As a result, the Tydings Committee (after Senator Millard Tydings, a Democrat) was set up to investigate the matter. After 31 days of hearings the committee decided the charges leveled by McCarthy were a “fraud” and a “hoax.” The truth, however, was quite different. McCarthy gave the Tydings Committee the names of 110 people, 62 of whom worked at the State Department. Despite the committee’s findings, the State Department started its own investigations and initiated proceedings against 49 of these individuals. Eighty-one of those whose names were present on McCarthy’s list left the government due to dismissal or resignation. What counts is that McCarthy was right about them. Here are a few examples.
One notable was Philip Jessup, whose record shows that he was an influential member of the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR), which was described in 1952 as “a vehicle used by Communists to orientate American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives” by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). In 1951 the Senate rejected his nomination as a delegate to the UN. President Truman appointed him in a recess appointment. Later he served as a representative of the US on the International Court of Justice from 1960 to 1969.
Owen Lattimore was one of the determining factors in the pro-communist foreign policy in the Far East. He was identified in sworn testimonies from 13 different witnesses, and the SISS declared in 1952 that “Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.” He went on to the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, and after serving in Outer Mongolia for the Kennedy State Department in 1961, he eventually became the head of the newly formed Chinese studies department at the University of Leeds in 1963.
