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Sunday, May 11, 2003

By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Sen. Joseph McCarthy's private hearings often were not private at all.

Newly released transcripts show that McCarthy's wife, his cronies and his favored newspaper reporters were allowed into many of the so-called executive sessions. McCarthy even invited the governor of Wisconsin, his home state, to sit through one "closed" hearing about communists in the Army.

McCarthy also violated his own rule of secrecy by giving interviews about what had transpired during hearings. A compliant press corps seldom dug beyond the surface of the senator's claims.

Members of the committee staff complained that they functioned in a state of chaos because McCarthy handed out subpoenas like parking tickets. As committee chairman, he called 395 witnesses in 1953, so many that staff investigators and senators went in unprepared and therefore unable to conduct meaningful questioning.

"No real research was ever done," said the late Robert F. Kennedy, who served as an assistant counsel for the committee for eight months in 1953. "Most of the investigations were instituted on the basis of some preconceived notion by the chief counsel or his staff members, and not on the basis of any information that had been developed."

The chief counsel was a pit bull of a lawyer named Roy Cohn, who was 26 years old in 1953. He and Kennedy, then 28, came to hate each other over committee tactics, and then they came to blows. Nobody seems to know who got the better of their fistfight.

Kennedy quit the committee in August 1953, but returned the next year as counsel for the three Democratic senators who served on it. The Democrats had boycotted the committee during much of 1953 because they regarded McCarthy, a Republican, as vainglorious and irresponsible.

The Democrats fled after McCarthy appointed J.B. Matthews as staff director. Matthews, a one-time Marxist turned anticommunist, publicly said religious figures were abetting communism.

When McCarthy refused to fire Matthews, the Democrats simply stopped attending the hearings.