Time Capsule - Communism, Berlin Wall and McCarthyism

A couple of days ago it was the anniversary of an important event which became the hallmark for the end of the Cold War – the tearing down of the infamous Berlin Wall. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States and Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

When the Berlin Wall was erected, it was a period in history where words like “Cold War”, “Korean War”, “fallout shelter”, “nuclear warfare”, “communism”, and “McCarthyism” became well known in America. When the Berlin Wall fell, it also marked another era in history.

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was born on a farm in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, November 14^th and died on May 2^nd, 1957. He was the son of an Irish father and German mother. McCarthy was admitted to the Bar Association in 1935 and while working in a law firm in Shawano, Wisconsin, he began his political career in an unsuccessful campaign to become District Attorney as a Democrat in 1936. In 1939 he successfully was elected to the post of the non-partisan 10^th District Circuit Court and became the youngest judge in Wisconsin’s history. In 1942, shortly after World War II began, McCarthy enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, even though his judicial office had exempted him from the draft. McCarthy later received a commission as a lieutenant and served as an intelligence briefing officer for a bomber squadron in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville. McCarthy flew 11 times as an aerial photographer and tail gunner and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952 and also received commendation from Admiral Chester Nimitz for flying despite an injury. Critics would later state that McCarthy exaggerated his wartime service record when he ran for political office. McCarthy campaigned for the Republican Senate nomination in Wisconsin while still on active duty in 1944 but was defeated by Alexander Wiley, the incumbent. After McCarthy resigned his commission in April of 1945, five months before the end of the Pacific Theater part of World War II in September 1945, he was re-elected to his circuit court position and began the campaign for the 1946 Republican Senate primary nomination. His opponent was Robert M. La Follette, Jr., who was unfairly attacked by McCarthy for not enlisting during the war (he was 46 and exempt), presented allegations that La Follette was a war privateer in his business dealings, which was the most damaging against the opponent of the young circuit judge. After his win for the seat in Congress, McCarthy called a press conference on the first day in the Senate where he proposed to have a solution to a coal strike that was taking place. He stated that the Union leader John L. Lewis and the striking miners be drafted in the Army. If the men refused to mine the coal, McCarthy implied that they be court-martialed and executed for their insubordination. Despite McCarthy’s marriage at the age of 44 to Jean Kerr, a researcher in his office, he was accused of being a homosexual, because of his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who was also accused of being homosexual. Many years later Roy Cohn’s homosexuality became known when he contracted HIV and died of AIDS in 1986.

Senator McCarthy’s first three years in office He joined Senator Robert Taft in a lobby to commute death sentences given to a group of Waffen-SS soldiers convicted of war crimes for their participation in the 1944 Malmedy massacre of American prisoners of war. Senator Taft had been critical of the trial because of allegations of misconduct during the interrogations that produced the confessions by the defendents, as well as the objections of Soviet involvement in the trial.

McCarthy’s early senate campaigns consisted of housing legislation and was against sugar rationing. He became more noticeable to the public after his Lincoln Day speech on February 9^th, 1950 during the presidency of Harry Truman. During this speech he produced a list of known communists working for the State Department. McCarthy stated: “I have here in my hand a list of 57 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.” America was worried at the time about the aggressive behavior of the Soviet Union in Europe, as well as the trial of Alger Hiss. McCarthy’s accusation was seen as an explanation for the fall of China to the Maoists and the Soviet’s development of a nuclear bomb (atomic bomb) in 1949 – which they achieved through captured German scientists and stolen U.S. secrets.

Thus in February of 1950, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee set up a subcommittee called the Tydings Committee to conduct “a full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State.” During a February 20^th, 1950 speech, Democrat Senator Scott W. Lucas demanded that McCarthy make the 81 names McCarthy had claimed in the Senate, which was inflated from the original 57 names he stated he had collected earlier. McCarthy refused and stated: “If I were to give all the names involved, it might leave a wrong impression. If we should label one man a communist when he is not a communist, I think it would be too bad.” He then identified the individuals by case numbers instead of their names. After 31 days of hearings, during which McCarthy attempted to present public evidence on nine persons (Dorothy Kenyon, Haldore Hanson, Phillip Jessup, Esther Brunauer, Frederick Schuman, Harlow Shapley, Gustavo Duran, John S. Service, and Own Lattimore), the Tydings Committee officially labeled the charges as a “fraud” and a “hoax.” [Note: It was Own Lattimore who first coined the phrase "McCarthyism."]

