Lest you all forget what happens when you give a paranoid megalomaniacal politicians the power to destroy people's lives at their whimsy with false accusations and phony charges.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fifty years after Sen. Joseph McCarthy's scorched earth investigation into supposed communist infiltration of America's most sensitive institutions, secret transcripts released on Monday add another layer of tarnish to his place in history.
The 5,000 pages from his closed-door hearings show no smoking guns, no uncovered spies, no verification of conspiracy theories on which he built his political career.
"McCarthy had shopworn goods and fishing expeditions," said Don Ritchie, the Senate's associate historian who began poring over the transcripts in 1976. He said the files won't provide fodder for any revisionists arguing McCarthy was right.
No one McCarthy summoned went to jail -- even the few who were convicted of contempt won on appeal. But his probes ruined lives and careers with unproven hints of communist taint.
The documents were released in a joint venture authorized by Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Susan Collins of Maine, then respectively the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, McCarthy's platform.
McCarthy flourished during Cold War anxieties, with some parallels to today's fear of terrorism. Levin said the hearings were a reminder of "tactics (that) can be used to quiet dissenters" and the need to resist "those who try to still voices of disagreement."
Perusing the 1953-54 transcripts, released online (http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/psi.htm) and in the Senate hearing room where McCarthy held forth, shows that McCarthy in private was like McCarthy in public.
His interrogation of an obscure engineer named Benjamin Zuckerman, who had worked briefly with the U.S. Army Signal Corps, was a good example of his brow-beating style.
Zuckerman testified that on his rare encounters -- four in eight years -- with a former college acquaintance later implicated in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy case, the two young men had talked about women, audio equipment, and the best way to cook eggs. McCarthy snarled that he was "either the damnedest liar" or "a case for a mental institution."
"Did you ever tell anybody that you believed in communism," McCarthy's lead lawyer Roy Cohn once asked a security guard named Francesco Palmiero, who had testified that he had walked past some communist meetings near his housing project.
Composer Aaron Copland, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, and poet-playwright Langston Hughes are among the handful of celebrity witnesses who appear in these transcripts.
Hammett refused to answer many questions. Hughes sought to explain how racism shaped his political views. Copland, when McCarthy harshly pressed for his views of U.S.-Finnish relations, calmly replied, "I spend my days writing symphonies, concerts, ballads and I am not a political thinker."
But mostly McCarthy picked on the obscure and the expendable, file clerks, engineers, mid-level bureaucrats.
He questioned one former army engineer as to why he hadn't known his mother was a communist when he was a boy. He threateningly spoke of looming perjury charges when witnesses said they didn't discern any future spies in their college classes 15 years earlier. He badgered a World War II veteran on whether he enlisted on the orders of the Communist Party.
"I know you are not as dumb as you are trying to make out," he told a secretary named Doris Powell who had once worked for what she later discovered was a leftist publication, menacingly urging her to get some legal advice or face the consequences.
A Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy served in the Senate for only a decade and his headline-grabbing investigations lasted a mere two years. His final years, from his censure in 1954 until his death in 1957, he served in relative oblivion.
But McCarthyism was longer and deeper than Joe McCarthy himself. Anti-communist probes, sometimes camouflage for attacks on labor or early civil rights activism, dated back to the 1930s and intensified in the late 1940s with the Cold War.
Ironically, it was McCarthy and his excesses that not only gave a name to the anti-communist drive, it was also his excesses that brought about its end. "Once he was censured, the whole anti-communist issue dried up," Ritchie said.
Ritchie recalled that before McCarthy aide Cohn died, he dismissed allegations he had destroyed lives. "Name them." he demanded. "Here they are, these are the names," said Ritchie.
Mcarthy papers opened after 50 years
Mcarthy papers opened after 50 years
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... 3May5.html
Re: Mcarthy papers opened after 50 years
/agree 100%kyoukan wrote:Lest you all forget what happens when you give a paranoid megalomaniacal politicians the power to destroy people's lives at their whimsy with false accusations and phony charges.
Politicians with power... never a good situation whether they are on the right or the left. I personally don't think John Ashcroft is evil, but the power and secrecy of his position can very easily lead to poor decision-making and ultimately to corruption.kyoukan wrote:Not really. More like giving evil men like John Ashcroft powers that he should not have under any circumstances.
I still whole-heartedly agree with Kooky's original assertion. I'm sure it applied to Joe McCarthy. I'm less sure it's applicable to John Ashcroft until more proof is presented.
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Fallanthas
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Adelrune Argenti
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On the other hand, you cant deny that there were some communists within the government and other industries at the time of the hearings. The world was a very scary place then with the onset of the Cold War, the Korean conflict, and the development of the hydrogen bomb. I don't think we would have the same scenario in today's world primarily because there are not as many daily reminders of the peril we are all in. Desperation leads to different tactics.
