II

The Hiss verdict came on January 21, 1950. Truman announced his hydrogen bomb decision on January 31. The Fuchs arrest occurred on February 3. And on February 9, Joe McCarthy gave a speech that hit like a thunderclap and cemented his place in U.S. history textbooks forevermore. In a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, before the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club, McCarthy declared, “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—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” He had no evidence, either then or in the days that followed, when in his speeches the number dropped to fifty-seven, then rose to eighty-one, then became “a lot.” McCarthy in fact had no list, and almost certainly had no proof that anyone in the State Department actually belonged to the Communist Party.14

It’s not even clear that McCarthy had any real interest in either espionage or Communism. “Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx,” journalist George Reedy, who was later an aide to Lyndon Johnson, memorably remarked. Facing lagging popularity at home in Wisconsin and the prospect of a tough reelection battle two years away, McCarthy needed an issue with which to revive his political fortunes.15 He felt sure he’d found it. He was at bottom a salesman, an actor, someone for whom accuracy mattered far less than attention, and he had a talent for imagining subversion and conspiracy and for humiliating the scared and vulnerable. A lazy man unwilling to do the work required to back up his claims, he relied on allusion and inference. But he was also shrewd: he understood the resentments and fears that existed just below the surface in many people—resentment of the elites, fears of the other—and indeed felt them himself.16 Like all demagogues, he knew that people sought simple answers for why the world seemed not to be going their way, knew that he could captivate them by appealing to emotion rather than intellect. And he understood that merely by making bombastic claims he sent the message that there must be some truth to the claim that the government was teeming with traitors secretly taking orders from the Kremlin.17

McCarthy’s timing was right, moreover, for the national fever that had been building for years rose sharply with the twin shocks and the espionage cases. And indeed, McCarthy’s Wheeling remarks and those that immediately followed (in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno) gained him the headlines he craved—reporters knew both that he was a shameless fabulist and that sensational stories sell papers. (The wilder the charge, the bigger the headline.) Rarely did journalists press him to back up his claims with evidence. He moved copy; that was all that mattered.18

Still, the reporters who covered him could see what he was doing, could see that he always kept his claims deliberately vague, that he cared only about gaining publicity, which meant issuing a steady stream of new claims, new accusations. When caught in a lie, he never apologized or recanted; he attacked his accuser or simply moved on to another target. “Talking to Joe was like putting your hands in a bowl of mush,” said Reedy, who found the experience of covering McCarthy for the United Press so loathsome that he quit journalism.19 Insecure and eager to please, and saddled with a serious drinking problem (he liked nothing more than to pal around with reporters in bars in the evenings), McCarthy was perfectly willing to give the pressmen around him a story when they needed one, if necessary by conjuring up some new charges. If the reporters wanted to know what the party leadership was contemplating on this or that issue, McCarthy happily called up Senator Taft’s office and asked him questions while the journalists listened in silently on an open receiver.20

“McCarthyism” was the name later given to the senator’s antics, a term signifying a ruthless search for Communists, publicly and with little or no evidence, and in a manner that savaged the reputations of its targets. So ubiquitous did McCarthy become that it was easy to forget that the phenomenon had existed before him—since 1946–47 in its new incarnation, and in a different, lesser form since an initial “Red Scare” immediately after World War I. But undeniably, the Wisconsin senator gave this second Red Scare added fuel.

McCarthy’s position was further strengthened by the sudden outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula in late June 1950. Colonized by Japan in 1910, Korea had been divided in two by the Soviet Union and the United States after Japan’s defeat in 1945, with the Soviets in control of the land north of the thirty-eighth parallel and the Americans in charge in the south. The division was supposed to be temporary, but as Cold War tensions deepened, the split persisted. Both the North’s Communist leader, Kim Il Sung, and the South’s president, the U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee, sought to take control of a reunified Korea. Kim struck first; on June 25, after securing the reluctant approval of Stalin and Mao, he sent his troops across the parallel into the South. In short order they captured the southern capital of Seoul and appeared well positioned to march all the way down the peninsula and hand Kim control over the entire country.21

The invasion caught Washington by surprise, but Truman responded rapidly. He deployed U.S. forces to South Korea to repel the invasion, and got the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the North’s attack and summoning member states to send their own troops. (The Soviet representative was unable to veto the resolution because the Soviets were boycotting the UN in protest of its refusal to grant membership to the People’s Republic of China.) In this way the defense of South Korea became a UN operation, albeit one led and dominated by the United States. Truman called the military effort a “police action,” which allowed him to avoid going to Congress for a declaration of war. Following a brilliant amphibious landing at Inchon, on the west coast of Korea, more than a hundred miles behind North Korean lines, UN forces under General Douglas MacArthur reversed the tide of battle in the late summer and proceeded to march north, beyond the original demarcation line. In so doing, MacArthur went beyond the UN directive, which authorized only the defense of South Korea, but Truman gave his commander the go-ahead; the president sensed an opportunity to score a complete victory and rebut GOP charges that he had “lost China” the previous year. Onward MacArthur’s units drove, toward the Yalu River and the Chinese frontier, until Chinese troops suddenly attacked in massive force in November, driving UN and South Korean forces southward once again. Gradually, a stalemate set in near the original demarcation line at the thirty-eighth parallel.

