Committee v. Chairman

Early in his public feud with the Army last month, Joe McCarthy triumphantly charged that the Signal Corps had a Communist named Annie Lee Moss encoding and decoding "top-secret" messages in its Pentagon headquarters. Proof? He had the sworn testimony of a woman FBI agent.

As usual, there were some pertinent facts that McCarthy did not mention: 1) Mrs. Moss, a 49-year-old Negro widow, had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in closed session and under oath denied that she had ever been a member of the Communist Party, or had ever engaged in espionage; 2) she did not encode or decode anything, had no access to the Pentagon code room, and handled top-secret messages only in the form of scrambled and unreadable Teletype tape; 3) the FBI agent, while identifying her by name and address, had admittedly never seen her. When Mrs. Moss appeared to testify publicly, McCarthy waved her away. "We do have . . . two witnesses who know that she had been . . . a Communist . . . a long time," he said. "[This] witness is of no importance."

Noise & Emotion. Annie Moss and her attorney, a Negro lawyer named George E. C. Hayes, did not accept this brushoff without protest. Hayes wrote each member of the subcommittee, noting that the Army has suspended her from her job. The Washington Daily News took up her case. While McCarthy was in Florida two weeks ago, the subcommittee agreed to give her the chance to defend herself.

Last week, bundled up in a black coat and wearing a pair of frayed white gloves in honor of the occasion, Mrs. Moss patiently took the stand in the Senate Caucus Room and denied again that she was or ever had been a Communist. Senator McCarthy promptly left the room wearing an expression which indicated that he had no time for such trivial matters. But his long-suffering colleagues turned the resultant hearing into a loud and emotional attack on their own chairman's methods.

When Committee Counsel Roy Cohn insisted that there was secret evidence, which he could not produce, that Mrs. Moss was a Communist, Arkansas Democratic Senator John L. McClellan bitterly decried "convicting people by rumor and hearsay and innuendo." When Mrs. Moss admitted that she knew a Negro named "Rob Hall" (whom Cohn identified by name as a representative of the Communist Daily Worker), a reporter reminded Democratic members in a whisper that the Worker's Hall (its longtime Washington correspondent) is a white man. Cohn blandly promised to "check" the discrepancy.

Three Annie Lees. The Democratic Senators managed to draw from Mrs. Moss the suggestion that her own identification as a Communist might be the result of the same sort of mixup. She testified that there were three Annie Lee Mosses living in the District of Columbia. But in the furor, no one questioned her on a pertinent point: the address she gave in getting Government employment was the same as that of an Annie Lee Moss known to FBI Undercover Woman Mary Markward as a Communist.

Mrs. Moss testified that she had never even heard of Communism until 1948, swore she "would have reported" anyone who asked her for a coded Signal Corps message. She was asked: "Did you ever hear of Karl Marx?" The crowd laughed as she answered: "Who's that?"

As Mrs. Moss left the stand, Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington brought the hearing to an emotional climax. Cried he: "I may be sticking my neck out . . . I think you're telling the truth. If you're not taken back into the Army [job] . . . I am going to see that you get a job."

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