Chapter Ten
The McCarthy Hearings
For several years the U.S. Congress tried to use its powers under the Constitution to
compel the Executive Branch of the Government to clean out the subversives. Under the
principle of checks-and-balances, the Congress can have its committees conduct inve
stigations to
determine whether or not there is corruption, waste of expenditures or subversion in the
executive branch. Three avenues are open to the House and the Senate:
1. Upon learning of an allegation of subversion, refer it to the President or to the
Department involved and ask for an investigation and a report.
2. If this doesn't get results, then subpoena those who are supposed to know about the
problem and release the facts to the public so there will be sufficient pressure and embarrassment
3. If neither of the above get results, then subpoena those who are known by other
Government employees to be guilty of subversion and ask them under oath whether or not the
charges are true. If such persons are innocent, they can say so; but if they plea
d the Fifth
Amendment, then they will be publicly exposed and forced out of Government.
By 1950 the first two approaches had been used repeatedly with no results except
contemptuous indifference. This reviewer has a published copy of a letter to the Secretary of
State dated June 10, 1947, from the Senate Appropriations Committee, which state
s:
Dean Acheson
"It becomes necessary due to the gravity of the situation to call your attention to 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,
[page 81]
but to reduce security and intelligence
protection to a nullity....
scandal.
"On file in the Department [of State] 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. This report has been chal
lenged and
ignored by those charged with the responsibility of administering the Department with the
apparent tacit approval of Mr. Acheson. Should this case break before the State Department acts,
it will be a national disgrace."
Nothing happened. Here was a committee in the Senate with a majority of its members
being Democrats, pleading with its own Administration to clean house before there was a public
It can be readily understood why more and more Congressmen and Senators decided by
1950 that it was high time they started naming names and calling persons accused of wartime
subversion before an investigating Committee where they could either clear thems
elves or plead
the Fifth Amendment, thereby indicating that they could not answer to the charges without
incriminating themselves. This whole procedure was inaugurated by the Founding Fathers to get
the facts without subjecting the accused to imprisonment
in case he were guilty. In other words,
the guilt of the person was revealed by his plea of the Fifth Amendment; but this could not be
used against him in any criminal proceedings.
It was February 9, 1950, that a U.S. Senator decided to demand direct interrogation of
alleged subversives. His name was Joseph McCarthy.
Joseph McCarthy
McCarthy was born on a farm near Appleton, Wisconsin, left school at age 14, entered
high school at 20, graduated, enrolled in Marquette University and eventually graduated in law.
Thereafter he
[page 82]
was elected a circuit judge, but when World War II broke out he enlisted
in the Marines and spent most of his military career in the South Pacific as an intelligence
officer. He flew over 25 missions photographing targets from the back seat of dive-bombers or as
a gunner on regular bomber planes.
After the war he ran for the Senate against the most powerful politician in Wisconsin,
Senator "Young Bob" Lafallette, who had been in the Senate for 21 years. McCarthy
out-campaigned Lafallette and won by a substantial margin in one of the major politica
that you can learn very little from people like Dr. Quigley who, as we shall see in a moment,
l upsets of
This reviewer has read many volumes on the McCarthy controversy and has discovered
practically went into an intellectual spasm because McCarthy ALMOST aroused th
e American
people to action against the Communist-Establishment conspiracy before they could get him
politically quarantined.
It turns out that McCarthy was neither the personification of Satan which the
Establishment press (and Dr. Quigley) tried to picture him as being, nor was he the knight on a
white charger which his defenders sometimes tried to present him as being. Actual
ly, he was a
tough, frustrated American ex-Marine who was sick and tired of seeing the enemy in striped
pants walking around Washington sabotaging the most basic ingredients of America's interests
both at home and abroad. It was in this spirit that he gave
At Wheeling, West Virginia, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno, Nevada, McCarthy talked
three speeches in 1950.
Joseph McCarthy Launches A One-Man Campaign
about a letter which Secretary of State Byrnes wrote in 1946 to Congressman Adolph Sabath,
stating that there were 284 people in the State Department who were "unfit." McC
arthy had
learned from confidential informants who had come to him from the State Department that as of
1950, 205 of these "unfit" persons were still there. He was told the names of 57 who were either
Communists or loyal to the Communist Party and an addit
ional group (making the total 81) who
were marginal suspects.
