Was Joe Mccarthy wrong about the communists?

[billc]

This is from another thread but I was curious what people know about this guy and what actually happened back then...

 

[Big Don]

Of course he wasn't. But, he wasn't nice about it, and that makes him bad.

 

[K-man]

I think, in the main he was right.

http://www.spongobongo.com/em/em9820.htm

His biggest problem was the lack of resolve by others to act on the information they were given which must have been very frustrating for McCarthy. :asian:

 

[billc]

Thanks Don and K-man. I don't know if you looked at my post on the shooter at the FRC getting different media coverage, but that is where this thread originated. I gathered up some info. on some of the famous incidents of mccarthies antics that have since been shown to have been true or distorted by his enemies. Was he a nice guy, no. Was he an alcoholic, of course. However, he was right about the communists.

 

[WC_lun]

If you mean by "right" that he could use a legitimate threat to stoke fear, and gain power through inciting hate of the "other" then destroying lives and carreers of those "others" creating a threat far greater than the original, then yeah, he was right as rain,

 

[K-man]

Perhaps I should clarify my post. McCarthy had a big problem with honesty. He exaggerated his war service and I am sure that many of the people he accused of communist sympathies may have been innocent.

However, where he was right was that there were extensive Soviet networks throughout the West. He did draw attention to those. But, having done that, he tried to 'grow the business' in as much as he needed to conjure up more and more communist symphathisers. This culminated in his detractors producing the saying "reds under the beds" that characterises his crusade to this day.

 

[Tez3]

Perhaps I should clarify my post. McCarthy had a big problem with honesty. He exaggerated his war service and I am sure that many of the people he accused of communist sympathies may have been innocent.

However, where he was right was that there were extensive Soviet networks throughout the West. He did draw attention to those. But, having done that, he tried to 'grow the business' in as much as he needed to conjure up more and more communist symphathisers. This culminated in his detractors producing the saying "reds under the beds" that characterises his crusade to this day.

To be fair though there were also extensive 'Western' networks throughout the Soviet Union and it's satellites. It is and was the Great Game after all. America even had extensive networks throughout the West, spying on it's neighbours was considered fine. Australia had it's own problems with the CIA where the Austrialian security services were spying on it's own politicians etc for the CIA ( Mr. Justice Hope's Royal Commision) with if it's to be believed America wanting to overthrough the Australian government of the time. That caused quite a ripple through the security services here as I remember.

 

[elder999]

This is from another thread but I was curious what people know about this guy and what actually happened back then...

In that other thread I specifically stated, and will state again:

No, Joe McCarthy wasn't wrong about "the Communists." There were Communist agents and symptathizers at various levels of society and government. Some ideological spies-scientists who worked in our nuclear weapons programs for decades, all the while giving information to the Russians-did not come to light until as late as the 80's or 90's.

No, Joe McCarthy wasn't wrong about the Communists-he was just wrong: wrong in his personal conduct, wrong in how he conducted the hearings, wrong in the travesty he made of justice. Several notable times, he was completely wrong about those he accused. Wrong about the atmosphere of fear he fomented. Wrong about completely ignoring the rules of evidence. Wrong in using a legitimate congressional investigation to increase his own personal power through falsehoods....just as he had on the campaign trail. It's well substantiated that he lied about his war record, stating he had enlisted in the Marines as a buck-private, when, in fact, as an attorney, he'd automatically been commissioned a snd lieutenant after completing basic training. He claimed 32 missions as a "tail gunner," in order to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, when in fact he'd actually flown only 16 "milk runs" as a tail-gunner observer-he was an intelligence officer for his Marine bomber wing.

