Cold War - McCarthyism
Joe McCarthy gave anti-Communism a bad name. The excesses of McCarthy's witch-hunts discredited the whole idea of a Communist menace. they were too easy to lampoon, and after a few years of over-estimating the Communist threat, America spent decades tending to under-estimate the Communist menace.
Not only did the Cold War shape U.S. foreign policy, it also had a profound effect on domestic affairs. Americans had long feared radical subversion. These fears could at times be overdrawn, and used to justify otherwise unacceptable political restrictions, but it also was true that individuals under Communist Party discipline and many "fellow traveler" hangers-on gave their political allegiance not to the United States, but to the international Communist movement, or, practically speaking, to Moscow.
During the Red Scare of 1919-1920, the government had attempted to remove perceived threats to American society. After World War II, it made strong efforts against Communism within the United States. Foreign events, espionage scandals, and politics created an anti-Communist hysteria.
When Republicans were victorious in the midterm congressional elections of 1946 and appeared ready to investigate subversive activity, President Truman established a Federal Employee Loyalty Program. It had little impact on the lives of most civil servants, but a few hundred were dismissed, some unfairly.
In 1947 the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated the motion-picture industry to determine whether Communist sentiments were being reflected in popular films. When some writers (who happened to be secret members of the Communist Party) refused to testify, they were cited for contempt and sent to prison. After that, the film companies refused to hire anyone with a marginally questionable past.
Americans in the late 1940s awoke to a rude shock when they learned that since the mid-1930s significant numbers of Soviet spies had been operating in the United States. There were several factors that made this particularly disturbing. For one, most of these spies were native-born Americans, apparently motivated by sympathy for communism. In addition, some of these agents had been able to penetrate several agencies of the federal government-especially the Departments of State and the Treasury, as well as the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency)-and in some cases at very high levels.
In 1948, Alger Hiss, who had been an assistant secretary of state and an adviser to Roosevelt at Yalta, was publicly accused of being a Communist spy by Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet agent. Hiss denied the accusation, but in 1950 he was convicted of perjury. Subsequent evidence indicates that he was indeed guilty. In 1949 the Soviet Union shocked Americans by testing its own atomic bomb. In 1950, the government uncovered a British-American spy network that transferred to the Soviet Union materials about the development of the atomic bomb. Two of its operatives, Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, were sentenced to death.
How could these setbacks be explained? The arrest and prosecution of a number of Soviet spies in the United States seemed to provide at least a partial answer. Perhaps it was the activity of disloyal Americans-in the Federal Government, in Hollywood, in the schools, etc.-that allowed China to "go communist," that handed Russia the bomb, and invited Stalin's puppets in North Korea to attack their neighbors to the South. But what constituted disloyalty? Was it only to be defined as outright spying or sabotage? Might someone who belonged to the Communist Party be considered disloyal, whether or not he had committed any overt act against the United States? And what about a screenwriter who interjected pro-Soviet themes into a Hollywood movie, or a songwriter who criticized some aspect of American society in one of his songs? Attorney General J. Howard McGrath declared there were many American Communists, each bearing "the germ of death for society."
The most vigorous anti-Communist warrior was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin. He gained national attention in 1950 by claiming that he had a list of 205 known Communists in the State Department. Though McCarthy subsequently changed this figure several times and failed to substantiate any of his charges, he struck a responsive public chord. McCarthy gained power when the Republican Party won control of the Senate in 1952. As a committee chairman, he now had a forum for his crusade. Relying on extensive press and television coverage, he continued to search for treachery among second-level officials in the Eisenhower administration. Enjoying the role of a tough guy doing dirty but necessary work, he pursued presumed Communists with vigor.
On February 9, 1950, the little-known Republican senator from Wisconsin made a speech alleging that some large number of Communists infested the State Department. There is some dispute about the number of Communists McCarthy claimed to have known about. Though advance copies of this speech distributed to the press record the number as 205, McCarthy quickly revised this claim. Both in a letter he wrote to President Truman the next day and in an "official" transcript of the speech that McCarthy submitted to the Congressional Record ten days later he uses the number 57. Although McCarthy displayed this list of names both in Wheeling and then later on the Senate floor, he never made the list public.