The fact that McCarthy had the actual names of 57 identified subversives sent the State
Department and the Establishment Press into a frenzy. McCarthy sent a wire to President Truman
offering to furnish
[page 83]
him the names of the 57, and suggested that the President require
Dean Acheson to explain why these and the remainder of the 205 "unfit" persons were still in the
State Department. The President never even acknowledged the wire.
The diversionary tactic used by the press and the defenders of the State Department was
to accuse McCarthy of not being consistent with his figures. Was he charging the State
Department with having 57 Communists, 81 Communists or 205 Communists? He was ac
of being reckless and irresponsible in his charges.
McCarthy next went to the Senate and gave a speech offering to turn these 57 names --
which he already had in his possession over to a Senate Committee. McCarthy said he could
furnish the names of witnesses who could positively identify these people as pa
rticipating in
subversive activities. The Senate appointed the Tydings Committee to hear McCarthy's charges.
1946. 1(105)
cused
The Committee ended up investigating McCarthy. McCarthy went to the hearings
prepared to present his "facts" and during the first day's session he was allowed barely 8 minutes
of direct testimony. The next day he had 91⁄2 minutes. Senator Tydings harangued
people inside the State Department were brought up before a Loyalty Board
the press and
engaged in polemics which frustrated the entire proceedings. Tydings finally issued a "report"
declaring McCarthy's charges a complete fake. McCarthy was beginning to learn what it meant to
take on the Establishment.
The storm signals were up and the liberal press, radio and TV immediately prepared to
launch an all-out campaign to smash the senator from Wisconsin. Meanwhile, the 57 "identified"
so the cases against
them could be heard. 54 promptly resigned. By November 1954, not only had the original 57
been dismissed or resigned, but the same thing had happened to the 24 marginal cases which
McCarthy had
[page 84]
named in his figure of 81. (Dr. Quigley elected not to mention this in
his book.)
In 1953 McCarthy Becomes Chairman of His Own Committee
As a result of the Republican victory in 1952, Joseph McCarthy became chairman of the
Senate's permanent Investigations Subcommittee. The Committee had a statutory mandate to
investigate graft, incompetence and disloyalty cases. McCarthy took this assignm
ent seriously. In
1953 he conducted 169 executive and public hearings and interrogated more than five hundred
witnesses. Here is a summary of the findings:
1. That security laws and procedures in the State Department had become a farce.
2. That Establishment people at the White House and the top level of the State
Department were continually employing people in spite of the fact that they came under the ban
of "security risks."
3. That administrators and security officers who were demanding strict enforcement of
security measures had been removed or transferred.
4. That "security risk" people who were either known Communists or Communist
sympathizers were being made commissioned officers.
5. That people known to be Communist activists were advanced in the military even
though the U.S. was fighting a Communist foe in Korea.
6. That the political pressures on the military resulted in people being commissioned and
promoted even though these people had written "Fifth Amendment" on their loyalty oath form.
7. That an investigation of the Voice of America exposed waste, corruption and
incompetence resulting in an immediate saving to the American people of some 18 million
dollars.
8. That an investigation of the overseas libraries of the U.S. Information Service resulted
in the removal of more than 30,000 Communist and Left-wing books.
9. That the hearings uncovered widespread Communist infiltration of the Government
Printing Office and resulted
[page 85]
in the removal -- or referral -- to the FBI of more than 75
persons, and a complete reorganizing of the GPO security system.
10. That the investigation of Communist infiltration in key defense plants resulted in the
suspension or discharge of more than 20 Fifth-Amendment security risk cases.
11. That the investigation exposed the existence of powerful Communist espionage cells
operating in the secret radar laboratories of the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New
Jersey. (Although the FBI had been warning the Army about this situation since
until 1953 that McCarthy provided the ammunition which allowed a courageous commanding
1949, it was not
officer, Major General Kirke Lawton, to risk the wrath of top political brass by suspending 35
security risks. Amazingly, the Loyalty Review Board at t
he Pentagon reinstated all but two of
these exposed security risks and gave them back-pay! McCarthy then demanded the names of the
twenty civilians on this review board, and soon found himself sawing on a raw nerve of the most
powerful Establishment team i
Pentagon.)
n Washington -- the White House, the State Department, and the
The Famous Zwicker Case
Nothing so outraged McCarthy in the Monmouth investigation as his discovery that an
identified member of a Communist cell had been knowingly promoted from captain to major and
had then been hurriedly given an honorable "separation" on orders of the White
House after
McCarthy had called the seriousness of this case to the attention of top military leaders. The man
who had been promoted was Irving Peress of the dental corps at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. The
man who signed his "honorable separation" was General
Ralph W. Zwicker.