As the fighting in Korea ramped up, so did McCarthy’s rhetorical blasts. With U.S. troops being shot at by North Korean and Chinese Communists, few observers in or out of government were brave enough to condemn him. Few registered any objection when he attributed the loss of China and the failure to win a swift victory in Korea to the “pretty boys” and “homos” in the State Department, “with their silver spoons in their mouths.” Many GOP lawmakers indeed welcomed his crusade, even if they privately thought it extreme, because he targeted almost solely Democrats and liberals and because they could see that his portrayal of these individuals as privileged and soft elites hit home with a lot of voters in Middle America. That year McCarthy received hundreds of invitations to speak on behalf of Republican candidates, more than all of his Senate colleagues combined.22

The rare colleague who tried to take him on did so at personal peril. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a freshman Republican from Maine and a moderate, learned this firsthand in early June 1950 when she condemned McCarthy’s methods in a speech titled “The Declaration of Conscience.” The American people “are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents,” Smith proclaimed. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.”23 McCarthy hit back hard, mocking her and the Senate co-sponsors of her declaration as “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Millard Tydings, the conservative Maryland Democrat who had publicly opposed McCarthy after his subcommittee found that McCarthy’s first charges against the State Department were bogus, got labeled an “egg-sucking liberal” and a “Commiecrat.” Soon all the co-sponsors except Wayne Morse, an iconoclastic Republican from Oregon (he would later become an independent, and still later a Democrat), drifted away from Smith, and she herself eventually beat a quiet retreat. Tydings lost his bid for reelection that fall, after McCarthy loyalists smeared him by distributing a composite image depicting him as an ally of Earl Browder, leader of the American Communist Party.24

John F. Kennedy was not one of the six dwarves. Quite the contrary, in 1950 he offered his own criticisms of Truman’s and Acheson’s handling of the Chinese Civil War, and his own gripes that the administration had been insufficiently vigilant in combating espionage. He thought Hiss guilty as charged and believed that Truman’s fiscal prudence undermined military preparedness. Kennedy also voiced reservations about Truman’s decision to commit combat units to Korea—he feared that U.S troops were being spread too thin, threatening the nation’s ability to thwart Communist expansion in other, more vital areas, especially in Europe, where, he pointed out, the Red Army had eighty divisions to NATO’s twelve. When American forces suffered a string of early defeats in Korea, Kennedy saw it as proof of “the inadequate state of our defense preparations,” and he advocated raising taxes to pay for the war and the broader military buildup. That fall, in a seminar at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration (later to be renamed the John F. Kennedy School of Government), he offered candid observations about U.S. foreign policy and the men behind it. He was critical of the leadership of Dean Acheson, he told the students, and said President Truman had been mistaken in vetoing the McCarran Act, which mandated the registration of Communists and Communist-front organizations and provided for their internment in the event of a national emergency. (Congress overrode the veto almost immediately.)25

More than that, Kennedy knew Joe McCarthy and got on well with him. He was a fellow Irish Catholic who, like Jack, had served in the South Pacific during the war (they may have first met in the Solomons) and who had come around for dinners at the Georgetown home in 1947, when both men were new on Capitol Hill.^*2 Jack got a kick out of McCarthy’s affability and energy on these evenings, and Eunice, too, welcomed his presence. McCarthy’s penchant for profanity didn’t bother Jack; he himself could curse like the sailor he had once been. In due course McCarthy would squire both Eunice and on occasion her sister Patricia to evening events in Washington and Boston, and would visit the Kennedys in Hyannis Port. He attended Robert Kennedy’s wedding to Ethel Skakel in Greenwich, Connecticut, in June 1950. At Eunice’s birthday party on the Cape the following month, the Kennedy siblings “gave [McCarthy] the boat treatment, i.e. throwing him out of the boat, and then Eunice, in her usual girlish glee pushed him under,” Rose reported in a letter to the newlyweds. “To everyone’s concern and astonishment, the senator came up with a ghastly look on his face, puffing and paddling. The wonder of it all was that he did not drown on the spot because, you see, coming from Wisconsin, he had never learned to swim.” On another Hyannis Port visit, McCarthy played shortstop for Team Kennedy in a softball game on the family lawn against a squad of neighbors, promptly committed four errors, and was retired to the porch. (Jack, too, ended up on the porch early in the game, his back problem flaring up.)26

Joseph P. Kennedy in particular took a shine to McCarthy, admiring the very things others found so unpleasant: the brashness, the no-holds-barred attacks on the political establishment, the contempt for genteel manners and diplomacy. He himself could be said to possess these attributes, albeit to a milder degree. The Ambassador also relished McCarthy’s rowdy amiability whenever they were together, and he shared his disdain for left-wingers and his love of gossip. “In case there’s any question in your mind,” Kennedy told an interviewer years later, in 1961, “I liked Joe McCarthy. I always liked him. I would see him when I went down to Washington, and when he was visiting Palm Beach he’d come around to my house for a drink. I invited him to Cape Cod.” On occasion the Ambassador even called McCarthy to offer advice on political tactics and strategy. At no point, it seems, did he indicate concern for the victims of the senator’s attacks.27

McCarthyite tactics were everywhere in the midterm elections in 1950. In Florida, George Smathers defeated his mentor, Senator Claude Pepper, in an ugly, bruising, red-baiting primary before coasting to victory in the general election. “Joe [Stalin] likes him and he likes Joe,” Smathers said of Pepper. In the Senate race in California, Richard Nixon, who had studied Smathers’s tactics, hammered his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a fellow traveler who was hopelessly leftist. (She was “pink right down to her underwear,” he said, sexism as much a part of his tactics as red-baiting.) Nixon won handily. In Illinois, Republican Everett Dirksen beat Democratic incumbent senator Scott Lucas, vowing to clean house on Communists and their supporters. And in New York, in a losing race for the Senate, John Foster Dulles said of his opponent, Herbert Lehman, “I know he is no Communist, but I also know that the Communists are in his corner and that he and not I will get the 500,000 Communist votes that last year went to Henry Wallace in this state.”28