Encyclopedia
Joseph Raymond McCarthy was a Republican
Senator from the
U.S. state of
Wisconsin between 1947 and 1957. During his two terms as Senator, McCarthy gained notoriety for aggressively investigating claims of Communist and
Soviet operatives inside the Federal Government.
During this period, people at every level of society were suspected of being
Soviet spies or Communist sympathizers and were the subjects of investigations and questioning regarding their beliefs, affiliations and statements. These inquiries were conducted by a variety of federal and local government committees as well as by private sector "loyalty review" agencies. Joseph McCarthy became the most visible public face of this era of intense
anti-Communism, and as a result, the term
McCarthyism was coined to describe both the historical period and the practices that came to be identified with McCarthy. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "McCarthyism" as "the practice of publicizing accusations of political disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence" and "the use of unfair investigatory or accusatory methods in order to suppress opposition."
Early life and career
McCarthy was born on a farm in the town of
Grand Chute, Wisconsin. McCarthy's mother, Bridget Tierney, was from County Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Tim McCarthy, was American; the son of an
Irish father and a
German mother. McCarthy dropped out of junior high school to help his parents manage their farm and later returned to school and earned his diploma in one year. McCarthy worked his way through college, from 1930 to 1935, studying engineering and law, earning a law degree at
Marquette University in
Milwaukee. He was admitted to the Bar Association in 1935. While working in a law firm in
Shawano, Wisconsin, he launched what was ultimately an unsuccessful campaign to become District Attorney as a Democrat in 1936. However, in 1939, McCarthy's luck was better: he successfully vied for the elected post of the non-partisan 10th District
circuit judge, becoming the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history.
Military service
In 1942, shortly after the U.S. entered
World War II, McCarthy enlisted in the
United States Marine Corps, despite the fact that his judicial office had exempted him from compulsory service. His position as a judge qualified him for an automatic commission as a
second lieutenant, and he would leave the Marines with the rank of captain. He served as an intelligence briefing officer for a
dive bomber squadron in the
Solomon Islands and
Bougainville. McCarthy reportedly chose the Marines with the hope that being a veteran of this branch of the military would serve him best in his future political career.
It is a matter of record that McCarthy exaggerated his war record. He claimed to have enlisted as a "buck private," though due to his automatic commission he entered basic training as an officer. He flew 12 combat missions as a gunner-observer, but later claimed 32 missions in order to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross, which he received in 1952. McCarthy publicized a letter of commendation signed by his commanding officer and countersigned by Admiral
Chester Nimitz, but it was revealed that McCarthy had written this letter himself, in his capacity as intelligence officer. A "war wound" that McCarthy made the subject of varying stories involving airplane crashes or antiaircraft fire was in fact received aboard ship during an initiation ceremony for sailors who cross the equator for the first time.
McCarthy campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination in Wisconsin while still on active duty in 1944 but was defeated for the GOP nomination by
Alexander Wiley, the incumbent. After resigning his commission in April 1945--five months before the end of the Pacific war in September 1945, and being re-elected unopposed to his circuit court position--he began a much more systematic campaign for the 1946 Republican Senate primary nomination, again challenging an incumbent, four-term senator and United States Progressive Party icon,
Robert M. La Follette, Jr.Senate campaign
In his campaign, McCarthy attacked La Follette for not enlisting during the war, although La Follette had been 46 when
Pearl Harbor was bombed. McCarthy also claimed La Follette had made huge profits from his investments while he, McCarthy, had been away fighting for his country. The suggestion that La Follette had been guilty of war profiteering was deeply damaging, and McCarthy won the primary nomination 207,935 votes to 202,557. It was during this campaign that McCarthy started publicizing the nickname "Tailgunner Joe", using the slogan "Congress needs a tailgunner". Arnold Beichman later reported that McCarthy "was elected to his first term in the Senate with support from the Communist-controlled
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, CIO," which preferred McCarthy to the anti-communist Robert M. La Follette.
McCarthy enjoyed the support of the state Republican party organization, and he won the nomination narrowly. He won in the general election against Democrat opponent Howard J. McMurray by a 2 to 1 margin, and thus joined Senator Wiley in the Senate.
