99Tiger Wrote:1a) Let's start with him accusing Army officers of being Communists. He made a huge deal of Communists in the Army and never provided any tangible proof...this was the downfall of his career, because it showed that he had nothing.
1b)He accused President Truman of being "a satisfactory front" to the Communist Party.
He accused General Marshall of supporting/helping Communist Russia through his policies and actions, stating in front of Congress in a speech on Marshall:
2) But my counter question to you is...who did McCarthy out as being a Communist spy? Of all of the people on his list of 205 that he initially bragged about (later reduced to 81), how many of them were ever convicted of anything related to espionage or the Communist Party? Most of the 81, did lose their jobs, but to the best of my knowledge, no charges were ever brought forth.
Alright I split it into a couple of parts, but first I think I should reclarify a statement, or misconception: McCarthy was not simple looking for spies, but potential security risks (i.e. members of the CPUSA within the government). He was assigned to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, whose job it was to find subversive activity within the Government.
1a) Like I said, give me a name, and one other than Irving Peress.
1b) These people you named weren't accused as communists by McCarthy. Calling something a sympathizer is one thing, and I hardly doubt that hurt their careers (though I don't recall reading about McCarthy going after Marshall) not to mention that John F. Kennedy also criticised Roosevelt, Marshall, and "our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks," for failing to take a hard stand, especially abondoning Chiang Kai-Shek in China.
2a) He claimed to have a list of 57, but no one knows who was on the original list, since he never shared it with anyone. The 205 is just a mathematical game done to try and "prove" that McCarthy was making up numbers as he went. In his Wheeling speech, McCarthy referred to a letter that Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Congressman Adolph Sabath in 1946. In that letter, Byrnes said that State Department security investigators had declared 284 persons unfit to hold jobs in the department because of communist connections and other reasons, but that only 79 had been discharged, leaving 205 still on the State Department's payroll. McCarthy told his Wheeling audience that while he did not have the names of the 205 mentioned in the Byrnes letter, he did have the names of 57 who were either members of or loyal to the Communist Party. On February 20, 1950, McCarthy gave the Senate information about 81 individuals - the 57 referred to at Wheeling and 24 others of less importance and about whom the evidence was less conclusive. Yet when in Congress, McCarthy did not refer to people by their names but instead, by their case numbers. There was also a congressional commitee dedicated to verifying how many names McCarthy had claimed, and they came back with the conclusion that is was 57.
2b) I don't know if these people were on his list (nor a way to verify), but Annie Lee Moss, Irving Peress, Laurence Duggan, Reinhold Niebuhr, to name a few.
2c) Whether you agree with it or not, it was actually illegal to be a member of the communist party for some time after 1948ish. I'll find a link later if I can rediscover it.
For more info on Soviet espionage in the US, check out
Venona : Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr (I personally own this and it has an entire list of names and their code callsigns in the back, and its literally a list). And for more on McCarthy, a very thorough report: <a href='http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/1777/mccarthy.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senat...77/mccarthy.htm</a>. And if you have a ton of time: <a href='http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/McCarthy_Transcripts.htm' target='_blank'>http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/histor...Transcripts.htm</a>. I spent 3 solid months doing research on McCarthy, and did a full 2-hour presentation on him this year. I would send you the presentation if I wasn't locked out of my user profile on my school's server.
The bottom line is (distorted over time and with the "evolution" of the mantra Communist Party within the US): the Communist party is dedicated to the overthrow of the US government by any means necessary (i.e. violence), and it was incredibly dangerous to have people whose first loyalty was to the communist movement in positions of power within the US government and taking orders from the KGB and Kremlin. The US made a huge mistake in ignoring this subversive activity of the Cold War era (Repubs and Dems alike), yet people continue to condemn the most important person in the anti-subversive movement instead of admitting they were wrong.
NOTE: Its late, so this may have a couple of typos. :snore:
