Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy Made His Move

Senator Joseph McCarthy waves one of several versions of his "list of Communists in the State Department." The number changed with every speech and none were ever revealed to the public.  Note that the paper appears to be a page of a random typed letter.

Note—Demagogues and opportunist sociopaths are nothing new in American History.  Until now all were ultimately stopped before they captured the flag…

Seventy-five years ago on February 9, 1950 an obscure Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy began a meteoric rise to fame with a Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. 

Although no recording or transcript was made, he was reported in the press to say, “State Department is infested with Communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” He would repeat that claim frequently, although the number of names fluctuated with each telling and he never produced the list. 

McCarthy won his Wisconsin Senate seat running as "Tail Gunner Joe."  He would inflate the number of combat missions that he flew several times as well as claims of enemy kills.  A biographer who researched his war record said that his major achievement was "strafing a bunch of palm trees."

The Senator had been elected running as Tail Gunner Joe for his World War II service in the Marine Corps and projected image as a regular guy. 

Despite his sensational claims being roundly refuted by a Senate Foreign Relations Sub-Committee chaired by Millard Tydings, McCarthy continued to fan growing public panic. He campaigned against Tydings and for other Republican Senate candidates that fall. Tydings was swamped in Maryland and all of the GOP candidates he endorsed, including Everet Dirksen in Illinois won. Suddenly he was seen as a rising political star with real connection to voters.

Cartoonist Herblock coined the term McCarthyism. 

McCarthy was not without opposition. Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block (Herblock) coined the derisive term McCarthyism. A few opined against him as his power rose.

As the Korean War raged McCarthy relentlessly attacked to Truman administration and Secretary of State George Marshall in particular blaming them for “loosing China.” When Dwight Eisenhower ran for President he so feared McCarthy that he would not even publicly defend his friend and mentor Marshall.

But Ike loathed McCarthy and after the election tried to distance himself without publicly attacking the Senator. 

In 1953, as chair of his own Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations McCarthy finally had the power to unleash his reign of terror with the help of his committee counsels Roy Cohn and young Robert Kennedy. 

He took on the Voice of America and its parent the United States Information Agency (USIA) accusing them of spreading Communist ideology and packing overseas libraries with pro-communist authors. The panicked State Department banned books from McCarthy’s new list and some libraries even burned them. 

Then the Senator turned his guns on the Army. He managed to turn up an Army dentist who had once belonged to the U.S. Labor Party. When the dentist was given an honorable discharge, he attacked his base commander, a much decorated World War II hero. Many began to feel he had gone too far. 

Edward R. Murrow attacked McCarthy in a landmark TV broadcast.

On March 10, 1954 CBS’s Edward R. Murrow dedicated a whole hour on his highly rated program See It Now to a meticulous attack on McCarthy, his lies, and his method.  In conclusion with the camera tight on his face, Murrow told the American public:

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Edward R. Murrow attacked McCarthy in a landmark TV broadcast.

In 1954 a special subcommittee chaired by Senator Karl Mundt was formed to investigate McCarthy charges and the dramatic Army-McCarthy Hearings began airing live televised testimony on April 27. During the hearings, which focused ostensibly on whether the Senator and Roy Cohn had improperly influenced favorable treatment for a young officer friend of Cohn, both men were unmasked as relentless bullies. 

Thirty days into the hearing the Army’s Chief Counsel Joseph Welsh challenged the Senator to produce the names on yet another list, one of supposedly 130 Communists working in defense contractors “before sundown.” McCarthy retorted by asking Welsh about a young lawyer in his Boston office who had once been a member of the National Lawyers Guild. Welch retorted:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…Let us not assassinates this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? 

 

Army council Joseph Welch confronting McCarthy live on television during the Army-McCarthy hearings.

McCarthy was finished, or nearly so. Over the course of the hearings his public approval ratings dropped from 50% to 34%. Now it was the Senator’s turn to be investigated, by a Special Committee chaired by Arthur Watkins, which recommended censure. On December 2, 1954 the Senate voted 67 to 22 to “condemn” Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

Deflated, McCarthy served out the balance of his term in isolation and turned more heavily than ever to alcohol. He died of hepatitis, a liver disease tied to his heavy drinking, on May 2, 1957 at the age of 48. He was not missed until some conservative Republican firebrands tried, unsuccessfully, to resurrect his reputation.





