Those who forget their pasts...

Senate unseals McCarthy transcripts

By FREDERIC J. FROMMER, Associated Press

Last Updated 2:13 p.m. PDT Monday, May 5, 2003

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. Joseph McCarthy used closed-door sessions to winnow out witnesses who might challenge him in the sensational anti-communism hearings of a half-century ago, transcripts unsealed Monday show.

Of the 500 witnesses who testified in private, one-third were never called back to testify in public.

"Anybody who stood up to McCarthy in closed session, and did so articulately, tended not to get called up into the public session," said Senate Associate Historian Donald Ritchie, who assembled the 4,000 pages of transcripts. "McCarthy was only interested in the people he could browbeat publicly."

McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, chaired the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953 and 1954 at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. His investigation into communists in the U.S. government, denounced by critics as a witch hunt, spawned the term "McCarthyism" to describe smear attacks.

Composer Aaron Copland, brought before the subcommittee because he had been hired by the State Department to lecture overseas, was one of those never called back for a public session.

When McCarthy asked whether he had ever been a communist sympathizer, Copland replied, "I am not sure I would be able to say what you mean by the word 'sympathizer.'"

"Did you ever attend a communist meeting?" McCarthy pressed.

"I am afraid I don't know how you define a communist meeting," the composer answered. Copland, who wrote the 1942 orchestral composition "Fanfare for the Common Man," went on to win the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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