An American ism: Joe McCarthy; Part 1

The following program was made possible by a grant from this station, other public television stations, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The program was made possible by a grant from this station, other public television stations, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The program was made possible by a grant from this station, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In the midst of the dull spot of a Pacific War, one would sit around and bow for hours at a time,

and I must have listened to Joe McCarthy's reminences and his dreams and for the future. You know, 20, 30, 40 hours at a clip that there wasn't that much else to do, and it's true that Joe was very self-conscious about wanting to do something in politics after the war, and he talked about that. There wasn't anything particularly special about it, except that, obviously, Joe was giving it some thought, and when he left the bench, he tried to figure out he told me, what would be the best thing you could do to have a good war from a political point of view, and he was very much torn between the Army Air Force and the Marine Corps. So, when he found out that there was a program where he could be with the aviation Marines, he thought that he'd hit the jackpot. Well, I tried to teach him how to become a gunner. Well, I taught him how to shoot the machine gun and sit in the seat and time himself in, and he took a few flights when a pilot would take him or when a gunner was sick or killed,

every once in a while, would give him a little run. I wasn't too good a teacher because the gun wasn't synchronized correctly, he shot the tail off the plane. There wasn't any flight, it was just, we were practicing shooting down trees. One Communist on the faculty of one university is one Communist too many. One Communist among the admirers, American advisors at Yolta, was one Communist too many. And even if there were only one Communist in the State Department, even if there were only one Communist in the State Department, that would still be one Communist too many. I knew Joe McCarthy, I knew Joe McCarthy the man,

I knew Joe McCarthy the senator, and I think I got to know Joe McCarthy theism. Well, there's only one way that you can find out about Joe McCarthy or anything else. You got to investigate it. You want to find out about Joe McCarthy, you got to go back where he came from, you got to go back to Wisconsin, you got to find out what made him tick, what made him run, what motivated him. And then you got to follow his career right on through to the end. And if you will do that, you just might be able to come up with a lesson that will have historical importance. I don't intend to try to fight communism and corruption, State Department fashion with a still caricature can't be done. And I intend to continue fighting it with constant fashion on that basis I ask for your vote.

The McCarthy Farm is a quarter of a mile west, and one mile north is a great where I understand you know. There were seven McCarthy children and Joe was a fifth child in the family and was the first child born in this house.

Tim McCarthy was a very good man. Always neat and trim, not too large a man. And Joe's mother Bridget was a little heavier type of woman. Never did I detect anything that wasn't just genuine among so many. But he was remarkably bright. I had a sister who had him in the great school for three years. And she was amazed. Well, he lived in the town of Grand Shoots. I recall the name of the road at that time, now it's called McCarthy Road. But the family homestead was out there. And then every time that we needed eggs, we'd call them a McCarthy Farm and Joe would bring them in, or sometimes Howard. And he sold eggs to many of the mom and pop stores that were most common in those days. But I was in the grocery business and buying eggs from the farmers

that was part of the trade. And Joe came in one day and he said, well, I've got to make for sale. I said, okay, Joe, how many you've got? He says, I've got more eggs than you want, more eggs than you can handle. I'm going to have 10,000 chickens before I get through. I said, well, how many you've got now? He says, right now my flock is in the neighborhood of 2,000 chickens. This seemed like a man from Mars. It didn't seem realistic at the time because so many people had chickens. They would have 50s or 100 chickens and it was a big flock. But not with Joe. He wanted a flock that was a flock and his ambition was to get 10,000 chickens. So I started buying eggs from Joe. Joe came into town and saturday to market his eggs. Appleton is a paper no town. Basically a German population with a overlay of Irish and a few wasps. Oh, it was a very peaceful place, Appleton. I first met Joe McCarthy when I was about 10 years old. We knew something different about him.

He was a heck. He wore overalls, bib overalls, and the days when those weren't popular. We saw him as some kind of a target that we like to tease. But Joe was an awkward boy. He was an awkward acting and awkward looking. He was always doing the wrong thing. He came here with the idea of managing a grocery store. He and his sister. And I think this was the main intent. But years later, Joe said to me, you remember honor of the day you came in? You jumped up on the counter and you said, Joe, why don't you go to high school? And he said I had hand thought about it. Later that fall school was ready to begin and I was at school. Joe came up there and wanted to know if he could enter high school and do part-time work and keep up his grocery business if the grocery business didn't fall down.

