If you ask most people over the age of 5, they’ll tell you McCarthy was cruel/reckless/paranoid/hateful etc. But my Dad has always said it was all lies. My Dad has researched all this stuff, but he can’t do my research for me. So I thought, I have to look into this myself. I want the truth by golly. So I read Ann Coulter’s book “Treason”, went on a bunch of websites, and took notes. After all of that I’m convinced he was a hero and has been the victim of the biggest smear campaign since, um, the last really big smear campaign.

We will examine McCarthy in two sections:

1. Clearing up some popular misconceptions

2. Evaluating the accuracy of his charges

I realize there may be some bullets that don’t exactly fit the above categories. Oh well.

Question 1:

You want bullet points? You can’t HANDLE my bullet points!

• Some people think McCarthy was part of HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The “H” stands for House, and McCarthy was a senator. Let’s move on.
• HUAC was responsible for the Hollywood blacklist. McCarthy may possibly have named some celebrities as Communists, but that was not his focus at all, as explained in the next bullet
• McCarthy was on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose express purpose was to investigate the government (Coulter 56).
• McCarthy did not prosecute Alger Hiss, the convicted spy who was the secretary general at the founding meeting of the United Nations. Richard Nixon and Whitaker Chambers get most of the credit for his prosecution (Coulter 18-21).
• McCarthy was not the only one concerned about communism at the time. There was HUAC, a totally separate committee. There were the American people, who gave McCarthy an approval rating between 29 and 50% just months before his censure (Coulter 101). There was political philosopher Sidney Hook, who in 1953 said the US was the “chief remaining obstacle to world domination” by the Soviet Union (Coulter 32).
• McCarthy is villified for publicly naming names and destroying lives and reputations. In fact, he only named names after being pressured and harassed by Senate Democrats. When he made his case against the State Dept in front of the Senate, he wanted to use only numbers to refer to his targets, not names. But they interrupted him 84 times that day, more than once demanding that he name names. He squirmed and struggled, hesitant to publicly name people in front of the world that might turn out innocent. He wanted to submit the names to a closed committee. But Democrats voted to compel him to name security risks openly. So he finally named names, but with caveats and qualifiers. This suggests that it is the Democrats’ fault the names were named, not McCarthy’s (Coulter 64-65). He had hoped to handle the matter with more discretion and sensitivity.
• One of his famous victims is Owen Lattimore, who did some work for the State Department. McCarthy never publicly leaked Lattimore’s name; instead, Lattimore’s name was leaked by journalist Drew Pearson.
• In McCarthy and His Enemies, Buckley and Bozell state that from 2/9/50 to 1/1/1953, McCarthy openly questioned the loyalty or reliability of only 46 people (referenced here: http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm). Where are the hundreds of victims from popular conception?? The author of the article claims that McCarthy publicly exposed at most 160 people.
• Did you know that JFK staunchly defended McCarthy in 1954, long after McCarthy’s “reign of terror” had begun? He called him a “great American patriot” (Coulter 101)
• For the record: McCarthy and his aides were cleared in the Army-McCarthy hearings (Infoplease encyclopedia, http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0830834.html)
• What was McCarthy censured for?
• Failing to cooperate with a Senate elections subcommittee that investigated him in1952. But he was never subpoenaed for the committee; it only invited him to testify. It seems to me to be pretty drastic to censure some one for that (Infoplease encyclopedia, http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0830834.html and http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm).
• Various remarks he made about certain Senators/committees. Of the ones I could find: From Treason, he said that Senator Flanders had to be “taken out of mothballs” to participate in the censure. He also said that Senator Robert Hendrickson was “a living miracle…the only man in the world who had lived so long with neither brains nor guts” (Coulter 120). You might not have used such caustic statements. But is an intemperate tongue mutually exclusive with a sincere desire to fight for your country? Remember Patton?…McCarthy also said the Committee investigating him was the “unwitting handmaiden” of the Communist Party and called the session that voted on his censure a “lynch party” and a “lynch bee” (http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm)
• By the by: McCarthy had been accused by other senators of perjury, taking bribes, election fraud, libel and blackmail. They were never censured for these statements (http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm).
• And, big surprise here, the press hated him.
• In ’54, CBS ran a hatchet job on him produced by Edward R Murrow, a friend of Venona-convicted Soviet spy Laurence Duggan. (Coulter 120)
• One press account of the Army-McCarthy hearings described it like so: “This is a story of good triumphing over evil, of two men going into battle. McCarthy is the dark knight, his opponent the simple and good Joseph Welch, the Army’s counsel.” (Coulter 117)
• When he died in 1957, NY Times editor Charles Merz explained the lack of an editorial about it thusly: “Why dignify the bastard; let him pass from the scene without more attention” (Coulter 123)
• I. F. Stone was a renowned and respected journalist who consistently attacked McCarthy. Wouldn’t you know it…Venona identified him as a Soviet agent (Coulter 97)
• Another tidbit: The IRS got into the act and audited him…after a 5-year dig, they gave him a rebate (Coulter 106)
• Military record: He was exempt from the WWII draft as a sitting judge but volunteered for the marines anyway. He was too old to fly so he did intel. However, he went ahead and flew on 12 combat missions as a tailgunner. What more do you want from him?? (Coulter 106)
• When he died, there was dancing in the streets and everybody partied right? Dead wrong. He was given the first state funeral in the Senate chamber in 17 years. Seventy senators went to his funeral. 30,000 Americans visited his funeral home to pay last respects (Coulter 123 and http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm)

Question 2:

The above citations should make you question your actual knowledge of McCarthy. Do you know anything about him, or do you just repeat what you’ve heard? If you believe my sources, then I’ve proven McCarthy did NOT want to name names and ruin innocent lives, and that he was unfairly victimized by the press and his colleagues. The next important question is, if he wasn’t a reckless evil tyrant, was he right in his accusations? Or was he just misguided and confused?

