Commiw, Contai~~menl,
o ~ Cold
~ d War
What were the Pumpkin Papers?
To many Americans in the days and years fo11owing the war,Communism was on the march around the world. Roosevelt and his "eastern
establishment" liberal coterie had "giveti away" Eastern Europe, surrendering it to Stalin at Yalta. In one of the first tests of U.S. resolve,
the Soviets had tried to close off Berlin, forcing d ~ United
e
States to
conduct a massive Airlift iin 1948 that finally cracked the Russian hold
on he city. In China, the Nationalists were crushed by Mao's Cornmunist forces in 1949. At about the same time, it was revealed that the
Sovieti had the atomic bomb. The world seemed to be in the grasp of a
Communist conspiracy of international domination, and the president
had responded witlijthe Truman Doctrine, with the complete support
of a bipartisan Congress.
The obsessive fear ofCommunism in America was nothing new.
Americans had been battling the Red Menace-for years, and the first
wave of Red hysteria had followed World War I (see Chapter 6). But it
seemed as if the fears were much more real now, heightened by the terror of the mushroom cloud. Communism was the cutting issue on
which people voted. To be "saft"on Communism was political suicide,
and ambitious young men, like Representative Richard M. Nixon
(1913-94) of California, could see that Communist bashing was lhe
tickct b the future.
Responding to this anti-Red pressure, Truman had set up loyalty
boards in I947 to check on reports of Communist syrnpathizers'in the
federal government. Thousands were investigated, but there was no
meaningful trace of subversion, even though careers were destroyed as
suspicion replaced evidence. These were the first of the anti-Communist "witch hunts" in which the burden of proof was on the accused,
who couldn't face or know his unnamed accusers. Hearsay testimony
from unreliable witnesses became Holy Writ.
The fear got front-page headlines in 1949, when Whittaker Chambers (1901-6 I), a repentant "reformed" Communist Party member
and later a senior editor at Time magazine, charged that Alger Miss was
a member of the Communist Party and part of high-reaching Soviet
spy ring. To those who knew Hiss, this was nons,enns that took the antiSoviet paranoia too far. A Roosevelt New Dealer, Hiss (1904-96) was
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405
born and bred to the castern establishment, with impeccable credentials as a progressive and a long, distinguished career in public service,
beginning as a law clerk under Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell
I,Iolmes. But to conservatives, H i s s was blemished because he had
been with Roosevelt at Yalta and was secretary general of the United
Nations organizing conference in 1945-46. Both Yalta and the UN
were increasingly viewed as parts of the Cominunist scheme for weakening America and achieving world domination. In 1947, Hiss was
serving as president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foundation devoted to furthering the wealthy steel
magnate's commitment to a worldwide peace process, with the blessing
of diplomat John Foster Dulles (later Eisenhower's secretary of state)and his brother Allen Dulles (legendary founder of the CIA).Wit11 his
many such friends, Hiss's integrity and loyalty were unquestioned at tile
highest levels of government.
Disheveled, overweight, and a somewhat ill bred character, Chambers claimed that in the 1930s, Hiss had been a Comrr~unistwho had
given Chambers classified documents to be passed on to Moscow;
Pressed by Cor~~ressrnan
Richard Nixon in a 1948 hearing before the
House Un-American Activities Comrniltee (HUAC) investigating
alleged Communist subversion in government, Hiss denied the allegations. Everything in Hiss's demeanor and bearing seemed to demolish
the allegations made by the unseemly Chambers, who was also the
subject of a whisper campaign that Re was mentally unstable, an alc*
holic, and a homosexual. But there werc also some damaging revelations that left nagging suspicions. The most sensational of these came
to light when Cl~ambersproduced microfilm copies of stolen State
Department documents that Chambers said W iss had given hirn to pass
on to the Soviets. Chambers had hidden them inside a hollowed-out
pumpkin in his garden. Overnight, these became the Pumpkin Papers.
In Hiss's undoing was Richard NixonS moment. PLs Sam Tanenhaus
wrote in his monumental biography of Chambers, "Nixon was motivated by more than dislike of Hiss. He also saw a ~oliticalopportunity.