Senator
McCarthy's first three years in the Senate were unremarkable. McCarthy was a popular speaker, invited by many different organizations, covering a wide range of topics. His colleagues and aides considered him to be friendly and likeable. He was active in labor-management issues, with a reputation as a moderate Republican. He fought against continuation of wartime price controls, especially on sugar. He supported the Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto, angering labor unions in Wisconsin but solidifying his business base.. Following the lead of Senator
Robert Taft, McCarthy lobbied for the commutation of death sentences handed to a group of
Waffen-SS soldiers convicted of war crimes for their involvement in the 1944
Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war. Taft had been critical of the proceedings because of allegations of misconduct during the interrogations that led to the confessions, as well as his objections of Soviet involvement in the trial.
Kennedy family and Irish Catholics
McCarthy became good friends with
Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. in the late 1940s, in part because of their connection as fellow Irish Catholics. He was a frequent guest at the Kennedy home in
Hyannis Port, and at one point dated Patricia Kennedy. After McCarthy became nationally prominent Kennedy was a vocal supporter, and helped build McCarthy's popularity among Catholics. Kennedy contributed cash and encouraged his friends to give money. Some historians have argued that in the Senate race of 1952, Joseph Kennedy and McCarthy made a deal that McCarthy would not make campaign speeches for the Republican ticket in Massachusetts, and in return, Congressman
John F. Kennedy would not give anti-McCarthy speeches. In 1953 McCarthy hired
Robert Kennedy as a senior staff member. When the Senate voted to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, Senator Kennedy was in the hospital and never indicated then or later how he would vote.
Wheeling speech
McCarthy's national profile rose meteorically after his Lincoln Day speech on February 9, 1950, to the Republican Women's Club of
Wheeling, West Virginia.
McCarthy's words in the speech are a matter of some dispute, as they were not reliably recorded at the time. It is generally agreed, however, that he produced a piece of paper which he claimed contained a list of known Communists working for the
State Department. McCarthy is usually quoted to have said: "I have here in my hand a list of 205 people 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."
There is a great deal of dispute about whether or not McCarthy actually gave the number of people on the list as being "57" or "205". In a later telegram to President Truman, and when entering the speech into the Congressional Record, he used the number 57
. The origin of the number 205 can be traced: In later debates on the Senate floor, McCarthy referred to a 1946 letter that then-
Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph J. Sabath. In that letter, Byrnes said State Department security investigators had resulted in "recommendation against permanent employment" for 285 persons, and that only 79 of these had been removed from their jobs. With some slightly faulty arithmetic on McCarthy's part, this left 205 still on the State Department's payroll. On the Senate floor, McCarthy said that while he did not have the names of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter, he did have the names of 57 who were either members of or loyal to the Communist Party. McCarthy stated he referred to 57 "known Communists"; the number 205 was referring to the number of people employed by the State Department who, for various reasons, had been recommended for removal by the State Department's security investigators. Instead he just had case numbers. Eventually McCarthy moved on from his original list of unnamed individuals and used the hearings to make charges against ten others for whom he had names: Dorothy Kenyon, Esther and Stephen Brunauer, Haldore Hanson, Gustavo Duran, Owen Lattimore,
Harlow Shapley, Frederick Schuman,
John S. Service and Philip Jessup. Some of these no longer, or never had, worked for the State Department, and all had previously been the subject of various charges of varying worth and validity. Owen Lattimore became a particular focus of McCarthy's, who at one point described him as a "top Russian spy." Throughout the hearings, McCarthy had colorful rhetoric, but no substantial evidence, to support his accusations.
From its beginning, the Tydings Committee was marked by partisan infighting. Its final report, written by the Democratic majority, concluded that the individuals on McCarthy's list were neither Communists nor pro-communist, and said the State Department had an effective security program. Tydings labeled McCarthy's charges a "fraud and a hoax," and said that the result of McCarthy's actions was to "confuse and divide the American people[...] to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves." Republicans responded in kind, with William Jenner stating that Tydings was guilty of "the most brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history." The full Senate voted three times on whether to accept the report, and each time the voting was precisely divided along party lines.