He was 19 years old, passed high school age. So I asked the school board and they just passed it back to me and said, you asked the teachers if they're willing to bother with him, go ahead. And so I told Joe, come ahead and we'd let him start. Sure, coming to Manor maybe was not the big step. But entering high school as a freshman must have been a big change in his life. He wanted to try and go through in two years. I told him I didn't think he could. You know, if you try to tell somebody in America that something can't be done, they go ahead and do it. And Joe not only did it in two years, he did it all in one. He was a very determined young man. And I remember him as that.

A boy who really wanted to get ahead once he found out he could. And he certainly did. I was a fine boy off the farm spending five years of walking, becoming certified, learning what life was all about. He was the same. He'd come strictly from the farm with no urban background. And he was a boy like an embryo mosquito before it's born. I don't think of that time. He had plans for his future life in any great detail. He may have had in the back of his mind what he'd like to do. But these, as in my own case, came after graduation from law school. But within a matter of six months after I started the school at Marquette, the Great Depression came on. And from that time until I finished and really until 1941 on World War II started, the Depression affected all of Milwaukee.

Obviously, the impact of the economic situation existing at that time was fairly severe because Milwaukee was known as a town of skilled workers, mainly machinists, highly skilled blue collar workers. And with the Depression, things were tough. I started the Market University on an athletic scholarship. And I came up on the gymnasium floor and asked, well, what do I do now? And someone came over to me and said, well, what are you way? And I told them on even 70 pounds, he said, I ain't any good. And I said, well, you want to try me. So while he said, let's go a couple of rounds. So he and I started the box. And well, he hit me a little harder than I thought he should hit me. And I guess I hit him a little harder than he thought I should hit him. And then we went at it pretty heavy for a while. And pretty soon, of course, we decided to call it quits. He introduced himself as Joe McCarthy.

And he said, well, who are you? And he said, well, I'm the boxing coach. And he was a two-fisted fighter. He was probably more of a aggressive puncher and a counter-puncher. If someone hit him and hurt him, that would be the trigger for him to try harder to hit the other guys. Now why, ladies and gentlemen, why has this administration deliberately built up Russia while tearing down the strength of America? Now I have been proving that it was because of a combination, a combination of abysmal stupidity and treason. Whatever we did, we did to excess. Nothing normally. And Joe was typically one of these excess people. When Joe played card, we'd play for maybe three-day straight. And Joe was a good card player. But along with it, he had the bluff and bluster. That goes with a young fellow that's rolling and punching and doing his thing. And I don't know anybody that could bluff more than Joe could.

Or there would bluff more than he could. And if he had a pair of juices and was playing poker, he'd bet the limit. And many times, bluff you out. Typical bluffer. And all the time he was doing it, he was carrying on a line of chatter. That was interesting. But a bluffer from the word goal. You've asked what I have in my possession. The photo stats, affidavits and such, like I can tell you, that all of the affidavits, all of the photo stats, let me finish, let me finish. All of the affidavits, all of the photo stats, are easily accessible to you. You can get them without any trouble at all. They're all in those files. He just wanted it to be a winner just to get that recognition. Well, Joe was always ambitious with respect to positions of leadership. In, for instance, the Franklin Club, which was a debating society at that Marquette, Joe ran for president of that organization against me, and was unhappy when he was defeated.

And subsequently, Joe ran for president of our class, law school class against me. I, in our senior class election, we carried on a very vigorous campaign, and after a very tremendously hard fought campaign, it came out of tie. The vote did. And the dean called us in, and he said, the Marquette and Kern, what do you want to do with cut cards, or draw straws, or how do you want to settle this thing? And I said, well, I'd like to cut cards, Dean. And Joe said, oh, let's have another election. I'd like to have another election. So the dean said, well, all right, we'll postpone the election, who put on another election in two weeks, and you guys see what you can do. So he went at it again, campaigned solidly for two weeks. When the vote was all in, Joe had defeated me by one vote. And after that, I said, Joe, I think that you may have gone back on our agreement. You and I agreed that we'd vote for each other. And Oal, he said, to be honest with you, Charlie, I did. He said, I campaigned so strong, telling everybody what a real good leader I was that I convinced myself,

and I had to change my mind and vote for myself. And Joe had an inferiority complex that he overcame in his public image. And he worked at overcoming that feeling of inferiority. As he had said to me many times, even when he was in the Senate, he said, gee, he said, is it possible? Here's the guy that came out of the farmlands, the hinterlands of Wisconsin, here I am. The U.S. Senate, the greatest private club in the world. Confidence is returning, returning to our agricultural population who in spite of unpredictable and uncontrollable drought in a large area of the nation

