Millard Tydings

Millard Tydings was a prominent Democratic senator who chaired the Senate subcommittee investigating Joseph McCarthy’s charges in 1950. His effort to subject those accusations to public scrutiny became a consequential reversal: hearings meant to weaken McCarthy instead magnified his influence and left Tydings under pressure to defend the committee’s handling of the case.

Role in the Investigation

As McCarthy’s allegations drew attention, Senate Democrats called for a complete investigation. The special subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations began hearings under Tydings’s chairmanship. He was regarded as one of the Senate’s most respected and influential Democrats, and the investigation proceeded on the assumption that exposing McCarthy’s claims to public examination would undermine both the accusations and the methods used to advance them.

Hearings and Reversal

The hearings, held in the Senate’s Caucus Room, gave McCarthy sustained attention from the press. He portrayed the committee as more interested in identifying his informants than in finding security risks, while continuing to make new accusations. In the six weeks after his initial outburst at Wheeling, he had not named a single Communist. He then identified Owen J. Lattimore as a leading Soviet espionage agent; the accusation was a fraud. Rather than diminishing McCarthy, the public proceedings gave him a central stage from which to keep advancing his claims.

Pressure and the White House Files

Tydings later became closely involved in the dispute over access to government records. Harry S. Truman had initially refused to turn security files over to the committee as a matter of principle. He subsequently allowed Tydings and the committee to examine the files of the eighty-one people McCarthy had accused, hoping to help Tydings discredit McCarthy and answer Republican claims that the President was concealing evidence. The decision backfired: it made Truman appear to be yielding to McCarthy.

The pressure on Tydings was intense. He called the White House three or four times a day, and Truman’s staff became deeply worried. Truman urged them to remain calm and believed McCarthy would eventually be exposed as a liar and expelled from the Senate. In this episode, Tydings’s committee was caught between its stated purpose of investigating the charges and the political consequences of giving them a public hearing. The attempt to settle the controversy through exposure instead helped sustain it.