Continuing Anti-Communism
From 1950 onward, McCarthy continued to press his accusations that the government was failing to deal with Communism within its ranks, which increased his approval rating and gained him a powerful national following. During a speech in Milwaukee in 1952, McCarthy dated the public phase of his fight against Communists to the May 22, 1949, death of former Secretary of Defense
James Forrestal, apparently by suicide. "The Communists hounded Forrestal to his death," McCarthy said. "They killed him just as definitely as if they had thrown him from that 16th-story window in Bethesda Naval Hospital."
McCarthy has been accused of attempting to discredit his critics and political opponents by accusing them of being Communists or communist-sympathizers. In the 1950 Maryland Senate election, McCarthy campaigned for
John M. Butler in his race against four-term incumbent Millard Tydings, with whom McCarthy had been in conflict during the Tydings Committee hearings. In speeches supporting Butler, McCarthy accused Tydings of "protecting Communists" and "shielding traitors" McCarthy's staff was heavily involved in the campaign, and collaborated in the production of a campaign tabloid that contained a composite photograph doctored to make it appear that Tydings was in intimate conversation with Communist leader
Earl Browder. A Senate subcommittee later investigated this election and referred to it as "a despicable, back-street type of campaign."
McCarthy was physically violent toward his critics on at least one occasion. He assaulted journalist Drew Pearson in the cloakroom of a Washington club, reportedly kneeing him in the groin. McCarthy, who admitted the assault, claimed he merely "slapped" Pearson.
McCarthy and Truman
There was considerable enmity between McCarthy and President Truman throughout the time they were both in office. McCarthy sought to characterize President Truman and the Democratic party as soft on or even in league with the Communists, referring to "twenty years of treason" on the part of the Democrats. Truman, in turn, once referred to McCarthy as "the best asset the
Kremlin has," and said his attempts to "sabotage the foreign policy of the United States" in a cold war was comparable to shooting American soldiers in the back in a hot war.
It was the Truman Administration's State Department that McCarthy accused of harboring 205 "known Communists," and Truman's
Secretary of Defense George Marshall who was the target of some of McCarthy's most colorful and memorable rhetoric. Marshall was also Truman's former
Secretary of State and had been
Army Chief of Staff during World War II. Marshall was a highly respected statesman and general, best remembered today as the architect of the
Marshall Plan for post-war reconstruction of Europe, for which he was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. McCarthy authored a book titled
America's retreat from victory; the story of George Catlett Marshall, accused Marshall of treason, of "aid the Communist drive for world domination," said "if Marshall was merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve America's interests," and most famously, accused him of being part of "a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man."
After Truman dismissed General
Douglas MacArthur during the
Korean War, McCarthy, using another phrase that would become famous, charged that Truman and his advisors must have planned the dismissal during a "midnight Bourbon-and-Benedictine session."
McCarthy and Eisenhower
With his victory in the 1952 presidential race,
Dwight Eisenhower became the first Republican president in 20 years. The Republican party also held a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Those who expected that party loyalty would cause McCarthy to tone down his accusations of Communists being harbored within the government were soon disappointed. Eisenhower had never been an admirer of McCarthy, and their relationship became more hostile once Eisenhower was in office.
During the 1952 campaign, Eisenhower's campaign schedule included a tour through Wisconsin with McCarthy. In a speech he delivered in
Green Bay, Eisenhower declared that while he agreed with McCarthy's goals, he disagreed with his methods. Eisenhower also included a strong defense of George Marshall in draft versions of his speech, in direct contradiction of McCarthy's frequent attacks on Marshall. However, under the advice of
conservative colleagues who were fearful that that Eisenhower could lose Wisconsin if he alienated McCarthy supporters, he cut these parts from later versions of his speech.
The deletion was discovered by a reporter for the
New York Times and featured on their front page the next day. Eisenhower was widely criticized for giving up his personal convictions, and the incident became the low point of his campaign.
