Chapter One
The List
I have here in my hand.
Thursday afternoon was overcast, the temperature hovering just
above freezing, when the black-haired, heavyset man carrying a
bulging, battered tan briefcase boarded a Capital Airlines
plane for the two hundred-seventeen-mile flight from
Washington’s National Airport to Wheeling, West Virginia.
“Good afternoon, Senator McCarthy,” he heard the stewardess
say after he took his seat. He looked startled, then pleased,
not realizing the stewardess had been waiting to greet him
after noticing a senator’s name on her passenger list. “Why,
good afternoon,” he replied, flashing a broad smile. “I’m glad
somebody recognizes me.”
There was no false modesty in his remark. On February 9, 1950,
Joe McCarthy was neither a household name nor a recognizable
public face. In four years as a freshman senator, a position
he held by virtue of the 1946 Republican sweep of both houses
of Congress, his record was so undistinguished that in a
recent poll Washington correspondents had voted him America’s
worst senator.
As he boarded the plane, McCarthy’s career was in shambles. In
his home state of Wisconsin, critics were calling him the
“Pepsi-Cola kid” because of reports that he had taken $10,000
from a manufacturer of prefabricated housing and obtained an
unsecured loan of $20,000 from a lobbyist for Pepsi-Cola. Then
it was disclosed that he recklessly lost the money speculating
on soybean futures.
A year prior, McCarthy, a lawyer, had come close to being
disbarred by the Wisconsin State Board of Ethics Examiners; he
had run for the U.S. Senate while holding a state judicial
office, a practice deemed both unethical and illegal. The
board found that he had acted “in violation of the
constitution and laws of Wisconsin,” but dismissed a petition
to discipline him by concluding that his infraction was “one
in a class by itself which was not likely to be repeated.”
McCarthy’s reply was contemptuous. Paraphrasing the board’s
ruling, he mocked, “Joe was a naughty boy, but we don’t think
he’ll do it again.”
He was also in trouble in Washington.
In a clubbish Senate that relied on hoary tradition and
deferential collegiality, on rigid seniority and elaborate
courtesy, his repeated violations of Senate rules and customs
had lost him the respect of influential colleagues in both
parties and denied him a place among the players who would
shape the legislative future. Already he had alienated both
Republican and Democratic colleagues by lashing out during
floor debates with false accusations against them. Once, in
the spring of 1947, he so enraged two fellow Republicans,
Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont and Charles W. Tobey of New
Hampshire, that both arose in protest and, claiming personal
privilege, accused McCarthy of having falsified their
positions. This came after McCarthy told the Senate that both
Flanders and Tobey had just informed him that they intended to
introduce a “fictitious amendment” designed to “deceive the
housewife” on a bill to extend wartime sugar controls for a
year. So furious was Tobey that, red-faced and shouting, he
accused McCarthy of lying and attempting to confuse the
Senate.
As McCarthy was acutely aware, for these reasons and others
his prospects for reelection in 1952 were imperiled. He had
been consulting, in fact, his advisors about finding a cause
to bolster his public standing and reverse his political
slide. All this was about to change when his plane took off
that February afternoon for West Virginia.
The way west is the most enduring of American legends, and in
its time Wheeling, West Virginia, played a central role in
that saga.
There, where the last battle of the Revolutionary War was
fought at Fort Henry, a flood of pioneers and adventurers
found their overland gateway west through Wheeling’s gorges to
claim free land beyond the Alleghenies in the Ohio River
Valley. By the time Joe McCarthy’s flight landed that February
afternoon, Wheeling, once West Virginia’s capital and leading
city, had become a cultural and economic backwater. Its
population had sunk to fifty-nine thousand from its peak of
seventy thousand, and the exodus was accelerating. Wheeling
was hardly the place for an obscure freshman senator to make
his mark in history, especially at a political boilerplate
event like the annual Lincoln Day speech to the Republican
Women’s Club of Ohio County-in a state that had voted
Democratic in the last five presidential elections, including
Harry S. Truman’s two years earlier.
As unlikely as the backdrop was, when Joe McCarthy flew into
Wheeling, West Virginia, the stage for McCarthyism had already
been set.
Each morning that week, citizens of Wheeling had awakened to
find the pages of their newspaper filled with frightening
reports of treachery, spies, Communists, terrible new nuclear
weapons, and a Cold War turning hot. Everything pointed toward
a war of incalculable destruction. There seemed no end to
alarming news flashes. Typical was the eight-column banner
headline spread across the Wheeling Intelligencer’s front
page, two days before McCarthy left for Wheeling:
FBI Hunts Fuchs’ Aides in Atom Theft
The headline decks told the story, reported out of Washington:
Hoover Relates
Spy Activities
To Congressmen
British Scientist
Faces Trial Friday
For Betraying U.S.
Klaus Emil Fuchs, a British subject of German extraction who
as a physicist had worked for three years in the United States
on the ultrasecret atomic bomb project, had been arrested in
London. Fuchs, “weedy, with a large head and narrow, rickety
body,” as the writer Rebecca West described him, was charged
with transmitting to Soviet agents in the U.S. “all he knew”
about America’s A-bomb development. As the record revealed,
Fuchs knew a lot.
Days after these shocking revelations, a federal jury found
Alger Hiss, a top diplomatic aide to Franklin Roosevelt at the
Yalta Conference, guilty of perjury in a highly-publicized
espionage trial. An ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers had
accused Hiss in House Un-American Activities Committee
testimony of being a Soviet agent who passed him secret
government documents. After Hiss’s conviction, Secretary of
State Dean Acheson drew protests for telling reporters, “I do
not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Then Acheson made
matters worse by invoking the words of a forgiving Jesus in
the Sermon on the Mount in connection with the case of a
convicted traitor.
Coming on the heels of Fuchs’s arrest, and Hiss’s conviction,
President Truman’s announcement that the United States had
begun work on the hydrogen bomb only intensified national
anxiety. The hydrogen bomb was the deadliest weapon yet known
to humankind. Albert Einstein, the father of the nuclear age,
appeared on national television warning that “radioactive
poisoning of the atmosphere and, hence, annihilation of any
life on earth has been brought within the range of
possibilities.” Einstein’s conclusion: “General annihilation
beckons.” In this context, one of the staunchest Republican
anticommunists, Homer Capehart of Indiana, cried out on the
Senate floor: “How much more are we going to take? Fuchs and
Acheson and Hiss and hydrogen bombs threatening outside and
New Dealism eating away the vitals of the nation. In the name
of heaven, is this the best the nation can do?”
(Continues…)
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Copyright © 2005
Haynes Johnson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-1510-1062-5
Excerpted from The Age of Anxiety
by Haynes Johnson
Copyright © 2005 by Haynes Johnson .
Excerpted by permission.
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