Posted on 04/22/2008 3:58:29 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
Thanks for the ping. BUMP-TO-THE-TRUTH!
Yep. The Senate has a fifty year rule. Unfortunately, the official Senate historian took it upon himself to "summarize" McCarthy's era as it had already been written, despite the fact that many of the documents newly available in 2004 supported McCarthy.
There are also FBI FOIA documents shaking loose even at this late date.
During the hearings, McCarthy failed to substantiate his claims that communists had penetrated the Army.
This statement is false. Career military officers were forced out because they agreed (and secretly cooperated) with McCarthy. Contrary to historical claims, Annie Lee Moss was a communist. She was forced to leave shortly after the hearings. What is more, the Army had already briefed the Democrats on the committee that she was a known agent. Nevertheless, the Democrats on the committee created and successfully perpetrated a legend that Moss's case was one of mistaken identity. A shameful duplicity that illustrates all the points I ticked off about Democrats in my earlier post.
He did, however, insinuate that Fred Fischer, a young lawyer at Hale and Dorr, the law firm representing the Army, was a communist sympathizer
McCarthy did not "insinuate" anything. He said flat out that Fred Fischer was a communist. Furthermore, he made this declaration in response to a demand by Welch that McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, should have named a number of communists to the Army rather than to the committee, and the next time he was in possession of the name of a communist he should make it public.
Now the claim of the WSJ writer that McCarthy didn't prove penetration is demonstrably false just by setting the context of this claim: Welch, the counsel for the Army, was admitting that McCarthy's staff did have the names of communists, and he was faulting the Majority for failing to go to the Army with the names!
... because he'd been a member of the National Lawyers Guild at Harvard Law School. Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg had also been a member of the group, which was alleged to be a communist front.
More crap.
There was no "allegation" about the National Lawyers Guild. The NLG was the legal arm of the Communist Party in the United States, and it was very well known. Welch himself recognized this, and outed Fred Fischer weeks before McCarthy did in pages of the the New York Times and sent him home because of his membership in the NLG.
Which makes his famous soliloquy about "having no decency" all the more reprehensible.
Finally, sirs, finally and at long last, it was Joseph Welch who had no decency.
Herewith a letter sent to The Wall Street Journal a week ago in response to the recent anti-McCarthy article by Ronald Kessler.
By way of explanation for the staccato nature of this letter, I was told that I could have 750-800 words to reply to Kessler (whose article ran to 1,059 words). I overran this by 85 words, but even so it's difficult to answer so many misstatements in such a constricted format.
It's significant, for instance, that Kessler (falsely) invokes the authority of Willard Edwards to support his attack against McCarthy. I point out that Edwards said something very different from this hearsay, but couldn't go into the even more important point that he wrote a very extensive defense of McCarthy—devoted mostly to Fort Monmouth—in Human Events for November 10, 1954.
I have held off on circulating this letter until The Wall Street Journal had ample chance to run it. As of today, a week after the letter was received, it hasn't shown up in the Journal, so I am using this alternative method of conveying its contents. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Unreal Ronald Kessler
By M. Stanton Evans
Like many other critics of Joe McCarthy, Ronald Kessler would be more persuasive if he knew something of the subject.
Kessler's Journal essay ("The Real Joe McCarthy," April 22), attacking the Wisconsin senator and taking a sidewise shot at my recent book about him, is an odd amalgam of unverifiable hearsay and a handful of items checkable from the record. It's noteworthy that, on the checkable matters, Kessler is repeatedly, and egregiously, in error.
For openers, there is the bizarre assertion in Kessler's lead that, 54 years ago this April, McCarthy "started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and Communists in the Army." The point is twice repeated in subsequent paragraphs referring to these sessions as McCarthy hearings.
In fact, the hearings that began 54 years ago this April weren't hearings conducted by McCarthy, but hearings in which he was the main defendant, brought on by charges lodged against him by the Army. Kessler has obviously confused these sessions with the Fort Monmouth inquest of the previous year run by McCarthy. Anyone who doesn't know the difference between these two sets of hearings can't be taken seriously as an authority on such topics.