After being elected president, he made it clear to those close to him that he did not approve of McCarthy and he worked actively to squelch his power and influence. But he never directly confronted McCarthy or criticized him by name in any speech, thus perhaps prolonging McCarthy's power by showing that even the President was afraid to criticize him directly.
In 1952, using rumors collected by Drew Pearson, Nevada publisher Hank Greenspun wrote that both McCarthy and
Roy Cohn were homosexuals. The major media refused to print the story and no reputable McCarthy biographer has accepted the rumor as probable. McCarthy dated many women, including Joseph Kennedy's daughters; in 1953 he married Jean Kerr, a researcher in his office. He and his wife adopted a baby girl in January 1957.
In a November 1953 speech that was carried on national television, McCarthy began by praising the Eisenhower Administration for removing "1,456 Truman holdovers who were [...] gotten rid of because of Communist connections and activities or perversion." He then went on to complain that
John P. Davies was still "on the payroll after eleven months of the Eisenhower Administration," and repeated an unsubstantiated accusation that Davies had tried to "put Communists and espionage agents in key spots in the Central Intelligence Agency." In the same speech he criticized Eisenhower for not doing enough to secure the release of missing American pilots shot down over China during the Korean War.
By the end of 1953, McCarthy had altered the "twenty years of treason" catch-phrase he had coined for the preceding Democratic administrations and began referring to "
twenty one years of treason." to include Eisenhower's first year in office.
As McCarthy became increasingly combative towards the Eisenhower Administration, Eisenhower faced repeated calls that he confront McCarthy directly. Eisenhower refused, saying privately "nothing would please him [McCarthy] more than to get the publicity that would be generated by a public repudiation by the President." On several occasions Eisenhower is reported to have said of McCarthy that he didn't want to "get down in the gutter with that guy."
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
With the beginning of his second term as Senator in 1953, McCarthy was made chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. According to some reports, Republican leaders were growing wary of McCarthy's methods and gave him this relatively mundane panel rather than the Internal Security Subcommittee--the committee normally involved with investigating Communists--thus putting McCarthy "where he can't do any harm," in the words of Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft.
However, the Committee on Government Operations included the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and the mandate of this subcommittee was sufficiently flexible to allow McCarthy to use it for his own investigations of Communists in the government. McCarthy appointed
Roy Cohn as chief counsel and
Robert Kennedy as an assistant counsel to the subcommittee.
The subcommittee first investigated allegations of Communist influence in the
Voice of America , at that time a part of the State Department's International Information Agency. Many VOA personnel were questioned in front of television cameras and a packed press gallery, with McCarthy lacing his questions with innuendo and false accusations.
A few VOA employees alleged Communist influence on the content of broadcasts, but none of the charges were substantiated. Morale at VOA was badly damaged, with one of its engineers even committing suicide. Ed Kretzman, a policy advisor for the service, would later comment that it was VOA's "darkest hour when Senator McCarthy and his chief hatchet man, Roy Cohn, almost succeeded in muffling it."
The subcommittee then turned to the overseas library program of the International Information Agency. Cohn toured Europe examining the card catalogs of the State Department libraries looking for works by authors he deemed inappropriate. McCarthy then recited the list of supposedly pro-communist authors before his subcommittee and the press. The State Department bowed to McCarthy and ordered its overseas librarians to remove from their shelves "material by any controversial persons, Communists, fellow travelers, etc." Some libraries actually burned the newly-forbidden books.
Shortly after this, in one of his carefully oblique public criticisms of McCarthy, President Eisenhower urged Americans: "Don't join the book burners. […] Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book."
Soon after receiving the chair to the Subcommittee on Investigations, McCarthy appointed Joseph Brown Matthews as staff director of the subcommittee. A fervent anti-communist, Matthews had formerly been staff director for the
House Committee on Un-American Activities. Matthews combined his anti-Communism with a powerful dislike of the Protestant religion, and had recently written an article called "Reds and Our Churches"
which opened with the sentence "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen.". On learning of this, a group of Senators denounced this "shocking and unwarranted attack against the American clergy" and demanded of McCarthy that he fire Matthews. McCarthy at first refused, but as the controversy mounted and the majority of his own subcommittee joined the call for Matthew's ouster, McCarthy finally yielded and accepted Matthew's resignation. For some McCarthy opponents, this was a signal defeat of the Senator, showing he was less invincible than he formerly seemed.
