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J. Edgar Hoover’s 50-Year Career of Blackmail, Entrapment, and Taking Down Communist Spies

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Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarth in the early 1950s famously called attention to a major security problem within the American government? (Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with investigations into Hollywood, which were carried out by the House of Representatives; he was concerned exclusively with Communists or Communist sympathizers in government.)

How Joseph Mccarthy Gained Public Attention

One of the cases that McCarthy investigated involved Amerasia, a small pro-Communist journal whose personnel included a host of well-known Soviet apologists. In early 1945, Amerasia published what turned out to be a nearly verbatim classified report on American and British policy in Southeast Asia. How had they accessed this secret report?

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In June 1945, after a considerable period of surveillance, the FBI arrested several of the journal’s staffers and three officials of the U.S. government— naval intelligence official Lieutenant Andrew Roth, State Department employee Emmanuel S. Larsen, and diplomat John Stewart Service—who had supplied them with secret information, largely dealing with American policy toward Asia. More than 1,000 government documents were seized.

Surely something would come of a bombshell like this, right? J. Edgar Hoover described the case against the defendants as “airtight,” and preparations were made in the Justice Department to begin prosecution.

Then, suddenly, Justice backed off. Two of the figures involved received fines, while the others suffered no penalty at all. The Tydings Committee, a Senate committee established to investigate McCarthy’s charges, dismissed the matter as overblown.

But FBI wiretaps at the time that were made public only in the 1990s reveal a conspiracy to bury the case on the part of Lauchlin Currie, Democratic lobbyist Thomas Corcoran, and officials from the Justice Department. Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, two scholars of the subject, describe what all of this meant: “Three government employees were meeting regularly with a magazine publisher who had devoted his career to promoting the Stalinist line and who, as it turned out, had cultivated these contacts in the first place because it was his life’s ambition to become a full-fledged Soviet agent. . . . One did not have to be a right-wing crank to find this unacceptable and to feel isolated and suspicious when the whole mess was swept under a rug.” Stanton Evans concludes:

Suffice it to note that the Amerasia case displayed, to the fullest, every kind of security horror, and federal crime: Theft of documents, policy subversion, cover-up, perjury, and obstruction of justice—to name only the most glaring. In short, everything McCarthy had said about the subject was correct, while his opponents were not only wrong, but lying; the Tydings “investigation,” for its part, was a sham—the cover-up of a cover-up, not an investigation.

Senator Joseph Mccarthy

It is simply impossible to do the subject justice here. Books on McCarthy, in fact, tend toward the enormous: David Oshinsky’s book A Conspiracy so Immense, for example, is itself immense. In particular, McCarthy’s accusations against Owen Lattimore, Philip Jessup, and John Stewart Service remain a source of contention. But we can at least raise a few suggestive points.

By the time McCarthy emerged on the scene, internal security was a major issue, and an unresolved one. There is little doubt, as one scholar puts it, that “many U.S. officials whose job it was to guard against subversion took a strangely casual view of their assignment.” Repeated attempts, including two by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, to persuade government officials to act on evidence of Soviet infiltration were ignored. The situation grew so bad that in mid-1947, members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in a confidential report sent to Secretary of State George Marshall, observed in exasperation:

It is evident that there is a deliberate calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places, but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. . . . On file in the Department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States, which involves large numbers of State Department employees.. . . This report has been challenged and ignored by those charged with the responsibility of administering the department with the apparent tacit approval of [secretary of state] Mr. [Dean] Acheson.

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March 28, 2024 <https://www.historyonthenet.com/senator-joseph-mccarthy>
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