is giving understanding cooperation to practical planning. I think that probably the most serious effect of the oppression in an area where we lived was upon the farmers. And there was this very bitter milk strike. The farmers were dumping milk on the highways rather than deliberate and the tapikim a very bitter strike. I believe that if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not been elected in 1932, this country was headed for a knockdown right out revolution of some kind. There was a great deal of strong militant discontent in the country in the early 1930s. Come all you poor workers, good news to you, I'll tell how they good ol' union has come in here to dwell which side are you on, which side are you on. The milk strikes here in Wisconsin

were just about as sharp and bitter as anywhere in the country. The farmers band together into organizations and dumped their milk on the highways and the law and order people were responded with violence and vigilante actions. This occurred not only here in Dane County where Gunter fell under a respected farmer who was shot and killed. It also achieved considerable reaction violence from the law and order people to come up in Toronto County, the area from which McCarthy came. The communists had come forward and by their activities had indicated a desire to achieve the things that a lot of the liberals and other left-leaning people wanted. So there was a real growth of the communist membership. I think at one time they claimed a membership of 100,000 in the United States.

They got a million votes for one of their candidates, a real brother and this was in the 1930s. MUSIC Joe came here after he finished Marquette Law School looking for office space. It's my recollection where my father told me that Joe wasn't able to pay the rent. So he was looking for landlord. I guess that would trust him. And Joe rented a small office upstairs in this building. And I was always somewhat impressed because I once in a while got to visit Joe and he had a cot up there. Well, I was surprised, real surprised that Joe was coming to WorldPanca and knowing Joe the way I did. I wasn't surprised that he said

he wanted to come over to the house and stay that night, or at least until he found a place to room and board. Incidentally, he was with us until the day he left WorldPanca. MUSIC WorldPanca was not so greatly different than it is now. MUSIC Joe was very gregarious. He was happy, go lucky, follow, made friends very easily.

He wasn't in town only a few weeks and everyone seemed to know him. I was a trial attorney and did a lot of trial work in the city of WorldPanca. And I first met Joe and he used to come in and watch the trial of lawsuits. And I got acquainted with him through those means. The first impression of Joe was great. I mean, everybody felt that way. Some stayed with that impression, whether he played up to maintain it or not. I don't know. And others after a certain period of time just believed Joe. Two weeks ago, sadly, acting as spokesman and defense lawyer for the Democratic Party. MUSIC He used this officially approved and published communist method of attacking McCarthy in the Republican Party.

I think Joe had the potentials to be on a great large of our time if he had applied himself strictly to that. I'm not too sure that he had a solid educational background, however, either in the basics of education or in the law itself. But he was quick to learn and would have picked it up very well, I'm sure. My boss, Mike Oberlin, had been over to, I believe it was Wapaka in court. And Joe was trying a case there. And he heard him and he said, that's the fellow that I would like to have in my law office. Mike Oberlin was an old-time lawyer in Toronto and they're all his life. It was a fighter, really. I put it in that category. The type which we don't see too much anymore, the bombastic table pounding kind of lawyer. Unless we say to them,

as we've always said in the past, unless we say to them, the entire power of this nation rests upon your shoulders. Unless we say to them, if a brutalitarian, if a brutalitarian slips in and places his hug nails, boot upon your neck, we will be there within the matter of minutes. Well, I think he did learn some things from Oberlin. You couldn't be with Oberlin for very long until you did learn something. Joe tried to remember and know everyone in the City of Toronto and call them by first name. Joe would say, no, let's see. What's that guy's first name? Then I'd tell him, and the next time Joe would say, well, hey, Mike, how are you? And he made a point of doing that. And I think that was a little bit politically inclined, wouldn't you think? Joe was a person that would meet people very easily. And I think he made a point to meet people too

and become acquainted with him. He did run against me for District Attorney one term. I have to be successful, and he wasn't. At that time, he was running on the Democratic ticket in Toronto. Well, when he ran for District Attorney up in Toronto County, I believe he ran as the Democrat. And later he told me, he said, if I'm to be elected around here, he says, I think I'll have to run as a Republican or change, at least change parties. I really believe that Joe was the Democrat when he was talking to a Democrat and a Republican when he was talking to a Republican. And I don't think he had any deep-seated convictions at all. Well, he was cut out for politics. He was a born politician. We knew he was going someplace. He just couldn't hold him in the City of War Pack or the City of Toronto and expect him to spend his life there, practicing law. His very attitude and speech and everything else predicted it. He was on to something bigger, wider, larger.