The announcement catapulted McCarthy to center stage as America’s most aggressive foe of communists who, he claimed, had infiltrated the national government for the purpose of destroying the American political system and way of life. His unfounded and hysterical accusations, verbal abuse of witnesses, contempt for proper legal procedures, and attack on the loyalty—rather than the ideas—of those with whose policies he disagreed, led to the coining of a new word, “McCarthyism.” The process produced widespread hysteria that opponents and victims compared to the infamous Salem witch hunts of the 1690s.
The day after McCarthy’s famous Wheeling speech he flew to Salt Lake City where he participated in a Lincoln Day banquet held at the Newhouse Hotel. In Wheeling he had been somewhat vague about the number of alleged communists in the State Department, but in Salt Lake City McCarthy claimed to have a list with fifty-seven names of card-carrying communists in the State Department. While in the Beehive State, McCarthy learned that a spokesman for the State Department said they knew of no communists in their agency. McCarthy offered to give the list of fifty-seven communists to Secretary of State Dean Acheson if Acheson contacted him. The list was never produced. Despite his repeated claims, McCarthy never did produce the name of any card-carrying communist, leading critics to claim that “Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square.”
News of Senator McCarthy’s visit to Salt Lake City was carried in the same issue of the daily papers that reported atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs had confessed to giving United States atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. A political cartoon in the Salt Lake Tribune tied the McCarthy and Fuchs stories together in a very dramatic way. The cartoon showed Uncle Sam sitting at a desk going over the national defense plans. A broom-riding witch has just swooped over the desk and gathered an armload of documents labeled “atomic secrets.” As she flies off she cackles “…and give my thanks to all the ANTI-witch hunters, Uncle..!” It was not, of course, the anti-witch hunters who had allowed Klaus Fuchs to give atomic secrets away.
McCarthy wired President Truman to do something about the situation in the State Department and the press began to pay attention. Joseph McCarthy was becoming a national figure. The Senate also paid attention. The McCarthy allegations needed investigating, and a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, under respected conservative Democratic Senator Millard Tydings, was formed to look into the allegations. The committee found no basis for McCarthy's charges, but McCarthy was not cowed. He counterattacked. He named a certain Owen Lattimore as "the top Russian agent" in the United States and alleged that he had been one of the top State Department advisors on Far Eastern policy. Nothing came of the charge, but the country began to listen. McCarthy had struck a responsive chord, and with this came an increase in power. Some powerful conservative Republican senators backed him, and Herbert Block, acid-penned cartoonist of the Washington Post, coined the word "McCarthyism." An era of U.S. history had been given a name.
Three days after Maryland senator Millard Tydings publicly rejected McCarthy's accusations Julius Rosenberg was arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The issue of Soviet penetration of the U.S. government seemed shockingly real. As for Tydings, when he stood for reelection later that year McCarthy and his allies accused him of being "soft on communism." Marylanders took the charge seriously-Tydings, who had been in the Senate since 1927, was defeated. The message sent by the Tydings defeat was clear-it was dangerous to stand in the way of Joe McCarthy.
As his support increased, McCarthy's accusations became ever broader and wilder, going so far as to charge in June 1951 that General George C. Marshall was part of "a conspiracy so immense, an infamy so black, as to dwarf any in the history of man." And with the increase in recklessness came ever wider acceptance. A furor gripped the Nation. The frustration in 1949 of the concession of China to the Communists, the Soviet atom bomb, and the Alger Hiss case, expressed itself in a sweeping tide of anti-communism. Liberties that had been taken for granted were in danger of being lost. Loyalty investigations in the Government increased in intensity. The names of innocent men were being tainted and the services of "invaluable specialists" were being lost to the Government.
In 1952, aided in part by McCarthy's accusations (but probably more so by the stalemated war in Korea), the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress, while GOP candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president in a landslide. After the 1952 elections, McCarthy became even stronger. He was given chairmanship of the powerful Committee on Government Operations, as well as of the permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The Eisenhower administration did little or nothing to counteract him, for the president believed strongly in the separation of powers, and McCarthy's rampage continued. Two of McCarthy's staff members, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine, went on a quick tour of State Department installations in Europe and ostensibly found an "appalling infiltration," whereupon the department banned from its information activities all "books, music, paintings, and the like. . . of any Communists, fellow travelers, et cetera ." Books were removed from library shelves. Some were stored; some were burned.