Scarcely better is Kessler's repetition, as supposed fact, of the discredited notion that McCarthy claimed a list of "205 Communists" in the State Department, then crawfished and changed the number to 57. (McCarthy's version was that he never claimed 205, but had said 57 all along.) I devote two chapters to this issue, showing (a) that the alleged documentation of McCarthy's supposed lying about the numbers was a backstage concoction of the State Department, and (b) that the charge of McCarthy's having claimed 205 was debunked in 1951 by investigators for a Democratically controlled committee of the Senate. (Curiously, after the investigators turned in a 40-page report that in essence backed McCarthy, their memo would abruptly vanish—to be recovered later.)
Likewise with the face-value quote of Army Counsel Joseph Welch's lachrymose denunciation of McCarthy for allegedly having outed Welch assistant Frederick Fisher as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, an officially cited Communist front. Omitted from this Welchian morality play—and apparently unknown to Kessler, since he says nothing of it—is that Fisher had already been outed to the press and public as a former member of the Guild—by none other than Joe Welch, six weeks before this set-to with McCarthy.
As to Kessler's hearsay accounts of what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover supposedly said to William Sullivan or what Robert Lamphere then said to Kessler, suffice it to note that these windy generalizations about deceased third parties are uncheckable by their nature. Somewhat more susceptible to proof are comments that McCarthy made false accusations against a host of innocent people (specifics, please) and that the FBI couldn't find any Communists in the State Department to back his charges.
If that were true (which it isn't), then the Bureau was more incompetent than its worst enemies have imagined, as there were indeed Communists in the State Department when McCarthy came along, as shown by the official records. In my book I give a complete list of McCarthy's early suspects, plus now accessible data on many of these cases that show Communist affiliation, hanging out with Moscow spies, identification as Soviet agents in the Venona papers, and so on.
In one notable instance, it's possible to check out Kessler's hearsay stories from the grave, as he quotes a third-party account in which Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune allegedly said McCarthy picked up the "205" number concerning Communists in the State Department from a rumor relayed by Edwards. This, however, is also wrong, as shown by a memorandum on the matter from Edwards himself (provided by his son, Lee). This says McCarthy may have picked up the number 57 (not 205) from an Edwards article listing this number of suspects in the Federal government—a speculation that supports McCarthy's version of the numbers and contradicts the Kessler version.
A final instance to be noted is Kessler's reliance on Senate associate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited the McCarthy executive hearings for publication. Though Kessler quotes Ritchie as an impartial expert, the facts of the matter are quite different. In numerous comments, Ritchie has routinely stacked the deck against McCarthy—most conspicuously and most often in McCarthy's most famous case, that of Annie Lee Moss.
Mrs. Moss, who appeared before McCarthy in March of '54, has been portrayed for 50 years as a mistaken-identity victim because the committee supposedly collared the wrong suspect. Ritchie's treatment of the case, cited to secondary sources, reinforces the standard image of Moss as victim and McCarthy as browbeating tyrant. All of this, however, again is false, as shown by the extensive archives of the FBI and other official records.
When I got Ritchie on the phone I asked if he had by any chance checked out these official sources, rather than simply citing other academics. When I offered to sum up the relevant data proving McCarthy was right about the case, the historian grew irate, said "I am growing very tired of this conversation" and quickly ended our discussion. Such is the supposedly impartial authority quoted by Kessler-all too typical of the recycled error that passes for historical knowledge of McCarthy.
Excellent post.
Having read Treason and Blacklisted by History, I find it annoying when an MSM/Democrat type slanders McCarthy and extremely annoying when a Republican type does it. As Bill Bennet did in America: The Last Best Hope - and as even Thomas Sowell does on his own web site.Sowell suggested that he wanted
"In his research, he always used original sources"on his gravestone. But I just don't believe thatReplies never catch up with accusations, however, as Senator Joe McCarthy demonstrated in his campaign of character-assassination back in the 1950s. http://www.tsowell.com/About_Writing.htmlcan be supported from original sources. I would in fact suggest that it is McCarthy's enemies, rather than McCarthy himself, who demonstrated that "replies never catch up with accusations."
Nice link!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.