Wall Street Journal Stonewalls on McCarthy

Human Events, May 12, 2008 by Evans, M Stanton

Readers of these pages may recall that last year I published a book about Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.), the premier Red-hunter of the 1950s, based on long-secret but now available Cold War records: (Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy; Crown Forum. Reviewed in HUMAN EVENTS for Nov. 5, 2007.)

While the main burden of my McCarthy volume was the substance of his charges and what we currently know about them, a subtext was the extent to which the truth about such matters has been covered up in academic and media treatments of the era. In a nutshell, as I show in some detail, there has been a massive falsification of the record, involving the suppression or denial of key data, and flagrant misreporting of crucial episodes by journalists and alleged scholars.

Such misreporting, sad to relate, continues still today-both in responses to my book, and in more general comment on McCarthy. A prime example is a recent anti-McCarthy article in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal, by Ronald Kessler. As I noted in a letter to the Journal, this Kessler piece was an admixture of demonstrable falsehoods and uncheckable bloviations from deceased third parties. My letter briefly citing chapter and verse about these matters reads as follows:

Like many other critics of Joe McCarthy, Ronald Kessler would be more persuasive if he knew something of the subject.

Kessler's Journal essay ("The Real Joe McCarthy," April 22), attacking the Wisconsin senator and taking a sidewise shot at my recent book about him, is an odd amalgam of unverifiable hearsay and a handful of items checkable from the record. It's noteworthy that, on the checkable matters, Kessler is repeatedly, and egregiously, in error.

For openers, there is the bizarre assertion in Kessler's lead that, 54 years ago this April, McCarthy "started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and Communists in the Army." The point is twice repeated in subsequent paragraphs referring to these sessions as McCarthy hearings.

In fact, the hearings that began 54 years ago this April weren't hearings conducted by McCarthy, but hearings in which he was the main defendant, brought on by charges lodged against him by the Army. Kessler has obviously confused these sessions with the Fort Monmouth inquest of the previous year run by McCarthy. Anyone who doesn't know the difference between these two sets of hearings can't be taken seriously as an authority on such topics.

Scarcely better is Kessler's repetition, as supposed fact, of the discredited notion that McCarthy claimed a list of "205 Communists" in the State Department, then crawfished and changed the number to 57. (McCarthy's version was that he never claimed 205, but had said 57 all along.) I devote two chapters to this issue, showing (a) that the alleged documentation of McCarthy's supposed lying about the numbers was a backstage concoction of the State Department, and (b) that the charge of McCarthy's having claimed 205 was debunked in 1951 by investigators for a Democratically controlled committee of the Senate. (Curiously, after the investigators turned in a 40-page report that in essence backed McCarthy, their memo would abruptly vanish-to be recovered later.)

Likewise with the facevalue quote of Army Counsel Joseph Welch's lachrymose denunciation of McCarthy for allegedly having outed Welch assistant Frederick Fisher as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, an officially cited Communist front. Omitted from this Welchian morality play-and apparently unknown to Kessler, since he says nothing of it-is that Fisher had already been outed to the press and public as a former member of the Guild-by none other than Joe Welch, six weeks before this set-to with McCarthy.

As to Kessler's hearsay accounts of what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover supposedly said to William Sullivan or what Robert Lamphere then said to Kessler, suffice it to note that these windy generalizations about deceased third parties are uncheckable by their nature. Somewhat more susceptible to proof are comments that McCarthy made false accusations against a host of innocent people (specifics, please) and that the FBI couldn't find any Communists in the State Department to back his charges.

If that were true (which it isn't), then the bureau was more incompetent than its worst enemies have imagined, as there were indeed Communists in the State Department when McCarthy came along, as shown by the official records. In my book I give a complete list of McCarthy's early suspects, plus now accessible data on many of these cases that show Communist affiliation, hanging out with Moscow spies, identification as Soviet agents in the Venona papers, and soon.

In one notable instance, it's possible to check Kessler's hearsay stories from the grave, as he quotes a third-party account in which Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune allegedly said McCarthy picked up the "205" number concerning Communists in the State Department from a rumor relayed by Edwards. This, however, is also wrong, as shown by a memorandum on the matter from Edwards himself (provided by his son, Lee). This says McCarthy may have picked up the number 57 (not 205) from an Edwards article listing this number of suspects in the Federal government-a speculation that supports McCarthy's version of the numbers and contradicts the Kessler version.