Investigating the army
In the fall of 1953, McCarthy's committee began its ill-fated inquiry into the
United States Army. This began with McCarthy opening an investigation into the
Army Signal Corps laboratory at
Fort Monmouth. McCarthy garnered some headlines with stories of a dangerous spy ring among the army researchers, but after weeks of hearings, nothing came of his investigations.
At about this time, Senator McCarthy was alerted to the story of Irving Peress, a New York dentist who had been drafted into the army in 1952 and promoted to major in November of 1953 through the provisions of the Doctor Draft Law. Shortly thereafter it came to the attention of the military bureaucracy that Peress, who was a member of the left-wing American Labor Party, had declined to answer questions about his political affiliations on a loyalty review form. Peress' superiors were therefore ordered to discharge him from the army within ninety days. McCarthy subpoenaed Peress to appear before his subcommittee on January 30, 1954. Peress refused to answer McCarthy's questions, citing his rights under the Fifth Amendment. McCarthy responded by sending a message to
Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens demanding that Peress be court-martialed. On that same day, Peress asked for his pending discharge to be effected immediately, and the next day
Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, his commanding officer at
Camp Kilmer in
New Jersey, gave him an honorable separation from the army.
McCarthy summoned General Zwicker to his subcommittee on February 18. Zwicker, on advice from army counsel, refused to answer some of McCarthy's questions and reportedly changed his story three times when asked if he had known at the time he signed the discharge that Peress had refused to answer questions before the McCarthy subcommittee. McCarthy compared Zwicker's intelligence to that of a "five-year-old child," and said he was "not fit to wear the uniform of a General."
This abuse of Zwicker, a battlefield hero of World War II, caused considerable outrage among the military, newspapers, civilian veterans, Senators of both parties and, probably most dangerously for McCarthy, President Eisenhower himself.
Army Secretary Stevens ordered Zwicker not to return to McCarthy's hearing for further questioning. Hoping to mend the increasingly hostile relations between McCarthy and the army, a group of Republicans met with Secretary Stevens and convinced him to sign a "memorandum of understanding" in which he capitulated to most of McCarthy's demands. McCarthy later told a reporter that Stevens "could not have given in more abjectly if he had got down on his knees."
Reaction to this agreement was widely negative. Secretary Stevens was ridiculed by Pentagon officers,
and
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of London wrote: "Senator McCarthy achieved today what
General Burgoyne and
General Cornwallis never achieved--the surrender of the American Army."
A few months later, the army, with advice and support from the Eisenhower Administration, would launch a counterattack against McCarthy. It would do this not by directly challenging and criticizing McCarthy's behavior toward army personnel, but by bringing charges against him on an unrelated issue.
The army-McCarthy hearings
Early in 1954, the U.S. Army accused McCarthy and his chief counsel,
Roy Cohn, of pressuring the army to give favorable treatment to another former aide and friend of Cohn's,
G. David Schine. McCarthy claimed that the accusation was made in bad faith, in retaliation for his questioning of Zwicker the previous year. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, usually chaired by McCarthy himself, was given the task of adjudicating these conflicting charges. Republican Senator
Karl Mundt was appointed to chair the committee, and the Army-McCarthy hearings convened on April 22, 1954.
The hearings lasted for 36 days and were were broadcast on live television, with an estimated 20 million viewers. After hearing 32 witnesses and two million words of testimony, the committee concluded that McCarthy himself had not exercised any improper influence on behalf of David Schine, but that Roy Cohn had engaged in "unduly persistent or aggressive efforts". The committee also concluded that Army Secretary Robert Stevens and army Counsel John Adams "made efforts to terminate or influence the investigation and hearings at Fort Monmouth," and that Adams "made vigorous and diligent efforts" to block subpoenas for members of the army Loyalty and Screening Board "by means of personal appeal to certain members of the [McCarthy] committee."
