In the six weeks since he charged theState Department with harboring "57 card-carrying Communists," Wisconsin's Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had reaped whole scrapbooks full of scare-head publicity. But, despite congressional immunity, and the urging of a Senate committee set up especially to investigate his charges, he had not named one Communist, or produced any new evidence.
Instead he had dragged a batch of tired old loyalty cases back into the limelight and hashed over charges which had been hashed and rehashed (and in some cases, refuted) in the past. His tactics backfired during the testimony of his first victim—62-year-old Miss Dorothy Kenyon, a onetime Manhattan municipal judge and former U.S. delegate to UNESCO, where she consistently gave the Russian delegation the benefit of a sharp tongue.
McCarthy had accused her of having been a member of 28 Communist fronts. The ex-judge, a greying and angry woman, seemed delighted at the chance to appear; having called McCarthy an "unmitigated liar," she disproved his accusations so thoroughly that the audience applauded her, and Iowa's Republican Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper apologetically said there was not "the least evidence" that she had been "in any way subversive or disloyal."
This week, roving Ambassador Philip C. Jessup hurried home from a round-the-world trip to answer McCarthy's roundhouse accusation that Jessup has "an unusual affinity for Communist causes." He brought with him a letter from General George Marshall, who wrote Jessup that he was "shocked and distressed by the attack on your integrity," and another from General Dwight Eisenhower, saying that "no one who has known you can for a moment question the depth or sincerity of your devotion to the principles of Americanism."
Said Jessup: "While I was [in the Far East] I was attacked by two sources—Izvestia and Senator McCarthy. Anyone who believes in the concept of guilt by association might draw some startling conclusions from this fact. However, I do not believe in the concept of guilt by association. I do believe that anyone who, without adequate proof, levels a charge of conscious or ignorant support of Communism ... at an official of the United States Government, is irresponsible . . ."
Loud-mouthed Joe McCarthy had been irresponsible all right—and worse. He had made a wretched burlesque of the serious and necessary business of loyalty checkups. His charges were so completely without evidence to support them that he had probably damaged no reputations permanently except his own.