The Redhunter (20 page)

Lucas’s opening speech was relatively brief. He made three points. The first, that everyone agreed that maximum protection
against Communist agents was critically important. The second, that President Truman and Secretary Acheson were very well
aware of this and had made every effort to protect the government against penetration by “the enemies of true government,
who are friends of tyranny.” The third, that the junior senator from Wisconsin had leveled very grave charges against the
security system and very direct charges against the security program in the State Department.

“There is some question about exactly how many Communist spies … or just plain Communist Party members … or loyalty risks
whose names the senator says he has, are still in the State Department. I myself have heard 207, 81, and 57. But let’s start
at the beginning and ask our colleague what it is that makes him allege any such delinquency in the State Department. Sir,
will you inform us?”

Joe McCarthy rose. He did not appear to be ill at ease. He had been four years a senator and had engaged in many debates,
some of them spirited, one or two acrimonious. With deliberation he opened his folder and began to talk.

When Joe McCarthy was reading his remarks, the voice was monotonic, the speed a little faster than ideal for listening. It
was different when he was interrupted. His speech then became lively. An interruption came a few minutes after he had begun
his historical description of loyalty/security procedures in the State Department. Senator Benton, the quick-witted, erudite,
verbose senator from Connecticut, broke in.

“Can the senator from Wisconsin inform us why the Communists
have made available only to
him
their roster of agents in the State Department?”

The spurts of laughter from the floor and the galleries broke Joe’s rhythm. Lips tightening, he looked over at Benton.

“Maybe under the Truman administration the Communists have become so cocky they figure it doesn’t matter
who
they inform about their people, nobody will bother them. Only from now on, the senator from Connecticut may be dismayed to
know, they are
not
any longer safe. I,” he paused for a moment, then thought to look about the chamber, to share the credit, “and my colleagues—and
the American people—will not let it happen. We’re going to ruin their day. … Now let me get on with it. I have here … ”

McCarthy’s formulation would be imitated for months and years by late-night comedians and talk-show hosts and, indeed, the
whole derisive community—”a photostatic copy of—”

Senator McClellan of Arkansas broke in to ask for the history of the State Department’s loyalty procedures.

“I was coming to that. I was interrupted by the senator from Connecticut, who wanted to say something reassuring to some of
his constituents in Connecticut.” A little frown of dismay crossed the face of Senator Knowland of California. It was not
lightly suggested, on the floor, that any senator had constituents to whom he pandered, let alone Communist constituents.

McCarthy continued reading again. He sought, he said, to “refresh the recollection” of his colleagues by giving a little of
the background of “U.S. efforts to protect itself.”

In 1938, “twelve years ago,” Congress had passed the McCormack Act, ordering all agents of foreign governments to register
with the Department of Justice. That act, said McCarthy, was designed to “blow away the pretenses of American Communists,
who were taking their orders from the Soviet Union.”

The Hatch Act of 1939, McCarthy reminded the chamber, forbade federal employment to members of any organization that advocated
the forcible overthrow of our constitutional government.

“Even though there was a military honeymoon during the war, when Stalin and FDR fought the same enemy,” McCarthy went on,
“in 1942 the Civil Service Commission came through with loyalty criteria supposed to govern federal agencies in determining
whom to hire. That
commission set up the criterion of ‘reasonable’ doubt as to an applicant’s loyalty. If reasonable doubt as to the applicant’s
loyalty and reliability was found, he couldn’t be hired.” That criterion, McCarthy said, was very important. Yet the Hatch
Act had simply been unenforced.

“Whose responsibility is that?” Senator McKeller of Tennessee wanted to know.

“The attorney general, Senator, is supposed to enforce the laws we pass.”

The senator nodded. McCarthy continued. He gave an example. “The American League for Peace and Democracy is universally recognized
as a Communist front,” he reminded them. “It was never anything else. It had been so declared by the attorney general. Yet
537 members of the American League for Peace and Democracy were still in government.”

“Were
still in government, or
are
still in government?” Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota asked.

McCarthy hesitated. He came in with the more dramatic alternative. “
Are
still in government.”

“How did you get that number, 537?” Senator Benton wanted to know.

McCarthy flushed. “From the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Senator.” Benton was chairman of the board of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The laughs now were at his expense.

However, McCarthy explained, mark this loophole. The Civil Service reasonable-doubt criterion applied only to applicants for
government employment, not to those already
in
government. Frustrated by different loyalty/security standards being applied by the departments of the federal government,
the attorney general in 1942 created an “Interdepartmental Committee on Investigation.”

But it was ineffective, McCarthy said. “It never got its act together.” And besides, under its permissive criteria an applicant
could not be excluded “unless he personally advocated the overthrow of government by force and violence.

“Gentlemen, Senator Smith,” McCarthy said—Margaret Chase Smith, junior senator from Maine, was the only woman in the Senate—”I’m
not sure that by using Interdepartmental Committee standards you could exclude anybody. That committee said nobody could join
government who was in favor of overthrowing our government
by force and violence. I mean, is it all that easy, if you’re a security officer trying to make a case against an employee
or an applicant, to pick up a document that proves that a particular person once said,
‘I believe in overthrowing the government of the United States by force and violence
’? I’m not one hundred percent sure you can find that statement signed by Joe Stalin.

“Okay,” McCarthy went on. “You think I’m exaggerating. However latitudinarian the Civil Service Commission, in fact its exertions
did block access to federal jobs to some Communist employees. With what result? A protest from the Communist-dominated Federal
Workers Union.

