destroyed the careers of people who were not involved in the infiltration of our government.” Similar statements have been made by Senate Historian Ritchie in comments to the press, and numerous stories have repeated these charges as uncontested fact. But when asked to back up this sweeping and inflammatory statement, neither Senate office could do so.

Trying to check the matter out, I called the offices of both Levin and Collins and asked if they could provide me with the names of any innocent victims of McCarthy whose careers had been ruined in this manner. Neither office could provide me with a single name.

Who’s Running the Senate?

I also addressed the same question to a reporter for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, whose story happened to be the first one I read about the hearings and who made such assertions on his own. I got essentially the same non-answer, except that he mentioned in his story the case of an employee of VOA who had committed suicide—allegedly from fear of McCarthy.

Similar conversations ensued with reporters from the Washington Post and Reuters, both of whom got very testy when I asked them if they could back up anti-McCarthy comments in their stories with information on specific cases. Ken Ringle of the Post said write us a letter, and Joanne Kenen of Reuters was much too busy to discuss the matter with me.

In these press conversations, the people I talked to said the individual with all the answers was Senate historian Ritchie, who contributed his own introduction to the hearings slamming McCarthy, in slightly more subtle terms than those used by Levin-Collins. However, when I finally got Ritchie on the phone, he wasn’t much more helpful, giving me lots of generalities, but little by way of hard specifics. (It’s a big subject, and so forth).

As to McCarthy’s browbeating tactics, said Ritchie, they were apparent throughout the hearings, particularly those pertaining to Fort Monmouth. I told him I had read a fair amount of these (plus the long-available public hearings conducted by McCarthy) and personally I didn’t see it. A matter of interpretation, I suppose, but hardly justification for the venomous slurs that are being thrown around so freely.

I then tried to narrow things down to a specific case I have studied in some detail: Alleged McCarthy victim Annie Lee Moss, who worked in a code room for the Army and was called before his subcommittee.

In the standard treatment of Moss, she was a dazed and helpless woman falsely accused of being a Communist by the heartless and irresponsible McCarthy. This image is reinforced at some length by Ritchie in his editorial comments, citing as authority for his statements three books about McCarthy by academics. I noted that these were secondary sources and asked him if he had looked at the official, primary documents on the case, and whether he was aware that these conclusively prove Mrs. Moss was, indeed, a member of the Communist Party in the District of Columbia.

At this point historian Ritchie became very irked with me, and declined my offer to capsule these data for him. “I am,” he said, “growing very tired of this conversation.” He said he had been doing many media appearances on the McCarthy hearings, didn’t want to talk about the subject with me anymore, but that if I wanted to send something to him he would look at it. End of discussion.

Questions abound: How does it happen that Senators Levin and Collins make categorical statements in a Senate report that their offices cannot back up with a single specific? Why was historian Ritchie so unwilling to discuss with me well-documented facts about one of the more publicized McCarthy cases—though he has been prolific with disparaging comments on McCarthy to anyone who will listen? What ever happened to fact-based reporting? And, who, by the way, is running the Senate?

P.S. On the VOA employee allegedly driven to suicide by McCarthy: As the record shows, this employee was a potentially friendly witness for McCarthy, had views on the question at issue that would have backed McCarthy’s position, and was anxious to testify in the McCarthy hearings. Whatever drove this employee to suicide, if that is what in fact occurred, fear of Joe McCarthy is the least likely of all explanations. The reporter I spoke to on this knew nothing at all about these matters.

—Human Events, May 12, 2003, p. 1, 7

McCarthy and His Legacy
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Why do they keep digging up the corpse of Joe McCarthy for a ritual flogging? The Wisconsin senator died in 1957. He never killed anyone. He never sent anyone to prison.

Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on two defenseless cities of a prostrate nation and sent 2 million Russian prisoners back to Stalin to be murdered in Operation Keelhaul. Yet Truman remains a hero to those who despise McCarthy with an undying hatred.