So I think acted a lot of time on impulses. I doubt that he had a plan whereby he would take one stone and onto the other and up to the judgeship. I think it probably came to him sometime unexpected leap that he should be running for a certain judge. There was an opportunity there. A very unlikely opportunity when he first thought of it that he'd developed into an eventuality and got the judgeship. I was interested to know him and meet him and said rather casually that I thought I could help him out in my hometown, which is about five miles down the river at Little Shoot. And he said that he would be happy. But I was very surprised next morning about eight o'clock when my mother called me and said there was a man down there to see me and he said, well, man, are we ready to go? And I wanted to back out but couldn't. And I spent the entire day with him

and then I got to know that here was no ordinary man out running for a job that was the kind of job that would ordinarily go to a man 60 years old. He was then only 29 or 30. And he knew, as I know now and as certainty, that it only takes one small reason to get the massive voters to vote for you. Now, that is the central part of Joe's strategy. The massive voters do not know the issues clearly and don't even know the candidates well. Particularly, that's true in the election as for a judge, a circuit judge. There were three counties, Langley, Sean, and Howard Gaming. His basic technique was traveling and traveling by car. He usually had someone to drive for him. And as soon as he left a small village and one of the three counties or had met people,

he would then get into the car and immediately dictate a record and dictate the names of the people who he had seen. So the next day, I spent the entire day writing on a card like this. And he wanted it handwritten so that it would be more personal rather than being typed. And on the message side was this message. Dear Mrs. Smith, I wonder if you will do me a big favor and be sure that John gets out to vote next Tuesday. And by the way, don't forget to vote yourself. Signed Joe McCarthy. Well, I filled out over thousands of them really and sent them to three counties. And so, as Joe would comment, the housewife is going to go to the mailbox in the morning and he usually thinks of farmers who go out to the road and you get the mail. And on the way back,

she's going to look at that postcard and wonder who is Joe McCarthy and she never met him, but she will suppose that John or husband knows Joe. And that's the reason for the card. And for whom is she going to vote? Werner or McCarthy? She never knew anybody named Werner, but the name McCarthy comes to mind. And that's how he won. What Joe has been, the ledge to have been doing was to have told of the judge's age at the end of the term that he was seeking for that net to begin, which, of course, would make him six years older at the time of the election. I remember very vividly the accusation that he deceived the voters or that he lied about Werner's age. And I do know distinctly and I recall very clearly that Joe was right and was justified at the time. Now, of course, very cleverly. He didn't speak of Werner's present age. He said the present judge

will be 84 years old at the conclusion of another term or whatever the word was. And it was truthful. But that was a part of the scheme. I didn't think he could. No, I didn't think Werner could be beat. He'd been on for 24 years, liked by the people. He had the faith of the people, the confidence of the people. That generally was a pretty fair circuit judge. Joe was ambitious. And I think any person that's real ambitious might have to step on people once in a while. At least take advantage of him. It was a big upset, but actually he had so much going for him. And he worked so very hard at it that he was such a good campaigner. It was a campaign that, well, I don't think that oughta gave me Sean on and Langley Count. He's ever had a campaign

like the one that Joe put on. When he took on the bench, he tried, I think, 40 cases and 40 days or something like that. I don't have the record. But I remember coming to court, commencing a trial, probably 7-3 in the morning, and probably running through to 9-10 o'clock at night during those days. And he was a driver in that way. He wanted to make a record of having clean the calendars he referred to it. His methods were quick and maybe not as traditional as you might want. But I can think of no judge I've ever known, who truly loved justice as much as McCarthy did. And if we had to trample a little bit on some tradition, or if we had to avoid perhaps a little small provision of some old decadent statute, that would be done.

Tonight, tonight my good friends, I shall place before the greatest of all jury. The American people and indictment of 20 counts, picked that random which added together at best, at best constitute gross stupidity and at worth freedom. Those of us who had to work under his gavel didn't like it very well. But we had to do it. Well, when he was a judge, he was already thinking of the next step. And that next step was the Senate. As a circuit judge, he furthered his future political ambitions by going from one circuit to another to try lawsuits. And he came to receive. And when he was here, it was an advertising campaign to meet people, handshake, because he knew who was going to run for a statewide office. I was at his home one night shortly after I had gone down for my physical exam and had been admitted for limited service,

and he suggested that probably he too should go into service. And I probably said, we'll help you out for a great deal when you run for the Senate. And then he talked about getting into the Army or the Navy. And I said, look, McCarrie, if you really want to be a hero, then join the Marine Corps. When our squadron got into action, we were losing. But it wasn't our squadron that made us win, but it was a group of our type of squadrons that did. We were behind the traps at the time. The squadron was a very close knit squadron. It was the beginning of the war. We had all beat-up planes that left over from the Hawaii job. And we were one of the first squadrons to win the dive bombing.

