National Affairs: 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...