McCarthy's dirty work done off-camera, papers reveal

Mercury News ^ | 5/6/03 | Dick Polman - Knight Ridder

[NormsRevenge]

It now turns out that Joseph McCarthy, the witch-hunting, publicity-hungry senator whose investigative zealotry ruined the reputations of many innocent Americans during the Cold War, was just as contemptuous of civil liberties when the TV cameras were not around.

The transcripts of McCarthy's notorious closed-door hearings had been locked away for 50 years -- until Monday, when the National Archives released 4,000 pages of documentation about one of the darkest periods in American history.

[NormsRevenge]

50 years ago, a US Senator conducted closed and public hearings, condemned by many as mean-spirited and misguided, that sought to investigate and reveal communist infiltration of our government. The following links provide just released information gleaned from the National Archives.

Link to the Senate COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS / PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS page for information now being "disclosed".

WARNING -- These are big files!!!

• S. Prt. 107-84 -- Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations  
  Volume 1    TEXT 5.1M   PDF 2.4M
  Volume 2    TEXT 2.3M   PDF 2.2M
  Volume 3    TEXT 2.4M   PDF 2.2M
  Volume 4    TEXT 2.3M   PDF 2.2M
  Volume 5    TEXT 1.5M   PDF 1.5M
  

  From the New American .. The Real McCarthy Record

  Tailgunner Joe--Patriot Whistleblower or Right-Wing Witch-hunter?

  
  

  Senate unseals McCarthy transcripts
  
  Joe McCarthy Secret Hearings to Be Unveiled Monday

[Toddsterpatriot]

Elected in 1946, McCarthy first made headlines in February 1950, when he publicly blamed failures in U.S. foreign policy on communist infiltration of the government, particularly the State Department. A Senate investigation later dismissed the charges as ``a fraud and a hoax.'' But several events, including the conviction on perjury charges of Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, and the arrest of Julius Rosenberg on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage, helped McCarthy inflame the fears of the ``Red Scare.''

So, Hiss and Rosenberg, real Communist spies were part of a "Red Scare"?

I guess the millions "killed" in China and the USSR could have told us we had nothing to fear from the nice Communists.

[Arthur McGowan]

Fortunately, McCarthy's "Red Scare" of 1950-54 was unnecessary, and the Soviet Union was never a threat, as its collapse shortly after, in 1991, proved.

[martin_fierro]

Wonder how HilLIARy would hold up to this sort of scrutiny.

[50sDad]

Dose Wascully Wepubwicans!

[Future Useless Eater]

Democrats dont dredge up history unless they think they can
use it along with current events to smear Republicans,
or rescue endangered Dims.

Remember the 'coincidence' of how Thomas Jefferson's history
was dug up and rewritten 'just in time' for it to be useful
for the Clinton scandals?

I say that everyone should just drop the McCarthy story.
We all know where the Dims are trying to head with it.

[NormsRevenge]

I hear what you are saying, but do not agree.

This argument is similar to the sentiment of many about the Recall GrayOuT Doofus effort in California. Some folks say why take him down now, let him and the demRats drag the state down and then the Repubs can take over.

Not a good idea in my opinion, a lot of innocents will be taken down as well.

Re: McCarthy and why this now.. Im not too worried aout the demRats making any hay off of it.

The facts have shown that there are commies in the streets and government today. They have been emboldened by all the foreign and domestic support they receive, and if anything, this is one more opprtunity to throw their sorry history in their faces, imo.

But thanks for caring enough to reply. :-)

[ClearCase_guy]

I really don't understand this. I have no law background, so maybe I'm missing the obvious. In the case of a grand jury, won't some of the questions and some of the answers be worthless? So, when the actual trial is held, those questions and those answers will not make an appearance because the lawyers know that there's nothing worth pursuing there.

Isn't that what McCarthy did? When the public hearings occurred, he brought out the stuff that could build his case, and abandoned the stuff that wouldn't help him. What lawyer wouldn't have done the same?

[thatsnotnice]

There were a couple of guys (I think they were professors or historians or reporters or something) that went to Russia and several of the other former Soviet Union countries to do research into whether the USSR was involved in some of the charges McCarthy made.

The one man stayed in Russia doing research and the other came back to the US at some point and was a guest on a radio show. He claimed that at first the Russian government was very helpful and essentially gave them the run of their document storage places. They’d been digging through documents for almost a year and for some reason the authorities started putting restrictions on them and they had to start visiting other former Soviet countries to find things.

