WASHINGTON – Journalists echoing the Senate historian’s rewrite of history on the McCarthy hearings of 50 years ago are dismissive, upset or shocked when confronted with facts that deviate from the demonization of late GOP senator from Wisconsin.
They have been unable to cite a single life “ruined” because of McCarthy’s alleged “character assassination” of anyone.
Author/journalist M. Stanton Evans, whose encyclopedic research on Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his investigations into communism has been going on for years, talked with some of the Washington journalists who unquestioningly lapped up the press release put out by Senate Historian Donald Ritchie. Like Ritchie, they were unable to come up with a credible example of anyone who had been “smeared” by the senator.
An article by Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle was headlined “Tales From A Redbaiter’s 50’s Fishing Expedition,” and went downhill from there.
In an interview with NewsMax.com, Evans says Ringle blew him off and told him to write him a letter. “And I said to him, ‘I’m going to write something, but it’s not going to be a letter.’”
“Writing something” was a reference to a book on McCarthy that the conservative author has been working on for at least a decade. He has enough information to fill volumes.
A Reuters report by Joanne Kenan declared in its lead that “secret transcripts released on Monday add another layer of tarnish to [McCarthy’s] place in history."
“The 5,000 pages from his closed-door hearings show no smoking guns, no uncovered spies, no verification of conspiracy theories on which he built his career,” Kenan assures us.
NewsMax.com has already contradicted that assertion by tracking the decades-long controversy over atom scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, a McCarthy target whose guilt was nailed in the 2002 book “Sacred Secrets.” That volume produced “smoking gun” documents from the FBI and the Soviet NKVD that prove the scientist’s Communist Party membership and his ardent advocacy of sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union (See “
Perhaps Reuters' Washington correspondent believes a closed Communist Party meeting Oppenheimer attended was an afternoon tea-and-crumpets affair.
“She [Kenan] got very upset with me and said she was too busy to talk,” Evans told us.
A third journalist Evans confronted was “a young man named Mark Weston of Roll Call," Capitol Hill's “hometown” paper.
“I’ve cut him a little bit of slack. He’s very young, and he at least was willing to talk about the matter,” according to Evans.
Weston mentioned Raymond Kaplan, an employee of Voice of America. He had figured in McCarthy’s investigation dealing with VOA's placement of a transmitter in such a way as to be minimally effective in reaching people in parts of the world that needed to hear the message of freedom.
Kaplan was to testify before McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Before he could be called, “he allegedly committed suicide, or at least he died,” Evans recalled.
The Roll Call reporter this week wrote, “It is said” that McCarthy was responsible for this “victim.”
Actually, as Evans pointed out to Weston, Ray Kaplan was a potentially friendly witness for the committee. His position was identical to
McCarthy’s that a mistake had been made in the transmitter's placement. He wanted to testify. A co-worker quoted Kaplan as saying, “Why don’t they call me?”
It was not just McCarthy who was hammering on this. Committee Democrats Scoop Jackson and Stuart Symington were looking at the same problem and were in agreement, a fact reflected in the years-old public testimony by the committee, a copy of which is in the Washington library of NewsMax.com.
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