McCarthy Transcripts released

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Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who lent his name to the infamous search for Communists 50 years ago, used closed-door hearings to select witnesses who would make him appear powerful and commanding in public, according to newly released transcripts of the secret sessions.

 

Those most likely to grovel or bend to his intimidating tactics were called back. Those who defied McCarthy were rejected, the transcripts released Monday reveal.

 

"McCarthy was only interested in the people he could browbeat publicly," said Donald Ritchie, the associate Senate historian who spent more than two years editing the record for public consumption.

 

The Senate's Government Affairs Committee--its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was headed by McCarthy--released the documents because a 50-year secrecy provision has expired.

 

Not surprisingly, McCarthy is revealed to be a bully who frequently twisted the words of witnesses and often threatened them with charges of perjury.

 

The transcripts cover 160 sessions with 500 witnesses. They show McCarthy interrogating everyone from low-level government bureaucrats to Army officers and cultural and scientific figures such as composer Aaron Copland, chemist Eslanda Goode Robeson, author Dashiell Hammett, artist Rockwell Kent and poet Langston Hughes to find out if they were members of the Communist Party, USA.

 

McCarthy lectured Copland.

 

"Those who underestimate the work the staff has done in the past end up occasionally before a grand jury for perjury," McCarthy said. "So I suggest when counsel questions you about these matters that you tell the truth or take advantage of the 5th Amendment."

 

Copland denied being a Communist and said he had never attended any Communist meetings. The composer stood his ground and complained about the short notice to appear before the committee, and he was among those who was never called to testify publicly.

 

Ritchie said the documents will provide new fodder for historians seeking to better understand an era that was so entwined with McCarthy's search for Communists and Communist sympathizers that any attempt to unfairly smear an individual's reputation became known as McCarthyism.

 

The closed-door sessions also gave McCarthy the ability to control coverage of his activities, as he selectively provided information to reporters about questions and answers they had not witnessed firsthand.

 

"There was always a lot of suspicion that he was grossly exaggerating what went on in those sessions, and now we have the proof that he was grossly exaggerating," Ritchie said. "He gave everything this sinister twist to it."

 

The transcripts reveal that McCarthy and his associates targeted what they termed "Communist books" and "Communist authors," focusing on the willingness of the Departments of State and Defense to stock their overseas libraries with such works.

 

Among those subpoenaed to testify to the communist nature of their books was famed detective story writer Dashiell Hammett, author of "The Thin Man" and "The Maltese Falcon."

 

Hammett, an ardent anti-fascist who served as an enlisted man in World War I and World War II, was asked repeatedly if he was a Communist. He had belonged to the Communist Party in his youth and was a supporter of the communist-leaning Republican side in the 1936-1938 Spanish Civil War.

 

He replied, "I decline to answer on the ground that the answer would tend to incriminate me, pleading my rights under the 5th Amendment." Hammett gave the same reply when asked if any of his book income went to the Communist Party.

 

Artist Rockwell Kent, a lifelong left-wing activist and leading figure in the publication of the radical periodical The Masses, was called before the subcommittee for similar reasons and invoked the 5th Amendment when asked if he was a Communist.

 

He also was asked if he had donated royalty money to the Communist Party.

 

"I gave it as a matter of being so damned mad at something that happened that I thought, `Where can I give that money that the people the money came from hated most?'" Kent explained. "I looked it up in the New York telephone directory and gave it to the Communist Party."

 

Although Democrats boycotted McCarthy's hearings and some Republicans sought to distance themselves from McCarthy's tactics, Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) questioned Langston Hughes, the African-American writer and poet, about his yearlong trip to the Soviet Union and his membership in the League of American Writers.

 

Counsel Roy Cohn questioned Hughes about the meaning of his poetry, including one that read, "Rise, workers, and fight, audience, fight, fight, fight, fight, the curtain is a great red flag rising to the strains of Internationale."

 

When asked if he believed the message of what he wrote, Hughes said he did not.

 

"That is a poem. One cannot state one believes every word of a poem," Hughes said, repeatedly adding that there is not a simple yes or no answer to questions of literary meaning.

 

Subcommittee members were flustered in their attempts to question Eslanda Goode Robeson, a chemist, actress and wife of black actor, singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. She pleaded not only the 5th Amendment, which governs possible self-incriminating testimony, but also the 15th, which deals with black voting rights.

 

When pressed to say whether she was a Communist, Robeson declared, "I have been brought up to seek protection under the 15th Amendment as a Negro."

 

"The 15th Amendment has nothing to do with it," said McCarthy. "That provides the right to vote."

 

She replied: "I understand it has something to do with my being a Negro and I have always sought protection under it."

 

McCarthy countered, "Negro or white, Protestant or Jews, we are all American citizens here, and you will answer the question as such. The question is: Are you a Communist today?"

 

Robeson repeatedly told McCarthy she was confused, but when McCarthy threatened to have her cited for contempt, she replied, "Well, my answer is, `Yes,'" and went on to say she considered herself a "good American."

 

Robeson and Hughes later were called to testify at the committee's public hearings.

 

But the open hearings with carefully selected participants ultimately backfired on McCarthy. The senator's undoing came in 1954 with the nationally televised hearings in which McCarthy probed for Communists in the Army's ranks, alienating much of the public.

 

He was censured by the Senate and booed off the political stage, and his crusade came to an end. He died an alcoholic three years later. In 1957, the Supreme Court ruled that witnesses before congressional committees are entitled to their full constitutional rights, and now his crusade is widely viewed as a witch hunt that destroyed lives, mostly through blacklisting.

 

Monday's unsealing of the transcripts is the largest release of McCarthy-related documents to date. Senate rules say records related to personal privacy, national security or investigative materials can be sealed 50 years.

 

"By providing broad public access to the transcripts from this era, we hope that the excesses of McCarthyism will serve as a cautionary tale for future generations," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairwoman of the Government Affairs Committee, which authorized the transcripts' release.

 

"Basically what it shows is what we already know. He never caught a living, breathing Communist," said David Oshinsky, a history professor at the University of Texas and the author of a McCarthy biography, "A Conspiracy So Immense."

 

"There's just nothing there that would lead you in any way to say, `Wow, McCarthy really had something here,"' Oshinsky said. "Witnesses may talk more, but what they are saying is no value to the notion of a communist conspiracy."

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