If you haven’t read about the Venona project, you’re way behind. The Venona project was begun in 1943 by Colonel Carter Clarke, the chief of military intelligence. Is purpose was to decrypt Soviet cables. Apparently Clarke was more worried about “Uncle Joe” than were Franklin “In order to make a friend, one must be a friend” Roosevelt or Harry “I like old Joe…Joe is a decent fellow” Truman. The project was kept secret from both of these presidents, which is good because it violated a direct order from FDR not to spy on the Soviets (Coulter 34, 36, 43-44). It was declassified in 1995 and boy was it juicy!

First we want to look at the spy infestation of the government, then we will look at how accurate McCarthy was in his specific charges.

• Historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have looked into Venona. Here is what they have to say:
• “As we determined based in the new evidence [venona et al newly available evidence] that not a ‘few’ as we wrote in 1992, but of hundreds of American Communists had assisted Soviet espionage in the United States…”,
• And, “…it became crystal clear that espionage was a regular activity of the American Communist party.”
• From Wikipedia, my new favorite encyclopedia: The release of the VENONA information has forced reevaluation of the Red Scare in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VENONA_project)
• Lets get a little more concrete. How about a list? Yeah? Ok. The following were high level officials proved by Venona to be spies: Alger Hiss, State Dept; Harry Dexter White, asst secy of Treasury dept; Lauchlin Currie, personal assistant to FDR and White House Liaison to the State Dept under FDR and Truman; Laurence Duggan, head of the Latin American Desk at State Dept; Frank Coe, US rep on the IMF; Solomon Adler, senior Treasury dept official; Klaus Fuchs, top atomic scientist; and Duncan Lee, senior aide to the head of the pre-CIA OSS (Coulter 44). Those are some pretty high-level/sensitive positions. Are you beginning to understand the gravity of the problem?
• These sources, if true, show that McCarthy was on the right track, although I don’t know if he accused all of these people. And you can’t question his motives and say that he was just doing it for publicity. When you look at how much he was villified and hated and smeared, your statement would be ridiculous. Weeks before he died, he exclaimed at a dinner, “They’re murdering me, they’re killing me!” (Coulter 123) I think he really believed in what he was doing.
• So, couple that with the above Haynes and Klehr quote, and I have shown that he was sincere in his efforts and that espionage was a real threat. If you agree with me on that, I’ll be pretty happy. Because that would mean we’ve flushed a vast quantity of 50 years of lies down the toilet. We’ve shown that he took on a real threat despite a nonstop stream of vitriol directed at him by the press and the government. That deserves a round of applause and more. If you think he is a great man now, I guess you can stop reading.
• However, there is another important question: Was he correct in his actual accusations? Coulter says: “Among the Soviet operatives who had been in gov’t jobs and named by McCarthy were T A Bisson, Mary Jane Keeney, Cedric Belfrage, Solomon Adler, Franz Neumann Leonard Mins, Gustavo Duran and William Remington…” (Coulter 59) Now, I don’t know if by “named” she means accusations of spying or just communism. If we show that they were spies, then he was either right on target or he underestimated the problem. Oh my.
• Solomon Adler: see above
• For the goods on Mary Jane Keeney, we go to Accuracy in Academia, a group endorsed by Thomas Sowell, Dinesh D’Souza, and Judith Reisman, author of a Kinsey expose. A review of Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator states that Venona and her own diaries prove she was a soviet agent (http://www.academia.org/campus_reports/2000/january_2000_5.html)
• Per Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, author of one of those Clinton exposes, Venona proves that Cedric Belfrage (who worked for wartime British intel) was a soviet agent (http://intellit.muskingum.edu/)
• From Newsmax (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/5/12/124042.shtml): “Senator McCarthy pursued T. A. Bisson, a former State Department employee, for his written pro-Communist Chinese input. More recently, it’s been revealed that what the senator did NOT know about Bisson was even worse (See "The Venona Secrets" by Romerstein/Breindel-2000, p. 169.)”
• Klehr and Haynes claim that Neumann, an economist in the pre-CIA, was a Soviet agent (http://codshit.blogspot.com/archives/2004_01_25_codshit_archive.html)
• Per Ronald Radosh, professor emeritus of history at Queensborough Community College and CUNY Graduate Center: Venona implicates Remington as a Soviet agent or a source of info for Soviets http://www.historynewsnetwork.com/articles/935.html.
• Also, remember Lattimore from the previous section? A unanimous senate committee found him a “conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy” (Coulter 65)
• That leaves Duran and Mins. As for Duran, I found some stuff on him but the site is inaccessible now. I also found stuff on him but it was on a white power site or something so I didn’t wanna get tangled up in that. As for Mins:
• From Newsmax (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/6/23/120358.shtml): Mins wrote manuals for the armed forces and worked for the OSS. He pleaded the fifth to McCarthy on these questions: Membership in the Communist Party; discussing classified material with a member of the communist party or giving the material to a spy; engaging in espionage or illegal communist activities; being on the payroll of soviet military intel; attending the Lenin school of sabotage and espionage; believing in the overthrow of the US by violence. Draw your own conclusions.

What do you think? I think I’ve proven that the communist threat was real, that McCarthy pursued it out of a real sense of duty while being viciously attacked, and that he did a decent job in identifying specific threats. Obviously I don’t know the validity of every charge he ever made. Maybe he got some wrong. But then again, he allowed for that in his first big speech before the Senate. Add it all up, subtract out unfounded, uninformed mantras, and you get the valiant knight of the Republic, the unfrightened by a cacophony of shallow sycophants, the indispensable Joseph Raymond McCarthy.