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From 1943 until 1980, unbeknownst to virtually everyone, the National Security Agency intercepted every Soviet message going from or to the United States. It was not until 1994 that their existence was even acknowledged, and 1995 when the first 1,400 of 240,000 intercepts were released to the public. Their content was damning and supportive of the contentions of not only McCarthy but Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, Hoover, and others.

The collapse of Communism opened files of not only internal Soviet spy documents but also gave the FBI, CIA, and American scholars access to the files of the American Communist Party that had been hidden in a Russian warehouse since 1950. The cat was out of the clichd bag.

Just who was exposed by these documents. Alger Hiss who had been the number three man at State behind Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk, and who, most assuredly, at some point, would have eventually been Secretary of State. Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who purposely withheld allocated funding for the Chinese Nationalists, during their Civil War, that destroyed their currency and, thus, their efforts against Mao’s Communists.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been conduits for even more damaging information than the atom bomb, for which they were executed. Lauchlin Currie, Special Assistant to F.D.R. Samuel Dickstein, member of the House of Representatives from Brooklyn.

William and Martha Dodd, son and daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1930’s. Lawrence Duggan, State Department Director of Latin American Affairs. Harold Ickes, Sr., father of Clinton’s impeachment flack, who was Secretary of the Interior. Finally, William Weisband, U.S. Army Signal Security Agency. This is just a very few, the most prominent or household names one might say.

Was Robert Oppenheimer, the Director of the Atom Bomb Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, a member of the Communist Party? Quite emphatically, no! His wife was. His brother was. His mistress was. As were many of his closest associates at the University of California. In addition, Oppenheimer was one of those scientists in the 40’s who thought that all scientific information should be shared universally for the good of mankind.

Were any of the aforementioned exposed by McCarthy? Not one. He’d been too late at the spy discovery game. After all, Alger Hiss got Richard Nixon the Vice-Presidency. White had been shifted to that historical ashbin where failures are allowed to “resign” to, the International Monetary Fund.
Just how many did McCarthy catch? Darn few. Of the 10,000 government employees who were exposed as Communists, security risks, or of questionable loyalty and lost their jobs, at the least, only forty can be attributed to McCarthy.

Any of the major players? None, as most had either been moved laterally by Truman or snared by the FBI.

Most of the forty were small time functionaries such as Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, Philip and Mary Jane Keeney, and Howard Shapley; and these were the most prominent. In every case, of the forty, they were all accorded trials and attorneys before their dismissal.

Lattimore had been Director of the School Of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, advisor to FDR on China in 1941, advisor at State in 1946-1947, preached that Mao’s Communists were “agrarian reformers”, in 1948 encouraged George Marshall to stop aid to Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalists, and in 1949 urged U.S. withdrawal from Korea….

…Was he a pillar of virtue? Hardly! He was a dreadful alcoholic and eventually died from cirrhosis of the liver. He was a bully, unkempt, crude, and a lout. He once unmercifully pummeled Drew Pearson, his antagonist in the press, after a dinner party, in the coat room of a Washington doyenne. He had many physical and character shortcomings. But he was right.

Since I am more interested in the MESSAGE and not the MESSENGER, hamfisted tactics and all, I stand by McCarthy.