Transcript
Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra
Episode 6: Under Pressure
As Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s activities — and his troubling connections to those on the ultra right — are exposed in the press, Democratic Sen. Lester Hunt launches a final effort to take McCarthy on and rein in his abuses. In response, McCarthy and his allies launch a coordinated blackmail campaign against Hunt, using his own family, that will ultimately end in tragedy
Announcer: This episode contains descriptions that reference self-harm. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org.
(NBC NEWS RADIO CHIMES)
Rick Ewig: This is an interview with Mr. Lester C. Hunt, Jr. Mr. Hunt is a historian teaching in a Chicago-area college. This interview is being conducted on December 29, 1979, in Mr. Hunt’s home on Cornell Avenue in Chicago.
Rachel Maddow: That is the voice of a grad student at the University of Wyoming. His name is Rick Ewig. It’s 1979, and Mr. Ewig is doing this interview for a research paper. The paper is about a U.S. senator from Wyoming, Lester Hunt. He’s in Chicago to interview the son of the senator.
Ewig: His father was a United States senator from the state of Wyoming who served in the Senate from 1949 to 1954.
Maddow: It was 25 years since Lester Hunt had served in the Senate; 25 years since he died. But this grad student managed to track down the senator’s son and namesake, Lester Hunt, Jr., who had always been known by the name Buddy.
Radio Anchor: Taking seats right next to Mrs. Hunt, Buddy Hunt, son of His Excellency Governor Lester C. Hunt of Wyoming.
Maddow: Buddy Hunt had been a young man when his father died. He’d been 26 years old.
Ewig: Okay, what I’d like to start out with first is, like, a general background on your father, since I really don’t know much about him.
Lester C. “Buddy” Hunt, Jr.: Well, let me see. What do you want from me? Like, you know, beginning to end sort of thing?
Ewig: Okay, well, for my own benefit that I would — I would like to have is a physical description of him. Was he your size or?
Buddy Hunt: How interesting. He’s taller than I am, had light brown hair, as you probably know, and white later. He was corpulent. And often as fat as I am, although not always. And round-chested, you know, heavy built. Women thought he was very charming. He had a good smile and a sort of pleasant face. His sort of face did not put people off.
Maddow: There was a lot that Buddy remembered about his dad. How he never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. How good a baseball player he was. How he had decided to become a dentist, not exactly for the love of medicine, but just as a way to build a bigger, fuller life for himself and his family. He remembered that the career his dad built after being a dentist, that one was the real passion for him.
Buddy Hunt: He would often talk about how he enjoyed his dental practice and this and that, but it was clear, I think, from our point of view, that what he liked was politics and dentistry was a way to make a living. Anyhow, that’s the way we saw it, and that’s sort of the way my mother and sister and I sort of talk about it, at least. And he loved politics. He just loved it.
Maddow: He loved politics. One of the things that stuck out the most for Buddy about his dad, even all those years later, was how hard he had worked at that job that he really loved.
Buddy Hunt: He worked a lot of nights, a lot of weekends. But, on the whole, he didn’t bring his work home. So that at home, we didn’t — we talked about personal things, you know, family things and so forth. And he didn’t talk much politics at home. He was glad to get it off his mind when he came home.
Maddow: “He was glad to get it off his mind when he came home.” And maybe it was for that reason, Senator Hunt not bringing his work home, that there was quite a lot that the senator’s own family didn’t know about him in terms of what he was contending with at work day to day. That was certainly true when it came to the darkest chapter of his time in politics, his time in Washington. And that was the reason this grad student was interviewing Buddy Hunt in the first place.
During the interview in Chicago, he pulled out some old newspaper articles for Buddy to take a look at. They were from right after his dad died. Articles written by Washington journalists Drew Pearson and Marquis Childs. They had to do with the specific circumstances surrounding the death of Senator Lester Hunt.
Ewig: Have you read the things that were written by Drew Pearson or Marquis Childs?
Buddy Hunt: No. No.
Ewig: You haven’t read any of that?
Buddy Hunt: No, I haven’t.
Ewig: Oh. Because they say basically that — you know, that your father was being blackmailed.
Buddy Hunt: Oh, they did?
Maddow: Blackmailed. It was maybe not the sort of question Buddy Hunt expected to get from this grad student who was just there interviewing him for a research paper.
Ewig: They say basically that — you know, that your father was being blackmailed.
Buddy Hunt: Oh, they did?
Ewig: Yeah.
Buddy Hunt: By whom? I don’t —
Ewig: It was by Senators Welker and Bridges at the time.
Maddow: It was by Senators Welker and Bridges, two Republican U.S. senators.
Ewig: You know, I have the things here if you’d like to look at them.
Buddy Hunt: Yeah, I might. I don’t — I don’t think I’ve seen them. I might have seen those and, you know, ignored them because I —
Ewig: Yeah, well, this here, this one is by Drew Pearson, that one came out shortly after your father died, like a few days.
Buddy Hunt: Uh huh. Interesting. I didn’t see this.
Maddow: Buddy Hunt here is reading these newspaper articles detailing a blackmail campaign by these other senators against his father.
Ewig: And Marquis Childs says basically the same thing as —
Buddy Hunt: Uh huh, uh huh. No, I didn’t see that. It may be that nobody told me this, in order not to tell me this, you know, and then —
Ewig: Yeah.
Maddow: You can hear it in Buddy’s voice. He’s almost speechless. But it’s there in black and white in front of him. It’s detailed reporting.
Buddy Hunt: I don’t know anything about that. But maybe I — maybe I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe that was the whole issue.