Why? Even if what is alleged is true—that McCarthy bullied witnesses and accused men of disloyalty who only made mistakes—that still does not explain why the Left cannot let go of him.

The answer: As no other man, Tailgunner Joe stripped the old establishment of its reputation, credibility and moral authority in the eyes of the people.

McCarthy convinced Middle America that FDR and Truman had been duped by “Uncle Joe,” had tolerated treason, and had blundered and lost in five years all the fruits of the victory won by the blood and sacrifice of the Greatest Generation in World War II.

The establishment has never recovered from that beating.

In the latest document dump by the Senate, we learn—horror of horror!—that McCarthy questioned witnesses in private before selecting those he put on the stand. But so, too, did the Watergate committee of the sainted Sam Ervin. This is a common practice of senators who don’t want to be surprised before TV cameras.

The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes that those few historians shown the latest documents claim they “do not support McCarthy’s theories that, in the 1950s, communist spies were operating in the highest levels of government.”

Perhaps not, Ms. Stolberg. But if so, that is only because, by the 1950s, the spies had been rooted out, though their collaborators remained. But they had been there, selling out their country.

Indeed, the espionage and treason, proven again by the Venona transcripts—the intercepted coded messages from Soviet agents to Moscow—were far more extensive than even McCarthy imagined. In the 1940s, the U.S. Government was honeycombed with traitors and spies. Even today, not all the names have been revealed. Call the roll:

• Alger Hiss and Lawrence Duggan, two of the highest ranking diplomats at State, were communist traitors and spies. Hiss stood behind FDR at Yalta when Eastern Europe was signed away to Stalin and helped shape the United Nations for Harry Truman.

• Harry Dexter White, father of the International Monetary Fund and the “Morgenthau Plan” to smash all German industry after the war—a plan embraced, then disowned, by FDR—was a Soviet agent. Truman knew it by 1946 and covered it up.

• Lauchlin Currie was a Soviet spy on the White House staff.

• William Remington was the Soviet spy at Commerce.

• Judith Coplon headed up a spy ring at Justice with access to the FBI secrets and files she transferred to Soviet agents.

• The Rosenbergs were communist traitors who gave their Russian handlers secrets of the atom bomb. The brother of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-bomb, was a communist, as was his wife, who was a lifelong friend of Steve Nelson, a key figure in the Communist Party underground apparatus.

On and on the list goes. For an unbiased account of McCarthy’s life, Arthur Herman’s Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator is indispensable.

McCarthy’s career as an anti-Communist began in February 1950 with his Wheeling speech and was effectively ended with his censure in December 1954. Why was Harry Truman chased out of Washington in 1952 with an approval rating of 23%? Why did Joe McCarthy enjoy a 50-29 favorable rating as late as January 1954?

Because McCarthy, almost alone, was exposing the treason and folly of those who had ceded half of Europe to Stalin and all of China to the murderous hordes of Mao Tse-tung. And with 200 American boys dying every week in Truman’s “no-win war” in Korea, Americans were demanding explanations.

The 1950s were good years. No one was terrified then, except the fools who had joined a Communist Party that turned out to be a lickspittle of the Comintern. Gallup polls of the era show not even 1% of Americans were concerned about “witch-hunting” or “anti-Communist hysteria” or “McCarthyism.” That is pure myth.

In 1954, when some snot at the 15th reunion of his class got up to toast Harvard College for never having produced an Alger Hiss or a Joe McCarthy, John F. Kennedy stood up and walked out, roaring, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor.” Yes, indeed, that was when the Right was right.

—Human Events, May 19, 2003, p. 21

McCarthy and His Committee
by Eric Fettman

The release this week, with great fanfare and media hoopla, of the so-called “secret” hearings of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations committee 50 years after the fact is hardly the great historical revelation it is being portrayed as.