Unfortunately, he didn't understand that the guy, his age, could never qualify for flight training. And Joe was very frustrated about that. And he was a ground officer in an aviation squadron, which is about a second-class citizen, as you can be. You know, to wave goodbye to the pilots and then greet them when they come back and say, how did you do, boy? So, the Joe was sort of sitting there, stewing, warring all the time, of whether or not he was ever going to see any action in this particular war. My job was a gunner. Since I was all this, I guess they made me the head gunner, or forty of us. And really and truly, referring to Joe, he wasn't qualified in that. He was our intelligence officer, and I think a very good one. I was a combat correspondent with the Marine Corps, and I'd been a newspaperman before the war. And he said, hey, Penn, do you think that you could dream up signs some kind of a story that I could send back to my friends in Wisconsin,

who are kind of keeping track of me when the war is over, and I go into politics. And I said, Joe, there's an old rule in the newspaper business. You can't write a story about it. If you don't do something, now you're sitting around here, and you're nice fellow, but you're not doing anything. And he said, well, see if I can think of anything. And he came back to me a few days later, and he told me he said, my squadron has been assigned to make a lot of milk runs on the Japanese airfield of Tahili on the south end of Boganville. And I've been talking to my squadron leader, and he said that it would be okay for me to ride the rear seat and the in the dive bombers, and to make some direct observations as an intelligence officer to just see what kind of a job we're doing in neutralizing that air strip. And there are no Japanese airplanes for miles around, so he's not endangering anybody's life, and I promise not to even try to shoot the gun so I don't shoot the tails off the plane. And maybe if I went along that, you could think of some way to ride a story. And I said, well, that sounds promising. Why didn't you do it? So indeed, his squadron

started out one morning before sun-up, and flew all day long to Tahili and came back to Munda and loaded up with bombs and went back to Tahili. And at the end of the day, I concocted a story about that squadron. I can't remember its numbers, even, about how they had set a new world's record for dropping bombs in the south Pacific. Dateline at an airfield somewhere in the south Pacific. And that this squadron had done this, dropped this enormous tonnage of bombs on the Tahili airstrip. And one of the people who had gone on every mission was Captain Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the former judge who had written as a tail gunner down the missions. And I gave the story to Joe because I didn't know anything about Wisconsin, didn't know the names of any papers even in Wisconsin. And then he apparently sent them back to some friend of his because the next time he came up to Munda on the mission, he had in his hand a fistful of clippings, which he showed to me and he said, hey, Penn, look at these clippings. He said, these are worth thousands of votes to me if I survive this war and get to run in

Wisconsin. So that in one sense, it's always haunted me through the years that maybe I am the person who invented the myth that it was a myth of tail gunner, Joe. Before he rose in a sense, I had a premium. And Joe was his Marine Corps uniform and I think he had a captain's rating. It was very acceptable in politics. In our first meeting, we had the young Republican Fister Hotel, of course, Joe showed up in uniform, and this didn't hurt him any. When I got back to Wisconsin and spoke to Joe, I realized he had the whole campaign mapped out completely. I had supposed, before I came home, that it was futile and hopeless for him to suppose that he could

defeat La Folleta. Remember, he couldn't defeat. He couldn't beat Wiley. And Wiley was a nobody. And Bob La Folleta was the darling of the US Senate. And as you know, his father was a senator. And his brother had been a governor. And he was the best known politician or a statesman or whatever you will call him that we had. He ran against Wiley in 44 while he was still in the service. So he had, his name was exposure there. But we didn't know. None of the veterans knew him that we were returning and things like that. We didn't know who Joe McCarthy was, really. We were principally concerned with getting young people into the Republican party is what our concern was at the minute. And he looked like a good handle for us to grab a hold of. And we had young Republican district conference meetings and conferences in each one of the 10 congressional districts at that time. And Joe attended all of them. And he gave some, you

might say, Hellfire and Brimstone talks that roused young people. He was well received. He was one of these fellows that, damn it after you shook hands with him and you had met him. You feel, I'm glad I know that guy. He was one of those type of personalities. He was not a flamboyant, I wouldn't say, but he had something that seemed like sincerity to him when he came up and shake hands with him, glad to see him and so on and so forth. You're probably almost a minute. .