At long last, things began to change. When President Dwight Eisenhower, at an extemporaneous speech at commencement exercises at Dartmouth University, decried the book ban, a loud cheer went up from the population. Many citizens by now were getting fed up with McCarthyism. But throughout his political career, Dwight Eisenhower refused to take a public stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy's aggressive anti-communist campaign. Eisenhower even struck from a 1952 campaign speech in Wisconsin a defense of his mentor, George C. Marshall, a McCarthy target.
In early 1954 when McCarthy began an investigation of the U.S. Army, his end was near although he did not know it. His investigation led to an army dentist alleged to be a Communist sympathizer. The army counterattacked with the accusation that McCarthy, Cohn, and Francis Carr, the subcommittee staff director, had all conspired to obtain favorable treatment for Schine, who had been inducted into the army. McCarthy countered with his own charges that the army had tried to halt the exposure of alleged Communists at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The Subcommittee on Investigations ordered an investigation, but this time McCarthy was not in charge; his charges were being investigated. Even more important, he met his match in the chief army counsel, Boston lawyer Joseph Welch.
Television brought the hearings into millions of homes. For thirty-six days the televised hearings went on with the Nation in rapt attention. The deft and skillful Welch showed McCarthy for what he was: an overbearing bully. At the climax of a highly emotional exchange, in which McCarthy attacked as a Communist sympathizer a young associate of Welch who was not even involved in the hearings, Welch asked of McCarthy, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" McCarthy, finally silenced, did not really understand what had happened. After a few seconds the hearing room - including the members of the press - burst into loud applause. Many Americans saw McCarthy's savage tactics for the first time, and public support began to wane. The Republican Party, which had found McCarthy useful in challenging a Democratic administration when Truman was president, began to see him as an embarrassment. McCarthy was finished as a political force. That the Senate went on to censure him was almost redundant; the public had had enough.
Joseph McCarthy gave anti-Communism a bad name. His subsequent exile from politics coincided with a conversion of his name into a modern English noun "McCarthyism," or adjective, "McCarthy tactics," when describing similar witch hunts in recent American history. Crtoonist Herb Block coined the phrase "McCarthyism" in his cartoon for March 29, 1950, just weeks after Senator McCarthy's spectacular pronouncement that he had in his hand a list of communists in the State Department. The American Heritage Dictionary gives the definition of McCarthyism as: 1. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence; and 2. The use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition.] McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate on December 2, 1954 and died May 2, 1957.
McCarthy had attacked people who were not communists at all. So, on the basis of that and McCarthy's record in which he was attacking as Communists people who were liberals, who were actually anti-Communists, he was thus providing cover for the real Communists. The great challenge in those cases was to find out just what the evidence was on the basis of which a person was accused.
The hysteria that would ultimately flow from the espionage scare of the late 1940s would lead many to believe that even the original threat had been overblown, and that at least some of those who had been convicted, like Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were victims of a witch hunt. Recent research, however, has shown that this is likely not the case. The opening in the 1990s of the archives of the former Soviet Union showed that the penetration of American institutions was, indeed, significant, and was being directed locally by the Communist Party of the United States. Moreover, the 1990s also saw the declassification of the transcripts from the Venona Project. Under Venona, thousands of communications between Moscow and its agents in the United States during the 1940s had been intercepted and decoded, giving critical insights into the Soviet espionage network and, in many cases, revealing the identities of the spies themselves. However, because the FBI was unwilling to release this information at the time (it seems as though not even President Truman was aware of it), it was never used to prosecute the individuals involved. Whatever one might think of the tactics of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s, or those of Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, there is little doubt today that the Soviet spy network in America existed, and that it was extensive.
Senator Joseph McCarthy's claim that spies riddled the American government was not without foundation. There were communists in the government working against American concepts of democracy. The FBI worked closely with Senator Joseph McCarthy until Hoover severed its relationship with McCarthy in 1953. Before Stalin's paranoia, purges, and murderous campaigns against the Russian people were documented in the West, before Communist theories were publicly discredited by decades of failure and opportunism, it was possible for idealistic Americans in the grip of "romantic anti-fascism" to see the USSR as the world's best remaining hope. Wartime cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union allowed Soviet intelligence to dig into the burgeoning bureaucracy in Washington, where its recruits swelled from dozens in the late 1930s to several hundred during the war. According to transcripts of Soviet wartime cables deciphered by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the Venona project, codenames of some 350 cooperating Americans appear in Soviet wartime cable traffic.
