Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (65 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
“Hey, nigger, why don’t you go back to the cotton field, where you belong?”
“They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!”
“We don’t want you here, nigger.”
2
To many Americans in the days and years following the war, Communism was on the march around the world. Roosevelt and his “eastern establishment” liberal coterie had “given away” Eastern Europe, surrendering it to Stalin at Yalta. In one of the first tests of U.S. resolve, the Soviets had tried to close off Berlin, forcing the United States to conduct a massive airlift in 1948 that finally cracked the Russian hold on the city. In China, the Nationalists were crushed by Mao’s Communist forces in 1949. At about the same time, it was revealed that the Soviets had the atomic bomb. The world seemed to be in the grasp of a Communist conspiracy of international domination, and the president had responded with the Truman Doctrine, with the complete support of a bipartisan Congress.
The obsessive fear of Communism in America was nothing new. Americans had been battling the Red Menace for years, and the first wave of Red hysteria had followed World War I (see Chapter 6). But it seemed as if the fears were much more real now, heightened by the terror of the mushroom cloud. Communism was the cutting issue on which people voted. To be “soft” on Communism was political suicide, and ambitious young men, like Representative Richard M. Nixon (1913–94) of California, could see that Communist bashing was the ticket to the future.
Responding to this anti-Red pressure, Truman had set up loyalty boards in 1947 to check on reports of Communist sympathizers in the federal government. Thousands were investigated, but there was no meaningful trace of subversion, even though careers were destroyed as suspicion replaced evidence. These were the first of the anti-Communist “witch hunts” in which the burden of proof was on the accused, who couldn’t face or know his unnamed accusers. Hearsay testimony from unreliable witnesses became Holy Writ.
The fear got front-page headlines in 1949, when Whittaker Chambers (1901–61), a repentant, “reformed” Communist Party member and later a senior editor at
Time
magazine, charged that Alger Hiss was a member of the Communist Party and part of a high-reaching Soviet spy ring. To those who knew Hiss, this was nonsense that took the anti-Soviet paranoia too far. A Roosevelt New Dealer, Hiss (1904–96) was born and bred to the eastern establishment, with impeccable credentials as a progressive and a long, distinguished career in public service, beginning as a law clerk under Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. But to conservatives, Hiss was blemished because he had been with Roosevelt at Yalta and was secretary general of the United Nations organizing conference in 1945–46. Both Yalta and the UN were increasingly viewed as parts of the Communist scheme for weakening America and achieving world domination. In 1947, Hiss was serving as president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foundation devoted to furthering the wealthy steel magnate’s commitment to a worldwide peace process, with the blessing of diplomat John Foster Dulles (later Eisenhower’s secretary of state)—and his brother Allen Dulles (legendary founder of the CIA). With his many such friends, Hiss’s integrity and loyalty were unquestioned at the highest levels of government.
Disheveled, overweight, and a somewhat ill-bred character, Chambers claimed that in the 1930s, Hiss had been a Communist who had given Chambers classified documents to be passed on to Moscow. Pressed by Congressman Richard Nixon in a 1948 hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigating alleged Communist subversion in government, Hiss denied the allegations. Everything in Hiss’s demeanor and bearing seemed to demolish the allegations made by the unseemly Chambers, who was also the subject of a whisper campaign that he was mentally unstable, an alcoholic, and a homosexual. But there were also some damaging revelations that left nagging suspicions. The most sensational of these came to light when Chambers produced microfilm copies of stolen State Department documents that Chambers said Hiss had given him to pass on to the Soviets. Chambers had hidden them inside a hollowed-out pumpkin in his garden. Overnight, these became the Pumpkin Papers.
