Free Republic

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) - Pushing an anti-communist crusade that riveted America a half century ago, Joseph McCarthy manipulated his Senate hearings by calling witnesses he could intimidate and ignoring those likely to oppose him, newly released transcripts show.</p> <p>Among the roughly 400 witnesses covered in transcripts of closed door meetings, made public Monday by the Senate, are composer Aaron Copland, New York Times journalist James Reston and Eslanda Goode Robeson, the wife of blacklisted singer-actor Paul Robeson. Some 4,000 pages of newly released documents also show that McCarthy was convinced that many writers, government officials and secretaries had access to classified information.</p>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifty years after Sen. Joe McCarthy conducted some of the most infamous hearings in Senate history, thousands of pages of his secret probes into alleged Communist subversion will finally be made public. Some 5,000 pages of 1953-1954 closed-door hearings from McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will be released Monday by Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. Levin and Collins have both chaired McCarthy's former committee during the past two years as the documents were prepared for release. They plan to issue them in the same Senate hearing room where McCarthy himself...