No stranger to the Communists in government issue, Nixon had ridden it to an upset victory over a popular incumbent, Jerry Vmrhis, in
1946 and rincc his arrival in Washington h ~ been
d diligently throwing
out lines tu its dense network of Red hunters. . . . With brilliant clarity,
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QONJT
K N O W M U C H ABOUT
H151'0~1
n
3 7
cables sent from U.S--based Soviet agcnts to their home ofice in
Moscow.Ihese cables implicate Hiss as part of a large espionage network centered in the federal goverilment,
Nixon grasped that the emerging Chambers-Hiss mystery could yield
great political dividends for the man who solved it. And SO he pitched
himself into the case with rnethodrcal intensity few in Washington-or
anywhere-could match."
His reputation darnaged by the evidence that Chambers had p r e
vided to support his charges, Hiss sued Chambers for libel, and the evidence against this paragon of American progressive liberalism turned
out to be strong. In the courtroom, Chambers showed that he knew intimate details of Hiss's life, and even produced papers showing that H i s
had once given him an old car. In the wake of the failed libel suit, Hiss
was indicted for perjury for lying to a congressional committee. Wllilc
the statute of limitations protected Hiss from espionage charges, a federal grand jury indicted him in 1948. Tried and convicted in Januaq
1950, Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison and served three years
before his release in 1954. (His personal fortune gone after his conviction, Hiss was also disbarred and became a printing salesman in New
York City. In 1975,at age seventy, he was readmitted t o the bar in Massachusetts, and continued to work for vindication until his death in
1996.)
For most of the next half-century, pet>plccontinued to argue this
case with passion. More than twenty books have been written about the
care, which, until hirly recently, remained one of the l i h u s tests of
one's political views: liberals were certain of Hiss's innocencc, conservatives of his guilt. But in the wake of the Cold War coming to an end.
new evidence in the case has surfaced, and many uncertainties have
Read: Perjury: The HissChamben Case by Allell Weinstein;
Whittaker C h ~ m b e r by
s Sam Tanenllaus.
Must
Why were the Amanbegs executed fbr espiofiage?
been removed.
When selected Moscow archives were opened to researchers after
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Hiss side was bolstered when
old KGB files were searched and none indicated that Hiss had spied for
the Soviets. But there was more damning evidence to follow. First a
researcher discovered documents in 1993 that related to Noel Field,
another prominent State Department oficial who had actually
defected to the Communists in 1949. According to Field, Hiss had
tried to recruit him into t t ~ cCommunist underground. Then in 1995,
the highly secret American National Security Agency (NSA), Lhe
organization that intercept3 and translates messages horn around the
world, released what are known as the "Venona trafic," thousands of
Commies, Contuinment, and Cold War
u
i
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The explosive Hiss story captured the headlines at about the same time
that Americans learned that IClrus Fuchs. a respected German-born
physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Protect developing the
atomic bomb at Columbia University and h ter at Los Alarnos during
the war, had been passing America's atomic secrets to the Russians.
Harry Cold, an American associate of Fuchs who was a chemist, was
caught at the same time as an American couple, David and Ruth
Greenglass. Greenglass, a young American soldier who also worked at
Lor Alarnos, testified that he had passed on crude drawings of atomic
weapons to his brother-in-law and sister, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
According to FBI documenk released later, J. Edgar Hoover urged
Ethel's arrest to force Julius to talk They were arrested in 1950, along
with another conspirator, Mort011 Sobell. They were tried in 1951 for
conspiracy to commit espionage.
Claiming innocence at their trial, the Rose~lbergsrelied 011 the
Fifth Amendment when asked if they were Cornmenisb. Greenglass
gave drtailed testimony about the information he had given to tlie
Rosenbergs and said Ethel transcribed notes for her husband. Cold,
who had already been sentenced to thirty years, said Saiet officer A p toli Yakovlev was julius Rosenberg's contact in tlre KGB. Their day in
court came in the midst of the Korean War, resided over by judge Irving R. Kaufinan, a iudge who, by all appearances, seeined in 1~aglre
with the prosecution. Sobel was sentenced to thirty years in iail; tllc
RaKnbergs were wntenced to death by Lufman, even though J.
Iloover opposed the death penalty for Ethel, fearing
reaction to
the execution of the mother of two small children. The other conspirators were also given prison sentences, including Fuchs llimself,
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Commies, Confuinrnertf, and Cold War
D O N ' TK N O W M U C I I A B O U T H I S T O R T
because they all agreed to help the prosecution, which the Rosenbergs
refused to do. And that was ultimately t l ~ ereason they were sent to the
electric chair on June 19, 1953.