It all began on January 30, 1954, when McCarthy called Major Peress to answer questions
about his Communist affiliations. Peress invoked the Fifth Amendment 20 different times. It
even turned out that Peress had written "Fifth Amendment" across his Loyalt
had been promoted. It was unbelievable.
y Oath form and still
Finally McCarthy was ready for General Zwicker. This turned out to be a game of
charades. The General was evasive and on occasion
[page 86]
defiant. He changed his testimony
three times under oath when asked if he knew who had ordered the general to give
Peress his
honorable separation.
But the general soon found, as other hostile witnesses had discovered in other hearings,
that McCarthy was no "genteel Senatorial sophisticate." He was primarily an ex-Marine who had
seen enough of subversion and corruption in certain military-White House
policies to alert him to the fact that there are some very real enemies in the American camp. He
-State Department
didn't care whether they wore striped pants or army uniforms. If they were covering up for known
Communists in the U.S. Military services, th
ey were serving the enemy.
When Zwicker turned hostile and treated the Committee with evasive contempt,
McCarthy went after him like a prosecuting attorney. Strategically, it was a mistake. It gave
McCarthy's enemies the ammunition they had been looking for. The payoff came after Z
wicker
refused to answer questions about Peress on the grounds that President Eisenhower had issued
the same kind of restrictive order that President Truman had issued: no government employee
could answer questions or supply Congressional committees with f
iles relating to the loyalty of
another government employee. Naturally, this short-circuited the whole checks-and-balance
relationship between the legislative and executive branches of government, but there it stood.
McCarthy then asked General Zwicker if he thought a general who had knowingly
covered up for a Communist should be removed from his command. General Zwicker said he
didn't think that was sufficient reason to remove a general. Ex-Marine McCarthy was quick
react to that one. He immediately said: "Then, General, you should be removed from any
command. Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says 'I
will protect another general who protected Communists' is not fit to wear t
That did it. McCarthy's enemies had their ammunition.
absorbed in explaining or refuting a continuous avalanche of allegations. He was i
hat uniform, General."
McCarthy was never allowed to continue his investigation. A whole series of charges
were hurled against both McCarthy and the members of his staff. Time and energy were all
nvestigated
five times in four years.
Finally the tidal wave of propaganda had reached a crescendo and the whole
Establishment press as well as the Establishment hard-core in the Senate began to clamor for a
censure. The Communist
Daily Worker
[page 87]
published an instruction kit on how to
McCarthy. It was advertised as "Four full pages on Sen. Joe Low-Blow McCarthy, his record and
what you can do about him."
Two graduate students from Yale decided to take a cold, hard look at the various
McCarthy hearings and then examine the charges one by one. They found a variety of things for
which they criticized Senator McCarthy but decided that without a doubt there wa
s a concerted
campaign to deceive the American people as to the actual issues. They wrote a book entitled,
McCarthy And His Enem
ies. 2(106)
The authors were William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell. This
book contains an excellent analysis of each of the charges
case-by-case report on the people who were supposed to be smeared or improperly treated. Later
against McCarthy. It even gives a
an excellent analysis of the Zwicker case was written by Lionel Lokos entitled,
Who Promoted
Peress?
. 3(107)
get
to
The Campaign To Censure Mccarthy
It was not just the hearings of the McCarthy committee that got the Senator into trouble.
He had also given a speech in which he documented what he called "Twenty Years of Treason"
by Democratic administrations. Then he took on President Eisenhower's admi
charged it with continuing along similar if not identical lines. He had also put into the
nistration and
Congressional Record of
June 14, 1951, a devastating attack on the State Department which was
later published as
America's Retreat From Victory
. 4(108) The
text relied upon published records to
explain to the American people what the Communist-Establishment had done to the United
States and her allies during the post-war years. It was a hard-hitting factual exposure of many top
political, military and diploma
tic personalities who had been surreptitiously carrying out the very
policies which Dr. Carroll Quigley says the secret Establishment powers were using to gradually
move humanity toward a global collectivist society.
