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Slightly revised Aug. 26, 2010
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Joe McCarthy: still making trouble
Press and public remain confused over pivotal events of Cold War

By PAUL CONANT

It may be that the history books are out of sync about Joe MCarthy. So what? That was more than 50 years ago. Who cares?

Interestingly, McCarthy remains a highly charged issue, and he remains relevant. After all, if McCarthy really was thwarted in an attempt to knock out communist subversion in government, wouldn't that imply that the problem may have continued, with ramifications even today?

The fact is that the received wisdom concentrates on "what was wrong with McCarthy" and denies the reality of Soviet subversion and agitprop in America, which continued well after McCarthy's death. (McCarthy is believed to have died from alcoholism, though it is curious that the murders of two erstwhile McCarthy allies, the Kennedy brothers, benefited, among others, the communists.)

How the media handles the McCarthy issue has a lot to do with public perception of how well things are going in America, of course.

M. Stanford Evans in his book Blacklisted by History: the untold story of Senator Joe McCarthy (Random House 2007), cites several instances of what he saw as media bias in coverage of release of Senate executive session transcripts of the McCarthy committee. He says that in his many press releases, Donald Ritchie a Senate historian, "stacked the deck against McCarthy, up to and including glosses that were demonstrably in error." Evans said he discussed the matter of Annie Lee Moss, portrayed as an innocent victim of a McCarthy mixup, with Ritchie but that Ritchie did not correct the record to show that Democrats had staged a trick in order to make McCarthy look bad.

At some point, however, Ritchie included a line on one of his web pages noting that some, such as "M. Staunton (sic) Evans," dissented from his estimate of the Moss case.
http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/2003aug/mccarthy.html

Ritchie explained his position in an email to me:

"When I prepared the 160 closed hearings of the McCarthy investigation for publication in 2003, the 500 witnesses did not include two names that have been most associated with the McCarthy hearings, Irving Peress and Annie Lee Moss. In the introduction to volume 5, covering the hearing in 1954, I explained who they were and why they did not appear in the transcripts. A recurring question was how Senator McCarthy winnowed the 500 witnesses in executive session down to the 300 he called to testify in public. Unlike the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which heard from Moss behind closed doors, but not in public, Senator McCarthy called her before the TV cameras. He might not have chosen the public route if he had interrogated her in executive session, but she had been ill at the time. The senator left the hearing midway through her testimony and never followed through with his threat to charge her with perjury if she denied membership in the Communist party. The Army, which had suspended Moss before the hearings, then gave her another job. So, unlike Mr. Evans, I think the case remains ambiguous. I was later asked to write a biographical entry about Moss for the African American National Biography Project, which I’ve included below [appended at bottom of this post]."

Evans wrote that the Moss case was not a matter of mistaken identity, as executive session material bears out and as his own reporting showed at the time of the hearing. Rather, Democratic senators played the case before the TV cameras to make it appear that Moss was a barely literate black woman, who couldn't possibly have been the Army code and cipher clerk with a communist background cited by McCarthy.

In a published summary of the Moss case, Ritchie counters Evans and others thus: "Rather than accept her word, some have speculated that she must have been shrewder and more political than she let on, wearing a mask of innocence to deceive her interrogators. The few reporters who interviewed Moss at her home described a deeply religious woman devoted to her family, church, and community."

Even so, Ritchie doesn't make plain the full extent of the televised deception detailed by Evans, though he does mention Edward R. Murrows' See It Now telecast of the Moss hearing, which was intended to discredit McCarthy and did not explain the Democratic maneuver.

The Army argued that, as a typist for encrypted messages, Moss had no access to classified data. However, such a claim implies that she was in no position to glean sensitive information from fellow employees, vacant desks or scraps carelessly tossed into waste baskets. Whether she did so is unproved. But McCarthy wasn't buying the Army's blow-off, though it appears that it is possible he overstated her role in encryption and decryption. (Ritchie's summary of the Moss case is appended at the bottom of this post; in fairness, I should also append excerpts of Evans' analysis, but I haven't time to enter it.)

Evans also wrote that when Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Wall Street Journal columnist, lashed Ann Coulter for her defense of Joe McCarthy, Evans tried to obtain a clarification. "A letter to the editor correcting this mangled treatment and setting forth some facts about the matter received no acknowledgment, and was never printed." He added that as far as he knew no correction appeared.

Rabinowitz responded to my email query asking about his attempt to gain a correction,thus:

"What efforts are those? Those of his [McCarthy's] advocates seething over the injuries allegedly done Mr. McCarthy's memory are so numerous they tend to elude one's attention."

