The first six months of 1953 was a period to warm the cockles of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's heart. He bounced from headline to headline, denouncing the use of Communist books in U.S.-sponsored overseas libraries, challenging with cloakroom innuendo the appointment of Charles Bohlen as ambassador to Russia, engaging in a transatlantic cat fight with Britain's Clement Attlee. But with the adjournment of Congress, McCarthy had to scramble to keep his name in the big black type. He was beginning to sag as a topic of conversation when Harry Truman came to his aid by injecting Joe into the Harry Dexter White case—in which McCarthy had had no part. Last week, with public hearings regarding Communism in the Army Signal Corps radar laboratories at Fort Monmouth, N.J., McCarthy was bouncing again.
Last October, while on his honeymoon in the West Indies, McCarthy learned that the Army had suspended several Fort Monmouth employees as "security risks." With that, the honeymoon was over. McCarthy flew to New York and " began closed hearings. Unidentified witnesses scuttled in and out, rumors of missing microfilm and sinister scientists filtered through, and from time to time McCarthy emerged with dark reports of a Communist espionage ring organized by Atom Spy Julius Rosenberg, which "may still be in existence" at Fort Monmouth.
Some papers played nebulous rumors about the evidence as fact; other papers asserted that McCarthy was getting nowhere. Either way, Joe got the headlines. But the time came when McCarthy was willing to agree with Army Secretary Robert Stevens that the whole probe should be called off. At that point, last month, Stevens took a step that was either a courageous act or a big mistake. At a press conference, two reporters, whose stories had been critical of McCarthy's hearings, needled Stevens into saying: "We have been unable to find anything relating to espionage." McCarthy burned and bored into the counterpunch. He grimly promised to open up the hearings and "let the evidence speak for itself." The Harry Dexter White case, which had given Joe $300,000 worth of free TV time, greatly enhanced interest in his revival of the Fort Monmouth hearings.
From the Grave. Thirty-three Fort Monmouth employees already had been suspended by the Signal Corps, not as a result of McCarthy's investigation. Some had been reinstated; most were awaiting hearings. Of the 33, McCarthy called only one, Aaron Coleman, a classmate of Julius Rosenberg at the City College of New York, who went to Fort Monmouth in 1939, became a radar laboratory chief.
On the witness stand, Coleman admitted attending a Communist meeting with Rosenberg 16 years ago during their senior year at C.C.N.Y., but he swore that he had never seen, heard from or corresponded with Rosenberg after they left college. McCarthy, who admitted he had no living witnesses to prove the story, confronted Coleman with testimony from Rosenberg's trial: Rosenberg said that while an inspector at Fort Monmouth in the early 1940's, he had seen Coleman there. Said McCarthy, threatening a perjury citation against Coleman: "Testimony from the grave is admissible here."