The Red Scare revisited: inside McCarthy files

Long-sealed transcripts of the Joseph McCarthy hearings, released on Monday, amplify much of what is already known about the most notorious investigation in congressional history: how witnesses were badgered - and lives ruined - by charges of communist subversion that proved to be largely groundless.

What is more striking in these transcripts is what the chairman failed to note: the lack of direction to his investigation, subpoena errors, and inept staff work. McCarthy also failed to recount how effectively many witnesses handled the heat.

Such printed testimony may not be as riveting as the 1954 televised Army-McCarthy hearings, watched by 20 million people. Nor is there a moment as seismic as the rebuke from Special Counsel Joseph Welch that marked McCarthy's downfall: "Have you no sense of decency?"

But until the release of these transcripts, many quiet voices of resistance had been largely unheard. They are surfacing as the nation again faces a search for enemies within - the less sensational hunt for terrorists. From secretaries to military brass, McCarthy's targets taunted, parried, even ridiculed their interrogators. Some just said "no." Most were never invited back to testify in public.

One witness the public never got to hear was Sherrod East, an archivist at the National Archives and a founding member of the town council of Greenbelt, Md., a planned town created during the New Deal. He was also one of the few members of the Army's loyalty screening board to testify before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which McCarthy chaired (1953-54). McCarthy was sure that the board's loyalty files would prove his case that subversives were being protected in Army and State Department, and Mr. East looked to him like a communist sympathizer. The evidence: East once sponsored a lawn party at his home to raise funds for anti-fascist Spanish Loyalists.

At a closed session, Roy Cohn, the subcommittee's chief counsel, peppered East with questions: Do you have communist sympathies? Did you know that the doctor in the town's health association was a communist sympathizer? And then the punch line: Could someone "as fooled as you were by communists and communist sympathizers" be in a position to evaluate Army loyalty cases?

East never flinched, nor did he invoke constitutional protections. "I resent, if I may say so, the implication that I can't judge when a man's political complexion, if political is the right word, has a bearing on his duties," he said. The unflappable East was not called back for public testimony.

Despite McCarthy's constant reminders to witnesses that executive sessions are secret, he routinely gave the press his account of the day's events.

And while he informed the 395 witnesses of their right to constitutional protection, he described any attempt to do so as an admission of guilt - and encouraged employers to fire them. The hearings took on the tone of an inquisition. They ranged from investigations into the books in the State Department's overseas libraries, where more than 300 titles were then banned or burned, to allegations of subversion in defense plants, never substantiated.

Page: 1 | 2