Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (28 page)

Chambers then fought back. In November 1948 he said that Hiss had not only been a Communist but had committed espionage by turning over confidential government documents to the Soviets in the late 1930s. In one of the most theatrical moments of the controversy Chambers brought reporters to a field on his Maryland farm and showed them microfilmed documents that he had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin. These, he said, were copies of State Department documents that Hiss had turned over to him in 1937 and 1938. The "Pumpkin Papers," as they were called, made for sensational newspaper coverage.

Hiss was now on the defensive. The same grand jury that heard evidence concerning the top Communist leaders weighed Chambers's accusations in December 1948 and decided to press ahead with his case. The statute of limitations had lapsed for charges of espionage, but the jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury: for denying that he had ever given Chambers any government documents, and for claiming that he had never seen Chambers after January 1, 1937. The trial in June 1949 ended in a hung jury, but when he was tried again he was convicted on January 21, 1950. Hiss later served three years of his five-year sentence and spent more than forty years thereafter stoutly asserting his innocence.

Whether Hiss was innocent in fact remained a much-disputed matter years later. The political legacy of the case, however, was clear. The prolonged and often sensational struggle refurbished the facade of HUAC, which grew bolder in its anti-Communist probes. It advanced Nixon, whose instincts about Hiss seemed justified by the results. It established that Chambers and others had indeed been engaged in espionage for the USSR in the 1930s. When Klaus Fuchs was arrested on charges of atomic espionage six days after Hiss's conviction in 1950, it was easy for people to imagine the existence of a vast and subterranean conspiracy that had to be exposed.

The Hiss trials had still wider symbolic value for many conservatives and anti-Communists in the United States.
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To them Hiss's conviction seemed long-overdue validation of all that they had been saying about rich, elitist, well-educated, eastern, Establishmentarian New Dealish government officials. "For eighteen years," HUAC Republican Karl Mundt of South Dakota exploded, the United States "had been run by New Dealers, Fair Dealers, Misdealers and Hiss dealers who have shuttled back and forth between Freedom and Red Fascism like a pendulum on a Kukoo clock."
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W
ITH A STAGE SO WELL SET
in February 1950, it was hardly surprising that one of these angry partisans in Congress should have marched to the center and stolen the scene. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin wasted no time doing so when he spoke to the Republican women in Wheeling on February 9. There he waved around papers that he said documented the existence of widespread subversion in government. His exact words on that occasion are disputed, but he appears to have said, "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."
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These were sensational charges. McCarthy, after all, was a United States senator, and he claimed to have hard evidence. Intrigued, reporters asked for more information. Doubters denounced him and demanded to see the list. McCarthy brushed them off and never produced one. His information, indeed, was at best unreliable, probably based on FBI investigations of State Department employees, most of whom were no longer in the government. In subsequent speeches—he was on a "Lincoln Birthday" tour—McCarthy changed the figure from 205 to fifty-seven. When he spoke on the subject in the Senate on February 20, he rambled for six hours and bragged that he had broken "Truman's iron curtain of secrecy." The numbers changed again—to eighty-one "loyalty risks" in the State Department—but McCarthy remained aggressively confident. "McCarthyism" was on its way.
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People who knew Joe, as he liked to be called, were hardly surprised by the brazenness of his behavior. A lawyer and controversial circuit court judge before the war, McCarthy had served in the marines during World War II. In 1946, still only thirty-seven, he beat Robert La Follette, Jr., the incumbent, in a Republican primary that featured lies about La Follette's campaign finances. McCarthy then swept to victory in the anti-Truman backlash of that year. His campaign relied heavily on lies about his war record as a marine officer in the Pacific. Advertising himself as "Tail Gunner Joe," he falsely maintained that he had flown up to thirty combat missions when in fact he had gone on none. Later he often walked with a limp that he said had been caused by "ten pounds of shrapnel" that had earned him a Purple Heart. In fact he had hurt his foot by falling down the stairs at a party. He had seen very little combat action and had never been wounded. This did not faze him: in the Senate, he used his political influence to get an Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
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McCarthy was in fact a pathological liar throughout his public life.

Colleagues also knew that McCarthy was crude and boorish. Thickset, broad-shouldered, and saturnine, he was often unshaven and rumpled in appearance. He spent more time playing poker and accepting favors from lobbyists than he did on Senate business. A heavy drinker, he regularly carried a bottle of whiskey in the dirty briefcase that he said was full of "documents." He bragged about putting away a fifth of whiskey a day. McCarthy liked above all to be thought of as a man's man. Many of the subversives, he said, were "homos" and "pretty boys." When attractive women appeared before his committees, he leered at them and jokingly told aides to find out their telephone numbers. Being a man's man, he seemed to believe, meant being rough and profane: he thought nothing about using obscenities or belching in public.