He's probably the only U.S. serviceman to claim a Purple Heart for injuries incurred during a shellback ceremony. :lfao:

 

[billc]

From the other thread...


http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-.../1439582/posts

Daniel J. Flynn
For generations of American students, the name Joe McCarthy and not Joe Stalin has been synonymous with evil. A practitioner of “black arts,” a “demon,” “ogreish,” and a “seditionist” are a few of the descriptions of him handed down to us from his first major biographer. The passage of time hasn’t tempered these hysterical reactions.
The late senator, the story goes, created a climate of fear in the early 1950s by conducting a witchhunt that called liberals “Communists” and Communists “spies.” We now know better. The witches were real. Today, even many of McCarthy’s most extreme and ridiculed statements—alleging “a conspiracy on a scale so immense” or lambasting “twenty years of treason” in Democratic administrations—seem, if anything, to understate the pervasiveness of Communist infiltration of the U.S. government and the enormity of its damage.
Documents from the Soviet Union’s archives, USSR spy messages deciphered by the U.S. government’s Venona program, and declassified FBI files and wiretaps all prove that hundreds of U.S. officials were agents of an international Communist conspiracy. If these previously inaccessible documents shed light on only a few of McCarthy’s specific charges, they certainly vindicate his general charge that security in the U.S. government was lax and that large numbers of Communists penetrated positions of great importance...


More so than any other witness, Annie Lee Moss purportedly exposed the cruelty and recklessness of Joseph McCarthy. Moss, who somehow jumped from an Army cafeteria worker to a clerk in the Pentagon code room, was labeled by McCarthy to be a loyalty risk. A middle-aged African American woman who walked to give her testimony with an elderly gait, Moss quickly gained the sympathy of Democrats on McCarthy’s committee. When asked about her knowledge of Karl Marx, Moss asked, “Who’s that?” The copies of The Daily Worker that arrived at her house were sent to the wrong address, she maintained. There were three Annie Lee Mosses in Washington, DC, her defenders intoned, so perhaps McCarthy had gotten the wrong woman...

McCarthy-haters seized on the Moss case as a club with which to beat anti-Communists. Edward R. Murrow devoted his weekly “See It Now” program to Mrs. Moss’s plight, while Missouri Senator Stu Symington told the witness that if she lost her job with the Army she could always come work for him. Just a year after McCarthy’s death it was revealed that he had indeed got the right woman. There was only one Annie Lee Moss in Washington, DC and it was the same Annie Lee Moss whose name and address appeared on the rolls of the local Communist Party. A former FBI agent even attested to seeing her actual Communist Party membership card from years earlier. If one U.S. Senator should be destroyed for allegedly making false accusations of Communism, what should the penalty be for another who announces to the world his willingness to give a Communist a job in his office? ...


After McCarthy first made his charges public in February of 1950, Senate Democrats demanded that he stop hiding behind closed-door sessions and name names. Once McCarthy did what they asked, these very same Senate Democrats pounced on him for making charges without giving the accused the opportunity to defend themselves.
McCarthy’s enemies—supposed champions of civil liberties—tapped his phone, intercepted his incoming personal mail, placed a paid spy in his office, and illegally released his tax returns to the press (resulting in a large refund!). Herman recounts the amusing story of Paul Hughes, one that has been curiously forgotten by most McCarthy biographers. Hughes, a confidence man, convinced members of the Democratic National Committee, famous labor lawyer Joseph Rauh, and the Washington Post that he was a spy in McCarthy’s office and that he had evidence of major lawbreaking by the Senator. Rauh and a DNC leader paid more than $10,000 for the information, and the Post prepared a twelve-part series on the allegations, which included a bizarre tale about McCarthy stockpiling weapons in the basement of the Capitol, with an obvious implication of a coup. After nine-months of feeding absurd stories about McCarthy to liberals hungry for anything that would defame their enemy, Hughes was revealed as a fraud. The massive Post series was killed at the last minute.