Adelrune Argenti
Actually Tanc, from the various "high level" defections from various countries over the years to the USSR, you can say there were. No I am not going to look this up and give you a source, but if you lived before the early 80s, you would have seen some of it in the news.
McCarthy personified a fear taken to the extreme. His methods didn't work for shit but the fear was not totally unfounded.
McCarthy personified a fear taken to the extreme. His methods didn't work for shit but the fear was not totally unfounded.
Wulfran Moondancer
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Petitioner to Club Bok Bok
Founding Member of the Barbarian Nation Movement
Stupid Sidekick of the Lambent Dorf
Petitioner to Club Bok Bok
Founding Member of the Barbarian Nation Movement
Kooky, you are exposing your ignorance here.kyoukan wrote:The KGB was mostly internal intelligence. They were sort of teh soviet version of the FBI (although a lot more paranoid and evil). They just got a bad repuation in hollywood as international spies because everyone knew what they were.
KGB had directorates for both internal security and external espionage. It would be more accurate to state the KGB was the equivalent to our FBI and CIA combined. KGB had it's share of success because idiots believed (some still do) the communist vision while neglecting to recognize it's dehumanizing implementation.
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Krimson Klaw
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Krimson Klaw
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Yea 300k. They had agents in every theatre, shopping center, and things like that. I would imagine that they "employed" 300k people for internal/external spying, but the amount of actual "agents" was probably much smaller. Just repeating what the ex KGB agents were saying on the special.
-edit and just to be clear, they said 300k agents, not 300k people on the payroll.
-edit and just to be clear, they said 300k agents, not 300k people on the payroll.
From a quick search on the web it appears we are both right. Both the GRU and the KGB had external espionage groups and there were turf wars between them.kyoukan wrote:The GRU was the USSR's external espionage division.
Sorry.
300,000 agents lmao
http://www.russianbooks.org/oswald/kgb.htm
Secondly, there is a popular misperception of the KGB's primary function. The KGB is not an intelligence agency, but an internal security organization...Its foreign intelligence operations, although very extensive, were frequently focused on augmenting its internal security function
The active pursuit of traditional military intelligence such as nuclear weapon secrets, chain of commands, troop dispositions, military technological secrets, and the kind of data that Oswald might have yielded was and remains today the mandate of the GRU - the Main Intelligence Administration (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie.)
If the KGB had over 400,000 people then GRU could easily have been around 300,000 as Krimson posted...In 1991 when the KGB was split up into separate agencies, the new foreign intelligence component consisted of only 12,000 employees out of a total estimated 400,000 - 700,000 KGB officers,
The original point of this was that to place some perspective on the McCarthy era... the cold war was truly a war... we had enemies that were actively trying to hurt us. I don't think it excuses what McCarthy did to the country, but it offers some perspective. It's easy to sit in the relative comfort of 2003 and ignore the reality of 1953 when the doomsday clock hovered around the 2 minute mark...
Cold War TimelineLinda Rothstein, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, based in Chicago. Since 1947, that bulletin has kept a "Doomsday Clock" that scientists use as a gauge to warn of the chances of a nuclear war. It reached two minutes to midnight in 1953.
Pretty weak attempt at sarcasm. Just ignore the part about;Forthe wrote:All communists are evil and all democratic capitalists are good. Dirty commies are almost as bad as muslims.
Americans of 1953 were supposed to just blithely ignore the reality of their world? Do you understand the meaning of perspective Forthe? Do you understand the realities of Communism as it's still being applied today? Do you ever open your eyes to the world as it really is?
Metanis please elucidate the "realities of Communism" as they are being applied today?
would the increasing gains of free markets in the Peoples Republic of China be an example?
A couple of bankrupt countries (NK and Cuba) aren't exactly that frightening of a spectre.
Again i remind you. The "Communist" boogeyman has been retired. No matter how much Ronnie putters on about them, they are not an adversary anymore. The new bad guys are Global Terrorist Networks.
would the increasing gains of free markets in the Peoples Republic of China be an example?
A couple of bankrupt countries (NK and Cuba) aren't exactly that frightening of a spectre.
Again i remind you. The "Communist" boogeyman has been retired. No matter how much Ronnie putters on about them, they are not an adversary anymore. The new bad guys are Global Terrorist Networks.
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Niffoni
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I don't think that proves all Communists are evil...it is estimated that some 20 to 60 million Soviet citizens were put to death between 1918 and 1953 by the secret police apparatus.
Just like I don't think that the fact that millions and millions of people actually WATCH American Idol is proof that all capitolists are evil. It just makes it LOOK that way =D
Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. - Douglas Adams
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Forthe
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Please elaborate.Metanis wrote:Pretty weak attempt at sarcasm.Forthe wrote:All communists are evil and all democratic capitalists are good. Dirty commies are almost as bad as muslims.