 

 

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Ralph Bunche Was the Impossible Diplomat

Ralph Bunche as a senior diplomat from the National Museum of American Diplomacy.

On September 22, 1950 the world was surprised when an American diplomat on loan to the United Nations was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  It was not that his achievement was unworthy—brokering the thorny negotiations that led to an armistice agreement between Israel and the Arab States ending a bloody war that began when Israel declared its independence—it was because Ralph Bunche was an African-American.

Bunch was born in Detroit, Michigan on August 4, 1904 (some sources place the date a year earlier.)  His father was a barber serving an exclusively white clientele—and thus probably passing himself off as white in his work.  Some of his ancestors had been free since before the American Revolution.  His mother was an accomplished amateur musician.  Also in the household was his maternal grandmother, “Nana” Johnson who had been born into slavery but was also capable of “passing.”  Despite their fair completions the family strongly identified as Black and lived in that community.

Both parents were in fragile health and the whole family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico in hopes of improvement.  Both soon succumbed—probably to tuberculosis.  Bunche, his two sisters, and his grandmother moved to Los Angeles.

                                       Bunche as a UCLA graduate.

To help support the family Ralph sold newspapers and held numerous side jobs, including laying carpets, and being a house boy to a film actor while he attended Jefferson High School.  Despite the time lost to work, he excelled as both a student and an athlete.  He was valedictorian of his graduating class and earned athletic scholarships to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA.) While the scholarships paid his school expenses, he earned his personal expenses by working as a janitor.  He competed as a varsity basketball player on league championship teams while also competing in debate and writing for the campus newspaper.  In 1927 Bunche graduated summa cum laude and valedictorian with a major in international relations.

His accomplishment was a matter of great pride in his South Los Angeles neighborhood.  The community raised $1000 by subscription to supplement a scholarship so that Bunche could continue his education at Harvard.  He completed his Masters in political science in just a year.  He began teaching at Howard University, the nation’s most prestigious Black institution in the fall of 1928.  For the next six years he alternated terms at Howard and back at Harvard where he pursued his Doctorate.  He was named Chair of Howard’s Department of Political Science, a title he held until 1950 despite numerous absences to conduct research or in war time or diplomatic service.

He received many honors and distinctions as a scholar.  The Rosenwald Fellowship in 1932 and 1933 enabled him to conduct research in Africa for a dissertation comparing French rule in Togoland and Dahomey.  The resulting paper won the Toppan Prize for outstanding original research in the social sciences in 1934.  A fellowship from the Social Science Research Council from 1936-37 enabled Bunche to do postdoctoral research at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

                    Bunche as a young scholar.

As he was becoming the acknowledged leading academic on African affairs and European Colonialism, he began to forcefully expound his sometimes controversial views.  His influential 1936 pamphlet A World View of Race argued, “…class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.”  From 1936-40 Bunche was contributing editor to a leftist academic journal, Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly.

It was inevitable that with his credentials and expertise that Bunche would be called upon for service during World War II.  He began as a senior analyst on colonial affairs at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS.)  There his knowledge of French possessions helped provide information that kept most of the sub-Saharan colonies in Free French hands and available as support for eventual action in North Africa.  He also provided insight on Nazi attempts to turn South African Boers against the British Empire.

In 1943 Bunche moved to the State Department where he served under Alger Hiss as Associate Chief of the Division of Dependent Area Affairs.  There he worked not only on African issues but as a leader of the Institute of Pacific Relations and on the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission. 

Bunche was active in preliminary planning for the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations held in Washington, D.C. in 1944 and as an adviser to the U.S. Delegation for the Charter Conference of the United Nations in 1945. He participated in the drafting of the Charter.  He worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt in the creation and adoption of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

Given his role in the birth of the institution, it came as no surprise when UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie asked to “borrow” Bunche from the State Department in 1946.  He was placed in charge of the Department of Trusteeship to oversee the numerous dependent areas that were placed under UN Trusteeship following the war.  It was delicate work, balancing the demands of former colonial masters and the growing anti-colonial nationalism of countries straining against the slow transition process to self-government.

Bunche was Count Folke Bernadotte's top aid as UN mediator until the Swede was assassinated in Jerusalem and he inherited the job.