McCarthy was no stranger to Red-baiting, having resorted to it himself in 1946. But he was intellectually lazy and had never bothered to learn much about Stalin or the American Communist party. Above all, he was unscrupulous and ambitious. With re-election facing him in 1952, he cast about for an issue that would fortify his otherwise weak record. For a while he seems to have thought crime would be the issue, but Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee preempted that possibility by staging highly publicized hearings on organized crime. Dining with friends in January 1950, McCarthy was advised to go after subversives. "That's it," he said, his face lighting up. "The government is full of Communists. We can hammer away at them."
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He kept up the hammering, rarely relenting for long, for more than four years. He was remarkably inventive and imaginative in doing so. As before he did not worry about lying. Again and again he would stand up, pulling a bunch of documents from his briefcase, and improvise while he went along. As his audience grew, he became more and more animated and skillful at spinning stories. When opponents demanded to see documents, he refused on the ground that they were secret. When caught in an outright lie, he attacked his accuser or moved on to other lines of investigation. Few politicians have been more adept in their use of rhetoric that makes good headlines. Repeatedly he blasted "left-wing bleeding hearts," "egg-sucking phony liberals," and "communists and queers."
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McCarthy did not much care who he attacked. Once he referred to Ralph Flanders, a liberal Republican colleague from Vermont, as "senile—I think they should get a man with a net and take him to a good quiet place." Robert Hendrickson, a Republican from New Jersey, was "a living miracle in that he is without question the only man who has lived so long with neither brains nor guts."
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During McCarthy's four-year tear through American institutions he also assailed the army, the Protestant clergy, and the civil service. He reveled in super-masculine imagery of fighting and bloodshed, bragging that he went "for the groin" and that he would "kick the brains out" of opponents.
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The senator from Wisconsin saved most of his hard knocks, however, for the Democrats. Acheson, a special target, was the "Red Dean," a "pompous diplomat with his striped pants and phony British accent." Marshall, who had "lost" China, was part of a "conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any such previous venture in the history of man." The "Democratic label," he said, "is now the property of men and women . . . who have bent to the whispered pleas from the lips of traitors." The Democratic years were "twenty years of treason." When Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur from his Asian command in 1951, McCarthy said of the President, "The son of a bitch ought to be impeached."
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If there was a core of consistency to McCarthy, it was an emotional one of class and regional resentments. A Roman Catholic and a midwesterner, he seems genuinely to have detested the well-educated, wealthy, and mainly Protestant eastern Establishment. This is why Acheson and other "striped-pants" Anglophiles who dominated the State Department were such inviting targets. McCarthy underscored his feelings at Wheeling: "It is not the less fortunate members of minority groups who have been selling their nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer. . . . This is glaringly true of the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been worst."
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But McCarthy was not an ideologue. He was above all a demagogue seeking attention, re-election, and—maybe in the future—the presidency. A loose cannon, he had no organization to speak of, and he rarely followed up on any of his charges. Challenged to name a true subversive, he announced in March 1950 that he would "stand or fall" by his accusation that Owen Lattimore was the "top Russian agent" in the United States. This was a bizarre and unfounded accusation. Lattimore was a little-known scholar of Asia who had been uncritical in some of his writings about Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. But McCarthy could produce no documentary evidence that the professor had ever been a Communist.
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Thereafter McCarthy made no serious effort to name people who were supposedly ruining the United States, and he never identified a single subversive. It was simpler to scatter his shot around the landscape.

The scattering made him the most controversial public figure in the country by the spring of 1950. Both
Time
and
Newsweek
, while critical of him, put him on their covers. A Gallup poll in May reported that 84 percent of respondents had heard of his charges and that 39 percent thought they were good for the country.
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This was a remarkably high level of public recognition, and it placed the Truman administration on the defensive. Was there a way to counter McCarthy's reckless accusations?

Some people thought so. Given the attention McCarthy was receiving, they said, Truman and others should immediately have recognized the danger and appointed an impartial blue-ribbon investigating committee to weigh his charges.
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But that would probably have required giving such a committee access to sensitive personnel files. To the President, this was unthinkable. Democrats instead tried to refute McCarthy. In February Truman retorted that there was "not a word of truth" to McCarthy's accusations. In late March he said McCarthyites were the "greatest asset the Kremlin had."
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Senate Democrats set up a committee headed by Millard Tydings of Maryland to investigate the charges. Testimony before the Tydings Committee exposed many of McCarthy's lies and exaggerations, which the majority report later concluded were a "fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the Senate of the United States and the American people."
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McCarthy and his allies, however, brushed aside the Tydings Committee by charging that it was a partisan cover-up. Senator William Jenner of Indiana, a fervently anti-Communist Republican, accused Tydings of heading the "most scandalous and brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history." McCarthy branded the committee report as a "green light to the Red fifth column in the United States" and a "sign to the traitorous Communists and fellow travelers in our Government that they need have no fear of exposure."
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Reactions such as these showed why it was so difficult to discredit McCarthy and his allies. So long as the President refused to turn over personnel files, McCarthy could savage whatever committee that tried to refute his allegations.

Others who lament McCarthy's climb to fame have blamed the press. Reporters, they say, should more insistently have demanded that he produce evidence. Some newspeople were indeed appalled by his behavior. But McCarthy generally did well at manipulating the press. Many publishers were deeply conservative and believed in what McCarthy was saying. Moreover, reporters were not editorialists, and they felt obliged to record what a United States senator, who was "news," had to say. Again and again his charges got headlines that proclaimed the rise of a Red menace in the United States.
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