Far more important to McCarthy than the committee's inconclusive final report was the effect the extensive exposure had on his popularity. Many in the audience saw him as bullying, reckless and dishonest. Late in the hearings, Senator
Stuart Symington made an angry but prophetic remark to McCarthy: "The American people have had a look at you for six weeks," he said. "You are not fooling anyone." In Gallup polls of January, 1954, 50% of those polled had a positive opinion of McCarthy. In June, that number had fallen to 34%. In the same polls, those with a negative opinion of McCarthy increased from 29% to 45%.
An increasing number of Republicans and conservatives were coming to see McCarthy as a liability to the party and to anti-communism. Congressman George H. Bender noted "There is a growing impatience with the Republican Party. McCarthyism has become a synonym for witch-hunting, star chamber methods and the denial of[...] civil liberties." Frederick Woltman, a reporter with a long-standing reputation as a staunch anti-communist, wrote in
New York World-Telegram that McCarthy "has become a major liability to the cause of anti-communism."
The most famous incident in the hearings was an exchange between McCarthy and the army's attorney general Joseph Welch. On June 9, the 30th day of the hearings, Welch challenged Roy Cohn to give the
Attorney General McCarthy's list of 130 Communists or subversives in defense plants "before the sun goes down." McCarthy stepped in and said that if Welch was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the
National Lawyers Guild, which Attorney General Brownell had called "the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party." In an impassioned defense of Fisher that some have suggested he had prepared in advance,
Welch responded, "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness[...]" When McCarthy resumed his attack, Welch interrupted him: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" He then left the room to loud applause from the spectators, and a recess was called.
Edward Murrow, "See It Now"
One of the most prominent attacks on McCarthy's methods was an episode of the TV documentary series
See It Now was a television newsmagazine [i] and documentary [i] broadcast by ...
, hosted by journalist
Edward R. Murrow, which was broadcast on March 9, 1954.
The March 1954 show was preceded by one on a related topic, about the dismissal of Milo Radulovich, a former reserve Air Force lieutenant who was accused of associating with Communists in 1953. The program was aired on October 20, 1953 and advanced opposition of the American public against McCarthy.
The March 9, 1954 show consisted largely of clips of McCarthy speaking. In these clips, McCarthy
- accuses the Democratic party of being "in charge of twenty years of treason"
- makes a similar accusation against the Republican administration of Eisenhower
- incorrectly states that the American Civil Liberties Union is listed by the Attorney General as a front organization for the Communist party
- accuses Secretary Stevens of telling "two army officers that they had to take part in the cover-up of those who promoted and coddled Communists."
- badgers a witness, accused of helping the Communist cause by curtailing some broadcasts to Israel, over an irrelevant and unsuccessful book written 21 years earlier
- berates other witnesses, including General Zwicker
The Murrow report, together with the televised army-McCarthy hearings of the same year, were the major causes of a nationwide popular opinion backlash against McCarthy, in part because for the first time his statements were being publicly challenged by news figures. To counter the negative publicity, McCarthy appeared on
See It Now on April 6, 1954 and made a number of charges against the popular Murrow. This response did not go over well with viewers, and the result was a further decline in his popularity. President Eisenhower, now free of McCarthy's political intimidation, referred to "McCarthy
wasm" in conversation with a reporter.
Censure and the Watkins Committee
Several members of the U.S. Senate opposed McCarthy well before 1953. One example is U.S. Senator
Margaret Chase Smith, a
Maine Republican who delivered her "Declaration of Conscience" on June 1, 1950, calling for an end to the use of smear tactics without mentioning McCarthy or anyone else by name. Six other Republican Senators,
Wayne Morse,
Irving M. Ives,
Charles W. Tobey,
Edward John Thye, George Aiken and
Robert C. Hendrickson joined her in condemning McCarthy's tactics. McCarthy referred to Smith and her fellow Senators as "Snow White and the 6 dwarves."