In June, 1947 Bunche was assigned to work on the seemingly intractable problem of confrontation between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.  He soon moved from assistant to the UN Special Committee on Palestine to Principal Secretary of the UN Palestine Commission, which was charged with carrying out the partition approved by the UN General Assembly. When the original partition plan was dropped amid intense fighting between Arabs and Israelis in early 1948 the UN appointed Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte as mediator for the conflict with Bunche as his chief aide. Count Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem four months later on September 17 by the Zionist group Lehi. And Bunche was catapulted to chief mediator on Palestine. It was, theoretically, a temporary appointment.

The peace negotiations were tough, delicate, shirtsleeve work.  Bunche with a senior Israeli in his spartan headquarters on Rhodes.

For eleven months Bunche conducted ceaseless negotiations from his headquarters on the island of Rhodes.   Israeli negotiator Moshe Dayan later reported on Bunche’s unorthodox style.  He often conducted one-on-one talks with the parties over supposedly casual games of billiards.  He generally kept the parties apart as much as possible since their mere presence with each other in the same room inflamed passions and tended to harden positions.  He shuffled the parties in an out getting little concessions here and there from both parties until he could finally bring them together to sign the 1949 Armistice Agreements made successively between February and July between Israel and its neighbors, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordon, and Syria.  No party got what they really wanted, but all parties got what they could live with—at least for a while. 

Special U.N. envoy Ralph Bunche receives his Nobel Prize for brokering a peace between Israel and its neighboring Arab states.

His accomplishments made Bunche an instant celebrity.  He was greeted in New York City by a ticker tape parade and his adopted hometown of Los Angeles declared a Ralph Bunche Day. He was awarded the Spingarn Prize by the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) in 1949.  He was awarded 30 honorary degrees over the next three years.  He could not keep up with requests for speeches.  And all of this only intensified with the announcement of the Nobel Prize.

Of course, Bunche was not without critics.  His participation in the avowedly Marxist academic publication, his endorsement of National Negro Congress in the ‘30’s, and his close association with accused traitor Alger Hiss did not go unnoticed.  He was somewhat protected by the enormous prestige of the Nobel Prize—and the fact that he was no longer at the State Department. But he was subjected to an investigation by a Loyalty Board into American diplomats working at the United Nations in 1953 and had to personally appear and refute each of 14 spurious charges against him.  Although he had the support of President Dwight Eisenhower, it was a painful and humiliating experience for him. 

Bunche with Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King on the March from Selma to Montgomery.

Many also did not appreciate his loud public support for Civil Rights causes.  Academically, he had participated in the groundbreaking research on American race relations by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and often spoken out about the absence of scientific evidence for differentiations among the races.  He publicly supported actions by both the NAACP and the Urban League.  He endorsed the campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and participated in the 1963 March on Washington.  Controversy around him probably cost him an appointment as Secretary of State or Ambassador to the United Nations under John F. Kennedy.  But he did pave the way for Colin Powel and Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State and Susan Rice and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as Ambassadors to the United Nations.

The beneficiaries of his greatest achievement have not looked kindly towards him in recent years.  Palestinians and Israelis have hardened even more toward one another after years of ongoing conflict and bloodshed.  Both wield their own oft revised views of history as cudgels.  And both sides now feel that Bunche “sold them out” and blame the ongoing conflict in not getting everything they demanded in those tense negotiations.  Compromise and compromisers are no longer welcome in either camp.

For his part, the indefatigable Bunche resumed splitting his time numerous educational commitments, lecturing, and undertaking more missions for the United Nations.  From 1955 to 1967, he was Undersecretary for Special Political Affairs and from 1968 to his death was Undersecretary-General.  In 1960 Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld appointed him as his special representative to oversee the UN commitments in the war-torn Congo and he served similarly during conflicts in Cyprus, Kashmir, and Yemen.

The U.S. Postal Service honored Bunche with a 1982 stamp.

Bunche found time to teach at Harvard from 1950-52, serve on the New York City Board of Education from 1958-64, serve as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers from 1960 to 65, as well as being a board member of the Institute of International Education, and a trustee of Oberlin College, Lincoln University, and New Lincoln School.

Bunche died, evidently of exhaustion, on December 9, 1971 at the age of 68.

 

The Impossible Diplomat— Nobel Peace Prize Winner Ralph Bunche

 

Special U.N. envoy Ralph Bunche receives his Nobel Prize for brokering a peace between Israel and its neighboring Arab states.