[/QUOTE]

 

[billc]

From another article on the topic...


http://www.humanevents.com/2003/05/2...a-on-mccarthy/

The more we learn about the executive hearings on subversion held 50 years ago by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R.-Wis.), unveiled this month for public viewing, the more bizarre the tale becomes.
Though mostly covering the same terrain as did public probes run by McCarthy in ’53 and ’54, these 4,000-plus pages of closed-door sessions contain a lot of added information and should be a great resource for scholars. Assuming, that is, that anyone actually bothers to read them-rather than relying on the gloss supplied by Senate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited them for publication.
Ritchie penned an introduction to the hearings, plus editorial notes along the way, that variously slam McCarthy and/or stack the deck against him. In addition, he has been remarkably free with negative statements on McCarthy in dealing with the media, who have with few exceptions taken these as gospel. However, when the data are examined, the gap between Ritchie’s comments and demonstrable facts of record is astounding. Following are a few examples.



The hearing containing these exchanges and related bits of by-play was shown on TV and thereafter re-broadcast in part by Edward R. Murrow on his CBS program, "See It Now." The thrust of this reportage was that Mrs. Moss was a pitiful, dazed and harried victim smeared by the nefarious McCarthy. Such also is the standard version of the matter found in countless histories of the era.
Unfortunately for the standard version, and for Mrs. Moss, she gave herself away in testifying-volunteering one of the addresses where she had lived as 72 R St., S.W., in the District of Columbia. This went to the question of whether she was the individual named by Markward, who had seen the Communist Party records but not Mrs. Moss in person. The question would be resolved four years later when the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) obtained the records of the D.C. party-and there found an Annie Lee Moss, of 72 R St. S.W., listed as a party member in the middle ’40s.
Proof Positive on Moss
These records made the matter quite open and shut, rendering moot attempts to discredit Mrs. Markward, argue that there were three different Annie Lee Mosses in the phonebook, and other such rhetorical smokescreens. Whether Mrs. Moss was as befuddled as she appeared, or had been recruited into the party without knowing what she was doing, are debatable issues. What isn’t debatable is that this particular Annie Lee Moss, and no other, had been listed in official Communist records as a party member. The Markward testimony to McCarthy was 100% on target.
Senate historian Ritchie’s take on all of this is of interest, as he is the authority everyone else is quoting. In a fairly lengthy discussion of the case, he throws in a 24-word reference to the findings of the SACB, but so handled as to becloud them. He says the board confirmed Markward’s identification of Moss, but immediately adds that "the board conducted no further investigation of Moss" and that thereafter it had said "Markward’s testimony should be assayed with caution." These comments can only suggest to readers that there is some serious doubt about the Moss case-the more so as Ritchie follows up with an extended eulogy to Moss offered by a liberal writer, attesting to her blameless nature.
These comments, however, are thoroughly misleading. For one thing, the point of this particular SACB inquiry wasn’t to investigate Moss, but to gauge the credibility of Markward. There was no intent or reason for the SACB to investigate Moss beyond the acquisition of the Communist Party records, so Ritchie’s gratuitous comment about "no further investigation" is a red herring. No such further investigation of Moss had been in prospect.



However, numerous other comments by Ritchie are equally unhelpful.
For example, Ritchie suggests that McCarthy haled witnesses indiscriminately before his committee for the flimsiest of reasons, including people who had relatives who were Communists, had belonged to certain unions, and so forth. One McCarthy failing alleged by Ritchie, echoing the Moss dispute, was that he called up people "out of mistaken identity," a charge reiterated by the historian as subpoenaing someone who "simply had the same name as a Communist." As it happens, there is one conspicuous case in the record that fits this description, and it is most instructive.
This involved two people connected to activities at Fort Monmouth, a sensitive U.S. Army installation being investigated by McCarthy, both named Louis Kaplan. One of them had been identified as a Communist (and took the 5th Amendment when asked about it), while the other emphatically denied any such affiliation. As the second Louis Kaplan complained, he had been dogged constantly by the mix-up, and had all kinds of trouble with security types dating back to the early ’40s.
This unfortunate confusion was in no way the work of the McCarthy probe, as it had existed for many years before the investigation ever started. Moreover, rather than compounding the error, the committee sought to correct it. The exchanges on this between McCarthy staffers G. David Schine and Roy Cohn and the second Kaplan read in part as follows:

SCHINE: "Mr. Kaplan, of course our committee is interested in obtaining information on government departments and agencies’ efficiency; that means efficiency in both directions. Therefore, we would be just as much concerned with the firing of a capable person unjustly as we would be interested in the retention of one who was a security risk."