Even before the demise of McCarthy as a power in the Senate, international communism had turned a somewhat more benign visage toward the world. On March 3, 1953, less than two months after the Eisenhower administration took office, Joseph Stalin died and things changed. Georgi M. Malenkov, speaking for the triumvirate of himself, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, and Nikita S. Khruschev, offered that international conflicts could be "settled peacefully by mutual agreements of the interested parties." In a few short months, in July 1953, the Korean War ended. Despite some early truculence by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the use of Soviet armor to put down uprisings in East Germany, and Khruschev replacing the triumvirate, tensions between East and West did ease.
McCarthy in many ways represented the worst domestic excesses of the Cold War. As Americans repudiated him, it became natural for many to assume that the Communist threat at home and abroad had been grossly overblown. As the country moved into the 1960s, anti-Communism became increasingly suspect, especially among intellectuals and opinion-shapers. Whereas the Communist Menace had strongly influenced public opinion during the Korean War, the political impact of this threat was a spent force during the Vietnam War. Die-hard anti-Communists remained concerned, but McCarthy had convinced most Americans the Communist Menace was fake news.
McCarthy was a little-known junior senator from Wisconsin until February 1950 when he claimed to possess a list of 205 card-carrying Communists employed in the U.S. Department of State. From that moment Senator McCarthy became a tireless crusader against Communism in the early 1950s, a period that has been commonly referred to as the "Red Scare." As chairman of the Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee, Senator McCarthy conducted hearings on communist subversion in America and investigated alleged communist infiltration of the Armed Forces.
After World War II the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves on opposite sides of a “Cold War,” which pitted the democratic United States against the Communist Soviet Union. As the Cold War intensified, the frenzy over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. became known as the Red Scare. HUAC was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and rebel activities on the part of private citizens, public employees and organizations suspected of having Communist ties. Citizens suspected of having ties to the communist party would be tried in a court of law. In 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act making it illegal to support the overthrow of state or national governments. In 1949, 11 Communist Party leaders were convicted under this Act. The attorneys for the accused were themselves convicted of contempt of court and half served prison terms. Subsequently, most lawyers refused to represent suspected Communists unless they themselves were members of the Communist Party.
From 1950-1954 “McCarthyism” described the practice of accusing Federal Government employees of having affiliations with communism and leaking information. Government employees could be blacklisted (viewed as untrustworthy or someone to avoid) and could lose their jobs. The threat of Communism was a driving force that created a wedge between society and the United States government. During this time period the lines of civil liberties and national security began to blur, and U.S. citizens felt a sense of uncertainty. Some Americans felt that their personal freedoms were being taken away, while others believed HUAC and McCarthyism were necessary to secure national security. Government officials felt the same types of pressures on the home front. Were they overstepping government powers or just keeping America safe from outsiders that wanted to cause harm within the system?
Joseph R. McCarthy had come to the Senate in 1946 earlier after unseating 22-year incumbent Robert La Follette, Jr., who had devoted more energies to passage of his landmark 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act than to that year's Republican senatorial primary. The Saturday Evening Post heralded McCarthy's arrival with an article entitled, "The Senate's Remarkable Upstart." For the next three years, McCarthy searched for an issue that would substantiate his remarkableness. As one of his many biographers has observed, McCarthy's initial years in the Senate were characterized by his impatient disregard of the body's rules, customs, and procedures. Another scholar noted the ease with which he rearranged the truth to serve his purposes. "Once he got going, logic and decorum gave way to threats, personal attacks, and multiple distortions."
McCarthy first won election to the Senate during a campaign marked by much anticommunist Red-baiting. Partially in response to Republican Party victories, President Harry S. Truman tried to demonstrate his own concern about the threat of Communism by setting up a loyalty program for federal employees. He also asked the Justice Department to compile an official list of 78 subversive organizations. As the midterm election year got underway, former State Department official Alger Hiss, suspected of espionage, was convicted of perjury.
