The demonization of Joseph McCarthy continues, cheerfully exploding the pleasant theory that, in time, the truth will always come out. It is now an article of the American faith, accepted by naive young conservatives, as well as liberals of all ages, that McCarthy was an unconscionable monster who, in the early 1950s, roamed the globe defaming innocent men and women as communists, and failing utterly to prove anything of the sort.
It has now gotten to the point where, if someone discovered that McCarthy was especially fond of cream of tomato soup, learned professors would be quoted in the media to the effect that cream of tomato soup has recently been shown to encourage vicious behavior on the part of those who consume it.
The most recent example of this sort of thinking accompanied the release of the transcripts of some 161 “executive sessions” of McCarthy’s Senate committee from 1953 and 1954, in which the committee heard testimony from various people suspected of membership in the Communist Party. Our liberal media promptly hailed the event as further proof of McCarthy’s villainy.
As Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in her May 6 bylined article for the New York Times, the transcripts “reveal how [McCarthy] used secret proceedings to weed out witnesses who could adequately defend themselves against his browbeating. Only those who looked weak or confused, or who cast suspicion on themselves by asserting their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, were later called to testify in public.”
As a stellar example of successful defiance, she cites the composer Aaron Copland, who “fiercely defended himself, declaring, ‘I have not been a communist in the past and I am not now a communist,'” and was not compelled to testify in public.
As it happens, I have considerable personal knowledge of this general subject. In 1956 and 1957, I was associate counsel to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee – not McCarthy’s committee (a subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee, and thus confined to investigating the government), but the body charged by the Senate with oversight of the nation’s internal security. Such committees hold hearings to inform the Congress and the American people of matters that may require legislative action.
In the case of committees seeking testimony from people who may have something to hide (and that, of course, includes secret communists), it is common practice to hear the witness first in “executive,” or secret, session. And, curiously enough, the chief purpose in doing so is to protect witnesses who want to cooperate.
More than once we asked a witness, in executive session, if he had ever been a communist, only to have him sigh and reply, “Yes, and I’ve wanted to get this off my chest for a long time.” Then he would tell us frankly the story of his involvement, including the names of the other communists with whom he worked. When the session was over, we would thank him for his cooperation and he would go home, without the media so much as learning his name.
If, on the other hand, he refused to answer all questions about his communist involvement by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, he would be required to do so in a public session, from which Congress and the American people could draw their own conclusions.
In the case of Copland, the composer forthrightly denied communist membership under oath, so the McCarthy committee saw no point in a public session. But its curiosity about him isn’t hard to understand, for Copland was a world-class joiner of communist fronts, having belonged to more than 20 (including the Committee of Professional Groups for Browder and Ford, 1936, which supported Communist Party Secretary Earl Browder for president over FDR).
But the Times didn’t mention that. Reasons of space, I guess.