On the other hand, Evans has long been a substantial voice in conservative journalism, having when younger been editor of the Indianapolis News, which is now associated with the Indianapolis Star, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. More recently, he has contributed to National Review and written a number of conservative-oriented books.¹ Blacklisted received plaudits from Coulter, whose defense of McCarthy he praised, and the late Robert D. Novak, the conservative columnist ostracized by the journalistic community for doing his job in reporting Valerie Plame's CIA role. (Novak said he had been mentored by Willard Edwards, the conservative reporter who in the 1950s did much to blow the whistle on communist intrigue, but Novak's autobiography, The Prince of Darkness: Fifty Years Reporting in Washington, Random House 2007, says, as I recall, nothing or virtually nothing about using his column to expose true communist subversion -- as opposed to normal liberal activism.)

At any rate, we must acknowledge that despite Evans' credentials, his letter could easily have been overlooked.

Evans also tried getting a correction from the Washington Post's Ken Ringle who wrote a story on release of McCarthy transcripts. Evans said Ringle told him he was satisfied with the interpretation he used in his story. Ringle responded to my query by email:

"I have no idea who Stanton Evans is. I am long retired from the Post, but I very vaguely recall some sort of accusatory phone call years ago from someone concerning a very small and very routine day story about something the National Archives released about McCarthy. Sorry that I can't help you further, but to the best of my memory that was the only story I ever wrote touching on McCarthy, and it was very small beer in a journalistic career of more than 40 years. If that makes me part of the media conspiracy, so be it."

As a former reporter, I can appreciate Ringle's viewpoint.

But I have my own tale to tell. In 1986, I telephoned Eric Pace, a New York Times obituary writer, and asked him why his obituary of Philip C. Jessup contained no reference to Jessup's clash with McCarthy, which resulted in the rejection of Jessup's nomination as U.S. delegate to the United Nations. Pace, who had access to the extensive Times "morgue" of Jessup clippings, had nothing much to say, other than a verbal shrug of the shoulders. He closed the conversation by saying, "Good luck getting it [my article] published." And it wasn't.

I suspect that Rabinowitz went after Coulter because Rabinowitz was worried that Coulter's defense of McCarthy was helping to discredit the war on terror, which was under heavy attack from liberals. I was and am also very much against aspects of that struggle, realizing that 9/11 was without a doubt an inside job that could only be gotten away with via a throttled press. Interestingly, both George Bush and Dick Cheney played the "McCarthy card" (or the Coulter card) by claiming that those who opposed new curbs on liberty were aiding and abbetting al Qaeda.

In her Treason: liberal treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Random House, 2003), Coulter reexamines the 60-year history of the Cold War — including McCarthy's career, the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss affair, and Ronald Reagan's challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" and argues that liberals were wrong in their Cold War political analyses and policy decisions, and that McCarthy was correct about Soviet agents working for the U.S. government. She also argued that the correct identification of Annie Lee Moss, among others, as communists was misreported by that liberal media. (I haven't read her book and am relying on a Wikipedia summary here.)

Coulter's tunnel vision means that she gives liberals no credit for resistance to the communists. A case in point: John F. Kennedy's civil rights act crafted in 1963. That legislation, passed after his death, did a great deal to deprive the communists of a wedge issue. He did not accept the segregationist line that because communists pushed for black equality, therefore desegregation was wrong. In addition, his brother, Robert, as attorney general was highly successful in suppressing the Communist Party by requiring all its officers to register as agents of a foreign power (a rule later overturned by the court of Earl Warren, who headed the Warren commission whitewash).

Be that as it may, it was Coulter's defense of McCarthy that touched off Rabinowitz's famous column, where she wrote:

"Whether Sen. McCarthy actually believed some of the more fantastic charges he made -- charges that brought him instant fame -- remains a question. In 1951 he declared that Secretaries of State George Marshall and Dean Acheson had conspired to deliver China to the Soviets; and, not least, that they and other American leaders had taken part in a conspiracy against the United States, 'a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.' "

Were Marshall and Acheson Soviet agents? The record isn't quite as clear-cut as Rabinowitz seems to think. However, I don't suggest that she's necessarily playing a dual role. Plenty of people are in denial about the possibility of a vast communist conspiracy. It's too scary to think about. It raises the possibility that maybe Kremlin intrigue was involved in the 9/11 attacks, just as it seems to have been involved in the Pearl Harbor attack (in which communist sympathizers in the State Department evidently provoked Japan).

Some weird things were certainly going on in the 1940s. Edward Teller in his Memoirs: a twentieth-century journey in science and politics (with Judith L. Shoolery; Perseus 2001) cites a recollection of Lewis Strauss, a Navy officer during World War II and noted backer of the H-bomb afterward: Navy codebreakers intercepted a message from Tokyo to Prince Koniye, who was in Moscow trying to negotiate terms of surrender. The Russians however weren't interested in Japan's offer and ignored Koniye. The intercept never reached President Truman who was in Potsdam, talking with Churchill and Stalin after the victory in Europe.