. . . . The progressives decided in early 1946 or late 1945 to disband the party, and Bob LaFalla chose to run on the Republican ticket. There was quite a battle at the Portage Convention on the decision. The young people largely insisting on going at the Democratic Party, where they saw the greatest hope, the older members of the delegates present wanting to go back to the Republican Party or stay in the progressive party.

In every other state, the third party, the populist faction joined the Democratic Party about that time, but in Wisconsin LaFalla took back in the Republican Party. I didn't like him personally because he was a progressive, and they broke away from the Republican Party, and I just as soon have seen him join the Democratic Party. The LaFalla was hated by all of the regular Republicans. LaFalla was an active member, and probably the principal main spring of the progressive faction of the Republican Party. And so every year, the Republicans had their big fight in the primary. And those days, Tom Coleman was state chairman of the Republican Party. And newspapers of state like to call him boss Coleman at the time, and he was vehemently opposed to LaFalla coming in and attempting to take over the organization which they had left years before.

Of Tom Coleman despised the LaFalla, despised them. If I can recall properly, I said to Tom, I said, I don't think he had any choice but to accept McCarthy. At first, he thought Joe was a little ambitious, and he just should sit back and wait. There was a lot of very capable young men in Wisconsin in the Republican Party that should be really taken on, Bob LaFalla. I told him, I said, you know that my organization is a good 90% behind him, and he might as well face it. We're going to have people with that convention. We wanted to get away from rationing. We wanted to get away from the, you know, we needed housing. We had to have something for the return veterans, and this had to take somebody who understood the veterans. I mean, that was our, the way we fell about it. So we did everything we possibly could at that Ashkash convention, the convinced the delegates from throughout Wisconsin that Joe was a guy to do it.

So the endorsement went through without a hitch, and that was, as I said, latter part of May, and starting in June, yes, in June, Tom Coleman was arranging to send money to me as Joe's campaign manager. I was covering a city hall for the Milwaukee Journal, and both Bob LaFalla and Joe came around the city hall, and I trailed him around when they did that. The Follett's campaign was so quiet, most people weren't even aware that he was there. Bob LaFalla was an absentee candidate. I don't, I don't even know if he, he got back a couple times, and then he'd fly back to Washington. Certainly we had a candidate to work. This fellow McCarthy really worked at this campaign. We attended every veterans convention, the American Legion State Convention, the VFW State Convention, the Marine Corps State Convention, the Ann Vets, Purple Heart, DAV, every state

convention, every veterans organization. We made every crap game, wherever two people were, we would get Joe into it. Of course he intended, always to meet as many people as he could, but the essence of the campaign was to get out of the mail. This fellow came in and he said, I'm Joe McCarthy, leaned over, shook my hand. He said, I heard you're a good advertising man. Would you help me? I said, I didn't know anything about advertising, politically. Never had Lenny Campage, he said, that's just fine. He said, you're just a guy I want, and he laid down a bunch of clippings. He said, these are from various newspapers throughout the state. You look at them, and I'll be back in about three or four days and I'll see what you have. Then he walked away, left my office.

So I took the editorials and I picked out the best lines in each editorial from like the Milwaukee Journal, Sentinel, Oscar's Northwestern, down the line. It was a lie say, we put two or three sentences from each editorial on just one page so that the reader could flip through and not find too much reading matter at one point. So then they got the money and they printed about a million copies and they blanketed the state with that folder. That was sent to every householder in the state and the real Sunday punch was the postcards again. We knew that postcards would win. We had written 450,000 cards and each one was hand written and hand addressed and had a simple message, your vote Tuesday will be greatly appreciated by Joel McCarthy. I had the feeling that it was lost, that there had been no campaign. The only thing that held hope together at all was the fact that who was McCarthy?

It must have been a difficult thing for a thought, but he went to the Milwaukee Journal and begged them to endorse him. He realized at the last minute that he wasn't troubled and the journal seriously considered doing it, although their tradition and their background had been totally anti-Lafalat. I'm sure that the Milwaukee Journal endorsement would have made the difference. McCarthy won by, in that primary, by only 5,000 votes and the journal endorsement is worth at least, in those days, at least 25. After McCarthy's narrow victory over LaFalat, his election to the Senate over the Democratic candidate, McMurray, was easy. He appeared to be a liberal, he appeared to be an internationalist and foreign affairs, and my paper, the Milwaukee Journal, wrote a nice electoral saying a bright hope for the future. The election's 946 brought a new crop of men to town across the board. They, most of them were the Republicans, the new group, but they were also Democrats,

