Returned in Kind

"At a time when American blood is again being shed to preserve our dream of freedom, we are constrained fearlessly and frankly to call the charges . . . what they truly are: a fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the Senate of the United States and the American people. They represent perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruth in the history of this republic."

The Senate report was talking about Joe McCarthy. From the day in February when he had waved a paper before a Wheeling (W. Va.) audience and described it as a list of 205 State Department Communists, the charges and the big black headlines had been just about all his. This week the Democratic majority on the Senate subcommittee struck back with a thick, 313-page report.

It accused McCarthy of "hit & run" tactics, of a "cavalier disregard for facts," of "twisting, coloring, perverting and distorting" the truth, of a "campaign of vilification against this committee probably unparalleled in the history of congressional investigations." "Starting with nothing," it stated, "Senator McCarthy plunged headlong forward, desperately seeking to develop some information which, colored with distortion and fanned by a blaze of bias, would forestall a day of reckoning."

All Clear. After 31 days of investigation and two million words of testimony, the subcommittee underwrote the loyalty of the State Department and cleared everybody McCarthy accused, with only a light knuckle rap here & there. Likewise innocent, said the report, were all Government investigators or prosecutors who had been assailed for mishandling the Amerasia case (although the report slipped lightly over the refusal of Amerasia Editor Philip Jaffe to testify for fear of possible self-incrimination). The report also urged a careful restudy of the principle of congressional immunity, which gave Joe McCarthy his libel-proof soapbox.

Partisan Pitches. Once they had wound up, the subcommittee's three Democrats --Maryland's Millard Tydings, Rhode Island's Theodore Green and Connecticut's Brien McMahon--got in a few unmistakably partisan pitches. Straight-faced, they recommended the appointment of a twelve-man nonpartisan commission to go over the loyalty ground again, "human nature being what it is, particularly in an election year." Then they needled Republican members Bourke B. Hickenlooper and Henry Cabot Lodge (who did not sign the report) for not attending sessions regularly, adding that Hickenlooper had read through only nine of the 81 loyalty files, and Lodge only twelve. Lodge promptly cracked back that the whole investigation was "superficial and inconclusive," too intent on "proving or disproving individual charges" to take a thorough audit of disloyalty.

McCarthy, unchastened, called the report "a green light to the red fifth column in the U.S."

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