McCarthy's Detractors Can't Back Up Their Charges

WASHINGTON – The Senate historian, whose pronouncements trashing the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy are widely quoted in the mainstream media, could not cite one instance in which the senator’s alleged “browbeating” of witnesses ruined lives.

Nor could the leading senators on the Senate Government Operations Committee who repeated the rhetoric as they unsealed closed-door McCarthy hearings after 50 years.

Nor could several of the journalists who wrote stories this week accepting the historian’s rewrite of history as fact.

Journalist-author M. Stanton Evans, the ultimate authority on McCarthy and his investigations, asked Senate Historian Donald Ritchie, who had written the widely quoted forward to the five volumes of hearings, to name one victim of McCarthy’s alleged “character assassination, smears, mud-slinging, sensationalism,” to quote Ritchie’s written description.

“He kind of gave me his patented generalization,” Evans told NewsMax.com, "and I said, ‘Where are these browbeating tactics?’ And he said, ‘Well, at Fort Monmouth [N.J.].’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve read those hearings, and I don’t see that.’”

In fact, Evans found the Monmouth hearings informative. NewsMax.com, which has a copy of the public McCarthy hearings at Fort Monmouth released years ago, concurs in that judgment. They clearly show the carelessness with which people with communist backgrounds were given positions of responsibility.

Ritchie cited government employee Annie Lee Moss as a “victim” of McCarthy, R-Wis. Evans pointed out to Ritchie that the writings of three academics whom he quoted to back up his statements on the Moss case were “secondary sources.”

The primary official documents “prove conclusively that Annie Lee Moss was a member of the Communist Party of the District of Columbia.”

At which point, Ritchie told Evans, “I’m getting very tired of this conversation.”

Footnote: In 1954, McCarthy was excoriated by TV commentator Edward R. Murrow for his investigation of Annie Lee Moss. In 1958, after McCarthy was dead and buried, the Subversive Activities Control Board, a part of the executive branch of government, produced proof of Moss’s role as a communist.

Evans also called the offices of Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairman of the Government Affairs Committee, and Carl Levin, D-Mich., who had disparaged McCarthy when the 4,000-plus-page hearings were released. Their staffers “were either unable or unwilling” to cite a single name of a person whose life was “ruined” by McCarthy.

Levin, who had circulated an anti-McCarthy petition as a college student, was predictable.

On the day McCarthy was censured by the Senate, Collins was a toddler five days shy of her second birthday.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., a McCarthy successor as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, also disparaged the late Wisconsin lawmaker. At the time of McCarthy’s censure, Coleman was 5 years old.

Evans told NewsMax: “They don’t know anything about it. I doubt if they know what’s in these hearings.”