McCarthy rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies. These charges struck a particularly responsive note at a time of deepening national anxiety about the spread of world communism. In late 1949, six months before McCarthy’s speech at Wheeling, China fell to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces. Also, in the autumn of 1949, the Soviets successfully tested an atomic bomb, several years ahead of what U.S. officials anticipated. Alger Hiss’s libel suit against Whitaker Chambers had evolved into a trial over whether Hiss committed perjury. Two weeks before McCarthy’s speech, a jury convicted Hiss of the perjury charge. Also, on February 11 U.S. newspapers reported that Manhattan Project scientist Klaus Fuchs had confessed to leaking atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets.
"Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they are truly down." On February 9, 1950, the junior senator from Wisconsin thundered this warning in a Lincoln's birthday address to the Women's Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. In the Wheeling speech, among the most significant in American political history, McCarthy's recklessness finally merged with his search for a propelling issue. He explained that homegrown traitors were causing America to lose the cold war. "While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205."
McCarthy accused Alger Hiss of having “sold out the Nation” and revived old charges against John Stewart Service, who had been arrested in the Amerasia case. Linking both men to the fall of China to the Communists, McCarthy said that although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had arrested Service for passing “secret State Department information” to the Communists, Service had not been dismissed from the Department. Instead, the Department of State named Service as the next U.S. Consul General in Calcutta, which McCarthy described as “the most important listening post in the Far East.” McCarthy omitted the fact that a grand jury had unanimously rejected an indictment against Service.
Mounting an attack on President Truman’s foreign policy agenda, McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored “traitorous” Communists. McCarthy’s apocalyptic rhetoric made critics hesitate before challenging him. Those accused by McCarthy faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. As early as 1950, some senators felt deeply troubled by what they considered McCarthy’s reckless accusations. Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith composed the following “Declaration of Conscience,” condemning the atmosphere of suspicion and blaming leaders of both parties for their “lack of effective leadership.” Although Smith convinced six additional Republican Senators to join her in the Declaration, the seven refused to support a Senate report prepared by Democrats that called McCarthy’s charges against State Department personnel fraudulent.
Despite his charges, McCarthy faced initial embarrassments. In a Senate Committee meeting on March 8, McCarthy referred to Case #14 of the 81 cases, and said the person was a security risk because he was “a flagrant homosexual.” Committee chair Senator Millard Tydings (D-MD) asked McCarthy to name the person, knowing full well that Case #14 was Joseph Panuch, former Deputy Under Secretary of State for Administration, and that McCarthy had praised Panuch’s work just two weeks earlier.
Homosexuals and Communism were quickly conflated. During the McCarthy Era, “everyone was presumed to be a little light on his feet until proved otherwise.” Public discourse on sexual identity was extremely limited in the 1950s. Not only was sexual preference not viewed in terms of civil liberties or civil rights, it was almost never openly discussed.
McCarthy continued to level his accusations in a series of speeches, but the number of Communists in the Department of State often changed. On February 10, in Salt Lake City, he declared that “57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party” worked in the Department, an accusation he repeated in Reno on February 11. Also on that day, McCarthy sent a telegram to President Truman, citing the 57 Communists (whom he did not name), and demanded that Truman address the issue or risk having the Democratic Party labeled as a “bedfellow of International Communism.” Then on February 20, on the Senate floor, McCarthy declared that there were “81 loyalty risks” in the Department of State, and proceeded to describe each case. McCarthy’s numbers — 205, 57, and 81 — were inconsistent, but not fictitious. The numbers were derived from testimony by Department of State officials and Division of Security files.
Behind some accusations was the “Who lost China?” debate. Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent were members of the “China hands,” who had opposed U.S. policy supporting Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. The anger over the loss of China was soon directed against former Secretary of State Marshall, whom McCarthy accused of aiding the policy of Stalin and the Soviet Union, but most Republicans quickly rejected the accusations against Marshall. Chaired by Senator Pat McCarran (D-NV), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) investigated charges in 1951 and 1952 that Communists were trying to influence U.S. foreign policy.
After the 1952 election, in which the Republican Party won control of Congress, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy then extended his targets to include numerous government agencies, in addition to the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, and the United Nations. McCarthy relentlessly continued his anticommunist campaign into 1953, when he quickly put his imprint on the subcommittee, shifting its focus from investigating fraud and waste in the executive branch to hunting for Communists. He conducted scores of hearings, calling hundreds of witnesses in both public and closed sessions.
