Washington, D.C.

December, 1950

As ever, fortunes rose and fell on the Hill. From time to time the moment would pluck a figure from the masses and carry them to extraordinary heights. Now, it seemed, fate’s arbitrary hand closed around the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

In February this year, Senator McCarthy made a much-publicized speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. There he uttered the sensational claim that seized headlines nationwide, that the US State Department housed fifty-seven known communists who were working counter to American interests. He cited John S. Service, who had allegedly returned from China to advocate for the sabotage of Chiang Kai-Shek; he spoke more briefly of one Mary Jane Kenney, who worked for the State Department and, now, in the United Nations. He also described the State Department’s efforts to subvert the FBI’s prosecution of Service and other communists, interceding on their behalf when they were caught working for the “communization” of American allies.

American anxiety over communism had been building since the war years, when the uneasy US-Soviet alliance began to get more and more shaky in the opening half of 1945. President Roosevelt’s conciliatory attitude to Joseph Stalin in Yalta and in the terminal months of his life were viewed skeptically, but necessary evil in wartime.

As war ended, the spy revelations began to rock the headlines. Igor Gouzenko in Canada, more recently Alger Hiss-- a high-ranking State Department official and one of the architects of the United Nations-- stole the headlines, but most recently were the arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs had, apparently, been Soviet moles within the American atomic program and now languished in prison as the most public-facing members of a Soviet spy ring that included several other figures. Never mind the constant stream of Hollywood figures being condemned publicly as communist agents-- Dalton Trumbo, the famous screenwriter, had been imprisoned and refused to disavow communism. The continuing drama around Charlie Chaplin’s alleged communist ties burned slowly in the background while a parade of actors and actresses were dragged into the press and attacked for their political affiliations.

Another major story was the State Department’s desperate lobbying of Congress for aid to the Soviet satellite states and, indeed, to the Soviet Union itself in the final months of the Truman Administration in 1948. Congress, of course, was lauded for refusing to pass aid to the USSR. Conversely the press vilified the Truman State Department, however, for pushing so hard to send still more money to a Soviet Union that had already reneged on Lend-Lease repayments.

Re-enter Senator McCarthy into the story. His attack on the State Department in Wheeling in February unzipped a wave of discontent that washed through Congress and, in good time, through the White House.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was, naturally, inoculated against this. His connections in the Washington and New York press worked to cast the Secretary of State as an anticommunist in charge of-- and at odds with-- an organization shot through by communists. This was, broadly, successful. Political pressure mounted instead for the Secretary to do something about it.

McCarthy didn’t stop with John S. Service, though. He was after much bigger fish. Senator McCarthy came for General George Catlett Marshall, Secretary of State during the final months of the Truman Administration, who pushed so hard for Soviet aid.

In a radio interview with Fulton Lewis Jr., Washington D.C.’s biggest conservative radio host, he unloaded on Marshall. Marshall’s State Department was the chief architect of Chiang Kai-Shek’s downfall, according to McCarthy, and it had worked directly for the communization of China. “If Marshall were merely stupid,” McCarthy said, borrowing a line from a speech he’d recently made on the Senate floor, “the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interests.”

Inside the White House, the noise McCarthy made in Congress reverberated through the halls. President Dewey, by any metric a dedicated anticommunist, found a challenge from his political right on his anticommunist bona fides. The Oval Office declined comment on the question of George C. Marshall’s patriotism, though silence only left a vacuum for speculation to fill.

In the end the President issued a memorandum to Secretary of State Dulles requesting a report on communist activities in the State Department and an explanation of potential actions to be taken to correct them. Attorney General Brownell, equipped with information supplied by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover after more than a year of investigating the Federal Government, provided lists of individuals of questionable loyalty to the Secretary of State. Many of these were people believed to be vulnerable to Soviet blackmail-- almost universally they were suspected of homosexual tendencies.

Secretary Dulles set to work implementing strict controls over the State Department with the President’s approval. Employees identified by the FBI as uniquely vulnerable to blackmail were kept under surveillance and excluded from sensitive areas and information, not to mention blacklisted from promotion.

Suspected communists, considered by the Administration a category distinct from the other security risks mentioned before now, were to be thoroughly if covertly investigated and, if found to be sufficiently threatening-- a vague metric, to be sure-- their file would be submitted to the Loyalty Review Board established by President Truman’s Executive Order 9835. From there their careers were in the hands of the Board, and Secretary Dulles pledged to abide by their recommendations. Despite the Administration’s position viewing homosexual and communist security risks as distinct, the two swiftly became intertwined in the meetings of the Loyalty Board. The effect was that the anticommunist aims of the effort to cleanse the State Department crept into an anti-homosexual purge, seeing hundreds of State Department employees provably homosexual being fired for the risk they ostensibly posed.

The Loyalty Review Board’s work helped politically, however, insofar as it established in the public eye a perception that the Federal Government was taking internal security seriously in the first half of 1950.

The Senate, too, began to rumble towards action. The shockingly partisan undertaking of the Tydings Committee, which had inconclusively investigated the State Department in the summer of 1950, had simply served to kick dirt over the Democrats and buffer the anticommunist credentials of many Republicans in the eyes of Americans invested in the anticommunist cause.

