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JOE MCCARTHY, A VICTIMIZER OR VICTIM
By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid
McCarthyism has come to mean throwing around wild charges with no concern about their truthfulness or the harm they may do to innocent people. That was what Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was accused of doing when he spoke in Wheeling, West Virginia on Feb. 9, 1950. It was reported by the local paper that the Senator had charged that there were 205 card-carrying Communists employed in the State Department. In speeches given on the next two days he said the number was fifty-seven. That was seen as proof that Joe McCarthy was making wild charges without any evidence. There was no tape recording to prove whether McCarthy had said there were 205 card-carrying Communists in the State Department or not. He denied it, but his denial cut no ice with his enemies in the news media. What they reported became the accepted truth. On the fiftieth anniversary of McCarthy's controversial speech, Accuracy in Academia sponsored a symposium on Senator McCarthy's legacy. Stan Evans, a conservative who heads the National Journalism Center, was one of the speakers. He is working on a new book on McCarthy, and in his remarks he discussed the difficulty of proving what figures McCarthy used in his Wheeling speech. A Wheeling resident who saw the Accuracy in Academia symposium on C-SPAN, called Evans, telling him that there were people in Wheeling who might help answer that question. Evans went to Wheeling to interview them, and that is how he discovered Ava Lou Ingersoll. She had heard McCarthy speak. She was so shocked by the numbers that he gave about security risks in the State Department that she fished a piece of paper out of her purse, borrowed a pen and wrote them down. Her notes showed that McCarthy had said that in 1946 the President's Loyalty Board had declared that 284 State Department employees were security risks unfit to work in the State Department and that 79 were discharged. That left 205 still on the State Department payroll. McCarthy said that 57 of those were found to be card-carrying members of the Communist Party. Mrs. Ingersoll forgot about her notes, but she came across them about three months later. She said, "I thought, well I'll be darned. I knew I was right. And so I took it to other members of our club.... They acted just the way they did after the speech. They didn't want to talk about it. They seemed frightened, saying, "You know we were told not to say anything." I said, "Who told? Nobody told me not to say anything." But these women were really frightened and wouldn't discuss it." Evans didn't want to rewrite history on the basis of some scribbled notes. Digging deeper, he found a 50-year-old report of a Senate committee on what McCarthy had actually said. The Democrats didn't like the findings, and the report was suppressed. Evans found a copy among papers a member of the committee left to a university. It confirmed Mrs. Ingersoll's notes. Evans revealed this on C-SPAN on August 25. Who looks worse, McCarthy, the reporters that smeared him, the Democrats who suppressed the committee report or the news media today that won't report his vindication?
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