McCarthy

 Several years ago I listened with great interest as former KGB specialist, Major General Olig Kalugin, stated on Washington Journal one Sunday morning that Joseph McCarthy had done more to slow the Soviet infiltration of the State Department than anyone before or after that time. According to Kalugin, where McCarthy said there were 200 Soviet agents in the State Department, there were actually 250!

 

 JOSEPH R. MCCARTHY, COMMUNISTS IN GOVERNMENT
SERVICE, Senate Speech (February 1950)

Mr. McCARTHY. Mr. President, I wish to discuss
a subject tonight which concerns me more than
does any other subject I have ever discussed
before this body, and perhaps more than any other
subject I shall ever have the good fortune to
discuss in the future. It not only concerns me,
but it disturbs and frightens me.

About 10 days ago, at Wheeling, W. Va., in
making a Lincoln Day speech, I made the statement
that there are presently in the State Department
a very sizable group of active Communists. I made
the further statement, Mr. President, that of one
small group which had been screened by the
President's own security agency, the State
Department refused to discharge approximately
200 of those individuals.

The Secretary of State promptly denied my
statement and said there was not a single
Communist in the State Department I thereafter
sent a telegram to the President, which I should
like to read at this time:

President Harry S. Truman

White House, Washington, D.C.

In the Lincoln Day speech at Wheeling Thursday
night I stated that the State Department harbors
a nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers
who are helping to shape our foreign policy. I
further stated that I have in my possession the
names of 57 Communists who are in the State
Department at present. A State Department spokesman
promptly denied this, claiming that there is not a
single Communist in the Department. You can convince
yourself of the falsity of the State Department
claim very easily. You will recall that you
personally appointed a board to screen State
Department employees for the purpose of weeding out
fellow travelers--men whom the board considered
dangerous to the security of this Nation. Your
board did a painstaking job and named hundreds which
had been listed as dangerous to the security of the
Nation, because of communistic connections.

While the records are not available to me, I know
absolutely of one group of approximately 300
certified to the Secretary for discharge because of
communism. He actually only discharged approximately
80. I understand that this was done after lengthy
consultation with the now-convicted traitor Alger
Hiss. I would suggest, therefore, Mr. President, that
you simply pick up your phone and ask Mr. Acheson how
many of those whom your board had labeled as dangerous
Communists he failed to discharge. The day the House
Un-American Activities Committee exposed Alger Hiss
is an important link in an international Communist
spy ring you signed an order forbidding the State
Department's giving any information in regard to the
disloyalty or the communistic connections of anyone
in that Department to the Congress.

Despite this State Department black-out, we have been
able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State
Department. This list is available to you but you can
get a much longer list by ordering Secretary Acheson
to give you a list of those whom your own board
listed as being disloyal and who are still working
in the State Department. I believe the following is
the minimum which can be expected of you in this case.

1. That you demand that Acheson give you and the proper
congressional committee the names and a complete report
on all of those who were placed in the Department by
Alger Hiss, and all of those still working in the State
Department who were listed by your board as bad security
risks because of their communistic connections.

2. That you promptly revoke the order in which you
provided under no circumstances could a
congressional committee obtain any information or
help in exposing Communists.

Failure on your part will label the Democratic Party
of being the bedfellow of international communism.
Certainly this label is not deserved by the hundreds
of thousands of loyal American Democrats throughout
the Nation and by the sizable number of able loyal
Democrats in both the Senate and the House.

Mr. President the only answer I have received to this
telegram was the statement by the President at his
press conference to the effect that there was not a
word of truth in the telegram.

Subsequently the Democratic leader of the Senate--at
least the alleged leader--made a speech in Chicago in
which he repeated substantially what the President
said, except that he went one step further and stated:

If I had said the nasty things that McCarthy has
about the State Department, I would be ashamed all
my life.

He also said there was not a word of truth in my
charge. I think it is unfortunate, not because I
am concerned with what the senior Senator from
Illinois happens to think, but because he occupies
such an important position. I believe, if we are
going to root out the fifth column in the State
Department, we should have the wholehearted
cooperation of both Democrats and Republicans--

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. McCARTHY. Wait until I finish. If the Senator
will stay with me for the next few hours he will
learn a great many facts. I have never refused to
yield to any Senator, and I do not intend to refuse.
The Senator from Illinois will have full time in
which to answer any question he wishes to ask, but
let me first finish my sentence.

I started to say that I think it is especially bad
because it indicates a preconceived decision not to
work with us in attempting to ferret out Communists.
I do not feel that the Democratic Party has control
of the executive branch of the Government any more.
If it had, with the very able Members on the other
side of the aisle, we would not find the picture which
I intend to disclose. I think a group of twisted-thinking
intellectuals have taken over both the Democratic and
Republican Parties to try to wrest control from them.

