You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?-Sen. Joseph Welch, to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, during the end of the McCarthy hearings, (which you will doubtless defend, for the edification of us all.
but now I guess I'll have to recap parts of my smash best-seller Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
McCarthy said he had the names of 57 communists or communist sympathizers working in the State Department who needed to be investigated. Separately, he cited a 1946 letter from former Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congress stating that there were 205 known security risks still working there.
His point, misconstrued by Democrats at the time and since, was not to accuse specific individuals, but rather to indict the Democrats for turning a blind eye to ridiculous security risks in important government jobs, even after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. (Sorry, Nation magazine, they're still guilty.)
McCarthy gave his Wheeling, W.Va., speech two weeks after Secretary of State Dean Acheson had defended celebrity communist spy Hiss on Jan. 25, 1950 -- the day of Hiss' criminal conviction for denying under oath that he was a Soviet spy.
Even after Whittaker Chambers had produced documents proving that Hiss was working for the Soviet Union while advising President Roosevelt, the Democrats were still defending a traitor. Chambers said of Acheson's disgusting defense of Hiss, "You will look in vain in history for anything comparable to it."
As Democrats always do when they are caught red-handed harming the country, they obsessed on some small, technical error of a Republican.
They claimed that McCarthy had said in his Wheeling speech that he had the names of 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party -- not 57. (Having only 57 communists in the State Department was apparently considered a great success for a Democratic administration.)
In fact, McCarthy had mentioned the 205 number only in citing Byrne's letter to Congress a few years earlier saying that was the number of known security risks still employed at the State Department.
As Soviet spies were honeycombed throughout the government, influencing U.S. policy to the benefit of the Soviet Union, the Democratic-controlled Senate convened panels to determine exactly what Joe McCarthy had said to a meeting of Republican women in West Virginia. To wit: Had he said he had the names of 57 specific security risks at the State Department, or 205?
After dedicating months of investigation to this crucial question -- with Senate investigators actually flying to West Virginia to interview everyone who attended the speech -- it turned out McCarthy was right.
The Senate committee that was determined to censure McCarthy ended up having to drop the matter of McCarthy's Wheeling speech entirely. A fact-filled memo detailing the committee's findings concluded that McCarthy had said he had the names of 57 security risks, not 205.
The truth about McCarthy's Wheeling speech, including the committee's memo finding that McCarthy was telling the truth, and a newspaper article reprinting the speech before it became a object of obsession by Democrats, is given in M. Stanton Evans' monumental book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies.
Moreover, contrary to the nonsense about McCarthy not being able to name the 57 specific individuals, the very day he got back to Washington, he gave a six-hour speech on the Senate floor, providing details about the problematic State Department employees, chapter and verse. He did not "name names" because that was not his point.
As McCarthy said, some State Department employees with communist associations might be innocent. His point was: The Democrats were still refusing to take Soviet espionage seriously by investigating these preposterous risks on the government payroll.
Far from recklessly smearing people, McCarthy described each employee as a "case" and cited such evidence as their being identified as Soviet spies in FBI reports, by fellow spies and by the State Department itself. He reported their connections to known agents, attendance at "Youth International" meetings in Russia and repeated contacts with known Soviet espionage groups.
These were not baseless charges. And as we now know, they were absolutely true.
Sensible people knew it at the time, but the disgorging of Soviet archives as well as Soviet cables decrypted by the top-secret Venona project proved beyond a doubt that McCarthy was right about the individuals he named. None of them should have been allowed anywhere near a government office.
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Drawing on primary sources—including never-before-published government records and FBI files, as well as recent research gleaned from Soviet archives and intercepted transmissions between Moscow spymasters and their agents in the United States—Evans presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration. All of this was precisely as Joe McCarthy contended.
Blacklisted by History shows, for instance, that the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, had been identified by Communist leaders as a party member; that high-level U.S. officials were warned that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy almost a decade before the Hiss case became a public scandal; that a cabal of White House, Justice Department, and State Department officials lied about and covered up the Amerasia spy case; and that the State Department had been heavily penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents before McCarthy came on the scene.
Evans also shows that practically everything we’ve been told about McCarthy is false, including conventional treatment of the famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched the McCarthy era (“I have here in my hand . . .”, the Senate hearings that casually dismissed his charges, the matter of leading McCarthy suspect Owen Lattimore, the Annie Lee Moss case, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and much more.
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The history of Mccarthy isn't as simple as some on these posts would make it...and really, the nazi thing again...do you guys always have to go there, especially when the nazis were socialists and lefties and nothing like American conservatives...
About the "205" communists
The WSJ piece retreads the tired old myth that McCarthy — in his Wheeling, W. Va., speech in February of 1950 — charged there were 205 communists and spies in the State Department.
That misquote has been discredited so many times — from the day after the speech until this very day — that it recalls the Goebbels theory that a lie, if repeated often enough, becomes the "truth." (That so many wildly inaccurate assertions would appear in just this one article is breathtaking.)
What really happened
On the day of McCarthy's Wheeling speech, a local reporter met the senator at the airport. He asked for and got an advance copy. But McCarthy warned Frank Desmond of the Wheeling-Intelligencer that what the reporter was getting was a rough draft and that extensive edits would be made before delivery.
Two witnesses have sworn McCarthy did give Desmond that warning. Later, Senate investigators — sent twice to Wheeling by Democrat committees — verified McCarthy's version. The Wisconsin senator recalled that what he had actually said at Wheeling was that there were 57 persons in the State Department "who were either card-carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party."
That is the crucial half of the story that the WSJ writer ignores. The half that he does include is that before the Wheeling speech, legendary ChicagoTribune reporter Willard Edwards had given McCarthy the 205 figure — on the basis of "more or less a rumor." Edwards was concerned because by then the AP had picked up the misreported Desmond story and sent it to news outlets all over the nation.
That half of the story, if accurate, in no way contradicts the other half, clearly indicating that Edwards' pre-speech conversation with McCarthy explains how the 205 figure made its way into the rough draft in the first place (before being dropped prior to his actual delivery). To mention the Edwards half without also recounting the first half qualifies as the kind of half-truth often equated with falsehood.
Closed-door vs. open hearings
Kessler points out that McCarthy called many more people to testify behind closed doors than were ultimately ordered to testify in public.
It is no deep, dark secret that among the very reasons for holding hearings in executive session before bringing witnesses before the public is to make certain no one is unfairly tarnished; also to ensure that people who have little or no useful relevant information to impart, or who could testify only as to classified or highly secret security matters, do not end up becoming part of the public record. This is generally accepted procedure on Capitol Hill. It was not unique to McCarthy.
On this matter, the WSJ writer cites as an authority Senate Associate Historian Donald Ritchie. Kessler quotes Richie as saying McCarthy interviewed about 500 people in closed session and called about 300 people in public hearings.