The 5,000 pages of closed-door executive session testimony already are being cited by the left as further proof that the Wisconsin senator—whose name symbolizes an era Jimmy Carter would later naively call “America’s inordinate fear of Communism”—conducted a wide-ranging “witch hunt” for nonexistent subversives.

“McCarthy had shopworn goods and fishing expeditions,” said Don Ritchie, the Senate’s associate historian.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chairs the same committee McCarthy once headed, insisted the documents “shed new light on a shameful chapter in American history.” Meanwhile, ranking committee Democrat Carl Levin drew predictable parallels to the crackdown on civil liberties in the war on terrorism.

Once again, however, the left is looking to rewrite the history of this complex and misunderstood period.

For one thing, these “secret” sesssions were hardly the kind of star-chamber proceedings suggested in many news reports. Congressional committees have long used executive sessions to weed out witnesses and elicit information in advance; it was in executive session, for example, that the Senate Watergate Committee first learned of Richard Nixon’s secret taping system.

But the ultimate falsehood remains the left’s insistence on describing McCarthy’s investigations as “witch hunts”—the presumption being that witches don’t exist.

Yet growing historical evidence underscores that, whatever his rhetorical and investigative excesses—and they were substantial—McCarthy was a lot closer to the truth about Communism than were his foes.

Communists were well-organized, and they did manage to penetrate the highest levels of Washington, planting themselves into positions where they either significantly influenced U.S. policy or passed classified information to the Soviets, or both.

Cord Meyer, a top CIA official who would himself face unfounded charges he was a Communist sympathizer, wrote at the time that McCarthy “would never have achieved his national prominence unless there had in fact been serious Communist penetration and evidence available to the public of the government’s failure to cope with it.”

McCarthy was aided by much of the left’s unwillingness to acknowledge the extent of Communist activity, especially espionage—the assumption being that anything a villain like McCarthy said had to be false, and anyone who opposed him was a patriot and a hero.

In a famous 1952 essay in Commentary, Irving Kristol

excoriated the left for too often “joining hands with the Communists” and refusing to condemn Stalinist outrages.

“There is one thing that the American people know about Sen. McCarthy,” wrote Kristol. “He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.”

Ironically, McCarthy himself had little to do with the excesses of anti-Communism. Blacklisting of celebrities had begun in 1947, three years before he even gave his first anti-Communist speech; the extensive system of loyalty reviews and security probes was instituted by President Harry Truman in the same year.

Moreover, the notion of the era as a reign of terror is profoundly misleading.

“In a reign of terror,” wrote Irving Howe, “people turn silent, fear a knock on the door at four in the morning, flee in all directions. But they do not, because they cannot, talk

endlessly in public about the outrage of terror”—as McCarthy’s foes did.

Indeed, added Sidney Hook, “all the great organs of public opinion . . . were hostile to McCarthy; all the Luce magazines with the fabulous circulation damned him for his demagogy . . . To speak of a reign of terror, or a climate of fear, is to do the sort of thing which has come to be associated with McCarthy’s name.”

But McCarthy, with his whining voice, heavy jowls and often-bullying manner, writes historian Richard Gid Powers, “gave the enemies of anti-Communism what they had been looking for since the beginning of the Cold War: a contemporary name and face for their old stereotype of the anti-Communist fascist.”

Not that McCarthy didn’t give them plenty of ammunition. Arthur Herman, a sympathetic biographer, concedes that “when cornered or challenged, [McCarthy] preferred to exaggerate - even lie . . . [He] learned to bluff his way through, in hopes that subsequent research would confirm the bulk of it.”

And because he became the symbol of that cause, many conservatives—who privately derided him as a bumbling amateur—would not publicly criticize him, even though they realized McCarthy was hurting the very cause he, and they, championed.

Yet the tide of history has largely turned in McCarthy’s favor—in the basic truth of his accusations of widespread Communist influence, if not some of his specific targets or his methods.

The newly released transcripts reflect McCarthy’s unwarranted belief that the ends justified his means. His goal, however, was far more on target than his critics even now will admit.

