A Treasury of Great American Scandals (26 page)

Whenever McCarthy uttered Acheson's name, William White of the
New York Times
noted, he made it sound like an expletive. And in attacking him, he went right for the throat: “When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed Communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.” Acheson received so much threatening mail after McCarthy's assaults that guards had to be posted at his home around the clock. The senator, always a gutter brawler, was unrepentant. Nevertheless, he was actually surprised, and even a little hurt, when he encountered Acheson one day in an elevator and the much maligned secretary of state pointedly refused to acknowledge his presence.

For his own part, President Truman believed McCarthy was all bluster, “a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.” But the once insignificant senator began to get plenty of attention after Senate Democrats called for a complete investigation of his charges concerning hidden Communists within the State Department. The Democrats had hoped the special hearings would expose McCarthy as a fraud, but instead the press was dutifully reporting almost everything he said, and the public was lapping it up. McCarthy's popularity was beginning to soar as Truman's plummeted.

“You are not fooling me,” McCarthy at one point challenged the committee chaired by Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat from Maryland. “This committee [is] not seeking to get the names of bad security risks, but . . . to find out the names of my informants so they can be kicked out of the State Department tomorrow.” The senator was setting himself up as a national savior, fighting a growing evil all alone. “In his own mind, it was Joe McCarthy against the world,” writes historian Arthur Herman in his reexamination of the senator's legacy, “playing a sudden-death, high-stakes game against a Communist conspiracy that, in more expansive moments, seemed to include the entire Democratic administration and Washington establishment.” And he seemed to be winning—despite the fact that he had yet to prove a single instance of subversion within the government. When President Truman was asked at a press conference in March 1950 whether he expected McCarthy to find any Communists in the State Department, he replied, “I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.”

In July 1950, the Tydings Committee issued an interim report that stated McCarthy had imposed a “fraud and a hoax” on the Senate with his unfounded allegations. “Starting with nothing,” the report said, “Senator McCarthy plunged headlong forward, desperately seeking to develop some information which, colored with distortion and fanned by a flame of bias, would forestall the day of reckoning.” Uncowed as usual, McCarthy called the report “a green light for the Reds.” Stepping up his fight, he went after a genuine American hero.

General George C. Marshall had served as chief of staff of the U.S. Army during World War II, building perhaps the greatest fighting force in history. Under his command, Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur led American forces to victory in Europe and the Pacific. After the war, while serving as Truman's third secretary of state (before Acheson), he pushed for the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, that helped check the spread of Communism in Western Europe and later earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. At the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he became secretary of defense. Historian David McCullough writes that Marshall was often compared to George Washington, “a figure of such flawless rectitude and self-command he both inspired awe and made description difficult.” Churchill called him “the noblest Roman.” Joe McCarthy called him a traitor: “A man steeped in falsehood . . . who has recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience . . . [part of] a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man . . . [one in whose activities can be seen] a pattern which finds his decision maintained with great stubbornness and skill, always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin.”

McCarthy's attack on Marshall showed that no one was safe from his assaults. By late 1952, however, the Truman administration was coming to a close, and someone else was going to have to suffer the senator's outrageous slings and arrows. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president, was a natural target. McCarthy at one point called him “Alger . . . I mean Adlai,” and declared that he would “continue the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation.” But the Republican candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, once the supreme Allied commander in World War II, also seemed intimidated by McCarthy's power.

This was made sadly apparent when Eisenhower was preparing to campaign in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin. There had been much speculation that Ike was going to repudiate McCarthy's attacks on his old boss, George Marshall. “Just you wait till we get to Milwaukee, and you will find out what the general thinks of Marshall,” Eisenhower's campaign manager told reporters, hinting that McCarthy was in for a stinging rebuke. Indeed a paragraph praising Marshall “as a man and as a soldier, . . . dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America” had been drafted as part of Eisenhower's planned speech. It was never delivered. Instead, Ike sounded a lot like Joe McCarthy in the speech he did give, declaring that the Communist penetration of the government “meant—in its most ugly triumph—treason itself.” McCarthy was of course delighted with the speech, and vigorously shook Eisenhower's hand at its conclusion. Others were appalled. “Yesterday could not have been a happy day for General Eisenhower,” the
New York Times
editorialized, “nor was it a happy day for many supporters.”

Though Eisenhower came to loathe McCarthy and his methods, even if he did agree with him in principle, he was reluctant to tangle with him after he became president—at least not directly. The senator had become far too powerful, and was shielded by the support of millions of Americans. “I just won't get into a pissing contest with that skunk,” the president told friends. Eisenhower believed the best way to fight this enemy was to ignore him. “This he cannot stand,” Ike wrote in his diary. Given enough time, he believed, McCarthy would destroy himself. The president would not have to wait much longer to prove this point.

On the surface, in 1953, McCarthy seemed invincible. He chaired the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and made it his personal fiefdom. With a staff that included chief counsel Roy Cohn, soon to be an instrument of his downfall, and assistant counsel Robert Kennedy, whose father was an avid supporter of the senator and got his son the job, McCarthy went on a Red-hunting rampage. There were investigations of the State Department (an old favorite), the Voice of America, the Government Printing Office, and the United Nations, among others. He even planned to target the CIA, “a breathtaking choice,” writes Arthur Herman. “The notion of Joe McCarthy pawing through the intelligence agency's files and personnel records made not just administration officials but many senators blanch.”

