[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[John O]

Joe McCarthy bump!

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

[cynicom]

Flushed out a lot of "democrats" that wore pink underwear, did he not??

[DPB101]

McCarthy . . . spent considerable time behind closed doors trying to determine if artists -- such as Howard Fast, Aaron Copland, Dashiell Hammett and Langston Hughes -- were trying to send subliminal communist messages.

Outright distortion of the testimony. Congress was investigating in the first place because $130 million a year in taxpayer money was being spend on books, radio programs and cultural events in Europe to advance a positive image of America and fight a PR war with the USSR.

Copland, Hammett, Hughes and others benefitted financially from these programs. The committee wanted to know if American taxpayers were funding those who were communists while we were trying to fight communism.

The committee did not call Joe Six Pack. Everyone called was tied into a government program one way or the other.

Volume 1 has a fascinating account of goose down purchases by the US government. Goose down was a strategic material. We were building a stockpile of goose down. We spent $30 million buying goose down, mostly from communist China. That was a lot of money in the early 1950s. The only other material we spent more on for our reserve was castor oil.

McCarthy wanted to know why the purchase was not put out to competitive bid and why the books of the American companies which handled the transactions were never examined. At one point, we were paying Communist China over twice what we could have bought the goose down for on the open market.