Dr, Carroll Quigley voiced the same opinion in his book entitled
Tragedy and Hope by informing the reader that: "His mind collapsed under
the strain and he resigned in 1949, committing suicide shortly afterward."14
The American people will probably never know what happened to
James Forrestal. Only the clues to his tragic death remain.
The third individual who came to realize that there was something
wrong with America's policies was Senator Joseph McCarthy who was to
pay for this knowledge with both his reputation and later with his life.
The campaign to vilify Senator McCarthy was long in duration and in
fact has continued to the present. An examination of the facts will reveal why
his name is so sullied even to this day.
Appropriately, it was: "Forrestal who personally alerted the freshman
Senator to the Communist menace and 'named names' to him of key persons
in our federal government who were consistently shaping our policies and
programs to benefit Soviet Russia."15
The story of McCarthy begins, perhaps, on March 22, 1947, when
President Harry Truman issued Executive Order
#9835, establishing a
federal loyalty program that forbade the employment of loyalty risks. 16 This
action was followed on June 10, 1947, by a memorandum sent to Secretary of
State George C Marshall by the Senate Committee on Appropriations. The memo read, in part, as follows:
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...
There is a deliberate, calculated program carried out, not only
to protect Communist personnel in high places, but to reduce
security and intelligence protection to a nullity.
Should this case break before the State Department acts, it will
be a national disgrace.17 18
This report was completely ignored by Secretary Marshall.
This inaction caused Senator McCarthy to write the following about
George Marshall in his book, America's Retreat From Victory: "If he was
wholeheartedly serving the cause of the United States, these decisions were
great blunders. If they followed a secret pattern to which we do not as yet have
the key, they may very well have been successful in the highest degree."19
Later, on March 13, 1948, President Truman softened his position on
security risks when he: "issued an order instructing all federal employees to
withhold personnel loyalty and security information from members of
Congress...."20
This order obviously would make it extremely difficult to pursue any
security or loyalty risks through government channels, and certainly
hampered the investigations by those agencies responsible for ferreting out
those who jeopardized the security of the American government.
Later, just after Thanksgiving, 1949, three men came to Senator
McCarthy's office and:
... showed the Senator a one-hundred page summary of Communist
subversion in the United States, including serious penetration
of the State Department. The report, which had been prepared
under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover [the head of the F.B.I.], had
already been supplied to the White House, the Secretary of State,
and heads of other federal departments concerned.
It detailed the operations of spy networks operating in the U.S.
government and involving a large number of State Department
employees, some in very high positions.
Senator McCarthy read the report and was so shocked by what
it revealed that he committed himself to do something about it.21
And so began the McCarthy saga.
It was but a few months later, on February 9, 1950, that Senator
McCarthy "did something about it." He gave a speech to the Ohio County Women's Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he said: "I
have in my hand fifty-seven cases of individuals who would appear to be
either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but
who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy."22
McCarthy's sensational charges began appearing in newspapers across
the country.
In Salt Lake City, he withdrew the offer to give [Secretary of
State Dean] Acheson the names. A presidential order was then in
effect prohibiting the government from turning over loyalty
records of U.S. employees to anyone outside the Executive Department,
including, of course, congressional investigating
committees.
What would be the use of giving Acheson the names of Communists
and their sympathizers, McCarthy argued, unless their
actual records could be obtained and proof shown to the people.
What would prevent the Secretary of State from simply
accepting the list, announcing that nobody on it was either a
Communist or a security risk, and thus end the matter.23
On February 11, 1950, Senator McCarthy sent a wire to President
Truman: "calling upon him to furnish Congress with a list of all State
Department employees considered bad security risks and asking him to
revoke the presidential order."
Senator McCarthy was certain that the State Department loyalty files
would prove his case, but he never got a chance to receive them, as: "The State
Department's press officer... issued a heated denial. 'We know of no
Communist members in this Department and if we find any they will be
summarily dismissed.' "24
Those who felt McCarthy was libelling and slandering innocent people
now know that he was very concerned about not releasing the names of the
individuals he had on his lists, and: "on February 20, 1950, without naming
names, he gave his colleagues [in the Senate] a resume of the facts from the
files of eighty-one individuals — the fifty-seven referred to at Wheeling and
twenty-four additional cases of less importance and where the evidence was
less conclusive."25
Two days later: "... a Special Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee was appointed and charged with conducting 'a full
and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal
to the United States are or have been employed by the Department of State.'