I shall be glad now to yield to the Senator from Illinois.

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President, I should like to say to the
Senator that there is no one in the Senate or in the
country who is any more opposed to Communist domination
of any nation or Communist infiltration into any country
than is the Senator from Illinois. What I am asking the
Senator to do--and I hope he will do it, and the country
wants him to do it--is to follow through with the speech
which he made in Wheeling, W. Va., in which he stated more
than 200 persons working in the State Department were known
to the Secretary of State to be members of the Communist
Party. If the Senator made that statement--and that is
what has been reported--I want him to name those
Communists. If there are card-carrying Communists in the
State Department, the Senator from Illinois will go along
with the Senator from Wisconsin in any way possible to
remove those Communists from the rolls.

The Senator does not have to do as he did in Salt Lake
City and say, "I am not charging these four people with
being Communists." The Senator is privileged to name them
all in the Senate, and if those people are not Communists
he will be protected. That is all I want the Senator to do.
If the Senator names those 205 card-carrying Communists,
and he proves to be right, the Senator from Illinois will
apologize for anything he has said about the Senator
from Wisconsin.

Mr. McCARTHY, I wish to thank the distinguished Senator
from Illinois for his views, but I should like to assure
him that I will not say anything on the Senate floor
which I will not say off the floor. On the day when I
take advantage of the security we have on the Senate
floor, on that day I will resign from the Senate.
Anything I say on the floor of the Senate at any time
will be repeated off the floor.

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. McCARTHY. Not until I have finished answering the
question of the Senator from Illinois. The Senator
called my attention to something, and I am glad he did;
otherwise I might have overlooked it. Incidentally, the
speech in Reno, Nev., and that in Wheeling, W. Va.,
were recorded, so there is no question about what I
said. I do not believe I mentioned the figure 205.
I believe I said "over 200." The President said, "It
is just a lie. There is nothing to it."

I have before me a letter which was reproduced in the
Congressional Record on August 1, 1946, at page A4892.
It is a letter from James F. Byrnes, former Secretary
of State. It deals with the screening of the first group,
of about 3,000. There were a great number of subsequent
screenings. This was the beginning.

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. McCARTHY. Please let me finish. The Senator will have
all the time in the world to ask questions, and I shall
be very glad to yield to the Senator for that purpose,
and he can even make short speeches and take all the time
he wants.

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President, the Senator from Illinois ----

Mr. McCARTHY. I do not yield at this time.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin
declines to yield.

Mr. McCARTHY. The letter deals with the first group of
3,000 which was screened. The President--and I think
wisely so--set up a board to screen the employees who
were coming to the State Department from the various
war agencies of the War Department. There were thousands
of unusual characters in some of those war agencies.
Former Secretary Byrnes in his letter, which is
reproduced in the Congressional Record, says this:

Pursuant to Executive order approximately 4,000 employees
have been transferred to the Department of State from
various war agencies such as the OSS, FEA, OWI, OIAA,
and so forth. Of these 4,000 employees, the case histories
of approximately 3,000 have been subjected to a preliminary
examination, as a result of which a recommendation against
permanent employment has been made in 285 cases by the
screening committee to which you refer in your letter.

In other words, former Secretary Byrnes said that 285 of
those men are unsafe risks. He goes on to say that of this
number only 79 have been removed. Of the 57 I mentioned
some are from this group of 205, and some are from subsequent
groups which have been screened but not discharged.

I might say in that connection that the investigative agency
of the State Department has done an excellent job. The files
show that they went into great detail in labeling Communists
as such. The only trouble is that after the investigative
agency had properly labeled these men as Communists the
State Department refused to discharge them. I shall give
detailed cases.

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President--

Mr. McCARTHY. As to the 57 whose names the Senator is
demanding, if he will be patient and sit down--

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President, in view of the statements made,
the Senator should yield.

Mr. McCARTHY. I shall yield at this time only for a
question. I shall not yield for any lengthy speeches by
the Senator from Illinois. If he wishes to ask a question,
I shall be glad to answer it,

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President, did the Senator say at Wheeling,
W. Va., last Thursday night that 205 persons working for
the State Department were known by the Secretary of State
to be members of the Communist Party, or words to that
effect? Did he call the attention of the country to the
fact that 205 men in the State Department were card-carrying
Communists? Did the Senator say that? That is what I should
like to know.

Mr. McCARTHY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent at
this time to insert in the Record a copy of the speech
which I made at Wheeling, W. Va.

Mr. LUCAS. Cannot the Senator answer "Yes" or "No"?