The White House ordered McCarthy to back off, which McCarthy reluctantly did. But he still stood in the way of the Eisenhower administration on several key issues, including the nomination of Charles Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow. The president was furious. “McCarthy has the bug to run for the presidency in 1956,” he fumed to his staff, adding with an angry slap to his knee, “The only reason I would consider running again would be to run against him.” But any hopes Joe McCarthy may have harbored for the White House, or even another term in the Senate, were severely diminished when he and his staff took on the U.S. Army. It was this confrontation that ultimately destroyed him.

The assault on the army was classic McCarthy. At one point, for instance, he lashed out at General Ralph Zwickler, a war hero and field commander during the Battle of the Bulge. McCarthy called him a protector of Communists “unfit to wear [his] uniform.” What the senator failed to realize, though, was that the army was preparing a counterattack of its own, focusing on the activities of chief counsel Roy Cohn. It seems Cohn had a crush of sorts on another McCarthy staff member, David Schine, and was upset when Schine got drafted into the army. Cohn was determined to get his pal special treatment and went all the way to the secretary of the Army to see that he did. Not one to have his will thwarted, Cohn became enraged when he found out Schine's weekend passes were to start on Saturday rather than Friday night as he had requested. In a snit, he called the army's chief lawyer, John Adams.

“The army has double-crossed me for the last time,” Cohn screamed. “The army is going to find out what it means to go over my head.”

“Is this a threat?” Adams asked.

“It's a promise,” Cohn replied. “I always deliver on my promises. . . . We are not going to stop at this. Joe [McCarthy] will deliver, and I can make Joe do whatever I want.”

It was true. Cohn did have a strange hold on the senator and was now making it clear that McCarthy's investigation of the army was directly related to the army's willingness to bend to Cohn's will. It was just one instance of many the army assembled into a dossier and made public, showing the world how McCarthy and his staff sought to hound the army to further their own ends. Ironically, McCarthy agreed to have his own subcommittee investigate the army's charges, with him and Cohn, as implicated parties, recusing themselves. So sure was the senator of a positive outcome that he agreed to have the hearings televised. It was perhaps the greatest mistake of his life.

Millions tuned in to watch the spectacle. For many, it was the first time they were able to see Joe McCarthy in action. It was not a pretty sight. Day after day viewers watched the senator and his staff bully and harass witnesses while failing to produce any hard evidence to back up increasingly outrageous accusations. McCarthy's credibility crumbled before the eyes of the nation. In one dramatic moment, after McCarthy attacked a young associate of Joseph N. Welch, chief attorney for the army, Welch stood up, faced the senator, and said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”

The cloak of righteousness that had long shielded McCarthy in the eyes of the American public was now shredded. The end was near. “In this long, degrading travesty of the democratic process,” the
Louisville Courier-Journal
noted, “McCarthy has shown himself to be evil and unmatched in malice.” On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to condemn McCarthy for “conduct contrary to Senatorial traditions.” Less than three years later, he was dead of alcohol-induced cirrhosis.

J. Edgar Hoover: What a Drag

 

 

 

The sight of J. Edgar Hoover in an evening gown would be enough in itself to propel the notorious FBI director straight into the American Hall of Shame. But since that horrifying spectacle has yet to be proven, the fact that Hoover sashayed his way over the civil liberties of thousands—for nearly a quarter of the nation's history—will have to suffice.

Red-baiter and blackmailer extraordinaire, the director-for-life made the bureau a model secret police force that infiltrated the lives of suspected enemies ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to Albert Einstein. For J. Edgar Hoover, information meant power—the more lurid, the better—and he wielded what he knew like a spiked club. The abuses of office are legion, but the FBI's relentless campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.—or “that burrhead,” as Hoover preferred to call the civil rights leader—show the director at his most vicious.

The FBI's interest in King started out as routine. Red-hunting had long been the bureau's stock in trade—even before Hoover became its director in 1924—and the civil rights movement was thought to be prime for Communist infiltration. As one of the movement's most prominent leaders, King naturally merited watching. The attention was passive, however, until 1961, when Hoover himself became directly involved. King, heading the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had taken a leading role in the “Freedom Rides” that year, hoping to desegregate interstate bus transportation facilities across the Deep South. Alerted to this, the director wanted more information on this uppity Negro who was making such a fuss. He was disappointed to find that there wasn't much in the FBI files. On a memo sent to him noting that King had never been formally investigated, Hoover wrote, “Why not?” The basilisk's glare had now been focused and would not be diverted until well after King was dead.

Increased FBI surveillance soon revealed that one of King's closest associates, Stanley Levison, had been involved with the Communist Party in the early 1950s. And though it became apparent from further investigations—including wiretaps on Levison—that he had had nothing to do with the party since becoming associated with King, Hoover reacted as if a Soviet invasion was being plotted. King was added to the FBI's enemies list, and government officials were put on Red alert. “This Bureau has recently received additional information showing the influence of Stanley David Levison, a secret member of the Communist Party, upon Martin Luther King Jr.,” Hoover wrote in a memo to Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

When it came to stirring J. Edgar Hoover's eternal animosity, King's alleged Communist connections were nothing compared to his public criticism of the FBI in late 1962. A
New York Times
reporter had asked King if he agreed with a report on the civil rights protests that had taken place the previous summer in Albany, Georgia, in which the FBI was criticized for ignoring patent abuses of blacks by local law enforcement. King said he did agree with the report, particularly as it concerned the FBI. “One of the great problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white Southerners who have been influenced by the mores of the community,” he told the reporter. “To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation. Every time I saw FBI men in Albany, they were with the local police force.” The
Times
story, in which King went on to suggest that non-Southerners be assigned to FBI offices in the Deep South, appeared in many other newspapers across the country. Allergic to criticism of any sort, Hoover was wild.