Instead of investigating McCarthy's accusations, however, the Committee
investigated McCarthy. Millard Tydings, the Committee Chairman, set the tone for the inquiry when he boasted: 'Give me three days of public hearings and McCarthy will never show his face in the Senate again.' "26
The anti-McCarthy feelings in the United States started rising. Even the
Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker, of April 15, 1950, added its
concerns: "Communists are keenly aware of the damage the McCardiy crowd
is doing."27
Gus Hall, the head of the American Communist Party urged: "Communist
Party members and all anti-fascists to yield second place to none in the
fight to rid our country of the fascist poison of McCarthyism."28
So McCarthy had to face both the Communist Party and the government
investigating committee in an effort to force the government to rid itself
of the subversives already known to exist within its ranks.
McCarthy appeared to have won a victory when, on May 4, 1950,
President Truman changed his mind and announced that the loyalty files on
McCardiy's cases would be made available to the Committee.29 But when
they were delivered to the Committee, McCardiy charged that they had been
"raped," "skeletonized," and "tampered with."30 Later, on July 12, 1950,
McCardiy released the documents on which he based his charges that the files
had been stripped. "These documents are affidavits from four persons who
had been employed by the [State] Department on a temporary basis in the
Fall of 1946 and assigned to a 'file project,' the purpose of which, they said,
was to remove from the personnel files of Department employees all
derogatory information."31
So McCarthy was taking on the State Department and it was countering
with a concealment of the truth.
McCarthy also told the American public that it was at the Yalta
conference in 1945 that Roosevelt and Stalin planned, not only the Korean
War that the United States was then involved in, but also the Vietnamese war
that was to follow some 10 toi2 years later. It was on September 23, 1950, that
McCarthy charged: "Here was signed the death warrant of the young men
who were dying today in the hills and valleys of Korea. Here was signed the
death warrant of the young men who will the tomorrow in the jungles of
Indochina [Vietnam]."
He also saw that all of these machinations were the work of a giant
conspiracy and he said so. He wrote: "How can we account for our present
situation unless we believe that men high in Government are concerting to
deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a
conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in
the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally
exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all
honest men..."32 "What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions
and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to
incompetence .... The laws of probability would dictate that part of. . . [the]
decisions would serve this country's interest."33
(Notice the similarity of this statement and the one made by James
Forrestal about "consistency never being the mark of stupidity.")
McCarthy was becoming too dangerous to the conspiracy that he had
begun to discover. So the smear job began that it hoped would destroy him,
the smear job mat went something like: "I like what he is doing, but I object
to his methods." Or: "He is smearing individuals with guilt by association."
McCarthy knew that these smear jobs against him were inaccurate, and
he wrote about them in his book, published in 1952: "Whenever I ask those
who object to my methods to name the 'objectionable methods;' again I hear
parroted back to me the Communist Daily Worker stock phrase: 'irresponsible
charges' and 'smearing innocent people.' But as often as I have asked for
the name of a single innocent person who has been 'smeared' or 'irresponsibly
charged,' nothing but silence answers."34
The government later substantiated McCarthy's charges in 1953 when it
published a report, on July 30, entitled Interlocking Subversion in Government
Departments, which was written by the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee. It read, in part: "The Soviet international organization has
carried on a successful and important penetration of the United States
Government, and this penetration has not been fully exposed. This penetration
has extended from the lower ranks to top-level policy and operating
positions in our government. Despite the fact that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and other security agencies had reported extensive information
about this Communist penetration, little was done by the Executive branch
to interrupt the Soviet operatives in their ascent in Government..."35
So the decision was made to "get McCarthy," as there were those who
felt that he was getting too close to the truth. So on January 21, 1954: "... an
anti-McCarthy strategy meeting [was] held ... in the office of the Attorney
General."36
Present at this meeting were: Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. Ambassador to
the United Nations; Attorney General Herbert Brownell; Deputy Attorney
General William Rogers (later President Nixon's Secretary of State); White
House aides Sherman Adams and Gerald Morgan; and John G. Adams,
counselor, Department of the Army.