Note—The invasion of Ukraine by Russia—the first mass cross-border war in Europe in nearly 80 years—make one wonder if the impossible diplomat who brokered peace between intractable enemies Israel and its Arab neighbors and other thorny conflicts could somehow have helped head off this one.

On September 22, 1950 the world was surprised when an American diplomat on loan to the United Nations was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  It was not that his achievement was unworthy—brokering the thorny negotiations that led to an armistice agreement between Israel and the Arab States ending a bloody war that began when Israel declared its independence—it was because Ralph Bunche was an African-American.

Bunch was born in Detroit, Michigan on August 4, 1904 (some sources place the date a year earlier.)  His father was a barber serving an exclusively white clientele—and thus probably passing himself off as white in his work.  Some of his ancestors had been free since before the American Revolution.  His mother was an accomplished amateur musician.  Also in the household was his maternal grandmother, “Nana” Johnson who had been born into slavery but was also capable of “passing.”  Despite their fair completions the family strongly identified as Black and lived in that community.

Both parents were in fragile health and the whole family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico in hopes of improvement.  Both however soon succumbed—probably to tuberculosis.  Bunche, his two sisters, and his grandmother moved to Los Angeles.

                                       Bunche as a UCLA graduate.

To help support the family Ralph sold newspapers and held numerous side jobs, including laying carpets, and being a house boy to a film actor while he attended Jefferson High School.  Despite the time lost to work, he excelled as both a student and an athlete.  He was valedictorian of his graduating class and earned athletic scholarships to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA.) While the scholarships paid his school expenses, he earned his personal expenses by working as a janitor.  He competed as a varsity basketball player on league championship teams while also competing in debate and writing for the campus newspaper.  In 1927 Bunche graduated summa cum laude and valedictorian with a major in international relations.

His accomplishment was a matter of great pride in his South Los Angeles neighborhood.  The community raised $1000 by subscription to supplement a scholarship so that Bunche could continue his education at Harvard.  He completed his Masters in political science in just a year.  He began teaching at Howard University, the nation’s most prestigious Black institution in the fall of 1928.  For the next six years he alternated terms at Howard and back at Harvard where he pursued his Doctorate.  He was named Chair of Howard’s Department of Political Science, a title he held until 1950 despite numerous absences to conduct research or in war time or diplomatic service.

He received many honors and distinctions as a scholar.  The Rosenwald Fellowship in 1932 and 1933 enabled him to conduct research in Africa for a dissertation comparing French rule in Togoland and Dahomey.  The resulting paper won the Toppan Prize for outstanding original research in the social sciences in 1934.  A fellowship from the Social Science Research Council from 1936-37 enabled Bunche to do postdoctoral research at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

                        Bunche as a young scholar.

As he was becoming the acknowledged leading academic on African affairs and European Colonialism, he began to forcefully expound his sometimes controversial views.  His influential 1936 pamphlet A World View of Race argued, “…class will some day supplant race in world affairs. Race war will then be merely a side-show to the gigantic class war which will be waged in the big tent we call the world.”  From 1936-40 Bunche was contributing editor to a leftist academic journal, Science and Society: A Marxian Quarterly.

It was inevitable that with his credentials and expertise that Bunche would be called upon for service during World War II.  He began as a senior analyst on colonial affairs at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS.)  There his knowledge of French possessions helped provide information that kept most of the sub-Saharan colonies in Free French hands and available as support for eventual action in North Africa.  He also provided insight on Nazi attempts to turn South African Boers against the British Empire.

In 1943 Bunche moved to the State Department where he served under Alger Hiss as Associate Chief of the Division of Dependent Area Affairs.  There he worked not only on African issues but as a leader of the Institute of Pacific Relations and on the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission. 

Bunche was active in preliminary planning for the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations held in Washington D.C. in 1944 and as an adviser to the U.S. Delegation for the Charter Conference of the United Nations in 1945. He participated in the drafting of the Charter.  He worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt in the creation and adoption of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

Given his role in the birth of the institution, it came as no surprise when UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie asked to “borrow” Bunche from the State Department in 1946.  He was placed in charge of the Department of Trusteeship to oversee the numerous dependent areas that were placed under UN Trusteeship following the war.  It was delicate work, balancing the demands of former colonial masters and the growing anti-colonial nationalism of countries straining at the transition process to self-government.