refute McCarthy's charges against top Democrats and top Republicans who had been involved in
these subversive activities. So they didn't try. Both groups simply c
ombined in an all-out
campaign to get McCarthy censured so that his charges
the real tragedy of the McCarthy censure. It successfully distracted the American people from the
[page 88]
could be
discredited
. That was
real issues which could have turned the t
coalition.
ide of history against the Communist-Establishment
Senator McCarthy was a bombastic type of personality and had his faults, but even his
faults had to be inflated and exaggerated out of all reasonable dimensions before the heat of
resentment could be generated to a level where the Senate would officially
when the campaign against McCarthy first began, the Senator was confronted by the anomaly of
censure him. In fact,
seeing many of those who spoke out against him publicly, later apologizing to him privately and
commending him for doing a good job. The Esta
blishment press had created such a climate of
"hate McCarthy" that even those who felt he was doing a good job found it politically expedient
to denounce him.
When the Senate censure committee was appointed, it contained some questionable
ingredients. One member had publicly stated even before he had heard the facts that he would
vote to censure McCarthy. McCarthy attempted to object to that Senator's participa
Committee, but was gavelled down by the Chairman. The Liberal press practically fell all over
tion on the
itself trying to applaud the chairman for having the manifest courage to "stand up" to McCarthy.
Because the chairman was a friend of this reviewer, i
"set up and trapped", in a historical sense, by the same people who were trying to discredit
t was greatly disturbing to see him being
McCarthy.
Altogether, 46 charges were brought against McCarthy. They all dissolved into thin air
except two. It was found that Senator McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" with a Senate
subcommittee on Privileges and Elections in 1952 and that McCarthy had "intempera
tely abused"
General Ralph W. Zwicker.
And, of course, from the Establishment's point of view it was difficult if not impossible to
On the first count McCarthy offered an explanation which was not accepted, but which a
subsequent investigation verified as being true. His attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, wrote a
book in 1962 called
warned of their existence?
One Man's Freedom
in which he demonstrated that if McCarthy had been
able to dig up certain information in time, the first count would have died along with the other 44
"dismissed" charges.
As for McCarthy's "intemperate" statement to General Zwicker, this was indeed a flimsy
excuse for a censure. As researchers have since demonstrated, Senators of both the past and
present have been using far more vigorous language against hostile witnesses
without anyone
[page 89]
raising the slightest objection.
And what about the censure of General Zwicker? What about the promotion of a known
Communist and his being given a hasty honorable separation? What about giving commissions to
security risks who wrote "Fifth Amendment" on their Loyalty Oath forms? What ab
out the
toleration of spy cells in highly secret military operations for several years after the FBI had
Soon after these events General Zwicker was enjoying a pleasant retirement. It was only
Senator Joseph McCarthy who got the censure. And it did accomplish
exactly
what the
Communist-Establishment coalition intended.
From then until now, the people of the United States have been paying in blood and
treasure for the historical mistake of letting the "censure of McCarthy" totally discredit the
shocking disclosures which the McCarthy hearings had proven. Ever since then
attempting to tell the truth about Communist subversion in America has run the risk of being
any one
accused of the most heinous of offenses -- "McCarthyism!"
Dr. Carroll Quigley on McCarthy
The reader of
Tragedy And Hope
will never learn that anything good came from the
McCarthy hearings. He will never know it was one of those rare moments of awakening when
the American people
almost
became exposed to enough white light of reality to change
calamitous course of current history. It was such a narrow squeak for the secret power-combine
the
that Dr. Quigley could not resist the urge to lash out at McCarthy with the most vehement kind of
denunciation. Imagine this professional historian supposedl
y disciplined in the reporting of facts
indulging in the following diatribe against "Satan" McCarthy:
"McCarthy was not a conservative, still less a reactionary. He was a fragment of
elemental force, a throwback to primeval chaos. He was the enemy of all order and of all
authority, with no respect, or even understanding, for principles, laws, regulations,
or rules. As
such, he had nothing to do with rationality or generality. Concepts, logic, distinctions of
categories were completely outside his world. It is, for example, perfectly clear that he did not
have any idea of what a Communist was, still less of
Communism itself, and he did not care.
This was simply a term he used in his game of personal power. Most of the terms which have
been applied to him such as 'truculent,'
[page 90]
'brutal,' 'ignorant,' 'sadistic,' 'foul-mouthed,'
'brash,' are quite corre
ct but not quite in the sense that his enemies applied them, because they
assumed that these qualities and distinctions had meaning in his world as they did in their own.