From 1950 to 1953, Senator McCarthy continued to speak of his accusations and emphasized that the government was failing to deal with communism within its own members of government. During a speech in Milwaukee in 1952, McCarthy gave his reason for his campaign against communist infiltration in America as being the death of former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal on May 22^nd, 1949. He stated: “The communists hounded Forrestal to his death. They killed him just as definitely as if they had thrown him from that 16^th-story window in Bethesda Naval Hospital. While I am not a sentimental man, I was touched deeply and left numb by the news of Forrestal’s murder. But I was affected much more deeply when I heard of the communist celebration when they heard of Forrestal’s murder. On that night, I dedicated part of this fight to Kim Forrestal.”

Soon McCarthy was being accused of “attempting to discredit his critics and political opponents by accusing them of being communists or communist-sympathizers.” McCarthy was discredited because of his political campaign against Millard Tydings in 1950, which was called “one of the dirtiest in American political history.”

McCarthy became chairperson of the Senate Committee on Government Operations in 1953 and it’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He appointed Roy Cohn as chief counsel and Robert Kennedy as assistant counsel to the subcommittee. The focus was on government institutions unlike the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Meanwhile, McCarthy continued his crusade and made accusations of communist influence within the government. This angered President Eisenhower, who was also a Republican, although he never criticized the senator in public, he worked to have him removed from his position of influence. During 1953 and the first few months of 1954, McCarthy and his committee examined 653 witnesses, who appeared in closed executive sessions, and their identities were not revealed to the public. Some, who had invoked their Fifth Amendment rights during private questioning, were called before public sessions and their names became known to the public. Accusations began concerning abuse of witnesses at these hearings, those some witnesses reported they were treated fairly and not abused.

McCarthy was close friends to Joseph P. Kennedy, probably because of their common Irish family background and the senior Kennedy contributed to McCarthy’s campaigns being one of his main supporters. During the Senate election race of 1952, McCarthy, who was a Republican, made no campaign speeches against his Democrat opponents, out of respect for the Kennedy family. When John F. Kennedy ran for the Senate seat, he did not give anti-McCarthy speeches even though he was pressured by the Democrat Party to do so. It was Joe Kennedy that urged McCarthy to appoint Robert Kennedy at the age of 27 in 1953 as a senior staff member. In 1954 when the Senate threatened to condemn McCarthy, John Kennedy was put on the spot, and stated: “How could I demand that Joe McCarthy be censured for things he did when my own brother was on his staff?” In 1954, Robert no longer worked for McCarthy and John Kennedy had a speech drafted that called for censuring McCarthy, but it was never delivered. Senator Kennedy was in the hospital when the Senate called for a vote to censure McCarthy on December 2^nd, 1954. JFK never revealed how he would have voted.

In 1954, it was also the time when McCarthy began to crusade to find communists or those sympathetic to communists within the ranks of the U.S. Army. It became known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings and was broadcasted live on the radio and on television. Senate Everett Dirksen along with the Army’s attorney general, Joseph Welch, began to pick apart the charges at the hearing by bring up discrepancies of the evidence. The proceedings were documented in a film entitled Point of Order.

Sometimes McCarthy would be brutal against his opponents, as in the case of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican and the only woman in the Senate at the time, who delivered the Declaration of Conscience on June 1^st, 1950. Vermont Senator Ralph E. Sanders also condemned McCarthy in the Senate and introduced the resolution to censure him. McCarthy referred to Senator Smith and her group of senators as “Snow White and the 6 dwarves.”

On July 30^th, 1954, Senator Ralph Flanders, introduced a resolution that accused Senator McCarthy of conduct “unbecoming a member of the United States Senate.” Senator Flanders had made a statement earlier that McCarthy’s “anti-communism so completely parallels that of Adolf Hitler as to strike fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority.” This also was the time when the Democrat Party began using “class warfare” tactics in their political rhetoric mainly because that McCarthy and his fellow personnel had uncovered evidence showing that communist sympathesizers and “closet” socialists were members of the DNC. In all, McCarthy was accused of 46 different counts of allegedly improper conduct and a special committee was set up to evaluate those charges. By the time it got to the Senate floor for voting, only two charges remained out of the original: (1) “That Senator McCarthy had ‘failed to cooperate’ in 1952 with the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a resolution for his expulsion from the Senate; and “that in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had ‘intemperately abused” General Ralph Zwicker.