Had Truman learned of this, Teller seems to suggest, perhaps the United States needn't have used the A-bomb to such horrific effect. But Truman wasn't told.

I haven't seen Teller's source material. Yet, I can only wonder how such an important intercept failed to reach Truman in Potsdam. Marshall, as head of the armed forces at the time, should have seen it and made sure it reached Truman, and not simply hoped someone in the White House alerted Truman. If Marshall didn't see it, why not?

At any rate, the Russians certainly would have favored keeping the Americans busy in the Pacific while they consolidated their European conquests.

Teller of course goes to great lengths to justify his testimony at J. Robert Oppenheimer's security hearings. Teller said he had planned to back Oppenheimer, despite his communist connections, but had a change of heart when he learned that Oppenheimer had confessed to committing perjury with respect to attempted communist espionage while he headed the A-bomb project.

Teller wrote that he was inclined to dismiss as relevant the facts that "Oppenheimer's former fiancee, Jean Tatlock; his wife, Kitty; and his brother and sister-in-law, Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer, had all been active members of the Communist Party" and the facts that a "large group of organizations to which Oppenheimer had belonged were characterized as subversive" and facts that "he had also been associated with several Communist Party officials, had attended various Communist Party functions, and had contributed $150 every month to the Communist Party, making the last such payment in April 1942."

A major issue was Oppenheimer's intensive lobbying as a postwar atomic policy planner to thwart development of the H-bomb. Teller said he was shocked when Oppenheimer, once an H-bomb was successfully tested, proposed using such a device on North Korean troops, a proposal that seemed to belie Oppenheimer's purported moral opposition. I suggest that, assuming Teller's recollection is correct, Oppenheimer, realizing he'd been bested in the struggle over the H-bomb, tried to cover his hard-left tracks with this anticommunist statement.

Teller relates that an agitated Strauss, then Atomic Energy Commission head, came to him and told him President Eisenhower had ordered him to suspend Oppenheimer's security clearance and hold a loyalty hearing. But Strauss was upset because he feared being identified as a McCarthyite.

What Teller may not have known was that Ike told Strauss to hop on the Oppenheimer case at least in part because the president had learned that McCarthy was on the scent of Oppenheimer.

The point of this discussion of Oppenheimer is to demonstrate that McCarthy's cases were often very strong in substance, though sometimes erring in trivial detail (something that happens to investigative reporters also). On the other hand, the fact that the Oppenheimer matter was sent to Eisenhower by a McCarthy critic demonstrates that McCarthy had a point about high-level influence by people with doubtful agendas. But because Ike was doing something about the Oppenheimer security question, Republican McCarthy was honor-bound not to conduct a duplicative probe ordered by Republican Ike.

Back to Coulter and Rabinowitz. Both these conservative writers, though on opposed sides of the McCarthy controversy, were agreed on the need to assail the "Jersey girls" for raising a rumpus about the 9/11 commission's credibility.

Coulter went so far as to dub them the "witches of East Brunswick" (a New Jersey suburb within the New York City metropolitan region). Rabinowitz wasn't much nicer, suggesting it was time for America (and the press) to start ignoring them.

The four Jersey women, Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza, being 9/11 widows, had been getting fairly strong media coverage and thus had become more than an annoyance to the 9/11 coverup control clique. Who better to go after these women than two women columnists? Neither Coulter nor Rabinowitz would necessarily have realized that they were unwitting dupes of the Kremlin, which, like Israel, has a major interest in maintaining the official 9/11 fictions so as to encourage America's confrontation with radical Islam.

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Appendix: Ritchie's explanation of the Moss case:

Moss, Annie Lee (9 August 1905-15 January 1996), a Pentagon employee who became a celebrated witness during Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigation of Communism in the government, was born in Chester, South Carolina. One of six children of Katie and Clemon Crawford, tenant farmers, she began picking cotton at the age of five. While in her teens she moved with her parents to Salisbury, North Carolina, where she attended but did not graduate from high school. At twenty-one she married Ernest Moss, a worker at a tobacco factory in Durham, N.C. They had one son.

Moss moved to Washington, D.C. in 1941, where her husband took a construction job and she ironed at a laundry. In 1943 she became a dessert cook for the Welfare and Recreation Association, which assigned her to the Pentagon cafeteria. As a condition of employment, she joined the Washington Cafeteria Workers union, a local chapter of the United Federal Workers of America, later ejected from the CIO for having Communist leadership. In 1943 Anna Lee Moss; cafeteria (subsequently listed as Annie Moss and Annie Lee Moss) appeared in the membership rolls of the Communist party in Washington, assigned card number 37269.

