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Mon 5 May, 2003 10:15 am
Joe McCarthy Secret Hearings to Be Unveiled Monday
It will be interesting to find the similarities between the outrageous actions during the McCarthy era and what we see occurring today with the Justice Department's wounding of Constitutional protections. Both were in reaction to fear. Perhaps Roosebelt was right: "All we have to fear is fear itself." But I would add fear, manipulated by ideologs, partisan or otherwise, for their personal or political agenda is the real danger.
----BumbleBeeBoogie
Joe McCarthy Secret Hearings to Be Unveiled Monday
Sat May 3, 2:32 PM ET
By Joanne Kenen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifty years after Sen. Joe McCarthy conducted
some of the most infamous hearings in Senate history, thousands of pages of his secret probes into alleged Communist subversion will
finally be made public.
Some 5,000 pages of 1953-1954 closed-door hearings from McCarthy's
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will be released
Monday by Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine
Republican. Levin and Collins have both chaired McCarthy's former
committee during the past two years as the documents were prepared for release.
They plan to issue them in the same Senate hearing room where McCarthy himself once held court.
Historians believe the five volumes of transcripts will shed light on what many regard as one of the most shameful episodes in Senate history -- a time when Cold War anxiety about the Soviet Union, Communist China and a perceived domestic Communist threat led to political witch hunts at home.
"This is the first time historians have had access to raw documentation," said Donald Ritchie, the associate Senate historian. "I think it will really stimulate scholarship. They'll have much more substantive information to go on."
Most of the people who took part in the hearings are now dead.
McCarthy himself, a Wisconsin Republican who catapulted himself to fame with his headline-grabbing but ultimately fabricated allegations of vast Communist conspiracies tainting the State Department, the Government Printing Office and parts of the U.S. military, died in 1957. He was censured by the Senate in 1954.
McCarthy's most notorious hearings, the Army-McCarthy hearings, were
held in public and the secret portions of that investigation were released long ago.
The very public nature of the army hearings -- they were among the first televised -- helped bring about McCarthy's downfall as ordinary people saw his reckless and brutal behavior as he impugned the loyalty of the U.S. Army.
But before McCarthy was brought down, he brought down scores of people, historians say. Many had some degree of leftist politics or sympathies in their past, but none were traitors or spies.
The documents being made public now were the hearings he held behind
closed doors. Some of those witnesses were later called before public
panels, where McCarthy asked his trademark question, "Are you now or
have you ever been a Communist?"
But some of the secret witnesses were never called again in public. But they didn't necessarily stay secret either. McCarthy often briefed reporters on the secret proceedings -- at least his version of the proceedings. Many people's careers were destroyed simply because he had summoned them to testify.
No "smoking gun" in Joe McCarthy papers
Secret Joe McCarthy Papers Opened After 50 Years
May 5
By Joanne Kenen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifty years after Sen. Joseph McCarthy's scorched earth investigation into supposed communist infiltration of America's most sensitive institutions, transcripts released on Monday from his secret hearings add more tarnish to his place in history.
The 5,000 pages show no smoking guns, no uncovered spies, no verification of the conspiracy theories on which he built is political career.
"McCarthy had shopworn goods and fishing expeditions," said Don Ritchie, the U.S. Senate's associate historian.
No one McCarthy summoned ever went to jail -- even the few who were convicted of contempt later won on appeal. But his probes ruined lives and destroyed careers and livelihoods, with his unproven hints of communist taint.
He called a few celebrities before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Composer Aaron Copland, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett are among those who appear in these files. But mostly he picked on the obscure and the expendable, file clerks, engineers, mid-level bureaucrats. Many lost their jobs.
McCarthy remains a riveting figure, and while these 1953-54 texts may inspire new scholarship, they will largely "confirm what most people thought about him," said Ritchie, who began poring over reams of onionskin paper transcripts in 1976.
A Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy served in the Senate for only a decade and his headline-grabbing investigations lasted a mere two years. His final years, from his censure in 1954 until his death in 1957, he served in relative oblivion.
The red-baiting phenomenon known as McCarthyism was longer and deeper than Joe McCarthy himself. Anti-communist probes, sometimes camouflage for attacks on organized labor or early civil rights activism, dated back to the 1930s and intensified in the late 1940s with the Cold War.
Some of the most famous hearings, like those involving the "Hollywood Ten" blacklisted screenwriters, unfolded before McCarthy came on the scene.
Ironically, it was McCarthy and his excesses that not only gave a name to the anti-communist drive, it was also McCarthy and his excesses that brought about its end.
"McCarthy in a sense discredited the anti-communist movement. Once he was censured, the whole anti-communist issue dried up," Ritchie said in a recent interview.
Perusing the transcripts, released online (http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/psi.htm) and in the Senate hearing room where McCarthy held forth, shows that McCarthy in private was like McCarthy in public, only worse.
His interrogation of an obscure engineer named Benjamin Zuckerman, who had worked briefly with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, was a good example of his brow-beating style.
Zuckerman testified that on his rare encounters -- four in eight years -- with a former college acquaintance later implicated in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case, the two young men had talked about women, audio equipment, and the best way to cook eggs. McCarthy snarled that he was "either the damnedest liar" or "a case for a mental institution." The documents were released in a joint venture authorized by Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Susan Collins of Maine, then respectively the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, McCarthy's platform. The customary 50 years have passed. Most participants are dead.
Yet McCarthy remains a polarizing figure, and still has his champions on the right. More books have been written on him than any other 20th century senator, except for a handful who ran for or served as president, Ritchie said.
Eventually McCarthy's tactics caught up with him, and the Senate censured him in 1954 after he tried to impugn the loyalty of the U.S. Army.
But not before he had ruined lives, destroying careers and livelihoods, provoking one documented suicide with his unproven hints of communist taint. His "take no prisoners" approach also contributed to a climate of intense political conformity, a distrust of dissent.
Although his witnesses would appear in private, McCarthy often made sure word got out to favored reporters -- his version, with the most negative spin possible, Ritchie said. Some lost their jobs.
Ritchie recalled that shortly before McCarthy aide Roy Cohn died, he dismissed allegations that he had destroyed lives by saying, "Name them."
"Here they are, these are the names," said Ritchie.
in another 50 yrs we can read Ashcroft's files.
Yeah. The Bush team has already toughened the rules about access to presidential documents. I seem to recall this was one of their first moves. It's almost like, I don't know, they somehow knew there would be things we shouldn't find out about...
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