and they were the post-war signal, so to speak, from the country to Washington. And among these, Mr. McCarthy was one, I didn't know him, and in fact he was, I would have said, a total stranger to Washington when he came down here with that new Congress after four to six elections. I didn't arrive in Washington until the spring of 1947. This was after the class of 46 had finally been installed. It was after they had taken their oaths and were beginning to legislate. My role as a reporter for the Drew Pearson was what I am today, McRaker, who we preferred to say investigative reporter. It was our peculiar function to cover the shady side of the street, to report on what was going on in the shadows, to kind of keep an eye on what was under the rug, what was

in the closets, what was going on in the back rooms, what was happening behind closed doors. This was my function at that time. I got to know Senator McCarthy early in 1947, not long after I came to Washington, I began covering the Senate, I encountered Joe McCarthy. Best of my recollection, he looked me up. He was a freshman senator, he wanted publicity, he knew that the column was well read. He thought that I was a newspaper man that ought to be cultivated, and he certainly knew how to cultivate me. He would give me almost anything I wanted to know. But I wanted to know, was usually what the Senate didn't want me to know. And Joe McCarthy was always willing to tell me, he would, if there was a Republican policy meeting, meeting that was supposed to be secret, a meeting that those men were not supposed to know about, he'd put me on an extension, and he'd call Senator Robert Taff, the Republican

leader, and Senator to Senator, asking what happened, and Robert Taff, thinking that he was talking to a fellow senator, would tell him what happened, and I would be able to get the entire story. He would tell me almost anything that I wanted to know. I don't see Joe McCarthy as rising before the wheeling speech at all. He was just stumbling around town as another Greenhorn member of the Senate looking for a role, so to speak. When Joe came down here, he issues that he looked for, really, were those, which were personal benefit to him. We carried stories on his efforts for the sugar people. He made a great case. He was trying to help the women do their home canning, but he was not. He was helping the big sugar interests. When he got into housing, he did a booklet for Lestron, a pre-fab housing firm paid him $25,000. Booklet was not distributed in Wisconsin.

People in Wisconsin saw these news stories about it, but it never caused any problems for Joe that he was working for vested interests. McCarthy was certainly not the first. He didn't really discover anything about, quote, the issue that we talk about, which is a broad subject of communism. The one that I think is most significant is the forming of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, under Chairman Dyes from Texas, generally known as H.U.A.C. of Iraq, but that committee undertook to define Un-American Activities, and its first hearings actually were on the Nazis and fascists, but it didn't seem to be quite as intriguing I don't know why, as communism. The same tactics of communist notses and fascists are now endangering this country. America must wake up to its danger. It was 1938 that the Dyes Committee began.

It started as a special select committee and became a general and established committee over a course of time. And it had filled thousands and thousands of pages with testimony and reference all cons of reports long before Mr. McCarthy ever ran for office, far as I know. The Republicans had been out for 30 years. It seems like I can't remember the exact year, but they'd been out of power. They had, during this long drought, political drought, they had become a little bit irresponsible, they'd become irresponsible because they'd just been an opposition party, and they had not had the responsibility of governing the country for an extremely long time. And they had most of the people in Congress, most of the Republicans in Congress had been so accustomed just to opposing, had been so accustomed to just harping, so accustomed

to just criticizing that suddenly finding themselves in power puts some irresponsible people in committee chairmanship. This whole Republican attack upon the Democratic Party as the party of communism, the party of treason caused the Democrats to adopt such methods as the loyalty program to take steps that they normally would never have taken in order to prove and order to demonstrate that they were not pro-communists and that they were all loyal Americans. I think that they should have dug in their heels and fought instead of giving ground and sort of trying to conciliate the opposition. But what the tactic that a lot of people use in the Democratic Party administration was to prove that there was anti-communist anybody else. And so they more or less played into the hands of the opposition in a sense. I set up the loyal employee lawyer of the program with two objectives in mind.

I was determined as far as it was humanly possible to see that no disloyal person should be employed by our government. I mean, the loyalty program was simply reflecting the pressures that were being brought on the government, basically. They didn't find many disloyal people, but of course, I didn't satisfy anybody. You know, the people convinced there were a lot of disloyal people, as they became all more critical of the loyalty program that it wasn't digging them out, unearthing them. In those years, the House of American Activities Committee was staging anti-communist shows that were almost inquisitions. They would look for headline names, headline figures that would make news that would attract attention to themselves. I can remember the crowded scenes and the clean glights and the cameras. The spotlight was on the House of American Activities Committee.