Anyway, it was an interesting interview and the man said that there were Russian documents that verified that the USSR had people high up in the US government (and military) feeding them information. They were also preparing to write a book, so they may have been hyping things.

That was 8 - 9+ years ago. I’ve got to go to the library later and I’ll dig around and see if I can find anything. Certainly enough time has lapsed for a book to have been written by now.

[TheCrusader]

"The transcripts of McCarthy's notorious closed-door hearings had been locked away for 50 years -- until Monday, when the National Archives released 4,000 pages of documentation about one of the darkest periods in American history".

"One of the darkest periods in American history"? This is funny! Imagine comparing Joe McCarthy to the Civil War, slavery, WWI, Pearl Harbor and WWII, September 11th, etc? Where do these leftwing writers come up with this stuff? Perhaps the real "darket period of American history", (prior to Islamic terrorism), was the long, anxious period of the Cold War between the Soviet Empire and the U.S. Communism had turned the harmless, backwards Russia into an ever expanding global Superpower of darkness, deception and danger. Gobbling up sattelite nations in Eastern Europe in a mind boggling fashion, and even controlling a surrogate Communist State off the coast of Florida, the "Evil Empire" had spread its errors to China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba. Even France and Italy saw the rise of influence in their own communist parties. Traditionally conservative nations in South America were leaning towards socialism, and the nuclear arms race between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. was growing like the AIDS epidemic in Africa is today. Children were coming home from public schools with mimeographed evacuation plans in the event of thermo-nuclear holocaust. People of modest means were building bomb shelters in their back yards. Communism has infiltrated our public schools, our government, our business, (i.e. Armond Hammer), and even our Churches, (read Bella Dodd's "School of Darkness" - this former Communist leader converted to the Catholic Church and exposed the sinister plot of the Communists). Even Pope Pius XII was writing Encyclicals and Apostolic Letters warning of the grave dangers of Communism. And this left wing wanker who wrote this article has the friggin audacity to claim that it was Joe McCarthy who embodied the darkness in America? I'm sick of this left wing sh-t.

[NormsRevenge]

re: left wing poopoo..

That's why I'm going to pound this "issue" into the ground until JimRob bans me or the black helis get me. ;-)

[NormsRevenge]

Good luck finding it in the public libraries. These kind of books have a way of getting checked out and never returned.

[ckilmer]

the Russian KGB files on record agree with the USA Venona files on record
http://www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/venona_remember.html
Posted by Lonesome in Massachussets to ckilmer
On News/Activism 05/06/2003 9:23 AM PDT #10 of 11

Some more fun:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/622506/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a6dcdd17410.htm

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/711735/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b8cfbf9544a.htm

Books on the venona: The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895262754/qid=1052140583/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-0884201-3667931?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0300077718/ref=pd_sim_books_1/104-0884201-3667931?v=glance&s=books

[NormsRevenge]

Thanks for the links. :-)

[inquest]

Ultimately, none of the 395 closed-door witnesses -- mostly artists, government security workers and clerks -- was jailed. But many witnesses lost their jobs or suffered career setbacks, because McCarthy would later give their names to friendly reporters.

No examples of this, of course. Typical liberal hot air.

[upcountryhorseman]

these Senate hearings were on the right track; It was
later proven by Russian documents revealed after the
fall of communist Russia. Screen Writers, entertainers,
government officials, advisers to presidents were, in
fact, communist sympathizers or agents.

[F.J. Mitchell]

Clap! Clap! Bravo!!! Sarcasm at it finest. But you forgot to define it as sarcasm or assumed that it would be obvious to anyone with an IQ over 19, and that everyone here exceeds that IQ...Wrong!

[John O]

Joe McCarthy bump!

Probably the best Senator to ever come out of Wisconsin. Totally politically incorrect and proud of it.

[Intolerant in NJ]

There were a couple of guys......you may be thinking of Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev and their book The Haunted Wood. They had "unique access to thousands of classified Soviet intelligence dispatches" and integrated these with information from the VENONA transcripts to tell the fascinating story of Soviet spying in the US in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Much of the book details the personal lives of those involved as agents, and what interested me the most was the trivial and venal - or maybe "non-ideological" would be better - reasons so many of them got into the spy game - they were in love with someone who was already an agent, they wanted to go into business in the US and wanted the Russians to bankroll their project, etc. The book leaves little doubt that the infiltration of the government by Soviet agents was at least as pervasive as McCarthy's efforts implied.....

[quietolong]

Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies,.....Or... Joe McCarthy was more right than he ever knew

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/622675/posts