McCarthy’s List

He said there were communists in the government. He was right, and the proof stayed sealed for fifty years.

On Tuesday a slate of Democratic Socialists swept the New York primaries. POTUS called them Communists. My algorithm on X was full of the same sentiment: we owe Joe McCarthy an apology. And they’re right.

Here is the room where it started.

The Room

Wheeling, West Virginia. February 9, 1950.

The Colonnade Room of the McLure Hotel has fourteen windows and no fire exit you can see from the podium. The radiators knock against the baseboard like something outside wants in.

Two hundred women fill the chairs. Republican women. Lincoln Day dinner. Hats and gloves folded over the programs in their laps. The plates are cleared. The coffee has gone cold. The speaker is a junior senator from Wisconsin who flew in that afternoon, and not one woman in that room could have picked him out of a crowd that morning.

His name is Joseph Raymond McCarthy. He is forty-one years old.

Farm kid. Grand Chute, outside Appleton. Fifth of seven. His father raised cattle and hogs. His mother prayed the rosary every night and died while he was still young enough to hear her voice in rooms she wasn’t in. He quit school after the eighth grade, started a chicken farm, watched the chickens die. At twenty he walked into Little Wolf High School and finished four years of coursework in one. Then Marquette, for law. Then the youngest circuit judge in the history of Wisconsin, a man who cleared a three-year backlog working sixteen-hour days because he did not know how to stop.

In 1942 he volunteered for the Marines. As a sitting judge he was exempt. He went anyway. Intelligence officer, dive-bomber squadron, the Solomon Islands. Twelve combat missions in the tail gunner’s seat.

He won his seat in the 1946 wave against a La Follette who stayed in Washington and assumed the family name would carry the state. McCarthy drove every county road in Wisconsin and shook every hand on every road. He met you once and six months later, in a different town, he knew your wife’s name and asked how the knee surgery went. He remembered every name in Wisconsin. Three years in the Senate, and nobody remembered his.

Tonight he has a piece of paper in his right hand.

The advance copies handed to the press that afternoon carry a number. Two hundred and five. Two hundred and five people in the State Department who are known members of the Communist Party, or loyal to it, still drawing a federal paycheck, still shaping the foreign policy of the United States.

There is no camera in the room. No microphone runs to a transcription machine. The most consequential speech of the early Cold War will survive only in the press accounts written afterward, in the version McCarthy reads into the Congressional Record eleven days later, and in the memory of two hundred women in hats who will be asked, for the rest of their lives, what they heard.

He holds up the paper.

The room goes quiet.

The Vault

No one in the Colonnade Room knows what is already sitting in a vault in Washington.

The proof of what the man with the paper is claiming already exists. Decoded. Dated. Filed. Since 1943 cryptographers have been quietly breaking intercepted Soviet intelligence cables, and the traffic is real, the names are real, the cover names and the meeting points and the assignments all decoded and locked in a cabinet under a code word none of these women have heard, in a program so secret the President may not know its full size. The networks McCarthy is waving a sheet about are documented down to the pseudonyms, in a vault he will never be allowed to open.

The man who controls that vault knows. He has known for years. He will not show it to McCarthy. He will not show it to the Senate. He will not show it to the State Department, and he barely shows it to the President.

So the loudest accusation in American politics and the buried proof that the accusation is true exist on the same night, in the same country, and the country will not be allowed to put them in the same room for forty-five years.

The paper is in the air. The proof is in the vault. The machine has already chosen which one you get to see.

The Move

That is the move. It runs no offices and holds no members, only a behavior older than the republic, and the behavior never changes. When a man gets close to a sealed record it does not refute him, because refuting him means opening the vault, and the vault is the one thing that never opens. So it does the cheap thing. It goes to work on his name.

It takes the name of the farm kid who shook every hand in Wisconsin and files it into a word. The word means reckless. It means paranoid. It means a man hunting enemies that were never there. A newspaper cartoonist coins it in 1950. The country is using it by 1954. And from that night forward nobody will be able to point at infiltration in any institution, ever again, without the word arriving first to announce that he is sick for pointing.

Nobody runs this. It runs. It worked so well that for seventy years a man’s name was an insult all by itself. Your father flinched at it. You don’t anymore.

The Surfacing

The files came out anyway. They always do.

In 1995 the vault opened. The decoded cables went public under the name they had carried in secret, Venona, and the cover names resolved into real people in the State Department, the Treasury, the War Department, the White House.

In 2003 they unsealed the rest. Nine thousand pages of McCarthy’s own subcommittee, classified for fifty years. In the transcript for January 26, 1953, a State Department clerk named John Matson describes a procedure. Personnel files flagged for security review are pulled from the archive and walked to a supervisor, who decides their disposition. Files marked for discontinuance are destroyed. The paper is gone. The man the paper described keeps his desk. The next morning a clerk named Helen Balog describes the volume. Hundreds of files. Nothing in it random. The ones that disappeared were the ones that would have confirmed what McCarthy told the Senate. The ones that survived were the clean ones.

So the record that proved him right was not only locked in a vault. Part of it was walked to a shredder by the same department he was pointing at, while he stood there pointing.

By then McCarthy had been dead since 1957, and the word made out of his name had been in the dictionary for half a century. The proof arrived too late to save him and right on time to prove the point.

It was never a question of whether the Communists were real. That had an answer, and the answer was in a drawer the whole time. The machine won a different contest, and it won before he finished his first sentence.

A name can be sealed faster than a file.

The Drawer

The transcripts are public now. The Venona tables are a search away. The thing that was true the whole time is there for anyone who looks. Most never look. The word is enough. It was never an accusation. It was a lock, and a lock means someone needed a door to stay shut. That door is still shut. The word still does its work, every day, on anyone who gets too close to a record someone needs sealed.

In a hotel ballroom that no longer exists, in front of two hundred women who are all gone now, a farm kid from Grand Chute holds a piece of paper in the air. The proof that he is right already sits in a Washington drawer, decoded and dated and locked. The word that will bury him has not been invented yet. It is coming. And when it comes it will do the only thing the machine ever needs done.

It will get the country to look at the man instead of the drawer.

<3EKO

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P.S. I drafted a book on McCarthy last fall, but then shelved it to work on other projects. Suppose now is as good a time as any to release it.

You can download it free here.

And if you’d like to help fuel the mission, you can always buy me a coffee.

See you next week.

I love you.