Vermont Republican Senator
Ralph E. Flanders had also condemned McCarthy on the floor of the Senate, comparing McCarthy to Hitler, accused him of spreading "division and confusion" and said "Were the Junior Senator from Wisconsin in the pay of the Communists he could not have done a better job for them."
In June of 1954, Flanders introduced a resolution to have McCarthy removed as chair of his committees. Although there were many in the Senate who believed that some sort of disciplinary action against McCarthy was called for, there was no clear majority supporting this resolution. Some of the resistance was due to concern about usurping the Senate's rules regarding committee chairs and seniority. Flanders next introduced a resolution to censure McCarthy. The resolution was initially written without any reference to particular actions or misdeeds on McCarthy's part. As Flanders put it, "It was not his breaches of etiquette, or of rules or sometimes even of laws which is so disturbing," but rather his overall pattern of behavior. Ultimately a "bill of particulars" listing 46 charges was added to the censure resolution. A special committee, chaired by Senator
Arthur V. Watkins, was appointed to study and evaluate the resolution. This committee opened hearings on August 31, 1954.
After two months of hearings and deliberations, the Watkins Committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on two of the 46 counts: his contempt of the Subcommittee on Rules and Administration, which had called him to testify in 1951 and 1952, and his abuse of General Zwicker in 1954. The Zwicker count was dropped by the full Senate on the grounds that McCarthy's conduct was arguably "induced" by Zwicker's own behavior. In place of this count, a new one was drafted regarding McCarthy's statements about the Watkins Committee itself.
Thus the two counts that the Senate ultimately voted on were:
- That McCarthy had "failed to cooperate with the Subcommittee on Rules and Administration," and "repeatedly abused the members who were trying to carry out assigned duties..."
- That McCarthy had charged "three members of the [Watkins] Select Committee with 'deliberate deception' and 'fraud'... that the special Senate session... was a 'lynch party'," and had characterized the committee "as the 'unwitting handmaiden,' 'involuntary agent' and 'attorneys in fact' of the Communist Party," and had "acted contrary to senatorial ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity."
On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" Senator Joseph McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22, with the Democrats unanimously in favor of condemnation and the Republicans split evenly. As soon as the vote was taken, Senator
H. Styles Bridges, a McCarthy supporter, argued that because the word "condemn" rather than "censure" was used in the final draft, the resolution was "not a censure resolution." The word "censure" was then removed from the title of the resolution, although it is still generally regarded and referred to as a censure of McCarthy.
The Senate had invoked censure against one of its members only three times before in the nation's history.
McCarthy's final years
After his censure, McCarthy continued in his senatorial duties for another two and a half years, but his career as a major public figure was unmistakably over. His colleagues in the Senate avoided him; his speeches on the Senate floor were delivered to a near-empty chamber or were received with conspicuous displays of inattention.
The press that had once recorded his every public statement now ignored him, and outside speaking engagements dwindled almost to nothing. Still, McCarthy continued to rail against Communism. He warned against attendance at summit conferences with "the Reds", saying that "you cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers … without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder." He declared that "coexistence with Communists is neither possible nor honorable nor desirable. Our long-term objective must be the eradication of Communism from the face of the earth."
McCarthy's biographers are agreed that he was a changed man after the censure; declining both physically and emotionally, he became a "pale ghost of his former self" in the words of Fred J. Cook.
It was reported that McCarthy suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and was frequently hospitalized for alcoholism. Numerous eyewitnesses, including Senate aide George Reedy and journalist Tom Wicker, have reported finding him alarmingly drunk in the Senate.
Journalist Richard Rovere wrote:
- He had always been a heavy drinker, and there were times in those seasons of discontent when he drank more than ever. But he was not always drunk. He went on the wagon for days and weeks at a time. The difficulty toward the end was that he couldn't hold the stuff. He went to pieces on his second or third drink. And he did not snap back quickly.