—New York Post, May 8, 2003

McCarthy and His Witnesses
by William Rusher

The demonization of Joseph McCarthy continues, cheerfully exploding the pleasant theory that, in time, the truth will always come out.

It is now an article of the American faith, accepted by naïve young conservatives as well as liberals of all ages, that McCarthy was an unconscionable monster who, in the early 1950s roamed the globe defaming innocent men and women as communists, and failing utterly to prove anything of the sort.

The most recent example of this sort of thinking accompanied the release of the transcripts of some 161 “executive sessions” of McCarthy’s Senate committee from 1953 and 1954, in which the committee heard testimony from various people suspected of membership in the Communist Party. Our liberal media promptly hailed the event as further proof of McCarthy’s villainy.

As Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in her May 6 article for The New York Times, the transcripts “reveal how (McCarthy) used secret proceedings to weed out witnesses who could adequately defend themselves against his browbeating. Only those who looked weak or confused, or who cast suspicion on themselves by asserting their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, were later called to testify in public.”

As a stellar example of successful defiance, she cites the composer Aaron Copland, who “fiercely defended himself, declaring, ‘I have not been a communist in the past and I am not now a communist,’ ” and was not compelled to testify in public.

As it happens, I have considerable personal knowledge of this general subject. In 1956 and 1957 I was associate counsel to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—not McCarthy’s committee (a subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee, and thus confined to investigating the government), but the body charged by the Senate with

oversight of the nation’s internal security. Such committees hold hearings to inform the Congress and the American people of matters that may require legislative action.

In the case of committees seeking testimony from people who may have something to hide (and that, of course, includes secret communists), it is common practice to hear the witness first in “executive,” or secret, session. And, curiously enough, the chief purpose in doing so is to protect witnesses who want to cooperate.

More than once we asked a witness, in executive session, if he had ever been a communist, only to have him sigh and reply, “Yes, and I’ve wanted to get this off my chest for a long time.” Then he would tell us frankly the story of his involvement, including the names of the other communists with whom he worked.

When the session was over we would thank him for his cooperation and he would go home, without the media so much as learning his name.

If, on the other hand, he refused to answer all questions about his communist involvement by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, he would be required to do so in a public session, from which Congress and the American people could draw their own conclusions.

In the case of Copland, the composer forthrightly denied communist membership under oath, so the McCarthy committee saw no point in a public session.

But its curiosity about him isn’t hard to understand, for Copland was a world-class joiner of communist fronts, having belonged to more than 20 (including the Committee of Professional Groups for Browder and Ford, 1936, which supported Communist Party Secretary Earl Browder for president over FDR).

But the Times didn’t mention that. Reasons of space, I guess.

—The [Colorado Springs] Gazette, May 13, 2003, p. M 7

McCarthy and the Senate Historian
by M. Stanton Evans

The more we learn about the executive hearings on subversion held 50 years ago by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R.-Wis.), unveiled this month for public viewing, the more bizarre the tale becomes.

Though mostly covering the same terrain as did public probes run by McCarthy in ’53 and ’54, these 4,000-plus pages of closed-door sessions contain a lot of added information and should be a great resource for scholars. Assuming, that is, that anyone actually bothers to read them—rather than relying on the gloss supplied by Senate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited them for publication.

Ritchie penned an introduction to the hearings, plus editorial notes along the way, that variously slam McCarthy and/or stack the deck against him. In addition, he has been remarkably free with negative statements on McCarthy in dealing with the media, who have with few exceptions taken these as gospel. However, when the data are examined, the gap between Ritchie’s comments and demonstrable facts of record is astounding. Following are a few examples.

As already noted in these pages, one of the more famous episodes discussed by Ritchie is the case of Annie Lee Moss, portrayed in most treatments of McCarthy as an innocent victim of his bluster. This version is essentially recapped by Ritchie—with a bare minimum of hedging—footnoting his account to three biographies of McCarthy. (When I asked Ritchie in a phone interview if he had looked at the primary documents on the case, he abruptly ended our conversation. [See “Senate Historian Clams Up When Queried on McCarthy,” HUMAN EVENTS, May 12, 2003].)

