748 Chapter 28 Collision Courses, Abroad and at Home: 1946–1960
nuclear weapons had been lost. China had passed into
the communist orbit. Elsewhere in Asia and through-
out Africa, new nations, formerly colonial possessions
of the Western powers, were adopting a “neutralist”
position in the Cold War. Despite the billions poured
into armaments and foreign aid, national security
seemed far from ensured.
Internal as well as external dangers loomed.
Alarming examples of communist espionage in
Canada, Great Britain, and the United States con-
vinced many citizens that clever conspirators were
everywhere at work undermining American security.
Both the Republicans and conservative Democratic
critics of Truman’s domestic policies were charging
that he was “soft” on communists.
There were never more than 100,000 communists
in the United States, and party membership plum-
meted after the start of the Cold War. However, the
possibility that a handful of spies could do enormous
damage fueled a kind of panic that could be used for
partisan purposes. In 1947, hoping to defuse the com-
munists-in-government issue by being more zealous in
pursuit of spies than his critics, Truman established a
Loyalty Review Board to check up on government
employees. The program made even sympathy for a
long list of vaguely defined “totalitarian” or “subver-
sive” organizations grounds for dismissal. During the
following ten years about 2,700 government workers
were discharged, only a relative handful of them for
legitimate reasons. A much larger number resigned.
In 1948 Whittaker Chambers, an editor of Time
who had formerly been a communist, charged that
Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and a former State Department
official, had been a communist in the 1930s. Hiss
denied the charge and sued Chambers for libel.
Chambers then produced microfilms purporting to
show that Hiss had copied classified documents for
dispatch to Moscow. Hiss could not be indicted for
espionage because of the statute of limitations;
instead he was charged with perjury. In January
1950, he was convicted and sentenced to a five-year
jail term.
If a distinguished official such as Hiss had been
disloyal, anything seemed possible. The case fed the
fears of those who believed in the existence of a pow-
erful communist underground in the United States.
The disclosure in February 1950 that a British scien-
tist, Klaus Fuchs, had betrayed atomic secrets to the
Soviets heightened these fears, as did the arrest and
conviction of his American associate, Harry Gold, and
two other Americans, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on
the same charge.
Although they were not major spies and the
information they revealed was not crucial, the
Rosenbergs were executed, to the consternation of
many liberals in the United States and elsewhere.
However, information gathered by other spies had
speeded the Soviet development of nuclear weapons.
This fact encouraged some Republicans to press the
communists-in-government issue hard.McCarthyism
In February 1950 an obscure senator, Joseph R.
McCarthy of Wisconsin, introduced this theme in a
speech to the even less well-known Ohio County
Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia.
“The reason we find ourselves in a position of impo-
tency,” he stated, “is not because our only powerful
potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but
rather because of the traitorous actions of those who
have been treated so well by this nation.” The State
Department, he added, was “infested” with commu-
nists. “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of
names that were known to the Secretary of State as
being members of the Communist party and who nev-
ertheless are still working and shaping... policy.”^3
Why this speech caused a sensation has never
been satisfactorily explained. McCarthy had no shred
of evidence to back up these statements, as a Senate
committee headed by the conservative Democrat
Millard Tydings of Maryland soon demonstrated. He
never exposed a single spy or secret American com-
munist. One reporter quipped that McCarthy could
not tell Karl Marx from Groucho Marx.
But because of the government loyalty program,
the Hiss case, and other recent events, thousands of
people were too eager to believe McCarthy to listen
to reason. Within a few weeks he was the most talked
of person in Congress. Inhibited neither by scruples
nor by logic, he lashed out in every direction, attack-
ing international experts like Professor Owen
Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University and diplomats
such as John S. Service and John Carter Vincent, who
were already under attack for having courageously
pointed out the deficiencies of the Chiang Kai-shek
regime during the Chinese civil war.
When McCarthy’s victims indignantly denied
his charges, he distracted the public with still more
sensational accusations directed at other innocents.
Even General Marshall, whose patriotism was
beyond question, was subjected to McCarthy’s
abuse. The general, he said, was “steeped in false-
hood,” part of a “conspiracy so immense and an(^3) McCarthy was speaking from rough notes, and no one made an
accurate record of his words. The exact number mentioned has long
been in dispute. On other occasions he said there were fifty-seven and
eighty-one “card-carrying” communists in the State Department.