He died in
Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, at the age of 48. The cause of his death was variously reported as acute hepatitis and cirrhosis. He was given a state funeral attended by 70 Senators, and St. Matthew's Cathedral performed a Solemn Pontifical Requiem before over a hundred priests and 2,000 others. Thousands of people viewed the body in Washington. He was buried in St. Mary's Parish Cemetery,
Appleton, Wisconsin, where more than 30,000 filed through St. Mary's Church to pay their last respects. Three senators—
George Malone, William E. Jenner, and
Herman Welker—had flown from Washington to Appleton on the plane carrying McCarthy's casket. He was survived by his wife Jean, and their adopted daughter, Tierney.
Continuing controversy
In the view of some modern authors, McCarthy's place in history should be reevaluated.
Ann Coulter's book
is the best known example of this; Coulter devotes a chapter to her defense of McCarthy, and much of the book to a defense of McCarthyism. She states, for example, "Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis."
Other authors who have voiced similar opinions include William Norman Grigg of the John Birch Society,
and M. Stanton Evans.
Another recent defense of McCarthy was written by William F. Buckley in the form of a laudatory fictionalized biography:
The Red Hunter: a Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy.
These authors often claim that new evidence, in the form of
Venona decrypted Soviet messages, Soviet espionage data now opened to the West, and newly released transcripts of closed hearings before McCarthy's subcommittee, have vindicated McCarthy, showing that many of his identifications of Communists were correct. It has also been said that Venona and the Soviet archives have revealed that the scale of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during the 40s and 50s was larger than many scholars suspected,
and that this too stands as a vindication of McCarthy.
These attempts to "rehabilitate" McCarthy have not received much attention from scholars, though there have been some responses from such authors as Kevin Drum
and Johann Hari.
Of the many individuals that figured in McCarthy's investigations or speeches, most were already suspected of being Communists or at least of having leftist politics. There are several cases where Venona or other recent data has confirmed or increased the weight of evidence that a person named by McCarthy was a Soviet agent. However, there are few, if any, cases where McCarthy was responsible for identifying a person, or removing a person from a sensitive government position, where later evidence has increased the likelihood that that person was a Communist or a Soviet agent.
The names that various authors have listed as "correctly identified by McCarthy" include:
| Theodore GeigerHaldore HansonMary Jane KeeneyOwen LattimoreLeonard Mins | Annie Lee MossFranz Leopold NeumannEdward PosniakWilliam RemingtonJohn Carter Vincent |
HUAC
McCarthy is often incorrectly described as part of the
House Committee on Un-American Activities . HUAC is best known for the investigation of
Alger Hiss, and for its investigation of the
Hollywood film industry, which led to the blacklisting of hundreds of actors, writers and directors. HUAC was established in May 1938 as the "Dies Committee" before McCarthy was elected to the Federal office, and, being a House committee, had no connection with McCarthy, who served in the Senate.
McCarthy in popular culture
- In 1953, the popular comic strip Pogo introduced the visiting character "Simple J. Malarkey," a pugnacious and conniving wildcat with an unmistakable physical resemblance to McCarthy.
- "The Investigator" was a 1954 radio play first broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The satire links and equates the character representing McCarthy to several historical 'witch hunters'.
- In the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, the character of Senator John Iselin, a demagogic anti-communist, is strongly patterned after McCarthy, even to the varying numbers of "Communist infiltrators" he purports to have evidence of .
- Footage of McCarthy was recently used in the 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck is an Academy Award [i]-nominated 2005 film [i] ...
about Edward R. Murrow and the fall of McCarthy , starring David Strathairn as Murrow and George Clooney as Fred Friendly, co-producer of See It Now was a television newsmagazine [i] and documentary [i] broadcast by ...
, Murrow's show. Test audiences felt that the actor who portrayed Joseph McCarthy was overacting; they were unaware that only archive footage of the actual Joseph McCarthy was used in the film.
- The rock band R.E.M. have a song on their 1987 album Document called "Exhuming McCarthy".
- In Wu Ming's novel 54, Cary Grant and David Niven make harsh comments on McCarthy's sloppy way of dressing. At the end of the novel Frances Farmer's "ghost" appears to Grant and expresses relief after McCarthy's demise.
Notes
References and additional reading
Scholarly secondary sources
- Andrea Friedman, "The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics" American Q