In Hiss’s undoing was Richard Nixon’s moment. As Sam Tanenhaus wrote in his monumental biography of Chambers, “Nixon was motivated by more than dislike of Hiss. He also saw a political opportunity. No stranger to the Communists in government issue, Nixon had ridden it to an upset victory over a popular incumbent, Jerry Voorhis, in 1946 and since his arrival in Washington had been diligently throwing out lines to its dense network of Red hunters. . . . With brilliant clarity, Nixon grasped that the emerging Chambers-Hiss mystery could yield great political dividends for the man who solved it. And so he pitched himself into the case with methodical intensity few in Washington—or anywhere—could match.”
His reputation damaged by the evidence that Chambers had provided to support his charges, Hiss sued Chambers for libel, and the evidence against this paragon of American progressive liberalism turned out to be strong. In the courtroom, Chambers showed that he knew intimate details of Hiss’s life, and even produced papers showing that Hiss had once given him an old car. In the wake of the failed libel suit, Hiss was indicted for perjury for lying to a congressional committee. While the statute of limitations protected Hiss from espionage charges, a federal grand jury indicted him in 1948. Tried and convicted in January 1950, Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison and served three years before his release in 1954. (His personal fortune gone after his conviction, Hiss was also disbarred and became a printing salesman in New York City. In 1975, at age seventy, he was readmitted to the bar in Massachusetts, and continued to work for vindication until his death in 1996.)
For most of the next half-century, people continued to argue this case with passion. More than twenty books have been written about the case, which, until fairly recently, remained one of the litmus tests of one’s political views: liberals were certain of Hiss’s innocence, conservatives of his guilt. But in the wake of the Cold War coming to an end, new evidence in the case has surfaced, and many uncertainties have been removed.
When selected Moscow archives were opened to researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Hiss side was bolstered when old KGB files were searched and none indicated that Hiss had spied for the Soviets. But there was more damning evidence to follow. First a researcher discovered documents in 1993 that related to Noel Field, another prominent State Department official who had actually defected to the Communists in 1949. According to Field, Hiss had tried to recruit him into the Communist underground. Then in 1995, the highly secret American National Security Agency (NSA), the organization that intercepts and translates messages from around the world, released what are known as the “Venona traffic,” thousands of cables sent from U.S.-based Soviet agents to their home office in Moscow. These cables implicate Hiss as part of a large espionage network centered in the federal government.
Must Read:
Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case
by Allen Weinstein;
Whittaker Chambers
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Why were the Rosenbergs executed for espionage?
The explosive Hiss story captured the headlines at about the same time that Americans learned that Klaus Fuchs, a respected German-born physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb at Columbia University and later at Los Alamos during the war, had been passing America’s atomic secrets to the Russians. Harry Gold, an American associate of Fuchs who was a chemist, was caught at the same time as an American couple, David and Ruth Greenglass. Greenglass, a young American soldier who also worked at Los Alamos, testified that he had passed on crude drawings of atomic weapons to his brother-in-law and sister, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. According to FBI documents released later, J. Edgar Hoover urged Ethel’s arrest to force Julius to talk. They were arrested in 1950, along with another conspirator, Morton Sobell. They were tried in 1951 for conspiracy to commit espionage.
Claiming innocence at their trial, the Rosenbergs relied on the Fifth Amendment when asked if they were Communists. Greenglass gave detailed testimony about the information he had given to the Rosenbergs and said Ethel transcribed notes for her husband. Gold, who had already been sentenced to thirty years, said Soviet officer Anatoli Yakovlev was Julius Rosenberg’s contact in the KGB. Their day in court came in the midst of the Korean War, presided over by Judge Irving R. Kaufman, a judge who, by all appearances, seemed in league with the prosecution. Sobel was sentenced to thirty years in jail; the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death, even though J. Edgar Hoover opposed the death penalty for Ethel, fearing public reaction to the execution of the mother of two small children. The other conspirators were also given prison sentences, including Fuchs himself, because they all agreed to help the prosecution, which the Rosenbergs refused to do. And that was ultimately the reason they were sent to the electric chair on June 19, 1953.