The evidence against the Rosenbergs at the time, especially the testimony of Greenglass and Gold, was strong. But ever since, the h e n bergs' defenders have passionately claimed that the Rosenbergs were
framed, convicted, and executed in an atmosphere of anti-Semitic, antiCommunist frenzy. What has emerged, particularly since the release of
Soviet documents in the 1990s, confirms what had largely been the
consensus: that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a spy, but that the secreb
11e passed along were far less darnagmg than those Fuchs turned over. In
1997, a man who professed to be Rosenberg's Soviet "handler" said
Rosenberg had passed military secrets but not atomic secrets. As for
Ethel, the former Soviet spy said she knew what her husband, Julius,
was doing but was not involved, an assessment confirmed by the Venona
cables that also apparently confirmed Hiss's p i l t . In addition, Greenglass eventually admitted to jotirnalist Sam Roberts in his 2001 book,
The Brother, that he had lied about his sister to save himself.
What was McCarthyism?
It was from this toxic cloud of hysteria that Senator Joseph McCarthy
(1909-57) emerged, and was taken up by the right-wing press as a new
Paul Revere. He was the freshman senator frorn Wisconsin, elected to
the Senate ill 1946 by lying about his wartime service record and
smearing his primary and general election opponents. In a short time,
this scruffy, mean-spirited alcollolic was lining his pockets with lobbyist
money and was generally thought of as the worst senator in Washington. By 1950, he was looking fox the issue that would keep his leaky
political h a t from sinking.
McCarthy found that issue when he was fed some obsolete documents relating to old investigations of Communists in government jobs.
In February 1950, McCarthy told a women's club in Wheeling, West
Virginia, that he held, "here in my hand," a list of 205 men in the State
Department named as mcmkn of the Commur~istParty who were part
of a spy ring. The numbers changed from day to day, and even
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;
K'
t.
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McCarthy wasn't sure where he had gotten them. His bulging briefelre
of "evidence" generally held only a bottle of bourbon. ~ h this
t was the
beginning of his "big lie,"consisting of evidence ~ n charger
d
fabdcated
by a desperate man. h the following days, the ernptinevl of McCarthy7s
ue'evidence"sl~ouldhave ended his Senate career. But it didn't work out
that w y . In 1950,America was mare than ready to believe what Senator
McCarthy had to sav.
Although a Senah committee investigated and then refuted everything McCarthy claimed, its findings were ignored. True or not,
McCartby's irresponsible accusations caught the public ear, made
Ileadlines, and sold newspapers. The Senate investigations dismissing
his charges got buried on the back pages with the ship sailing notices.
Time has altered the meaning ofMcCarlhyism. In 1950, it meant a
brave, patriotic stand against Communism, with the broad support at
Ule media and people Now i t has come to mean a smear campign of
groundless accusations from which the accused cannot escape,
because professions of innocence b c o ~ n eadmissions ofguilt, and only
confessions are accepted. Many of those who came before &Carthy,
as well as many wlio testified before the powerful House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC), were willing to point fingen at nfhera
to save their own careers arid repuiaiians. To fight back was to be lamed
with McCsthy's "Communist sympatllizer"brush. For many, particularly in the entertainment industries of radio, motion pictures, and television, that meant "blacklisting" that ruined careers. In tllis cynical
atmosphere, laws al evidence and constitutional guarantees didn't
apply to "devious Commu~~ists."
Wr four years, McCartIty was as powerful as any man in Washington. He could force the president to clear
appoithtmenb through him, and McCarthy's rampage forced President
Eisenhower to institute a new round of "loyalty" programs to prove that
he, too, was "tougllmon Communism.
But in 1954, McCarlhy took up a battle illat turned against him
when lle challenged the U.S. Army to purge supposed Cornrnunistr
from the Pentagon. With the resourceful assislancc of Roy Cohn, a
young attorney whoin McCarthy had earlier dispatched overseas to
eradicatc "c~mrnunistic books" from U.S. ln terna tional in forrnation
Administration libraries, McCarthy had begun to attack certain Army
officersas Communists. Once again he captivated the public imagina-
Connt~ies,Contaittrttent, and Cold War
iion with his charges. Hut this time he overreached himself. The Army
was Ike's turf. Eisenl~owcrand +e Army started to liit back, hrst by
investigating David Schine, Rdy Cohn's wealthy companion on his
book-purge hip, who, ]laving rubseqhently been drafted into the Army,
had used McCarrhy's influence to win soft ~nilitaryassignments.