Those who belonged to were interested in the spotlight more than anything else. It was a time when communism was almost a neurosis in the United States, and that neurosis was both fostered and exploited by the House of American Activities Committee. Nixon was one of those men who undertook to define what was happening in this country about communism by way of the House Committee on American Activities. I am holding my hand a microfilm of the most confidential, highly secret State Department documents. This microfilm was made for the purpose of transmitting these documents in reduced form to the Soviet Union. The documents were obtained from State Department employees who were communists and who were interested in sending those documents to the Soviet Union, where the interests of the Soviet Union were in direct conflict with the United States. That is the intention of the Committee on Un-American Activities to pursue this investigation until we put the spotlight on those high officials in the State Department who were responsible

for selling this country down the river. Well, as a whole, a whole political process, of course, was being poisoned. Truman's victory in 48 just simply increased the bitterness and the venom of the attacks on the State Department, on the administration. A whole field of foreign policy was affected. The crisis lies in the war fever itself, not in real threats of invasion, but in the synthetic threats of invasion pumped out to support the arms program. The efforts of the administration to frighten the world, where the show of force will not bring peace, it will only intensify the efforts of Soviet Russia, and its allies to become equally strong. Things got progressively more tense on the whole question of loyalty and security after Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley started making their charges against a lot of people

who had worked in a new deal in different administrations, and then when Whitaker Chambers made his charges against his, who, of course, had been the State Department, and so they kept increasing, making the standards more rigid, more difficult. At first, of course, it was a reasonable, you had that reasonable evidence to suspect or a reasonable evidence of disloyalty, and then, of course, it was changed to just doubt of loyalty, you know, or how do you prove your loyalty, sort of thing. Now if it was a hiss case and it was a fall of China, it was obvious that we were in for a bad time. The way I see Joe McCarthy coming into the Communist issue is this. McCarthy was, my impression was just rattling around looking for something, and people who wanted to have somebody on the hill making noises found him and undertook to educate him and brief him, I think both in journalism and in education and in religion, all over

the shop there, people here always tried to get a voice on the hill at protagonist. Well, I think he was, he was without an issue, as he saw the election approaching, and somehow he sensed that he was not as popular in Wisconsin as he would like to have been, and he thought that the thing he had to do was get an issue. I think he knew that the Communist issue was a good issue for a long time. He used it once against McMurray in the 1946 campaign, and then, of course, in 1949, he started attacking the Capitol Times on the basis of Cedric Parker being the Communist. Well, you can imagine my surprise when, on the morning of November 9, 1949, I came to my desk as usual in the morning as city editor of the Capitol Times, and I found a press release on my desk, addressed to newspaper editors of Wisconsin from Senator Joe McCarthy, and it says that this is a document in which he thought the editors might be interested, and

I, of course, was quite interested because on the first page I would, I discovered that I was part of the subject of his document, and it was a lengthy thing, which I won't bother to go through entirely, but he raised some questions. The question number one that he raised was, has the Communist Party with the cooperation of the Capitol Times Corporation want a major victory in Wisconsin? Well, that referred to the fact that he said that the Capitol Times had been forwarding Communist causes in the state. The second question was, is Cedric Parker, city editor of the Capitol Times, a Communist? And after which question he proceeds the answer in general terms that indicate that he thinks I was? Suppose I had been a Communist, which I couldn't make a public statement on. If I had been, it was nothing illegal. It was a legal political party on the ballot. Earl Browder had been on the ballot in 1936 for president.

There was nothing illegal about it, and the party that he charged me with being a member of was just as legal as the Republican Party in which he ran for office. He took the position, of course, that anything against him was pro-communist. At that time I was city editor and wasn't doing a great deal of writing, so I don't know exactly what he was referring to, except perhaps the articles that I had done as city editor about him. Because of the fact that he had gotten so much national publicity on his attacks here in Wisconsin, upon us, he was able to launch this national campaign, and he found that he had a formula that worked, and I believe that was the background of what led to wheeling in

there after. Anything that would promote his own ambitions, no matter who he had to step on, no matter who he had to walk over, he was willing to do it. And to him it was like a game, he would almost disassociate himself from the Joe McCarthy who was slashing and battling his way to the top, as if it were another person. And when people would be offended at what this Joe McCarthy would do, he had sometimes be startled, he had sometimes be surprised. He couldn't figure out what they were angry about. He could have, of course...