About McCarthy

Six months ago, editors of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain gave New York World-Telegram and Sun Staff Writer Frederick Woltman a tough assignment: get busy and appraise the works of Senator Joe McCarthy. Freddy Woltman, 49, was just the man for the job. Long acknowledged the No. 1 newspaper specialist on Reds, he has been exposing Communists since 1938, and, unlike many other anti-Communist writers, he was never a Communist himself. A hard-digging reporter, he backed his stories with solid documentation--e.g., he exposed Gerhart Eisler as the top Kremlin agent in the U.S. the day before the FBI picked Eisler up. For his articles "on the infiltration of Communists in the U.S.," Woltman won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

This week the World-Telly and other Scripps-Howard papers splashed Woltman 's five-part series across their pages.

His appraisal: McCarthy is "a major liability to the cause of anti-Communism." By making it harder for real Communist-fighters to operate effectively, wrote Woltman, McCarthy has actually become an asset to Communism. "He has introduced a slambang, rabble-rousing, hit-and-run technique into the serious business of exposing the Communist conspiracy . . . and thereby disarranged . . .

the detection of penetration and espionage . . . With Asia and West Europe threatened, he has distracted public opinion from the world's critical danger spots . . . Unless he has his way, he's willing to destroy the Eisenhower Administration at a time when it's grappling with a world crisis . . . Essentially he's no investigator. He's a headline-maker." Johnny-Come-Lately. Woltman found that McCarthy makes headlines by "wild twisting of facts and near facts [which] repels authorities in the field." For his adversaries, McCarthy has a special technique that "consists of imputing [to them] treason, treasonable motives, plots and conspiracies . . . Those with whose decisions Mr. McCarthy disagrees are, in his book, in league with traitors." To prove his points, McCarthy has a "unique distortion technique: stating as facts a set of nonexisting circumstances, then repeating them as facts when challenged." Woltman himself has known McCarthy since shortly after the Senator walked into the anti-Red arena in February 1950 with his Wheeling, W.Va. speech about 205 "Communists" in the State Department (later toned down to 57, then upgraded to 81). McCarthy was then a frequent visitor at Woltman's Washington hotel suite, and at one social gathering there in April 1950, a young woman asked the Senator: "Just how long ago did you discover Communism?" McCarthy's answer: "Two and a half months!" By that time, Woltman recalled, twelve top U.S. Communists had been convicted, Gerhart Eisler had jumped his bail and fled the country, Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury, and Klaus Fuchs had been arrested in Britain. Said Woltman: "Senator McCarthy, although he often took credit, had no hand in [these cases. His] knowledge and understanding of Communism were sparse." Nevertheless, McCarthy has been able to build up the myth that he has "stopped Communism in America." Happy Headlines. To show that McCarthy "is still hammering out accusations of treason and espionage in Government . . . but . . . has come up with no proof," Woltman cited some of McCarthy's charges and investigations: -- In regard to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Senator told the press a year ago that a Communist Party member had access to CIA secrets, and commented darkly: "An extremely bad situation." Said Woltman: "Evidently it wasn't bad enough for Mr. McCarthy to do anything about it, but he did cash in on headlines." < At Fort Monmouth, McCarthy held "press briefings" to give his own version of the secret testimony about "espionage" at closed, one-man hearings. But "when the time came to make good on the charges," said Woltman, "the Senator ducked out." McCarthy also took credit for the suspension of 35 employees, although the Army had been investigating these cases (actually 36) for months beforehand. Said Woltman: "All. . . denied the Communist charges. Not one invoked the Fifth Amendment . . . Not one has been dismissed. Fourteen have been reinstated, four with full clearances." Then the plot enlarged. The instigators had become Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., his chief deputy, William P. Rogers, and Sherman Adams, Assistant to the President. Further along ... it was the Democrats who 'shoved' Secretary Stevens into the battle ... So Senator McCarthy had backed away completely from his original charges." J. B. Wiesner, director of the electronics laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had helped pick the site, then Cohn told the committee that the scientist was now opposed to the Seattle location. Wiesner later told Woltman that Cohn had "misrepresented" his position, that he had never changed his mind about the Seattle site, and that "the sabotage charge was completely unfounded and ridiculous." Said Woltman: "By failing to present [this] vital testimony, Senator McCarthy could report mismanagement approaching sabotage . . . And the world's two largest transmitters now lie useless in Government warehouses." Swallows Come Home. Was there ever a time when McCarthy could have been stopped? Woltman thinks it would have been a simple matter for President Truman to have done so when McCarthy first sent him a well-publicized wire about the State Department's "57 card-holding Communists." Said Woltman: "In a very real sense, [McCarthy] was the creature of his adversaries. The Senator can thank President Truman, as much as anyone, for his phenomenal rise. For the President ignored his wire . . . Had he turned it over to the FBI for investigation, Mr.

Truman would have taken the play away from Mr. McCarthy." As a result, said Woltman, McCarthy-has been able to exaggerate and confuse the entire issue of Communism. Said Woltman: "The fact is, there's nothing today like the Red climate in America of ten years ago. The public is alert to the Communist conspiracy . . . The party-liner, who operated openly--and brazenly --in official circles in the 1930s, has disappeared. Communism has lost most of the intellectuals . . . Yet Senator McCarthy continues to use the blunderbuss, firing in all directions at once . . . By his excesses . . . his thumb-in-the-eye tactics McCarthy has completely befogged a major issue of the day."

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