They did not, because his behavior was all an act, the things he did to gain the expe
rience he
wanted, that is, the feeling of power, of creating fear, of destroying the rules, and of winning
attention and admiration for doing so....
"His thirst for power was insatiable because, like hunger, it was a daily need. It had
nothing to do with the power of authority or regulated discipline, but the personal power of a
sadist. All his destructive instincts were against anything established,
the wealthy, the educated,
the well mannered, the rules of the Senate, the American party system, the rules of fair play. As
such, he had no conception of truth or the distinction between it and falsehood, just as he had no
conception of yesterday, today,
tomorrow as distinct entities...."
5(109)
This goes on for several more pages. It literally drips with malevolence. Dr. Quigley
attempts to give a few "facts" from McCarthy's biography. Everything is solid black.
Cooler heads without any axe to grind have described McCarthy as aggressive and
sometimes bombastic, but not a "throwback to primeval chaos." Like all politicians they have
caught him in an occasional exaggeration, but his speeches and Committee reports c
ertainly do
not support the charge that his mind had "nothing to do with rationality or had no conception of
truth or the distinction between truth and falsehood." In fact, the record would rather show that it
was his ability to hammer home a whole panoram
a of irrefutable facts and present them in a
completely rational, understandable way, that made him such an enemy of the powers behind the
scenes. McCarthy was one politician who could make himself easily understood. And the
American people were beginning
to respond. That is what was so reprehensible to the
Establishment.
The charge that he sought publicity begs the point. Every Congressional committee which
feels it has an important message to get to the rest of Congress and the people will seek publicity.
The point is whether or not the publicity was warranted. And was i
t accurate? From the point of
view of any old-fashioned Constitution-oriented American, the McCarthy hearings were not only
important, they were enough to leave the reader in a state of shock. As for their accuracy, what
else can you deduct from a high gov
ernment official who is
[page 91]
asked whether or not he is
part of the Communist conspiracy, and he pleads the Fifth Amendment? Why is it inaccurate to
say that such a man has the earmarks of a "security risk?"
Quigley points out that in five years McCarthy did not prove that any person in the State
Department was a Communist.
6(110)
If he m
Department of Justice, not a Congressional committee. The McCarthy heari
eans in court, this is true. But that is the job of the
ngs exposed enemies
of the American people in high places. McCarthy's committee then recommended that more
rigorous security laws be adopted. That was all his Senatorial Committee was supposed to do.
Dr. Quigley's statement that McCarthy "did not know what
a Communist was," is completely
irresponsible. Note that Quigley documents practically nothing throughout his entire book. What
can
be documented is the fact that McCarthy was finding not only Communists, but those who
were hiring Communists, promoting Co
mmunists, hiding Communists and lying under oath to
protect Communists.
After the McCarthy episode the American people virtually went back to sleep.
Nevertheless, the spectre of Communism returned to haunt them again and again.
In 1955 it was the Formosa crisis.
In 1956 it was the Suez Canal crisis followed shortly by the tragic and disgraceful
handling of the Hungarian Revolution.
In 1957 the State Department sponsorship of Fidel Castro as the George Washington of
Cuba set the stage for the betrayal of Cuba and her 6 million allies to a brutal Communist
conquest.
In 1958 the Soviet Union sponsored Nasser in the conquest of two independent Arab
states. U.S. Marines had to land in Lebanon and both the British and U.S. had to combine to
prevent the conquest of Jordan.
In 1959, the fall of Cuba had become a bizarre reality. While Castro was brutally
communizing this island 90 miles from U.S. soil, the State Department was continuing to
trumpet the deliberate falsehood that Castro was not really a Communist. The man on t
he Cuban
desk of the State Department was himself a personal friend of Fidel Castro and a former member
of the ABC Revolutionary Movement of Cuba.
----------------------------------------
Chapter Eleven
Prelude to a Showdown
It was Cuba as much as any other single factor which made the
the election of 1960.
[page 92]
blood of
Americans boil and caused the people of the United States to turn away from the Republicans in
About the same time a few Americans among both Republicans and Democrats had
begun to do their homework on the Communist conspiracy. A solid front of pro-American
anti-Communists had begun to emerge from among America's long-suffering silent majority.
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