The Red Scare revisited: inside McCarthy files

Stanley Berinsky, a worker for the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, N.J., was grilled about the political affiliations of his mother. "Did you ever ask her if she was a communist? ...When you went to see her, weren't you curious?" Some 42 engineers were suspended as a result of this investigation, and 40 were later offered their jobs back.

While the mantra of McCarthy's public hearings was the question: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" the most recurring phrase in these executive sessions was: "In other words...," says Senate associate historian Donald Ritchie. This phrase always prefaced "the chairman's relentless rephrasing of witnesses' testimony into something with more sinister implications than they intended," he says.

By making these transcripts available, "we hope that the excesses of McCarthyism will serve as a cautionary tale for future generations," said Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine, who currently chairs the subcommittee on investigations, as she released these documents Monday.

Senate historians also compared what McCarthy told the press with the transcript records. "In most cases, it was grossly exaggerated," says Mr. Ritchie, who directed the two-and-a-half year effort to transcribe and edit the stenographic transcripts.

The transcripts also show the full scope of the committee's blunders. Sometimes witnesses were summoned merely because their names resembled those of suspected communists. It produced exchanges such as: "Have you ever been known as Louis Kaplan?" Answer: No. And this question to the next witness: "Could you identify Louis Kaplan? ... Have you seen him today in the witness room? Answer: "No, I haven't seen him in years."

The transcripts confirm critical comments by Mr. Cohn and the assistant counsel, Robert Kennedy, who resigned from the committee and was rehired as minority counsel for the Democrats. "No real research was ever done," wrote Kennedy in his 1960 memoir, "The Enemy Within." Chief counsel Cohn describes his investigation into subversive books in State Department libraries abroad as "a colossal mistake."

Many of the authors of banned books produced some of the most memorable moments in the secret sessions.

Asked to shorten his responses, poet Langston Hughes replied: "I would much rather preserve my reputation and freedom than to save time." Writer Eslanda Goode Robeson invoked the protection both of the Fifth and the 15th Amendments. "I am a second-class citizen in this country and, therefore, feel the need of the Fifteenth. That is the reason I use it. I am not quite equal to the rest of the white people," she said.

Page: 1 | 2