Re: Joseph R. McCarthy — Donald Ritchie Anytime Over Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter? Feeeech! Donald Ritchie offers a dispassionate analyis of the McCarthy hearings. Roy Cohn and G. David Schine. What a zoo. And to think that Robert LaFollette, Jr. committed suicide because of this traitor. Yes — Joe McCarthy — not his victims, was the real traitor. A traitor does harm to his country. Oh, for a Senator like Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME)! Instead, we have Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn. Neither should be mentioned in the same breath with Maggie Smith. If this be treason, make the most of it.

[x OAH Newsletter]

Releasing Joe McCarthy

by Donald Ritchie

In May 2003, when the U.S. Senate released all of the previously closed anticommunist hearings that Joseph McCarthy conducted a half century ago, the event served as a national history lesson. The story spread across the media, and editorial cartoonists drew a natural connection between McCarthy's crusade and the current tension between national security and civil liberties. For historians, the release meant, at long last, access to the largest body of unexamined McCarthy materials other than his own senatorial papers still under seal at Marquette University.

I have spent the past two years compiling and editing the transcripts for publication, but in many ways the project had been under way for much longer. In 1975 the Senate established a Historical Office and appointed Richard Baker as historian. When I joined the staff the following year as associate historian, I initially spent much time screening committee records at the National Archives to open them for research. At the time, the Senate had no formal policy on records access, and we handled requests ranging from contemporary judicial nominations to Finance Committee records from the 1850s.

In 1976 Professor James F. Watts of the City College of New York sought access to the unpublished hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations during McCarthy's chairmanship, from 1953 to 1954. Pulling boxes, I accumulated 160 executive sessions (or closed hearings). The year before McCarthy became chairman, the same subcommittee had held only six.

Recognizing their historical significance, we recommended that the subcommittee open the records and allow the Senate Historical Office to prepare them for publication. Several senators who had served during McCarthy's chairmanship remained in office, however, as did McCarthy's chief clerk, Ruth Young Watt. They feared that opening the records would invade the privacy of the hundreds of witnesses who had testified in the closed sessions, a third of whom never appeared at a subsequent public hearing. In response, the Senate established standards that opened most of its records automatically after twenty years, but allowed committees to close sensitive materials dealing with national security, personal privacy, and investigations for up to fifty years. The Permanent Subcommittee opted for the fifty-year closure.

Although this was disappointing, contact with Ruth Watt turned out to be beneficial. In a 1979 interview upon her retirement, after thirty-two years as chief clerk, Watt offered unique insights into Senator McCarthy, his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, and the committee's unpaid "chief consultant," G. David Schine. Years later, her interview proved invaluable in deciphering the mountain of executive session transcripts. (The full text is available online at oral_history/Ruth_Young_Watt.htm>.)

Time passed, and in January 2001, with the fiftieth anniversary of the McCarthy hearings fast approaching, we went back to the Permanent Subcommittee with another proposal to prepare the hearings for publication. Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who then chaired the subcommittee, held the Senate seat once occupied by Senator Margaret Chase Smith. Senator Smith had stood in the Senate chamber and issued a "Declaration of Conscience" against McCarthy's tactics. In the same spirit, Senator Collins authorized the publication project. Six months later, an unprecedented shift in party power made Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, the subcommittee's chairman, who gave the project strong bipartisan support.

With the help of the staff of the National Archives' Center for Legislative Archives, we identified and transferred copies of all executive session transcripts to the Senate Historical Office. The original transcribers had done a professional job but had made mistakes; they misspelled names, misplaced punctuation, and heard sound-alike words, and scanning the onion-skin paper transcripts into computer files for editing often produced garbled text that required manual correction. Editing continued even after an anthrax attack forced us from our offices in the Hart Senate Office Building for three months.

Concerned over the potential impact of the release on surviving witnesses, we tried to make it clear that simply appearing before the subcommittee was not evidence of guilt. We attempted to identify everyone who testified, and established that the vast majority had since died. Tracing court records, we also found that not a single witness had gone to jail for testifying--or refusing to testify--before McCarthy's subcommittee. Either the Justice Department had refused to prosecute or the courts had thrown out the cases. Rare instances of conviction were all overturned on appeal.