In a nutshell, the facts about the matter are these: Mrs. Moss had been identified by FBI undercover operative Mary Markward as a member of the Communist Party in the District of Columbia, based on party records Markward said she had handled. This information was provided not only to the FBI, but also the Civil Service Commission and the Army. Despite this, Mrs. Moss had been hired as a code clerk by the Army, and had been cleared to do this work as of the early 1950s.

When Markward and Moss appeared before McCarthy in the winter of ’54, Markward repeated her story, naming not only Mrs. Moss but several others as members of the D.C. party. Mrs. Moss, seeming frail and bewildered, denied all, saying she was not a Communist and suggesting there was some other Annie Lee Moss out there with whom she was being confused. This mistaken-identity theme was stressed as well by Democratic members of the panel.

The hearing containing these exchanges and related bits of by-play was shown on TV and thereafter re-broadcast in part by Edward R. Murrow on his CBS program, “See It Now.” The thrust of this reportage was that Mrs. Moss was a pitiful, dazed and harried victim smeared by the nefarious McCarthy. Such also is the standard version of the matter found in countless histories of the era.

Unfortunately for the standard version, and for Mrs. Moss, she gave herself away in testifying—volunteering one of the addresses where she had lived as 72 R St., S.W., in the District of Columbia. This went to the question of whether she was the individual named by Markward, who had seen the Communist Party records but not Mrs. Moss in person. The question would be resolved four years later when the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) obtained the records of the D.C. party—and there found an Annie Lee Moss, of 72 R St. S.W., listed as a party member in the middle ’40s.

Proof Positive on Moss

These records made the matter quite open and shut, rendering moot attempts to discredit Mrs. Markward, arguing that there were three different Annie Lee Mosses in the phonebook, and other such rhetorical smokescreens. Whether Mrs. Moss was as befuddled as she appeared, or had been recruited into the party without knowing what she was doing, are debatable issues. What isn’t debatable is that this particular Annie Lee Moss, and no other, had been listed in official Communist records as a party member. The Markward testimony to McCarthy was 100% on target.

Senate historian Ritchie’s take on all of this is of interest, as he is the authority everyone else is quoting. In a fairly lengthy discussion of the case, he throws in a 24-word reference to the findings of the SACB, but so handled as to becloud them. He says the board confirmed Markward’s identification of Moss, but immediately adds that “the board conducted no further investigation of Moss” and that thereafter it had said “Markward’s testimony should be assayed with caution.” These comments can only suggest to readers that there is some serious doubt about the Moss case—the more so as Ritchie follows up with an extended eulogy to Moss offered by a liberal writer, attesting to her blameless nature.

These comments, however, are thoroughly misleading. For one thing, the point of this particular SACB inquiry wasn’t to investigate Moss, but to gauge the credibility of Markward. There was no intent or reason for the SACB to investigate Moss beyond the acquisition of the Communist Party records, so Ritchie’s gratuitous comment about “no further investigation” is a red herring. No such further investigation of Moss had been in prospect.

Likewise, the SACB comment about viewing Markward’s evidence with caution pertained to other matters entirely (her report of a Communist bigwig’s speech, compensation by the FBI), and specifically did not pertain to Moss, as the board would stress in frequent comments. (E.g., “the Communist Party’s charge that Markward gave perjurious testimony was not substantiated. Consequently, Mrs. Markward’s credibility is in no way impaired by the Annie Lee Moss matter.”)

In short, while the Communist Party had sought to raise doubts about Markward’s accuracy and expertise, the Moss case was repeatedly cited by the SACB as a clear instance in which Markward obviously knew whereof she spoke, thus bolstering her credibility. Nobody could possibly figure this out from the account supplied by Ritchie.