The media also turricd on llirn. CBS's legenday reporter Edward
R. Murrow (1 908-651, the man who had brought the Blitz of London
live to America on radio during the war, took aim at McCarthy on his
'11, program See It Now, a predecessor to 60 Minufes. By simply showing clips of McCartlry without editorializing, Murrow allowed the senator's bluster to undermine him, exposing McCarthy for the charlatan
4
he was.
During the tliirty-six days of the Army-McCarthy hearings,
McCarthy finally came undone, his cudgellike attacks, remorseless
crudeness,' and unfounded accusatiorls being revcalcd in an unpleasant
light. The daily televised Ilearings dissolved as joseph Welch, the
respected lawyer representing the Army, turned the tables on McCartlly
and routcd l-tirn in public. Tfle hearings ended inconclusively, but the
rest of the Senate srnellcd blood. By tile end of 1954, McCarthy was
condelnned by his peers, and his public support eroded. His llold on the
Senate and the ~ublicgone, McCarthy spiraled downward in a patt~ctic
drunken tailspin. He died in May 1957 of health problems brought on
by his alcoholism.
Must Read: he Grent I h r : The Anti-Comn~unistPurge Ullder
'I'nrrnnn~ ~ Eiscrll~flwer
n d
by David Caute.
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t
What was Sputnik?
On the educational Riclller scale, Brolvn had bccn h e equivalent of
the Great San Francisco Earthquake. It lcveled cverythirlg. While
Browri's tremors sent shock waves across the country, America got
,1
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43 1
another tremendous jolt lf'lat shook the collntly to ib foundalions. On
October 4, 1957, tllc Soviet Uniorl launclled Sputnik 1 (whose name in
Russian meant "little companion"), mau's tirst artificial satellite.
Weighing ;I at about 185 pounds, Sputnik was a little bigger than a
basketball and traveled 18,000 nlilcs per Imur some 560 miles above
the Earth, emitting a steady beepbeep-beep radio signal. The Iaunch
was not only an unexpected technoIogica1 acllievernent but a work of
propaganda genius. The Sovicts liad given Sputnik an orbit and trajectory h a t sent the satellite over tIie earth's most populous areas and low
enough ~liatit could be seen at times wit11 the assistance of powerful .
binocu brs. 1lam radio operators could pick up the distinctive message
i f beamed back to Earth.
The Sputnik shock was redoubled in November when the Russians
lofted a second satellite, dubbed Sputnik 11. Not only was h i s a sub
stantially larger satellite, weighing more than 1,100 pounds, but it carried a passenger. A small dog was strapped into the satelliie, hooked up
to monitoring equipment that relayed information about the physical
effects of space travcl. The space poocll, ;l tcrrier named Lajka
("barker" in Russia~l),was also ilie first sacrifice to tlic space race. In
the rush to get the dog into space, Ihc Russians l ~ a dnot planned for
reentry, and the dog was put to slecp witli a radio-controlIed injection.
Thcse two evcnts brougll t a wave of shock, fear, and' panic in America. It was unthinkable, hut h e Soviets had beaten tIie Unitcd States
illto space. The paranoia that the twin Spi~tniklaunclrit~gsinduced was
extraordinary, and it worked on two levels. In the early frosts of the
Cold War, the Sovict achievement was mare than a publicity coup.
Sputnik was frightful evidence that the USSR might possess missiles.
powerful enough to reach America. M o r e realistically, i t ~ n e a n tft at the
Soviets fwd taken tlic lead in developrrlcnt of the i~ltcrcon~i~lcntal
b~llisijc missile, thereby fundamentally altering the balance of power
between IJIC two competing powers. Sputnik oblitetatcd 111e American
assumption of ih nuclcar superiority. It was all the more rcason lo dig
that fallout shelter in the backyard.
The [car of the bomb merged with the reality of man moving into
space and the cowlant drumbeat of mli-Cornmunisi hysteria to ilroduce a paranoid pop cul~urethat blossomed in tl\c science fiction
books and films of 111efifties. Before World War if, science fiction had
.-Conrmies, Uotituinment, and Cold Wur
rnent to aid pul~licschools, along with an overhaul of rcsearch and
development in the rocketry field, spearheaded by a compelling
urgency to overtvke the Soviets in the area of missile delivec);syste~ns.
Sputnik had been the space equivalent of the Russian atomic bomb. In
the years ahead, the United States would devote enormolu rcsrmrces to
victory in the new space race.