The evidence against the Rosenbergs at the time, especially the testimony of Greenglass and Gold, was strong. But ever since, the Rosenbergs’ defenders have passionately claimed that the Rosenbergs were framed, convicted, and executed in an atmosphere of anti-Semitic, anti-Communist frenzy. What has emerged, particularly since the release of Soviet documents in the 1990s, confirms what had largely been the consensus: that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy, but that the secrets he passed along were far less damaging than those Fuchs turned over. In 1997, a man who professed to be Rosenberg’s Soviet “handler” said Rosenberg had passed military secrets but not atomic secrets. As for Ethel, the former Soviet spy said she knew what her husband, Julius, was doing but was not involved, an assessment confirmed by the Venona cables that also apparently confirmed Hiss’s guilt. In addition, Greenglass eventually admitted to journalist Sam Roberts in his 2001 book,
The Brother,
that he had lied about his sister to save himself.
It was from this toxic cloud of hysteria that Senator Joseph McCarthy (1909–57) emerged, and was taken up by the right-wing press as a new Paul Revere. He was the freshman senator from Wisconsin, elected to the Senate in 1946 by lying about his wartime service record and smearing his primary and general election opponents. In a short time, this scruffy, mean-spirited alcoholic was lining his pockets with lobbyist money and was generally thought of as the worst senator in Washington. By 1950, he was looking for the issue that would keep his leaky political boat from sinking.
McCarthy found that issue when he was fed some obsolete documents relating to old investigations of Communists in government jobs. In February 1950, McCarthy told a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he held, “here in my hand,” a list of 205 men in the State Department named as members of the Communist Party who were part of a spy ring. The numbers changed from day to day, and even McCarthy wasn’t sure where he had gotten them. His bulging briefcase of “evidence” generally held only a bottle of bourbon. But this was the beginning of his “big lie,” consisting of evidence and charges fabricated by a desperate man. In the following days, the emptiness of McCarthy’s “evidence” should have ended his Senate career. But it didn’t work out that way. In 1950, America was more than ready to believe what Senator McCarthy had to say.
Although a Senate committee investigated and then refuted everything McCarthy claimed, its findings were ignored. True or not, McCarthy’s irresponsible accusations caught the public ear, made headlines, and sold newspapers. The Senate investigations dismissing his charges got buried on the back pages with the ship sailing notices.
Time has altered the meaning of McCarthyism. In 1950, it meant a brave, patriotic stand against Communism, with the broad support of the media and people. Now it has come to mean a smear campaign of groundless accusations from which the accused cannot escape, because professions of innocence become admissions of guilt, and only confessions are accepted. Many of those who came before McCarthy, as well as many who testified before the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were willing to point fingers at others to save their own careers and reputations. To fight back was to be tarred with McCarthy’s “Communist sympathizer” brush. For many, particularly in the entertainment industries of radio, motion pictures, and television, that meant “blacklisting” that ruined careers. In this cynical atmosphere, laws of evidence and constitutional guarantees didn’t apply to “devious Communists.” For four years, McCarthy was as powerful as any man in Washington. He could force the president to clear appointments through him, and McCarthy’s rampage forced President Eisenhower to institute a new round of “loyalty” programs to prove that he, too, was “tough” on Communism.
But in 1954, McCarthy took up a battle that turned against him when he challenged the U.S. Army to purge supposed Communists from the Pentagon. With the resourceful assistance of Roy Cohn, a young attorney whom McCarthy had earlier dispatched overseas to eradicate “communistic books” from U.S. International Information Administration libraries, McCarthy had begun to attack certain Army officers as Communists. Once again he captivated the public imagination with his charges. But this time he overreached himself. The Army was Ike’s turf. Eisenhower and the Army started to hit back, first by investigating David Schine, Roy Cohn’s wealthy companion on his book-purge trip, who, having subsequently been drafted into the Army, had used McCarthy’s influence to win soft military assignments.