The most charitable explanation of all this is that the Senate historian indeed hasn’t read the primary sources, but instead seems to have lifted his discussion of the matter primarily from Thomas Reeves, author of a widely cited book about McCarthy. As Reeves’ convoluted wrap-up on Moss is itself misleading, so must be any treatment premised on it.

I have dwelt on this episode, perhaps unduly, because it was the only one I got to discuss with Ritchie before he cut me off, and also because it is one of the more famous of McCarthy’s cases. Given the prominence of the matter in the mythology about Joe McCarthy, it is important that the facts about it be set forth clearly in the record. However, numerous other comments by Ritchie are equally unhelpful.

For example, Ritchie suggests that McCarthy haled witnesses indiscriminately before his committee for the flimsiest of reasons, including people who had relatives who were Communists, had belonged to certain unions, and so forth. One McCarthy failing alleged by Ritchie, echoing the Moss dispute, was that he called up people “out of mistaken identity,” a charge reiterated by the historian as subpoenaing someone who “simply had the same name as a Communist.” As it happens, there is one conspicuous case in the record that fits this description, and it is most instructive.

This involved two people connected to activities at Fort Monmouth, a sensitive U.S. Army installation being investigated by McCarthy, both named Louis Kaplan. One of them had been identified as a Communist (and took the 5th Amendment when asked about it), while the other emphatically denied any such affiliation. As the second Louis Kaplan complained, he had been dogged constantly by the mix-up, and had all kinds of trouble with security types dating back to the early ’40s.

This unfortunate confusion was in no way the work of the McCarthy probe, as it had existed for many years before the investigation ever started. Moreover, rather than compounding the error, the committee sought to correct it. The exchanges on this between McCarthy staffers G. David Schine and Roy Cohn and the second Kaplan read in part as follows:

SCHINE: “Mr. Kaplan, of course our committee is interested in obtaining information on government departments and agencies’ efficiency; that means efficiency in both directions. Therefore, we would be just as much concerned with the firing of a capable person unjustly as we would be interested in the retention of one who was a security risk.”

KAPLAN: “If you want to build some morale, check my case rapidly. I think it will help considerably.”

SCHINE: “You have our assurance that we will get Mr. Adams, counselor to the department of Army, to check on this matter and it is going to be resolved very quickly.”

KAPLAN: [some minutes later] “Mr. Cohn, I feel a whole lot better right now. . . .”

Thus there was indeed a mistaken identity in this case, but instead of creating the problem the McCarthy committee set out to fix it. Of course, to know the facts about the matter, one actually has to read the hearings, rather than relying on Ritchie’s comments.

Concerning the larger issue at Fort Monmouth, Ritchie’s introductory statements are also intriguing. The public McCarthy hearings of 50 years ago made it quite clear, and these executive hearings confirm, that Monmouth was a security sieve. This was a matter of great importance, as the complex of laboratories there and related industrial outfits were engaged in top-secret projects involving radar, air defenses, and protection against guided missiles. Security should have been tight in such a set-up, but all too obviously it wasn’t.

As the McCarthy sessions showed, there had long been no effective system for keeping track of confidential papers, and people had been routinely allowed to take such documents off the premises. These conditions were the more disturbing as Monmouth and related labs had been a scene of action for convicted Communist agents Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell, and there were still a phenomenal number of people there who had been associates of this duo in one fashion or another.

A poster child for all these troubles was a high-ranking Monmouth employee named Aaron Coleman, who admitted to having attended a Young Communist League meeting with Rosenberg when they were in college, had dealings with Sobell up through the latter ’40’s, and also had a habit of taking documents from the office. In 1946, Army security agents had searched his apartment and found 43 confidential papers there—a security breach for which he had received a 10-day suspension.