Mr. McCARTHY. I will ask the Senator please not to interrupt
me. I will yield to him later. I will give him all the
chance in the world.

 Mr. LUCAS. I asked the Senator a very simple question,

Mr. McCARTHY. I ask at this time unanimous consent to be
allowed to insert in the Record a copy of the speech which
I made at Wheeling, W. Va., and at Reno, Nev. It was the
same speech.

Mr. LUCAS. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. McCARTHY. In that case I shall read the speech into
the Record.

Mr. LUCAS. We want to hear it.

Mr. McCARTHY. The speech reads:

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight as we celebrate the one
hundred and forty-first birthday of one of the greatest
men in American history, I would like to be able to talk
about what a glorious day today is in the history of the
world . As we celebrate the birth of this man who with
his whole heart and soul hated war, I would like to be
able to speak of peace in our time, of war being outlawed,
and of world-wide disarmament. These would be truly
appropriate things to be able to mention as we celebrate
the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

I hope the Senator from Illinois will stay for this.

Mr. LUCAS. I shall be right here. I am coming over to the
Republican side of the aisle so that I will not miss anything.

Mr. McCARTHY. I am sure the Senator will]l not miss
anything. The speech proceeded:

Five years after a world war has been won, men's hearts
should anticipate a long peace, and men's minds should
be free from the heavy weight that comes with war. But
this is not such a period--for this is not a period of
peace. This is a time of the "cold war." This is a time
when all the world is split into two vast, increasingly
hostile armed camps--a time of a great armaments race.

Today we can almost physically hear the mutterings and
rumblings of an invigorated god of war. You can see it,
feel it, and hear it all the way from the hills of
Indochina, from the shores of Formosa, right over into
the very heart of Europe itself.

The one encouraging thing is that the "mad moment" has
not yet arrived for the firing of the gun or the
exploding of the bomb which will set civilization about
the final task of destroying itself. There is still a
hope for peace if we really decide that no longer can
we safely blind our eyes and close our ears to those
facts which are shaping up more and more clearly. And
that is that we are now engaged in a show-down fight--not
the usual war between nations for land areas or other
material gains, but a war between two diametrically
opposed ideologies.

The great difference between our western Christian world
and the atheistic Communist world is not political, ladies
and gentlemen, it is moral. There are other differences,
of course, but those could be reconciled. For instance,
the Marxian idea of confiscating the land and factories
and running the entire economy as a single enterprise is
momentous. Likewise, Lenin's invention of the one-party
police state as a way to make Marx's idea work is hardly
less momentous.

Stalin's resolute putting across of these two ideas, of
course, did much to divide the world. With only those
differences, however, the East and the West could most
certainly still live in peace.

The real, basic difference, however, lies in the
religion of immoralism--invented by Marx, preached
feverishly by Lenin, and carried to unimaginable
extremes by Stalin. This religion of immoralism, if
the Red half of the world wins--and well it may--this
religion of immoralism will more deeply wound and
damage mankind than any conceivable economic or
political system.

Karl Marx dismissed God as a hoax, and Lenin and Stalin
have added in clear-cut unmistakable language their
resolve that no nation, no people who believe in a
God, can exist side by side with their communistic
state.

Karl Marx, for example, expelled people from his Communist
Party for mentioning such things as justice, humanity,
or morality. He called this soulful ravings and sloppy
sentimentality.

While Lincoln was a relatively young man in his late
thirties, Karl Marx boasted that the Communist specter
was haunting Europe. Since that time, hundreds of
millions of people and vast areas of the world have
fallen under Communist domination. Today, less than
100 years after Lincoln's death, Stalin brags that
this Communist specter is not only haunting the world,
but is about to completely subjugate it.

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between
communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern
champions of communism have selected this as the time.
And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down--they
are truly down.

I might say for the benefit of the Senator from Illinois
that what I am reading as taken from a recording of the
speech. I did not use a written speech that night. I
continue the reading:

Lest there be any doubt that the time has been chosen,
let us go directly to the leader of communism today--
Joseph Stalin. Here is what he said--not back in 1928,
not before the war, not during the war--but 2 years
after the last war was ended: "To think that the Communist
revolution can be carried out peacefully, within the
framework of a Christian democracy, means one has either
gone out of one's mind and lost all normal understanding,
or has grossly and openly repudiated the Communist
revolution."

And this is what was said by Lenin in 1919, which was
also quoted with approval by Stalin in 1947:

"We are living," said Lenin, "not merely in a state,
but in a system of states, and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with Christian states
for a long time is unthinkable. One or the other must
triumph in the end. And before that end supervenes, a
series of frightful collisions between the Soviet
Republic and the Bourgeois states will be inevitable."