Bunche was Count Folke Bernadotte's top aid as UN mediator until the Swede was assassinator in  Jerusalem and inherited the job.

In June, 1947 Bunche was assigned to work on the seemingly intractable problem of confrontation between Jews and Arabs in Palestine.  He soon moved from assistant to the UN Special Committee on Palestine to Principal Secretary of the UN Palestine Commission, which was charged with carrying out the partition approved by the UN General Assembly. When the original partition plan was dropped amid intense fighting between Arabs and Israelis in early 1948 the UN appointed Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte as mediator for the conflict with Bunche as his chief aide. Count Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem four months later on September 17 by the Zionist group Lehi. And Bunche was catapulted to chief mediator on Palestine. It was, theoretically a temporary appointment.

The peace negotiations were tough, delicate, shirtsleeve work.  Bunche with a senior Israeli in his spartan headquarters on Rhodes. 

For eleven months Bunche conducted ceaseless negotiations from his headquarters on the island of Rhodes.   Israeli negotiator Moshe Dayan later reported on Bunche’s unorthodox style.  He often conducted one-on-one talks with the parties over supposedly casual games of billiards.  He generally kept the parties apart as much as possible since their mere presence with each other in the same room inflamed passions and tended to harden positions.  He shuffled the parties in an out getting little concessions here and there from both parties until he could finally bring them together to sign the 1949 Armistice Agreements made successively between February and July between Israel and its neighbors, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordon, and Syria.  No party got what they really wanted, but all parties got what they could live with—at least for a while.

His accomplishments made Bunche an instant celebrity.  He was greeted in New York City by a ticker tape parade and his adopted hometown of Los Angeles declared a Ralph Bunche Day. He was awarded the Spingarn Prize by the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) in 1949.  He was awarded 30 honorary degrees over the next three years.  He could not keep up with requests for speeches.  And all of this only intensified with the announcement of the Nobel Prize.

Of course, Bunche was not without critics.  His participation in the avowedly Marxist academic publication, his endorsement of National Negro Congress in the ‘30’s, and his close association with accused traitor Alger Hiss did not go unnoticed.  He was somewhat protected by the enormous prestige of the Nobel Prize—and the fact that he was no longer at the State Department. But he was subjected to an investigation by a Loyalty Board into American diplomats working at the United Nations in 1953 and had to personally appear and refute each of 14 spurious charges against him.  Although he had the support of President Dwight Eisenhower, it was a painful and humiliating experience for him.

Bunche with Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King on the March from Selma to Montgomery.

Many also did not appreciate his loud public support for Civil Rights causes.  Academically, he had participated in the groundbreaking research on American race relations by Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal and often spoken out about the absence of scientific evidence for differentiations among the races.  He publicly supported actions by both the NAACP and the Urban League.  He endorsed the campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and participated in the 1963 March on Washington.  Controversy around him probably cost him appointment as Secretary of State or Ambassador to the United Nations under John F. Kennedy.  But he did pave the way for Colin Powel and Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State and Susan Rice and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as Ambassadors to the United Nations.

The beneficiaries of his greatest achievement have not looked kindly towards him in recent years.  Palestinians and Israelis have hardened even more toward one another after years of ongoing conflict and bloodshed.  Both wield their own oft revised views of history as cudgels.  And both sides now feel that Bunche “sold them out” and blame the ongoing conflict in not getting everything they demanded in those tense negotiations.  Compromise and compromisers are no longer welcome in either camp.

For his part, the indefatigable Bunche resumed splitting his time numerous educational commitments, lecturing, and undertaking more missions for the United Nations.  From 1955 to 1967, he was Undersecretary for Special Political Affairs and from 1968 to his death was Undersecretary-General.  In 1960 Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld appointed him as his special representative to oversee the UN commitments in the war-torn Congo and he served similarly during conflicts in Cyprus, Kashmir, and Yemen.

 The U.S. Postal Service honored Bunche with a 1982 stamp.

Bunche found time to teach at Harvard from 1950-52, serve on the New York City Board of Education from 1958-64, serve as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers from 1960 to 65, as well as being a board member of the Institute of International Education, and a trustee of Oberlin College, Lincoln University, and New Lincoln School.

Bunche died, evidently of exhaustion, on December 9, 1971 at the age of 68.