Analyzing Joseph McCarthy's Appearance On 'See It Now'

Did Joseph McCarthy lie or distort the truth, exaggerate or embellish information with respect to the charges and supporting evidence he made against Edward R. Murrow and others (Adlai Stevenson, for one) when he appeared on Murrow’s “See It Now” show (in response to the charges made against him by Murrow in an earlier show)? In an effort to discover the answer to this question, I’ve read, examined and researched a number of books, journals, periodicals and transcripts that featured stories and/or articles and testimony on this and other issues relating to McCarthy and Murrow. I hope you enjoy what I’ve discovered. You can (if you haven’t already) form your own opinions on this topic.

A reoccurring issue is whether or not McCarthy “ruined” people’s lives. Clearly, a definition of “ruined” is in order. “Ruined’ does not have to constitute a permanent condition (destitution or suicide). In some cases, his accusations (based on incomplete factual information and/or the embellishment of facts or statistics) caused people severe hardship, whether it was the loss of a job and/or the denial of employment for a long or short period of time. Not to mention the mental and physical anguish some---and I repeat some---of these innocent people must have suffered. However, this is not to say that everyone McCarthy accused was innocent; far from it. There were clearly communists in the government. Many others were in the process of or had successfully investigated and accused some of the same people McCarthy chose to go after. This is significant because the most significant question to examine is whether McCarthy used incorrect or misinformation, or embellished or lied to support his accusations. The answer to parts of this question is undoubtedly yes. However, for this entry, we’ll stick with the McCarthy/Murrow story. We begin with an earlier show. Fred Friendly would identify it as their “moment of truth.”

“The Case Against Milo Radulovich, A0589839” dealt with an unknown figure in a small town caught up in a scarcely noticed controversy. Murrow got his lead for this show from The Detroit News. To summarize, Radulovich was a 26-year-old senior at the University of Michigan who had previously served nearly eight years as an Air Force meteorologist and held a commission as a lieutenant in the Reserves. He was about to lose that commission. Under Air Force Reg. 36-52, he had been declared a “security risk” for having close associations with “Communists or communist sympathizers.” The Air Force demanded his resignation. The “close associations” were with his father and sister. The senior Radulovich, by this time an old man, came to this country 40 years before, served in WWI and spent his life working in coal mines and automobile plants. His crime? He read a Serbian-language newspaper said to support Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia. Now at the time the Air Force was using this information to question the old man’s loyalty---and by extension, his son’s loyalty---Tito had broken with the Soviet bloc. In fact, Tito was receiving loans from the same U.S. government that was persecuting Milo Radulovich. The sister was “alleged” by the Air Force to be a communist as well. Only no proof had been shown or presented. Radulovich refused to resign his commission. The Air Force convened a board to review the case and recommended Radulovich’s severance from the service. At this hearing no witnesses were produced and whatever evidence the Air Force had against his father and sister remained unopened in a manila envelope. This was the story Edward R. Murrow read in The Detroit News. Murrow and Friendly later said that the story was important because paranoia was becoming institutionalized. Due process, the right of the accused, the presumption of innocence could be denied without explanation. The Murrow show was broadcast on October 20, 1953. What Murrow and Friendly did was to give Radulovich what the government had denied him: the right to defend himself.

That broadcast, however, put Murrow and McCarthy on a collision course. For it was this broadcast, the “Radwich junk,” as McCarthy’s agent, Don Surine, had called it, that led Surine to say that McCarthy had “proof” that “Murrow was on the Soviet payroll in 1934.” It was after this statement that Murrow made the decision to go after McCarthy. But he wasn’t the first. Walter Lippmann, Drew Pearson, the Alsop brothers, even cartoonists had attacked McCarthy long before Murrow. CBS reported on McCarthy’s “tactics” on the radio. And in December 1951, Murrow himself reported on McCarthy’s tirades against General Marshall.

What McCarthy had on Murrow was circumstantial evidence or innuendo.