“Did anybody pay any attention to this protest, a protest from a Communist union? Yes: the Bureau of the Budget. It cut the
funds required to implement the loyalty program. And the result was that Communist after Communist worked his way into the
assorted wartime agencies.”

But the most important development, McCarthy told his colleagues, was the presidential order of March 13, 1948. President
Truman’s executive order instructed all federal departments to deny to any congressional investigating committee access to
loyalty/security files. “The president looked down on Congress and said: ‘Go away. We don’t want you around messing with our
business.’ Well, the Soviet Union has been messing with government business, and I believe it is time for the Congress of
the United States to assert its responsibility to monitor the executive branch.”

Senator McKeller spoke again. He wanted to know what proof there was that Communists had actually
remained
in government since wartime. He was seated next to Senator Benton, who spotted immediately the danger of his colleague’s
formulation, but before he could enter the exchange in an effort to distract from it, McCarthy pounced.

“
Proof?
The senator from Tennessee wants proof! Senator, are you aware that Alger Hiss was convicted by a federal court as recently
as
six weeks ago?
Did you not know that the State Department
and the White House
were
twice
informed about Alger Hiss? Mr. Adolph Berle relayed Whittaker Chambers’s report on Hiss to his superiors in 1939. In 1943,
Chambers spoke with the FBI, which, we have to assume—is that fair to say, Senator?—passes along the information it gets about
subversives to the government officials who employ them. The FBI
must have passed its information, dating back to
1939,
to the State Department. How do you account for that, Senator? Well,
I
have an explanation. There are people in the State Department who take the same view in these matters as Paul Appleby, not
so long ago an employee of the Bureau of the Budget.”

He paused. Waiting for a reaction to the name Paul Appleby. He got none.

“You know what he said? Mr. Appleby? He said—it’s in the
Congressional Record,
July 18, 1946—he said, ‘A man in the employ of the government has just as much right to be a member of the Communist Party
as he has to be a member of the Democratic or Republican Party.’ What do you think of that statement, Senator?”

Senator Benton raised his hand and began to speak, but McCarthy did not pause. “And Chambers didn’t give just the name of
Alger Hiss. He spoke of Lee Pressman and Nathan Witt and John Abt and Charles Kramer, among others. Some of them were still
in government;
all
of them have been in government. None of them was ousted from government. Why didn’t the loyalty/security division of the
State Department catch them? The State Department not only didn’t catch Hiss, it
promoted
Hiss. It was Hiss who presided at the opening session of the United Nations!”

McCarthy looked about him. Two of the senators were reading their mail. But most of the rest were listening, and were silent.
(“There are two kinds of silent senators,” McCarthy later told Jean Kerr at dinner. “There are the senators who are silent
because they aren’t talking. And there are the senators who are silent because they are actually listening.”)

He completed his discussion of Hiss and the State Department. “If an Alger Hiss can slip through the fingers of the State
Department with that kind of incriminating evidence sitting around since 1939, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that there
should be other Alger Hisses. How would we know?”

The Senate recessed for lunch and resumed its session at two in the afternoon, to adjourn, finally, just before six.

Sam Tilburn picked up his telephone in the Senate press gallery and dialed his boss, the editor of the
Indianapolis Star.
The
Star
was a part of the Eugene Pulliam chain. It had been cautiously receptive to McCarthy’s charges after Wheeling. Ed Reidy’s
lead editorial had said,

Intelligent Americans will simply deduce from the deteriorated position of the west that our policies have been misguided.
Who guided them? We mean, obviously, below the glittering surfaces, where one deals with Presidents and Secretaries of State.
Did any of our senior counselors have other motives in mind than the advancement of western interests? We believe that this
is at the heart of Senator McCarthy’s contentions.

Reidy had received a Pulitzer for reporting from China, ten years before. In those reports, which centered on the great Japanese
aggression against China, Reidy had emphasized the critical dependence of Japan on its supplies of oil. When President Roosevelt
imposed the boycott on selling oil to Japan, Reidy prophesied that Japan would react violently. His story was filed on July
26. Five months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Reidy was anxious to sustain his reputation as a reliable analyst, and now he gave instructions to his Washington reporter.

At age thirty, Sam Tilburn was a skilled Washington hand. He had lost a leg in a car accident when still a boy (his father,
at the wheel, had been killed) and so did not have to give up his post as a young reporter for the
Star
to serve in the army. He spent the war years at his desk, in Washington. Reidy’s orders now were to stick to the McCarthy
story “until the Communists and their sympathizers are run out of Washington, or until Joe McCarthy is.”

“It’s going to be a long haul.” Tilburn held the telephone mouthpiece close to his lips to make way in a room with twenty
reporters using twenty telephones. “I mean, the business of sticking to McCarthy until he shoots them or they shoot him.”

“What about today?” Reidy was impatient. “All we got on the ticker was that he had named two suspects. Why didn’t he name
more?”

“The Senate voted to set up an investigating committee. McCarthy said he would give the names to the committee ‘in
an orderly manner’—”already Tilburn was skilled at imitating McCarthy’s nasal monotone. “He blasted the living hell out of
the State Department, Truman, Acheson, and of course Alger Hiss. The arch enemy on the floor was Benton. If there is an early
kill, it will be Benton or McCarthy, one or the other.”