Seeking wartime housing, the Moss family lived for two weeks in a boardinghouse run by a woman later identified as a member of the Communist party. After moving into their own home, copies of the Communist party's newspaper, The Daily Worker, began arriving. When someone came to collect, Moss [said she] refused to pay, insisting that she had not subscribed. In October 1945 her name was dropped from the Communist party's rolls. Seeking a less-stressful, better-paying job, Moss became a clerk at the General Accounting Office in December. When security agents at the GAO asked in 1948 if she had a Communist Party membership card, she handed them her purse, containing only a membership card for the YWCA. Moss was cleared by the GAO's loyalty board [why were they interested?], but a postwar reduction-in-force terminated her job in 1949 [when a number of security risks were forced off the payroll]. She obtained a clerical position with the Army Signal Corps in 1950. The FBI provided the Army with information about her name having appeared on Communist membership lists, but the Army's loyalty board deemed it insufficient grounds for removal. At the Pentagon she operated a telegraph-typewriter that transmitted coded messages.

Moss came to public attention when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by McCarthy, looked into alleged Communist infiltration of the Signal Corps. In 1953 and 1954 McCarthy held hearings in which he made sensational charges about subversion and espionage, and called hundreds of witnesses to testify. In November 1953 the subcommittee staff learned that Army investigators had suspicions about Moss but lacked enough evidence to suspend her. The following February, when McCarthy came under fire for his rough treatment of Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker, he announced plans to expose a civilian employee at the Pentagon who was decoding top secret messages despite being listed by the FBI as a Communist party member. He claimed the case would prove that the Army was placingn known Communists in sensitive positions.

On February 23, 1954, Mary Stalcup Markward, a white woman from Virginia who had joined the Communist party as an undercover informant for the FBI, publicly revealed the name of Annie Lee Moss in testimony before McCarthy's subcommittee. Although Markward had been active in the Northeast Washington branch of the party that listed Moss as a card-carrying, dues-paying member, she could neither place Moss at any meetings nor identify her by sight. She knew only that Moss's address and employment records matched the information in the party's records. McCarthy insisted that the evidence showed Moss to be a Communist. If she denied it under oath, she would be subject to prosecution for perjury. "I am not interested in this woman as a person at all," he explained. "I am interested in knowing who in the military kept her on and promoted her from a waitress to a decoding clerk" (Army Signal Corps Hearings, p. 333). Army officials responded that Moss transmitted only unintelligible coded messages, but nevertheless transferred her to a supply room. She was then suspended but eventually reinstated and assigned to a nonsensitive position outside the Pentagon.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities questioned Moss in closed session in 1954. Finding no proof of disloyalty, it chose not to call her to testify in public. Illness prevented Moss from attending a preliminary executive session before McCarthy's Senate subcommittee. She finally testified under oath at a public hearing on March 11, 1954. She denied having been a member of the Communist Party, having paid dues or attended meetings. A small, frail widow, Moss appeared confused by the questioning. “Did you ever hear of Karl Marx?, a senator asked. "Who is that?" Moss answered, drawing laughter from the crowded hearing room (Army Signal Corps Hearings, p. 458).

Senator McCarthy left the hearing in the middle of her testimony. Moss's appearance represented a public relations disaster for his investigation, since the media portrayed her as a victim of circumstance. On March 16, 1954, Edward R. Murrow devoted his See it Now television show to her story. The program consisted mostly of video from the hearing, with little commentary, making it all the more convincing. The Moss case, followed shortly by the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, contributed to the erosion of McCarthy's credibility and to his censure by the Senate in December 1954.

Moss retreated into anonymity, living quietly with her son and grandchildren until her death in Washington at age ninety. In 1958 the defendant in another investigation sought to disqualify Mary Markward's testimony on the grounds that she had lied about Moss, but the Subversive Activities Control Board concluded that Markward had not been discredited as a witness since an Annie Lee Moss did appear on Communist party rolls. The Board conducted no further investigation of Moss, however, leaving her political past unresolved. Like McCarthy, commentators across the ideological spectrum have shown less interest in Moss as a person than as a symbol. Rather than accept her word, some have speculated that she must have been shrewder and more political than she let on, wearing a mask of innocence to deceive her interrogators. The few reporters who interviewed Moss at her home described a deeply religious woman devoted to her family, church, and community. If she was a symbol, it was of a bewildering era when citizens were presumed guilty until they proved themselves innocent.

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1. On Aug. 26, 2010, I made more precise my description of Evans' credentials and deleted a reference to the  Heritage Foundation because his association with that  outfit cannot be substantiated beyond guest lecturer.