KAPLAN: "If you want to build some morale, check my case rapidly. I think it will help considerably."

SCHINE: "You have our assurance that we will get Mr. Adams, counselor to the department of Army, to check on this matter and it is going to be resolved very quickly."

KAPLAN: [some minutes later] "Mr. Cohn, I feel a whole lot better right now. . . ."

Thus there was indeed a mistaken identity in this case, but instead of creating the problem the McCarthy committee set out to fix it. Of course, to know the facts about the matter, one actually has to read the hearings, rather than relying on Ritchie’s comments.

The most charitable explanation of all this is that the Senate historian indeed hasn’t read the primary sources, but instead seems to have lifted his discussion of the matter primarily from Thomas Reeves, author of a widely cited book about McCarthy. As Reeves’ convoluted wrap-up on Moss is itself misleading, so must be any treatment premised on it.
I have dwelt on this episode, perhaps unduly, because it was the only one I got to discuss with Ritchie before he cut me off, and also because it is one of the more famous of McCarthy’s cases. Given the prominence of the matter in the mythology about Joe McCarthy, it is important that the facts about it be set forth clearly in the record. However, numerous other comments by Ritchie are equally unhelpful.
For example, Ritchie suggests that McCarthy haled witnesses indiscriminately before his committee for the flimsiest of reasons, including people who had relatives who were Communists, had belonged to certain unions, and so forth. One McCarthy failing alleged by Ritchie, echoing the Moss dispute, was that he called up people "out of mistaken identity," a charge reiterated by the historian as subpoenaing someone who "simply had the same name as a Communist." As it happens, there is one conspicuous case in the record that fits this description, and it is most instructive

.

And a different view of the Army-Mccarthy hearings...

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/vernon/071119

And it continues here...

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/vernon/071126

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph
Raymond McCarthy, spent the better part of a year (1953-1954) investigating
efforts by Communists to infiltrate the ranks of the U.S. Army. As we mentioned
in our last installment, it all began when the senator was tipped that the
Rosenberg spy ring remained at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey, after the Rosenbergs
themselves were executed for their leading role. Herewith, a classic tale of how
the CYA culture in Washington works:

Case No. 1 — Major General
Kirke Lawton — the commanding officer of the post at Ft. Monmouth — tried to
fix the security problems he found there. He testified before McCarthy's
committee that his efforts met with resistance and/or indifference "at higher
levels," according to M. Stanton's brilliantly documented book Blacklisted by
History.

In the senator's executive closed-door hearings — released a
half century later in 2003 — General Lawton told the committee that he had made
a chart of security risks that he had sent up through channels to Washington.
However, the general added that on the advice of John Adams — legal counsel to
the Army Secretary who was present at the hearing — he was forbidden by a rule
to disclose the number of security cases he had recommended for removal vs.
those who actually were in fact removed.

"I would love to tell you," Gen.
Lawton added, "but I honestly feel that it is [a violation of the
rules]."

Senator McCarthy said he understood Lawton's position, but that
"t would be a good thing if the American people could learn that we have
someone someplace who is kicking the Communists out."

How did the Army deal with General Lawton...

Relieving General Lawton of his command would surely have given McCarthy a
reason to raise the proverbial roof. But Washington has its ways of dealing with
whistle-blowers without leaving fingerprints on the dirty deed.

So,
here's the plan: Tell the General to stop cooperating with McCarthy, put him on
"medical disability," and then tell the world that General Lawton is
still "in charge" at Monmouth. Visitors to his hospital room will say he seems
to be in good health. But they won't have our megaphone.

That script
played itself out.

McCarthy was held at bay when Pentagon forces told his
staff that if the general did appear before the committee again, there would be
more punishment — like losing the benefits he was to receive as a long-serving
member of the Army.