In the media, the most prominent attacker of McCarthy and his Anti-Communist crusade was Edward R. Murrow, and the first of a series of TV documentaries See It Now, was broadcasted on March 9^th, 1954. It made public the following details:

• Accused the Democratic Party of being “in charge of twenty years of treason.” (1933-1953).
• Made a similar accusation against the Administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. (Later it was to be found that the Venona Project showed that there were Soviet agents present in both administrations, including the Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White).
• Accused the American Civil Liberties Union of being a front for the Communist party.
• Accused Secretary Stevens of telling “two Army officers that they had to take part in the cover-up of those who promoted and coddled communists.”
• Accused Reed Harris (Civil Servant in State Department) of helping the communist cause by “curtailing some broadcasts to Israel.”
• Aberration of witnesses, including an Army general.

The Murrow Report, as it has become known, produced a negative view on the part of the American public. To counter all this negative publicity, McCarthy appeared on See It Now on April 6^th, 1954 and made several charges against Murrow. It did not look well for him and caused the public to further dislike him. President Eisenhower then began to refer to the situation as “”McCarthyism” in public.

After his censure, McCarthy continued his work in the Senate for two and one half more years. Some say be became a changed man during this time. Journalist Richard Rovere wrote in 1959: “There have been descriptions of him as having spent his last years in an unbroken alcoholic stupor. These descriptions are inaccurate. 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 him this meant beer instead of whiskey) 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.”

Joseph McCarthy died of acute hepatitis in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2^nd, 1957, at the age of 48. Despite enemies and the controversy over his crusade against communist infiltration in America, he was the first senator in 17 years to have funeral services in the Senate chamber. He was buried in St. Mary’s Parish Cemetary, Appleton, Wisconsin. It was reported that 30,000 Wisconsinites payed their respects to the senator at St. Mary’s Church. Three senators flew on the plane that carried his casket from Washington to Appleton on the plane – George Malone, William E. Jenner and Herman Welker.

During my college attendance, I had experienced the continued ridicule of Joseph McCarthy’s belief that the FDR administration had allowed communists to infiltrate the American government and pollute the political and traditional policies of America. I seemed alone in the belief that Stalin had initiated infiltration of communist spies and develop a communist party in America in the 1930s. Finally after so many decades after his endeavor, there are those who have sifted out the truth and denounced what the left jokingly called “McCarthyism.”

In Ann Coulter’s book, Treason, she points out that the reason why there was such a fuss over McCarthy’s accusations is that many he accused was guilty. In the book, Ann states: “’McCarthyism’ means pointing out positions taken by liberals that are unpopular with the American people. As former President Bush said, ‘Liberals do not like me talking about liberals.’ The reason they sob about the dark night of fascism under McCarthy is to prevent Americans from ever noticing that liberals consistently attack their own country.” (P.4)

And again on page 10: “The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobglonism. Liberals weren’t cowering in fear during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to black McCarthy’s name. 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.”

And on Page 11, Ann writes about the change within the Democrat Party: “…After World War II, the Democratic Party suffered from the same sort of pusillanimous psychosis that seized all of France after World War I. The entire party began to lose its nerve for sacrifice, heroism, and bravery. Beginning in the fifties, there was a real fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. By the late sixties, the contest was over. The anti-Communist Democrats had lost.”

On page 33: “A half century later, when the only people who call themselves Communists are harmless cranks, it is difficult to grasp the importance of McCarthy’s crusade. But there’s a reason ‘Communist’ now sounds about as threatening as ‘monarchist’ – and it’s not because of intrepid New York Times editorials denouncing McCarthy and praising Harvard educated Soviet spies. McCarthy made it a disgrace to be a Communist. Domestic Communism could never recover.”