On all of which, the comments of Ritchie in his introduction are telling. Recounting McCarthy’s interrogation of Coleman’s roommate about the papers in their apartment, the historian quotes an exchange in which McCarthy said security agents had “raided” the place, to which the roommate objected, saying it was merely “searched.” McCarthy thought this a quibble, and accused the roommate of covering for Coleman. Ritchie cites this as an instance of McCarthy’s “use of inappropriate or inflammatory words to characterize

[witnesses’] testimony. He took their objections as a sign they were covering up for something.”

In this discussion, Ritchie says not a word about the confidential documents in question, the security breach Coleman committed, the Rosenberg-Sobell connection, or anything of comparable substance. No, the issue to be highlighted is that McCarthy used the word “raided” when he should have used the more neutral “searched”—at least according to Donald Ritchie and Aaron Coleman’s roommate.

Nor is this Ritchie’s only effort to trivialize what had been going on at Monmouth. He notes that “the Soviet Union had been an ally during the Second World War, and during that time had openly designated representatives at the laboratories, making espionage there superfluous.” This ignores the generally acknowledged fact, known to most historians, that World War II ended in 1945, and that the activities that concerned McCarthy had continued up through the early ’50s.

Instances of such treatment of substantive matters by Ritchie might be multiplied indefinitely. He says, for example, that “the subcommittee’s dragnet included a number of perplexed witnesses who had signed a nominating petition years earlier. . . .” Neglected in this bland assertion is that the petitions referred to were petitions for the Communist Party, which explicitly said “I intend to support at the ensuing election” the Communist nominee for office. One might suppose an employee at a sensitive defense-related lab who had signed such a petition would be a legitimate subject for inquiry, or that a historian discussing the matter might trouble to note that the petitions were of this nature.

“Union” Activities

Likewise Ritchie informs us that various people named as Communists at Monmouth had been involved with union issues, and that witnesses who referred to them “invariably described union activities, and none corroborated any claims of subversion and espionage.” In fact, the foremost union activist featured in the hearings was a man named Harry Hyman, who had worked for many years at a Monmouth-connected telecommunications lab and was in continuing contact with its employees. Some of the questions and answers involving this union leader went as follows:

McCARTHY: “Have you ever discussed the subject of espionage with any members of the Communist Party?”

HYMAN: “I decline to answer for all the reasons previously given.”

McCARTHY: “Have you ever discussed any classified material with individuals whom you knew to be espionage agents, or individuals you had reason to believe were espionage agents?”

HYMAN: “I decline to answer for the reasons given.”

McCARTHY: “Have you ever turned government secrets over to anyone known to you to be an espionage agent?”

HYMAN: “I decline to answer on the same grounds.”

McCARTHY: “Did you make 76 calls to the Federal Telecommunications Laboratory at Lodi, N.J., between January 24, 1953, and October 21, 1953, for the purpose of getting classified information and for the purpose of then turning that over to an espionage agent or agents?”

HYMAN: “I decline to answer on the same grounds.”

And so forth and so on at some length—suggesting that the “union activities” of this particular labor leader were perhaps not confined to wages and hours. Again, however, one needs to learn something of the investigation, rather than Ritchie’s summary of it, to know what the relevant facts were. (Actually, these data on Hyman have been available for decades—the exchanges just quoted having appeared in the original public hearings.)

As above suggested, further examples in this vein appearing in historian Ritchie’s comments are legion, but the cases that have been cited are perhaps enough to show the nature of the problem, and have doubtless taxed the reader’s patience already. Nor, by the way, do these observations even begin to show the stunning contrast between the conduct of McCarthy and his staffers and the usual image of false and reckless charges conveyed not only by Donald Ritchie, but by a host of others like him.

More detailed analysis of such matters must await another day. For the moment suffice it to note that what historian Ritchie has provided is “history” only in the sense that one might accord this label to musings of the ACLU, or a lead article in The Nation. How such material could have been given the imprimatur of the U.S. Senate, and printed in an official document of record, is a mystery that needs some looking into.

—Human Events, May 26, 2003, p. 12ff