That is 20 to 60 million less commies in the world. I would have thought that would make you happy.Metanis wrote:Just ignore the part about;
Americans of 1953 were supposed to just blithely ignore the reality of their world? Do you understand the meaning of perspective Forthe? Do you understand the realities of Communism as it's still being applied today? Do you ever open your eyes to the world as it really is?
All posts are personal opinion.
My opinion may == || != my guild's.
"All spelling mistakes were not on purpose as I dont know shit ." - Torrkir
My opinion may == || != my guild's.
"All spelling mistakes were not on purpose as I dont know shit ." - Torrkir
Communists are not all Russians.
Russians slain in Stalin's Purges were not all Communists.
So the millions of Russian's killed then was still a very bad thing. There were many talented writers, artists, engineers, mathmaticians and decent people killed for Stalin's paranoia.
Russians have gone through some extremely hard times. Makes McCarthy's Witchhunts seem like fun and carefree hedonistic orgies. McCarthy = poopy.
Russians slain in Stalin's Purges were not all Communists.
So the millions of Russian's killed then was still a very bad thing. There were many talented writers, artists, engineers, mathmaticians and decent people killed for Stalin's paranoia.
Russians have gone through some extremely hard times. Makes McCarthy's Witchhunts seem like fun and carefree hedonistic orgies. McCarthy = poopy.
Kae
Voron, Communism is no longer the threat it posed some 50 years ago. But, it's wrong to forget it's seriousness and deadliness. Even recently, millions of people have or are dying unnecessarily due to Communism.Voronwë wrote:Metanis please elucidate the "realities of Communism" as they are being applied today?
would the increasing gains of free markets in the Peoples Republic of China be an example?
A couple of bankrupt countries (NK and Cuba) aren't exactly that frightening of a spectre.
Again i remind you. The "Communist" boogeyman has been retired. No matter how much Ronnie putters on about them, they are not an adversary anymore. The new bad guys are Global Terrorist Networks.
Witness North Korea starving it's citizens. Witness Cuba's recent executions. Witness China's deceit regarding SARS.
The Cold War isn't really over, hell, we are still fighting the reverberations in Iraq.
If the blindness and intolerance of the leftists on this board are any indication then we will be fighting for a long time to come.
so 3 guys in Cuba got executed without a fair trial and that is related to a global geopolitical threat how?
the Iran Iraq war wasnt part of the "Cold War". It was not the US vs. the USSR in an attempt to exert influence in a region. The US made it possible for the Ba'athists (socialists) to even gain power in the first place. They funded Hussein in the 80s because of Iran's fundamentalist government which was perceived to be a potential threat to the West.
If you want to talk about cleaning up from the Cold War, you could say that the Afghanistan operation was. That country festered in shambles after we no longer took interest in it when the USSR dissolved. Those conditions allowed Al Queda to utilize the area and grow their power. And no Iraq has no substantial link to Al Queda.
Their were more Al Queda guys in Buffalo, NY then there were in Baghdad.
the Iran Iraq war wasnt part of the "Cold War". It was not the US vs. the USSR in an attempt to exert influence in a region. The US made it possible for the Ba'athists (socialists) to even gain power in the first place. They funded Hussein in the 80s because of Iran's fundamentalist government which was perceived to be a potential threat to the West.
If you want to talk about cleaning up from the Cold War, you could say that the Afghanistan operation was. That country festered in shambles after we no longer took interest in it when the USSR dissolved. Those conditions allowed Al Queda to utilize the area and grow their power. And no Iraq has no substantial link to Al Queda.
Their were more Al Queda guys in Buffalo, NY then there were in Baghdad.
http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/wjhs/ ... short.htmlkyoukan wrote:hey shit for brains, why do you think the iran/iraq war was fought?Metanis wrote:Voron, Are you for real?
I haven't had a good laugh today so take your time.
There is some solace in the fact that even stupid people like Kooky and Forthe cannot successfully cause history to be re-written.
The only pertinence of this sideways jaunt to this thread on McCarthy was to add some perspective regarding the communist threat he felt had to be fought. It would appear none of you mental giants can relate to the situation 50 years ago. (Let me repeat, he did a bad thing to my country!)
Let me give you a bit of personal perspective, in my childhood it was still considered perfectly normal for families to excavate bomb shelters in the backyard. We still had nuclear attack drills in elementary school in which we were instructed to climb under our desks and cover our heads with our hands and arms. (uh uh, sure, like that's gonna help.)
In that context, when hydrogen bombs were expected to fly at any moment, do you think anyone in power in the U.S.A gave a rat's ass how the world viewed our interference with the governments of some nomadic tribes in the middle east? Yes, i'm laying it on thick here, but you 20 year old mental wizards just don't seem to have any empathy or imagination.
So the dance continues to this very day and it's not likely to stop soon.