At this meeting: "It was decided that John Adams would start compiling
notes to be used as the basis for filing charges against Senator
McCarthy...."37
(One of the efforts to expose McCarthy was a book written by Richard
H. Rovere entitled Senator Joe McCarthy.3
It has been pretty well established by America's major media that the
most serious charge against McCarthy is that he maliciously "smeared"
innocent people, by calling mem names.
Mr. Rovere, certainly no supporter of the Senator, called him the
following names in his book: a bully, a seditionist, a species of nihilist, a screamer, a political thug, a master of the mob, a black arts practitioner, a
champion liar, a prince of hatred, possibly a homosexual, a true hypocrite,
morally indecent, perhaps crazy, an outrageous fourflusher, a fraud, a heavy
drinker, and a demon.
It is comforting to know that it was the Senator who smeared people by
calling them names!
Mr. Rovere did like certain people, however. He called the Socialist
Norman Thomas a "devoted champion of liberty and decency."
The famous Army-McCarthy hearings started a few months later on
April 22, 1954, after McCarthy questioned the Army's decision to promote a
suspected Communist.
The next step in the destruction of Senator McCarthy occurred on May
17, 1954, when President Eisenhower, who had replaced Harry Truman,
"issued an Executive order prohibiting testimony at the hearings from any
member of the Executive without prior permission — which of course was
not given."39
Eisenhower himself admitted to some strong negative feelings about
McCarthy. He wrote about these feelings in the April, 1969, Reader's Digest:
"From the beginning, I was urged by a great many people ... to 'smash'
McCarthy by a public denunciation. When I refused, I was criticized bitterly
in many quarters. Actually, I yearned in every fiber of my being to do
precisely what my critics were urging—but I felt sure this was the wrong
tactic."40
The charges against McCarthy came to a head on July 30, 1954, when
Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution condemning Senator
McCarthy for "conduct unbecoming a member." It contained forty-six
different counts, and a committee was appointed to investigate the charges.
After hearings, it recommended that McCarthy be censured, not on the fortysix
counts, but on only two.41
The charges introduced by Flanders, however, were not written by him
nor members of his staff: "What is generally not known is that the speech
made by Senator Flanders in introducing the resolution, as well as the
resolution itself, were written for him by the National Committee for an
Effective Congress, [which was] created by . . . Arthur Goldsmith .... "42
The Senate later voted on the charges when they voted to "condemn"
and not "censure" the Senator. ("Condemning" is milder than "censuring.")
After all of the allegations against McCarthy about his "smearing innocent people," was he personally able to substantiate his charges?
Now, in retrospect, it is possible to look at the record. Was McCarthy
able to substantiate his allegations that there were at least eighty-one security
risks in the State Department?
1. Fifty-seven of these cases were later summoned by a Loyalty Board
and fifty-four of the accused confirmed McCarthy's charges by
resigning under fire.
2. By November of 1954, all of the eighty-one persons on McCarthy's
list had left government employ by dismissal or resignation.
3. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee revealed that, on June
27, 1956, the State Department's own security chief, Scott McLeod,
drew up a list of 847 security risks in the State Department.
It would seem that Joe McCarthy's major sin was that he
underestimated the extent to which the Communists had penetrated
the State Department.43
It is also revealing that an organization named The Constitutional
Educational League of New York "offered a $10,000 reward for any person
who could prove mat Senator McCarthy ever called anyone a Communist or
a Communist Fronter who, in fact, was not. Although this offer was widely
publicized from coast to coast, no one ever claimed mat reward." 44
How did Senator McCarthy account for, first, the smear and, then, the
vote to condemn him? It will be recalled that he wrote the following in his
book, America's Retreat From Victory: "How can we account for our present
situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting
to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a
conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in
the history of man."45
He also went on to explain what he felt was the purpose of this conspiracy:
"to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily,
to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East, and to impair our
will to resist evil. To what end? To the end that we shall be contained and
frustrated and finally fall victim to Soviet intrigue from within and Russian
military might from without."46[...]