The country responded with backyard bomb shelters and "duck and
cover" fallnut drills. But the government also unleashed a ulauive wave
of federal funds to improve science and math education while launching a full court press to surpass the Soviets in tecLnolok/. h x n i n g CAIculus was IIUW a l l act of patriotism. T h e space race was oCand running.
Success would be built o l failures.
~
And the Crst of these was nearly
devastating. On December 6, 1957-uncomfortably close to the
anniversary of Pearl Harbor in many minds-a Vanguard rocket that
was to carry America's first satellite inta space blew up an the launclling pad. It was an inampiclous beginning lo A~nerica'srace for the
moon. (Recently released Oval Officet a p s of President Kennedy discussing the Apollo program show that lie was primarily interested in
been a respec~ablesort of fantasy, most popularly pacticed by I!. G.
Wells a the pluratlf utopian visions of Edward Bellamy's novel Looting Backward. Radio's Buck Rogers gave new lire to notions of spce
travel and filturistic death rays, but that was mostly child's play. The
specter of totalitarian police stales in Germany and the Swiet Union,
heightened by the threat of the bonil), had tamed science fiction
darker. The trend began with such classics as George Orwell's 1984
and Aldous Huxl~y'sRrove New World, and was later reflected in such
books as Ray Bradbury's Fohmnheit 451, the classic about a futuristic
society in which all books are burned, which was written in the midst
of Senator McCartl~y'sw*itclt liur~lsand a rnovemcnt to purgc American libraries of "subversive" works. In the movies, the paranoia was
reflected in films Iike Irrvusiun oftlie Body Snatchers.
A more serious but equally hysterical fear rocked the American education system, reeling under the pressures of desegregation. Already
struggling gggiinst the Sovicb in an arms race, America now fout~ditself
left at the starting line in the new "space race." Worse than that, America didn't even have its sneakers on. To all the wise men it1 the land,
the reason for America's sad technological p c r l u r r ~ ~ s ~while
~ c e the Soviets had leaped into space was obvious: the Arnerican education system
was falling down, wl~ilethe Soviet system, w11icI1rigorou51y drilled its
cllildren in math and the sciences, was prodt~cingasuperrace of mathematicians and scientists who wot~ldrapidly o~~tdistance
American
children in their acl~ievements.
The decline in American staildards was blamed on that favorite of
whipping boys, "progressive education." I n the lute 1950s. "back lo
basics" was the call to arms. It is a staty that was replayed in the mid19805, when it was tlcterrnined that Americn's schools were Ialjing prey
to a "rising tide of mediocrity." The eighties also produced a new
archvillain who was out-educating America's children. Instead QI h e
Soviets, the new bogeyman was tl~cIapanese, and the media were
t;llcd,id, rcports of thc superiority of the Japanese educational system,
an uncanny reprise of (he debate in the late fifties. Once again. "back
to basics" was the simplistic artswer to the
of the miserable
American scl~oolsystems.
'Tile practical response to Sputnik was a total ovcrl~aulof American
education, with a new commitment on d ~ part
e of the federal govern,
the Soviets. A I many
~ military men from the early generation of the space program, which would
continue ta be dominated by military projects, tholrgl~tlhat the Moon
might provide a launching site for missiles that could be aimed at thc
Soviet Union.)
Sn~neday-say 500 years from now-October 4 way Lcome Sput11ik Day and occupy [he same place that Columbus Uay does in modem timcs-a date that marked the openi~lgof a dramatic llew era in
history, for be~tcror for worse, 'I'lle spirit of the ar~cientquest for llle
stars has always been about human curiosity, the desire to know the
unknowable, to rnove out, to create. And if S p l l f ~ 1 i k and the space race
have a message, it may L that combining tecllnical wizardry with
sheer courage and determination can produce the Lest of the human
dcr~~o~atrating
America's superiority over
,
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t
P;
1; en
k.
spirit.
W ~ e nSputnik was launched, the idea that American astronauts
and cosmonauts of the former Sovie! Union would someday be living
and working together on 3'space staticill would have bcen implausible.
Hut that is the reality. Once enemies, now colleagues-and friends.
Beyond that, it is worth remembering that the sllock nf Octai~rr-4,
1957, just like those of December 7, 1941, and Novctnbcr 22, 1963,
evcrlloaIly passed. T h e ~ ~ a l i osurvivcd
n
the knocL(lowtw stood up, and
was strengtl~encrl.
i,
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