And what exactly did McCarthy have on Murrow? A photostated newspaper clipping Donald Surine had given to Joe Wershba. There were two pages to it, a front-page story continued on page 6 of The Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph, dated February 18, 1935. The headline: “American Professors Trained by Soviet, Teach in U.S. Schools.” The paper was part of the Hearst chain. The assertion in the story was that American educators were sending teachers to a summer school at Moscow University to be trained as “adept Communist propagandists.” The chief target was George Counts, a Columbia University professor. (Counts had angered Hearst by calling an earlier Hearst series on education “fascistic.”) To McCarthy and his followers, the Hearst story proved that Dr. Counts was part of a conspiracy to teach communism because he served on a National Advisory Committee for the summer session in Moscow. The story also listed 24 fellow members of the advisory committee, all presumed to be equally disloyal. Among those names was Murrow. Surine and McCarthy even went one step further, claiming that Murrow had been on the Soviet payroll. Since the seminars were conducted by VOKS (a Soviet cultural agency), to them it proved that Murrow was in some way connected to the Soviet espionage apparatus.

Now let’s go back 22 years before. Murrow did work at the Institute of International Education (IIE), where he helped set up summer seminars at Moscow University for Americans interested in Russian studies. But it was only a small part of his desk job. He also worked on nearly 100 other study programs in dozens of other foreign countries at IIE. But here’s where McCarthy and his staff failed to conduct the required research before they made their accusations. By 1935, the summer session had been cancelled by the Russians. Murrow never accompanied any group to Russia. In fact, he had never been in the Soviet Union. And McCarthy never charged or accused the others people on the advisory committee to the study program, among them noted educators of the day (chancellors, deans, presidents of universities, colleges, etc.). Only Murrow.

Fast forward to the “See It Now” show on McCarthy. Another damaging blow to McCarthy was when he is seen describing Adlai Stevenson as a tool of the Communist conspiracy. A film clip shows McCarthy standing alongside a blowup picture of a barn. McCarthy explains that this picture-postcard New England barn housed “all the missing documents from the Communist front IPR” and that one such document reveals that Stevenson was the choice of Alger Hiss and other alleged Communists to attend a conference on Post War American policy in Asia. But this was only part of the story. Murrow then noted that McCarthy failed to mention that other persons also suggested to attend the conference were, like Stevenson at the time, on the staffs of Frank Knox and Harry Stimson, both distinguished Republican members of Roosevelt’s wartime cabinet. Murrow then went on to point out that past members of the IPR included Senator Ferguson, Paul Hoffman, and Henry Luce. McCarthy’s little red barn collapsed.

Next, McCarthy was seen interrogating Reed Harris, a Voice of America official. To McCarthy, Harris was part of the Communist apparatus because he once cancelled a Hebrew language broadcast over the VoA. McCarthy said that Reed had been suspended and that the ACLU had defended him. McCarthy described the ACLU as “a front for doing the work of the Communist Party.” Murrow said, “Twice, McCarthy said the ACLU was listed as a subversive front. The Attorney General’s list does not and has never listed the ACLU as subversive nor does the FBI or any other government agency. And the ACLU holds in its files letters of recommendation from President Eisenhower, Truman and General MacArthur.” No matter, as Murrow pointed out, a month after McCarthy’s charges, Reed Harris had been forced to resign from the State Department.

Now for those of you who love to debate this “ruined lives” issues, ask yourself this question: Is losing a distinguished position and good salary for a period of time, based on the accusation and/or charges leveled by McCarthy and others in the press constitute ruining a person’s life? Yea, for me that’s pretty “ruined”… at least for a period of time.

ALCOA, the sponsor of “See It Now,” received a telegram from McCarthy threatening the company with an investigation for subsidizing a “subversive broadcast.” McCarthy had a standing offer from CBS for equal time. He accepted. A huge audience was anticipated. The time had arrived. Murrow appeared on camera live with a brief introduction. Now McCarthy spoke. In examining the transcript, McCarthy’s very first sentence turned out to be incorrect: “Mr. Edward R. Murrow, Educational Director of the Columbia Broadcasting System…” Stop. Murrow had not held the educational post since 1936. Why do I point this out? It foreshadows what’s to come. “Now ordinarily I would not take time out from the important work at hand to answer Murrow. However, in this case, I feel justified because Murrow is a symbol, the leader and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors.”