Once the heat was off, the Eisenhower administration
finished the job. General Lawton was relieved of his command and the following
year retired from active duty. His career was finished.

And more on the Army...

Case No. 2 — General Ralph Zwicker, perhaps profiting from General
Lawton's experience, took a different route when push came to
shove.

But first, some background

McCarthy's original tip
on the doings at Ft. Monmouth included the suggestion that Camp Kilmer, also
located in New Jersey, might be worthy of "some digging," to quote Stan Evans in
Blacklisted by History.

Following up on that and other tips, a
McCarthy committee staffer, George Anastos, contacted the Kilmer commander,
General Zwicker, who confirmed that a dentist — Dr. Irving Peress — was among
the several suspects stationed there, and was scheduled to receive an honorable
discharge.

Let me digress: At the time of the ensuing uproar of the
Peress case, one of McCarthy's critic said to me, "Look at all this fighting in
Washington and what does he [McCarthy] come up with? A pink dentist."

But
as Evans points out, a dentist's office could be (and in fact had already been
in previous spy cases) "a very good cover for clandestine operations, as all
sorts of people might come and go there without attracting much
attention."

Secondly, the issue was lax security procedures, not about
Peress per se. Last I checked, subversives supposedly were not eligible for U.S.
military service.

Third, Peress was more than a "pink dentist." He took
the equivalent of the Fifth Amendment when asked about Communist Party
membership. Before McCarthy's committee, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment when
asked if he'd attempted to recruit any military personnel at Kilmer into the
Communist Party, whether there had been Communist Party meetings in his home
attended by one or more military personnel, whether he himself happened to be a
member of the Communist cell at Camp Kilmer, and if he had organized a cell at
the military base.

Adams: "To hell with McCarthy"

The hearing

Unlike General Lawton, the "team-playing" General
Zwicker folded like a cheap umbrella.

The next day at the hearing,
McCarthy was not in his best form. His wife had been in a car accident the day
before, and he had spent hours with her at the hospital until the wee hours and
again on the day of Zwicker's scheduled appearance. When he arrived for the
hearing looking frazzled, his staffers wanted to postpone the session. But the
senator insisted on going through with it. That turned out not to be to his
advantage.

When Zwicker took the witness chair, he hemmed and hawed as if
he had become a totally different person. He verbally fenced with McCarthy,
refusing to answer many questions, claimed he didn't know about Peress's Red
connections, and even said he didn't know about the well-publicized fact that
Peress had taken the Fifth Amendment.

The cat-and-mouse game went on
until finally McCarthy asked him if a hypothetical general who signed the order
to grant a security risk an honorable discharge should be kept in the military.
Zwicker responded, "I do not think he should be removed from the
military."

Whereupon, McCarthy finally "lost it," and fired a volley at
the general that would haunt the senator in his upcoming battle to fend off
attacks from his determined enemies. Said he, "Then, general, you should be
removed from command," adding that any general willing "to protect another
general who protected Communists is not fit to wear that uniform,
General."

McCarthy also found evidence of sensitive information at Monmouth
ending up in Soviet hands. The Army told him to forget about it — that a Soviet
defector who made that claim had since recanted. McCarthy sent his investigator
James Juliana — a former FBI agent — to East Germany, where he tracked down the
defector who stood by his story and had not recanted.

The late Senator
Barry Goldwater revealed in his 1979 memoirs that his Democrat colleague Sen.
Carl Hayden had told him that when the Democrats regained control of the Senate
in 1955, they quietly moved to transfer highly sensitive work that had been
going on at Ft. Monmouth to a facility in Arizona. The reason the move was made
without publicity, Hayden explained, was that the Democrats did not want to
admit that McCarthy was right in his charge that Monmouth was indeed
"penetrated."

 

[billc]

And behind the scenes of one of the big moments of the Army-Mccarthy hearings...

http://tmmason.hubpages.com/hub/Arm...uth-The-Whole-truth-And-Nothing-But-the-Truth

The big moment...

