General Snow was Chairman of The Loyalty-Security Board from 1947-1952. Snow stated that the Security Division at State passed on information on security questions and the FBI passed on information on loyalty exclusively.
Snow gave a report to the Secretary Jan 8, 1953 about McCarthy's allegations giving a statistical breakdown of McCarthy's allegations. McCarthy NEVER came to Snow or the Loyalty-Security committee, NOT ONCE, to discuss ANY report or ANY information.
In one case McCarthy made a public statement that a State Department employee was associating with a Communist, General Snow went immediately to McCarthy's office and inquired about the name of the Communist that employee was associating with. McCarthy told him he had that name on a piece of paper and that the paper had been lost.
"We never received any assistance from McCarthy whatsoever, except the names of 61 alleged communists in the State Departmend, whose files were made available to a select committee chaired by Millard Tydings-Foreign Relations Committee. That Committee had an oppurtunity to read all 61 cases. The Committee gave the State Department a clean bill of health on allof the files"
Snow made 3 speeches in 1951 "I accused McCarthy of making false statements about matters he knew were false".
General Conrad E. Snow knew McCarthy was a liar and told him that to his face.
Richard D. McKinzie interview with General Snow July 2, 1973
If this is an accurate recounting of what Gen. Snow said, he erred when he said that McCarthy had submitted
Snow made two errors here: the number of suspects, and the allegations against them. While many of the 124 suspects whose cases McCarthy submitted to the Senate for investigation were at such agencies as Treasury, Commerce, the UN, etc., 67 were still in the State Department at the time (68 if you count Harlow Shapley, a non-compensated State Department adviser at the UN). Nor were these “alleged Communists”: what McCarthy actually said was that his suspects “would appear to be either card carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.”
Fellow-travelers who were not CP members but were “loyal to the Communist Party” were explicitly targeted by the Truman Loyalty Order (“Membership in, affiliation with or
sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons, designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, Fascist,
Communist, or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny other persons their rights under the Constitution of the United States, or as seeking to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means” [Emphasis added]). However, Snow was absolutely right that
The Committee gave the State Department a clean bill of health on allof the files
The Senate had charged the Tydings subcommittee with the task of conducting “a full and complete study and investigation as to whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are, or have been, employed by the Department of State.” Astonishingly, Tydings could not find a single instance, somehow missing such blatant cases as Noel Field (who had defected to the East bloc in 1948) or Laurence Duggan, who committed suicide (or was “liquidated” by SMERSH) after being identified by the FBI as a Soviet agent.
Flabbergasted by Tyding's performance, Sen. Irving Ives (R-NY) suggested that “a fraud and a hoax have been perpetrated on the Senate of the United States, and the American people” by Tydings, adding that “such perpetration is evident in the apparently deliberate action of the subcommittee in disregarding the will of the Senate.”
How Tydings could have come to overlook such obvious cases may be surmised from his memorandum to President Truman:
I strongly recommend for your own welfare, for the welfare of the country and lastly for the welfare of the Democratic party that the present Communist inquiry not be allowed to worsen, but that you take bold, forthright and courageous action which I presume to say will do as much as anything I can think of to give you and your administration and party a tremendous advantage in the coming election. [Emphasis added]
Despite Truman's best efforts, the voters reelected McCarthy, and dumped Tydings.