Senator McCarthy’s power grew rapidly, and Republicans quickly came to realize that he had become the face of American anticommunism and could not openly be opposed. Through his agitation the Senate established the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, with Nevada Senator Pat McCarran as Chairman and Senator McCarthy a prominent player.

Pat McCarran was a more politically apt than his junior colleague, and manipulated the levers of power skillfully. His anticommunist credentials were unparalleled even by the Senator from Wisconsin. McCarran ran his committee like Hoover ran the FBI in its early years, with tremendous zeal and energy. Subpoenas swiftly began issuing forth from the Subcommittee, and several acrimonious hearings made headlines after McCarran spent hours smearing his unfortunate targets right up to the very line at which he might have been sued for libel or slander.

John S. Service’s turn before the Subcommittee saw his implication in the 1945 Amerasia Affair, wherein he and several other diplomats were charged with espionage after allegedly feeding diplomatic documents to the magazine Amerasia, put back before the public-- the grand jury refusing to indict him was not considered for long in the Subcommittee, and in the press McCarthy continued to assert it was part of a communist conspiracy in State. After the hearing Secretary of State Dulles fired John S. Service outright, abruptly ending his diplomatic career.

Owen Lattimore, a consultant with the State Department employed by the Institute of Pacific Relations, had correctly predicted the failure of the Nationalist Chinese cause-- proof, according to the anticommunists, that Soviet agents were pulling strings in State to ensure the failure of the Kuomintang. Lattimore’s dogged denial of McCarran’s assertions enraged the Nevada Senator, who charged him with perjury. As in Service’s case, the Secretary of State saw the debacle in Congress as good cause to terminate Lattimore’s association with the State Department.

Oliver Edmund Clubb, the present chief of the State Department’s China Desk, was called before the McCarran Committee and accused of close association with the communists-- he had been in Peking acting as consul general right before Mao seized the city, had spent the war in China and the Soviet Far East, and had similarly to Lattimore criticized the Nationalists. His association with Agnes Smedley, the pro-Mao American journalist, and testimony from Whittaker Chambers saw him successfully painted as a communist sympathizer-- he was, like Service, fired for this.

Another victim was a bit more unlikely, John Paton Davies, Jr. Davies’ anticommunism was a bit more evident, he had only recently gone on the record suggesting that the United States launch an atomic attack on the Soviet Union now, before they could respond in kind. Even so he had criticized Chiang Kai-Shek and attracted the ire of the so-called “China Lobby” initiated by T. V. Soong and Congressman Walter Judd. This misstep cost him his career-- a request that he resign was spurned, so the Secretary of State fired him for his “poor judgment.”

The McCarran Committee rolled onward with little interference from the broader Senate or the White House. Critics of the Chinese Nationalists were hauled before Congress and fired as the easiest targets, though several magazine and newspaper editors were called up and dressed down for their pro-communist sentiments. Members of the ill-fated Marshall Mission to try and put an end to the Chinese Civil War had their careers stunted by their hearings, though at the time they did not realize Dulles had blackballed them.

For its part the White House simply played along. Secretary of State Dulles played his role in firing the pro-Mao “China Hands” who’d ostensibly played their role in Chiang Kai-Shek’s downfall last October. An uneasy alliance formed between President Dewey, his Cabinet, Pat McCarran, and Joe McCarthy as this anticommunist crusade built up a head of steam and the President signed into law what became known as the McCarran Internal Security Act in the fall.

Democratic opposition began to mobilize in fits and starts as well. Former Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had worked with many of these men, spoke out in their defense. In his words they were “good men, unfairly maligned, who had delivered inconvenient facts.” Acheson was the most visible agitator, though some more courageous Senate Democrats-- of the liberal wing, naturally-- spoke out in his support.

Republican opposition existed, as well. Privately, Vice President Warren cautioned President Dewey about the dangerous legal waters they were in. Warren contended the White House should practice a deliberate distancing from the McCarran Committee, and enlisted Chief of Staff James Hagerty, Secretary of Labor Wayne Morse, and White House Counsel Bernard M. Shanley to this cause. Collectively they were able to sway the President into believing that McCarran was cruising towards the mother of all libel suits, one the White House would not want anything to do with.

By New Year’s Eve 1950 the Republican Party had more or less lined up behind McCarran and Dulles, with a loud few led by Senator Margaret Chase Smith in opposition. Democrats split as well-- the anticommunist Democrats supported their man McCarran, liberal Democrats offered tepid opposition. For the time being, however, the balance of power lay in McCarran’s favor. The scouring of communists from the US Government continued apace, backed by the powerful machinery of the Department of Justice and Congress. Hundreds of careers were abruptly ended for their liberal or socialist comments in the past, and the State Department continued to lay off hundreds of employees who were accused of communist sympathies or being security risks.

At year's end, then, the perception in January that the Federal Government had taken an ambivalent look at anticommunism since 1945 had been flipped on its head-- in the final three months of 1950, Congress and the White House had taken an exceptionally hard line against it.