"Until this moment. Senator, I think I never fully grasped your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to Harvard Law School and came with my firm and is starting what looks like a brilliant career with us... Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad . .. I fear that he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.

And then the rest of the story...

And subsequently:
"Jim [Juliana], will you get the news story to the effect that this man belonged to this Communist front organization?"
This drew from Welch a much-celebrated answer, featured in all the usual write-ups and replayed innumerable times in video treatments of the hearings. It was the distilled essence of Joe Welch, worth studying in detail to get context and flavor. Along with certain other statements on Fred Fisher, Welch assailed McCarthy as follows:
"Until this moment. Senator, I think I never fully grasped your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to Harvard Law School and came with my firm and is starting what looks like a brilliant career with us... Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad . .. I fear that he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me."
When McCarthy then attempted to give some background on the National Lawyers Guild, plus a strong tu quoque about the harm done to the reputations of Frank Carr and other young McCarthy staffers by the charges Welch had signed his name to, the Army counsel again lamented the injury to Fisher:
Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
And, finally:
Welch: Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further. You have been within six feet of me You have brought it out. If there is a God in Heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it with you further.
(Oh the indecency of pointing out the Commie lovers in our Govt., Also it should be pointed out that Welch himself outed Fred Fischer and his connection to the Commie lovin front group, the Lawyers guild, just weeks before this in an article in the New York Times, on April 16, 1954. A point that has convienently forgotten by the Leftists in this country and the Mass Media.)
Subsequently, we are told, Welch broke into tears and the audience in the Senate chamber responded with sustained applause. Thus the incident most remembered from the hearings, and generally viewed as the moral Waterloo of Joe McCarthy. The reckless evildoer had exposed young Fred Fisher and his former membership in the National Lawyers Guild, thus scarring the innocent lad forever, and the good, decent Welch had protested this shameful outing of a youthful indiscretion.


All of which seems very moving, and is invariably so treated. It looks a little different, however, when we note that, well before this dramatic moment, Fred Fisher had already been outed, in conclusive fashion, as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild—by none other than Joe Welch. This had occurred in April, some six weeks before the McCarthy-Welch exchange, when Welch took it upon himself to confirm before the world that Fisher had indeed been a member of the Guild, and for this reason had been sent back to Boston. As the New York Times reported, in a story about the formal filing of Army allegations against Cohn-McCarthy:
The Army charges were signed by its new special counsel, Joseph N. Welch. Mr. Welch today [April 15] confirmed news reports that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his own Boston law office because of admitted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell, Jr. the Attorney General, as a Communist front organization. Mr. Welch said he had brought in another lawyer, John Kimball, Jr., from his Boston office to take Mr. Fisher's place.

 

[K-man]

To be fair though there were also extensive 'Western' networks throughout the Soviet Union and it's satellites. It is and was the Great Game after all. America even had extensive networks throughout the West, spying on it's neighbours was considered fine. Australia had it's own problems with the CIA where the Austrialian security services were spying on it's own politicians etc for the CIA ( Mr. Justice Hope's Royal Commision) with if it's to be believed America wanting to overthrough the Australian government of the time. That caused quite a ripple through the security services here as I remember.

Over the years the CIA has arguably been involved in more unsavory interference in other countries' affairs than any other clandestine organisation in the world. What they have done over the years to friend and foe alike is the principal reason for the universal dislike and/or mistrust of the US.

It is playing out again at present with Wikileaks and Julian Assange, although this time I think it is the FBI. Persecution of whistle blowers seems to be par for the course with US administrations over the years. Who could ever forget the efforts of 'Tricky Dicky' and Watergate?

As to overthrowing the Australian Government in 1974-5. The Australian people did that. The US was probably justified in feeling concerned at the antics of the Labor government of Whitlam. He swept into power in 1972 with massive support but by the end of 1974 his government was on the nose. For most of us, the dumping of him by the Governor General couldn't have come sooner and that decision, although contravercial to this day, was vindicated by the Australian electorate.