so, this is why Owen Lattimore invented the term “McCarthyism”, to discredit and mischaracterize the demand for loyalty among US Government officials as an assualt on free speech. It was not. McCarthy was not concerned we any citizen’s views, he was concerned with the views of those who could betray secrets or influence American foreign policy.
4. Didnt McCarthy go too far in attacking the Army? No! McCarthy was investigating real security lapses at Monmouth bases, that were not properly attended to by the Army. The US Government knew Soviet spy Julius Rosenberg had recruited friends to work for the Soviets, many of whom were apparentely at the Monmouth Army base, and so were the targets of questioning and investigation. But the Army was covering up rather than cleaning up this situtation. McCarthy’s investigation into it went up against powers larger than he was in Eisenhower and the Defense Dept, and in alliance with Democrats, they used it to destroy him.
But after McCarthy was destroyed politically, even his enemies did know that security at Monmouth had been compromised:
“The Army Signal Corps installation at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey was one of the nation’s most vital security posts, since the three research centers housed there were engaged in developing defensive devices designed to protect America from an atomic attack. Julius Rosenberg, who was executed in 1953 for selling U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, worked as an inspector at Fort Monmouth from 1940 to 1945 and maintained his Signal Corps contacts for at least another two years after that. From 1949 to 1953, the FBI had been warning the Army about security risks at Fort Monmouth, but the Army paid little attention to the reports of subversion until the McCarthy investigation began in 1953.
During 1953 and 1954, the McCarthy Committee, acting on reports of communist infiltration from civilian employees, Army officers, and enlisted personnel, heard 71 witnesses at executive sessions and 41 at open hearings. The Army responded by suspending or discharging 35 persons as security risks, but when these cases reached the Army Loyalty and Screening Board at the Pentagon, all but two of the suspected security risks were reinstated and given back pay. McCarthy demanded the names of the 20 civilians on the review board and, when he threatened to subpoena them, the Eisenhower Administration, at a meeting in Attorney General Herbert Brownell’s office on January 21, 1954, began plotting to stop McCarthy’s investigations once and for all.
Virtually all of those suspended were eventually restored to duty at Fort Monmouth and anti-McCarthyites have cited this as proof that McCarthy had failed once again to substantiate his allegations. But vindication of McCarthy came later, when the Army’s top-secret operations at Fort Monmouth were quietly moved to Arizona. In his 1979 book With No Apologies, Senator Barry Goldwater explained the reason for the move:
Carl Hayden, who in January 1955 became chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee of the United States Senate, told me privately Monmouth had been moved because he and other members of the majority Democratic Party were convinced security at Monmouth had been penetrated. They didn’t want to admit that McCarthy was right in his accusations. Their only alternative was to move the installation from New Jersey to a new location in Arizona.””
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no18/vo12no18_mccarthy.htm
It is foolish indeed to pretend that the Army is immune to having spies in its ranks, even today.
Muslim Army Chaplain Yee, has just been charged with espionage in connection with his counseling of Gitmo Al Quaeda suspects:
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030919-105619-9614r.htm
5. Given the prevalence of hundreds of Commnist spies in Government, and the record of administration officials failing to maintain security, why the destructive attitude towards a man like Senator McCarthy who wanted to stop it? Joe McCarthy was hated and denounced not because he smeared innocent people, but because he identified guilty people, and because he exposed lapses in the security procedures in the US Government, embarrassing Government officials. McCarthy’s own faults and excesses gave McCarthy’s enemies in the executive branch the ammunition to bring him down.
“Professor Arthur Herman. His new book, “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator,” … shows the vindication of most of McCarthy’s charges. Herman, who is also coordinator of the Smithsonian’s Western Heritage Program, said that the accuracy of McCarthy’s charges “was no longer a matter of debate,” that they are “now accepted as fact.” However, the term “McCarthyism” still remains in the language.”
Asked whether McCarthy had understood all the forces arrayed against him, Herman said no, that McCarthy hadn’t realized he’d be fighting against much of the Washington establishment. President Truman was fearful that exposures would reflect on key Democrat officials, he said, and big media and the academic world were very leftist, a heritage of the Depression and World War II. High government officials also feared investigations of their past appointments and associations with people who turned out to be communists or sympathizers.”
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/jmc.htm
See also Arthur Herman’s book and the various reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684836254/104-8630515-5712732?v=glance
6. The real relevance of McCarthy to today: McCarthyism was a serious attempt to remove from positions of influence the advocates of communism, the willing supporters of communism and communists, and persons who would prevent the removal of those who give aid and comfort to the enemies of America. It’s a serious question, because just as we faced it with Communism in the Cold War 1950s, we face it with Jihadism today.
An analogous situation would be if an al-Qaeda or Hezbollah sympathizers were working in the State Department or another sensitive agency of government today and keeping such affiliation secret. Joe McCarthy demonstrated the fact that Communists had no more of a right work in our government than Nazis or a Klansmen or affiliates to terrorist organizations. Do Jihadists? If today, someone ‘plead the fifth’ on whether they were a member of Al Quaeda, or Hamas, or an islamic Jihadist organization, would we let them remain in sensitive positions in the Government? No, we’d remove them and rightly so.
7. The real more balanced story on McCarthy is now out there, raised by Conservatives who are challenging Liberals to own up to “McCarthyism is evil” as a fable:
Ann Coulter’s new book “Treason” is based partly on the theme of rehabiliting McCarthy after 50 years of demonization:
“McCarthy was not tilting at windmills. Soviet spies in the government were not a figment of right-wing imaginations. He was tilting at an authentic Communist conspiracy that had been laughed off by the Democratic Party.” -Ann Coulter, Treason.
Medford Evans said: “The restoration of McCarthy … is a necessary part of the restoration of America, for if we have not the national character to repent of the injustice we did him, nor in high places the intelligence to see that he was right, then it seems unlikely that we can or ought to survive.”
In summary:
The strawman view of McCarthy and McCarthyism as 100% wrong and a dangerous force in American politics is 100% wrong. Describing McCarthyism as a “witchhunt” is also false - there really was a serious problem of Communist infiltration into the US Government, in particular the State Department, at that time. It posed real security risks and real spies (many of whom were never caught) operated for years in sensitive posts. The demonization of McCarthyism for 50 years has served mainly as a useful rhetorical cudgel by Liberals against Conservative attempts to point out connections between Liberals and far Leftists and to descredit anti-Communism itself. But that demonization is a fraud, as anyone who honestly looks at the real historical record can discover.