Stop. “Always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors.” McCarthy, again, failed to do his research. Murrow, in fact, was the exact opposite. Murrow, in fact, reported for years on communist subversion and investigations into exposing communists. For example, in one case, the 1949 trial of Judith Coplon, Murrow praised the FBI and its work. And guess who was impressed? Hoover sent Murrow a letter praising him for his “objective” reporting.

McCarthy then brought up Murrow and the IIE. He said, “The IIE, which he was the acting director, was chosen to act as a representative by a Soviet agency to do the job which would normally be done by the Russian secret police. In the selection of American students and teachers who were to attend, Mr. Murrow’s organization acted for the Russian espionage and propaganda organization known as VOKS.” We’ve already addressed what Murrow actually did at IIE.

McCarthy then charged that “Mr. Murrow, by his own admission, was a member of the IWW, a terrorist organization cited as subversive by the attorney general of the U.S.” The first part of the charge was incorrect. Did McCarthy know it was incorrect? We don’t know. But it again demonstrated how some of his accusations and/or claims were based on careless or wrong information and/or evidence. Let’s examine: In 1949, Wesley Price did a profile on Murrow in the Saturday Evening Post. Price wrote that Murrow worked as a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest and carried a IWW card. The IWW had been declared a subversive organization. But when questioned later by the FBI on this claim in the story, Price admitted that Morrow only talked about the IWW and the Wobblies being in the lumber camp. He had assumed that Murrow was a member and added it. That was the source of how the information of Murrow being a member of the IWW appeared in an FBI report. So McCarthy was using wrong information when he said, “Mr. Murrow, by his own admission, was a member of the IWW, a terrorist organization cited as subversive by the attorney general of the U.S.”

After the show, Murrow held a press conference. He said he had never belonged to the IWW. Per the IIE being made out by McCarthy of being a tool of Soviet propaganda, Murrow destroyed this charge and added that even President Eisenhower endorsed the organization’s work. In the end, to credit Murrow with the fall of McCarthy would be a slight exaggeration. The day that Murrow made his broadcast Ralph Flanders (VT) ridiculed McCarthy on the floor of the Senate. And the Army (that McCarthy attacked) counterattacked. Weeks after Murrow’s broadcast, the public saw McCarthy unexpurgated.

Update: I should have added the following pertaining to McCarthy's attempts to paint Murrow as a tool or dupe of the Communists on the show. In fact, Murrow was a conventional anti-Communist. In 1946, the Russian government attacked the IIE and harshly criticized Murrow, describing him as "the reactionary radio commentator." Murrow saw the Soviet Union as the hand behind the Korean War. The Voice of Freedom (the left-wing monitor of U.S. broadcasting) described Murrow's commentaries as "a mouldy dish of red-baiting rhetoric." Murrow was a member of the Committe on the Present Danger, which stood squarely for the doctrine of Communist containment and on the belief that Soviet expansionism in the Old World represented the greatest global threat. Murrow also defended the death sentences of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg while many liberals deplored the handling of the case and the severity of the sentences. What disturbed Murrow about the far-right hysterics, the "professional" anti-Communists, and the inept McCarthy was that they turned their hatreds inward upon any fellow Americans who differed from their notion of "patriotic purity." What bothered him most about the "witch hunting" and "Red baiting"---and is all too apparent to most rational observers today---was the disregard for the individual's right to a fair hearing, the denial of the right to differ, and the presumed "guilt by association" (Radulovich).

Summing up McCarthy, perhaps two of the staunchest McCarthy supporters said it best in McCarthy and His Enemies (Buckley and Bozell): Thus he committed "an egregious blunder" when, in the follow-up to his famous speech in Wheeling, he said that he had the names of "57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party" within the State Department, when, in fact, all he had was a list of security risks. It mattered not that his original charge of 205 Communists at the State Department had fluctuated. And claiming that these were "new names," when, in fact, they came from a House investigation. McCarthy told the Senate he would give it "the fullest, most complete, fairest resume of the files" but failed to do so.