Ladies and gentlemen, can there be anyone here tonight
who is so blind as to say that the war is not on? Can
there be anyone who fails to realize that the Communist
world has said, "The time is now"--that this is the time
for the show-down between the democratic Christian world
and the Communist atheistic world?

Unless we face this fact, we shall pay the price that
must be paid by those who wait too long.

Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to
map out the peace--Dumbarton Oaks--there was within the
Soviet orbit 180,000,000 people. Lined up on the
antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that
time roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only 6 years
later, there are 800,000,000 people under the absolute
domination of Soviet Russia--an increase of over 400
percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around
500,000,000. In other words, in less than 6 years the
odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5
against us. This indicates the swiftness of the tempo
of Communist victories and American defeats in the
cold war. As one of our outstanding historical figures
once said, "When a great democracy is destroyed, it
will not be because of enemies from without, but rather
because of enemies from within."

The truth of this statement is becoming terrifyingly clear
as we see this country each day losing on every front.

At war's end we were physically the strongest nation on
earth and, at least potentially, the most powerful
intellectually and morally. Ours could have been the
honor of being a beacon in the desert of destruction,
a shining living proof that civilization was not yet
ready to destroy itself. Unfortunately, we have failed
miserably and tragically to arise to the opportunity.

The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency
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. It has not been the less fortunate or
members of minority groups who have been selling this
Nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits
that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer--the
finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest
jobs in Government we can give.

This is glaringly true in the State Department:. There the
bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their
mouths are the ones who have been worst.

Mr. LODGE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. McCARTHY. I yield.

Mr. LODGE. I should like to say to the Senator from
Wisconsin that I am interested in what he is saying,
both as Senator and as a member of the Foreign Relations
Committee. When the Senator casts doubt on the personnel
of the State Department that, of course, is something
which interests me very especially. I not only feel that
there should be no Communists in the State Department,
but that there should be nobody in the State Department
who is not affirmatively, enthusiastically loyal to the
United States and what it stands for. Therefore I say to
the Senator from Wisconsin now, that so far as the junior
Senator from Massachusetts is concerned, he will at the
earliest appropriate opportunity make a motion to have a
subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee take up
every single one of the accusations which the Senator
from Wisconsin makes.

Mr. McCARTHY. I was hoping the Senator would.

Mr. LODGE. I make that statement at this point, when
the Senator from Wisconsin is beginning to speak about
the State Department, because I think that I for one
have a special responsibility in that field.

Mr. McCARTHY. In case the Senator from Massachusetts is
not able to remain and listen to all of my remarks.

Mr. LODGE. I cannot remain and listen to the whole of the
Senator's speech, because I have another engagement, but
I shall read it all in the morning with the utmost care.

Mr. McCARTHY. In case the Senator must leave--and I say it
will take me a long time to conclude, if I continue to have
the interruptions I have previously had--I should like to
call attention to three of the cases which I intend to cite:
Case No. 1, case No. 2, and case No. 81. Those, I think,
represent the big three. While there are vast numbers of
other Communists with whom we must be concerned, if we
can get rid of those big three we will have done something
to break the back of the espionage ring within the State
Department.

I might say also, in case the Senator will not be present
to hear me, that in giving the records I have been very
careful about doing two things: No. 1, not to cite anything
which has not been confirmed by the intelligence agencies
which have been investigating these men; and No. 2--and this
I think is very important--I have tried, and I hope
successfully, to red-pencil anything that might be
embarrassing to any investigating agency. I know it is
easy to call for files, and when I call for a disloyalty
file I do not mean that I am calling for the source of
information. I do not think any intelligence agency can
work and do a good job if the Senate or the House, or any
other body is entitled to make public the source of the
information. The files which I have here show the source
of the information. I contacted one of the Federal
intelligence agencies, one of the investigative units.
I asked them if they would care to go over what I have
to say before I say it, and red-pencil anything which
they thought might in any way divulge the source of
information, that would in any way inform the Communist
spy ring of the information they have. The answer was,
"Well, you have gotten all of it from the State
Department files, and the Communists within the
Department can see those files, and I will show
you which Commies have the top-secret clearance so if
they have seen it, it does not do much damage for the
Senate to see them."

Mr. LODGE. Let me say to the Senator from Wisconsin that
I am not undertaking to say whether he is right or wrong.
I have no way of knowing that. What I say is that the
matter he is discussing is of such vital importance that
I think it ought to be investigated by a subcommittee of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. McCARTHY. Mr. President, I say with my whole heart,
I hope I am wrong. There is nothing as disturbing as is
this picture. But if I am wrong, I shall be very happy
indeed to know that I am....