And to further the evidence that McCarthy was right, on page 44: “Among the most notorious Soviet spies in high-level positions in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations — now proved absolutely, beyond question by the Soviet cables — were Alger Hiss at the State Department; Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, later appointed to the International Monetary Fund by President Truman; Lauchlin Currie, personal assistant to President Roosevelt and White House liaison to the State Department under both Roosevelt and Truman; Laurence Duggan, head of the Latin American Desk at the State Department; Frank Coe, US representative on the International Monetary Fund; Solomon Adler, senior Treasury Department official; Klaus Fuchs, top atomic scientist; and Duncan Lee, senior aide to the head of the OSS.”

Ann writes about the personality of McCarthy on page 70: “McCarthy was a popularizer, a brawler. Republican elitists abhor demagogic appeals to working-class Democrats. Fighting like a Democrat is a breach of etiquette worse than using the wrong fork. McCarthy is sniffed at for not playing by Marquis of Queensbury Rules — rules of engagement demanded only of Republicans. Well without McCarthy, Republicans might be congratulating themselves on their excellent behavior from the gulag right now.”

Ann Coulter demonstrates proof that the Democratic Party has screwed up foreign policy on page 155: “Liberals are very big on taking ‘the long view’ when evaluating their foreign policies. They create horrendous foreign policy disasters, but then eventually, a Republican is elected President and cleans up the mess. They said containment would work and, lo and behold, forty years later — right at the end of the Reagan administration — the Soviet Union was stopped dead in its tracks. That’s taking ‘the long view.’ Praise God President Bush is not ‘another Harry Truman.’”

And President Reagan’s key part in ending the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall on page 158: “Reagan took an approach to the Cold War dramatically different from any other US President. To wit, he thought we should win. This was a fresh concept. At the time, it was widely ridiculed as a dangerous alteration of US policy. Only after it worked was Reagan’s dangerous foreign policy recast as merely a continuation of the policies of his predecessors.”

And continues her praise of Ronald Reagan on page 190: “Liberals said Reagan was dangerous and his rhetoric scary. They ridiculed him as an idiot for believing the Soviet Union could be toppled. They opposed him on every front — strengthening the military, aiding and arming anti-Communist rebels around the world, invading Grenada, preparing to win a nuclear war, building a nuclear shield, and waging a spiritual crusade against Soviet totalitarianism. Reagan said the Soviet Union was an evil empire and we would prevail. He called the ball, the shot, and the pocket, and he won the game. But now we’re supposed to believe he was lucky. Liberals lie about Reagan’s victory because when Reagan won the Cold War, he proved them wrong on everything they had done and said throughout the Cold War.”

Just as history has verified that Senator Joseph McCarthy may have been a “coarse” fellow, prone to losing his temper (beat up Drew Pearson, press antagonist, after a dinner party in the coat room of a Washington establishment), and an alcoholic who died at a young age from cirrhosis of the liver. A person of virtue, he was not; but he discovered the dark secrets of a political party that today still upholds those political standards that is based upon their history of an American socialist party that still denies it is so to this day.

During a time when Communist spies were discovered, like in the case of the Rosenbergs, and others who had infiltrated the fiber of our national government, exposing the secrets of what really was going on in the 1930s and 1940s, which led to the belief that a welfare state is better than a democratic republic based upon individual freedom instead of the collective, McCarthy’s only sin is that he sought the truth – and when found out, he was publicly ruined. His story is proof that “truth will prevail.” One day you will be reading about more truth that history reveals – William Jefferson Clinton, Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be among those exposed. Maybe the truth will be appreciated about others as well, like John Kerry. The truth about Richard Nixon has been revealed, yet there are those who still believe he was behind the Watergate scandal or had knowledge of it; but the only sin he committed was trying to destroy evidence that the incident occurred once he discovered it and then lying to the American people and Congress. If Richard Nixon had not resigned (honorable on his part), he should have been impeached – not for being a part of Watergate Scandal, but lying and destroying evidence of the fact. Many years later, another president would lie to the American people and Congress, and he was painted as an “unfairly oppressed” president whose private life (even though the infractions he committed was within the Oval Office) was no one’s concern, according to the Clintonista and the DNC members.

The truth can be denied and even hidden for a time, but eventually it surfaces to return with vengeance upon the prevaricators. Joseph Stalin was right - they are “useful idiots.”

Funny how liberal-progressive-sociocrats seem to be looking for conspiracy around every corner and meanwhile ignoring the conspiracy within its own ranks.

Further Reading:

Joseph McCarthy: A Modern Tragedy