Reading the transcripts for over two years formed definite impressions of their substance. Convinced that subversion and espionage were rampant in the federal government, Senator McCarthy ascribed policies with which he disagreed to either stupidity or sabotage. He tended not to call an agency's top officials to explain these polices, but worked from the bottom up, starting with lower-level employees. With little hard evidence, he expected to drag confessions out of reluctant witnesses, or to get them to perjure themselves. If a witness took the Fifth Amendment, he interpreted it as an admission of guilt. After a closed hearing adjourned, the chairman would advise witnesses that they were free to talk to the waiting reporters if they chose, but that he would not reveal their names publicly. Most witnesses, shaken by the experience, fled without meeting the press. Senator McCarthy would then step into the hallway and deliver his version of the testimony. Somehow the names of the witnesses regularly made their way into print despite his assurances. A review of reports in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune--one skeptical and the other supportive of McCarthy's claims--reconstructed what he told reporters. His accounts appear grossly exaggerated when compared to transcripts.

How the senator chose which witnesses to take into public became clearer as the hearings progressed. Those who willingly confessed past politics and named names, and those who took the Fifth Amendment, were more likely to appear at a later public hearing than those who defended themselves rationally and articulately. The testimony of the composer Aaron Copeland and of the archivist Sherrod East offer models of the type that McCarthy did not want to confront publicly.

Revelations of the orchestration of the hearings and the patterns of culling witnesses dominated news coverage of the hearings' release. The New York Times ran an editorial on "Auditioning for Senator McCarthy." Headlines ranged from "McCarthy Rigged His Showdowns" in the New York Post to "Tales from a Redbaiter's '50s Fishing Expedition," in the Washington Post. Radio and television news pursued similar themes.

There were some dissenters. In Human Events, M. Staunton Evans cited evidence against Annie Lee Moss in defense of Senator McCarthy. Moss, Pentagon communications clerk, failed to attend an executive session prior to her public appearance due to ill health. When she appeared at a televised public session, she hardly seemed a threat to the republic. McCarthy recognized a public relations disaster when he saw one and quickly left the hearing room. Had she testified first in an executive session, it is unlikely that she would have been called back publicly. Her case contrasts with that of another African American woman, Doris Walters Powell, whom McCarthy erroneously pegged as a communist, drove from her government job, and crowed about to the press, but never brought to a public hearing. Ronald Radosh in the National Review pointed to McCarthy's questioning of Michael and Ann Sidorovich, whose names appear in the VENONA transcripts. (For more information on VENONA, see .) Under oath, both denied any espionage. If they committed perjury, McCarthy failed to make anything of it. Their brief testimony contrasts with the chairman's extensive effort to prove that Aaron Coleman, an Army Signal Corps engineer at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, had lied when he denied riding in a car pool with Julius Rosenberg. It later emerged that Rosenberg had taken Coleman's place in the car pool, and they had never overlapped. The 4,500 pages of transcripts are replete with such examples of inept investigating.

McCarthy's defenders cite the VENONA intercepts as evidence that the senator "was n to something." The problem with this defense is that very few of those in VENONA came under McCarthy's scrutiny. The term "McCarthyism" so broadly covers all of the investigations of the 1940s and 1950s, that it has melded McCarthy's investigations into those conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. McCarthy's detractors blame him for investigating Hollywood, which he did not. His supporters praise him for investigating Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, and others whom he did not. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations' release of these executive sessions finally clarifies the differences between McCarthy and McCarthyism.

The executive sessions are available in print through the Government Printing Office or online at common/generic/McCarthy_Transcripts.htm>. The original transcripts are open at the National Archives for comparison, along with the support files on each investigation. Rather than the end of the story, for historians this is just the beginning.

Donald A. Ritchie is associate historian of the U.S. Senate Historical Office. A past president of the Oral History Association, he is the author of Doing Oral History (2003), and Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (1991), which received the OAH's Richard W. Leopold Prize.

Copyright © Organization of American Historians.