In their hunt for subversion and espionage, Senator McCarthy and chief counsel Cohn conducted hearings on the State Department, the Voice of America, the U.S. overseas libraries, the Government Printing Office, and the Army Signal Corps. Believing any method justifiable in combating an international conspiracy, they grilled witnesses intensely. Senator McCarthy showed little patience for due process and defined witnesses' constitutional rights narrowly.
Gen. Telford Taylor, an American prosecutor at Nuremberg, charged McCarthy with conducting "a new and indefensible kind of hearing, which is neither a public hearing nor an executive session." In Taylor's view, the closed sessions were a device that enabled the chairman to tell newspapers whatever he saw fit about what happened, without giving witnesses a chance to defend themselves or reporters a chance to check the accuracy of the accusations. Characteristically, Senator McCarthy responded to this criticism with an executive session inquiry into Gen. Taylor's loyalty.
A dispute over his hiring of staff without consulting other committee members prompted the panel's three Democrats to resign in mid-1953. Republican senators also stopped attending, in part because so many of the hearings were called on short notice or held away from the nation's capital. As a result, McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn largely ran the show by themselves, relentlessly grilling and insulting witnesses. Harvard law dean Ervin Griswold described McCarthy's role as "judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one." Roy M. Cohn had participated in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and in the trial of the top Communist party leaders in the United States. He earned a reputation as a relentless questioner with a sharp mind and retentive memory.
In the spring of 1954, McCarthy picked a fight with the U.S. Army, charging lax security at a top-secret army facility. When McCarthy accused distinguished U.S. Army officers of subversion, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered a secret investigation of McCarthy’s dealings with the Army. A report revealed that McCarthy and lawyer Roy Cohn had actively sought special privileges for their former aide, Pvt. G. David Schine. These men were, in the words of Attorney General Herbert Brownell, “inseparable.”
After Secretary of the Army, Robert T. Stevens, refused to intercede to halt an overseas assignment for McCarthy’s chief consultant, G. David Schine, who had been drafted, McCarthy’s committee began a two-month investigation of the Army. The Army alleged that McCarthy had sought special treatment for the recently drafted former staff member. Roy Cohn, Chief Counsel, and G. David Schine, Chief Consultant, staff members, U.S. Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations, had been romantically involved.
By January 1954, Joe McCarthy’s prestige was at its zenith; 50 percent of Gallup Poll respondents approved of the senator, with 29 percent unfavorable. McCarthy himself became a subject of the investigation — the Special Senate Investigation on Charges and Countercharges Involving: Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens, John G. Adams, H. Struve Hensel and Senator Joe McCarthy, Roy M. Cohn, and Francis P. Carr. McCarthy temporarily stepped down as chairman and member of the committee. Karl Mundt presided over the hearings as acting chairman and Henry Dworshak was temporarily seated as a member in McCarthy’s place. The close association of Joseph McCarthy investigators Roy Cohn and G. David Schine came under scrutiny.
The three-month spectacle known to history as the Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast on national television and they contributed to McCarthy’s declining national popularity. The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy's career: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"
Overnight, McCarthy's immense national popularity evaporated. The standard explanations for McCarthy’s political demise are well known. Joe, an al coholic, supposedly did himself in. He was damaged by Edward R. Murrow’s legendary See It Now television program. Eisenhower took the possibility of subversion seriously, but firmly believed his methods would be ef fective whereas McCarthy’s demagogic tactics would fail. The enduring myth about Eisenhower’s leadership was that he was a disengaged, grandfatherly President more interested in playing golf than in the effective exercise of leadership. Eisenhower and his trusted subordi nates engineered this devastating assault on McCarthy.
Until his Senate censure four years later, Joseph R. McCarthy would be that body's most controversial member. In Robert C. Byrd's assessment, "There was never quite anyone like McCarthy in the Senate, before or after; nor has this chamber ever gone through a more painful period." Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man. McCarthy’s lack of respect for the truth, his insatiable appetite for headlines, and his willingness to damage reputations turned “McCarthyism” into an enduring epitaph in the American political language.
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