Ewig: That could be.
Maddow: Because buried in these old newspaper articles Buddy Hunt had never seen before was not just the reporting that Buddy’s dad had been blackmailed. It was also the reporting that the blackmail had to do with Buddy.
Buddy Hunt: The only blackmail thing I see here is in regard to me. Am I missing something?
Ewig: No, that’s basically it.
Buddy Hunt: No. Yeah, yeah.
Maddow: “The only blackmail thing I see here is in regard to me.” That’s what Buddy Hunt says there. And he is right about that. The blackmail that preceded his father’s death was in regard to Buddy.
What it was really about, though, was the fact that his father, Democratic Senator Lester Hunt, had made a very powerful, very dangerous enemy in Washington, a man with almost superhuman talent for dominating every news cycle. A man with a chain of serious ethics problems, personal problems, corruption scandals. A man who had been caught in innumerable lies, flagrant lies, on issues big and small, trivial and serious. All of which seemed to only increase his followers’ belief that he was the only one they could trust, the only politician they truly believed in.
He had been aligning himself with some of the most dangerous forces in the country, who saw in him not just someone they agreed with, but someone whose approach to power might succeed in what they wanted. It might succeed in taking the country apart.
His critics described him as a would-be American dictator, and warned that his power might be growing even beyond his own party’s ability to stop him. That he might make it to the apex of American power, to the White House, no matter what any entity in politics might do to try to stop him.
His political opponents had sought to have him censured, impeached, expelled from the Senate. Not only had he survived all of it, but each successive failed confrontation appeared to make him stronger, his base of support all the more energized.
And those battles had been costly. His opponents would not only find themselves unsuccessful in their efforts to stop him, they would then find themselves targeted in response with every kind of attack, breaking every kind of rule. Rules of the Senate. Rules of decency.
In Washington, Lester Hunt had made the kind of enemy who wouldn’t even think twice about trying to destroy an opponent by attacking a man’s family, by using his own son against him.
Ewig: This is a tough question to ask.
Buddy Hunt: Ask anything you want.
Ewig: Why do you think that your father did kill himself?
Maddow: This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”
Roger McDaniel: He had seen McCarthy ruin people’s lives, in some cases drive people to suicide.
Reporter: Former senator found shot to death in his Washington home today.
McDaniel: Hunt was one of the very few politicians at the time who challenged McCarthy.
Senator Lester C. Hunt: It’s being used as a special privilege for a few, very few, irresponsible members of Congress.
McDaniel: This opportunity presents itself for him to take revenge on Lester Hunt.
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Maddow: Episode 6: Under Pressure.
Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr.: I have introduced an amendment to the Constitution of the United States —
Maddow: As political nicknames go, it wasn’t the strongest. But it fit, and so everybody used it. Everybody called him Young Bob.
La Follette: — which would give the people the right to vote on the question of peace or war.
Maddow: Young Bob La Follette. The “Young” was to distinguish him from his dad, who was also named Bob. The older Bob, Robert La Follette, was political royalty in Wisconsin. District attorney, congressman, governor, U.S. senator. He’d even made a run for president as the candidate for the Progressive Party.
It was one of the most successful third-party presidential runs ever. He was a household name. And then so was his son, Young Bob, who succeeded him in the U.S. Senate. When Young Bob was elected to that Senate seat, he was only 30 years old, one of the youngest senators in U.S. history.
La Follette: I believe that it presents a great opportunity for service to your state and to the nation.
Maddow: Young Bob La Follette was a Republican. Like his father, he was also progressive. He was pro-labor, a critic of big business, a champion of civil liberties. He was pro-FDR’s New Deal. And although he had been an isolationist ahead of World War II — he’d even been involved with the America First Committee — nevertheless, FDR liked him back.
Roosevelt, in fact, liked Young Bob so much that he considered naming him Secretary of State or to the Supreme Court, or even tapping him as a potential vice presidential running mate, even though they were from different parties.
Young Bob was also loudly and firmly anti-communist. An issue which was much more important to him than it was at the time to an unknown political upstart who challenged him for his Wisconsin Senate seat in 1946.
Reporter: Today’s guest, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.
Maddow: When Joseph McCarthy primaried Young Bob La Follette in 1946, Young Bob wasn’t all that young anymore. He had been in the Senate for a couple of decades. And McCarthy blasted him as a creature of Washington who had lost touch with what was going on back home in Wisconsin. McCarthy told voters that Young Bob actually lived in Virginia, even though he had never lived there.
McCarthy said La Follette was corrupt, that he was using his influence in the Senate to enrich himself. That wasn’t true either. But McCarthy campaigned with incredible energy, and in a low-turnout August primary election, he won that big upset. Before McCarthy had come along, that U.S. Senate seat had been in the hands of someone named Bob La Follette for more than 40 years. But that is how McCarthy got his seat in the Senate, by cutting off a legendary political dynasty.
McCarthy biographer Larry Tye says Joe McCarthy called that race against Young Bob the sweetest political triumph of his entire life. Soon after he lost that race and left the Senate, Young Bob wrote an article for Collier’s magazine on a topic that was still an animating concern for him.
He wrote, “I know from firsthand experience that communist sympathizers have infiltrated into committee staffs on Capitol Hill in Washington. A few years ago when I was chairman of the Senate Civil Liberties Committee, I was forced to take measures in an effort to stamp out influence within my own committee staff.” It was 1947 when Young Bob wrote that.
He wrote it years before Joe McCarthy ever picked up anti-communism as his signature issue. But once McCarthy did latch on to that issue and rode it to the heights of political power —
Reporter: You believe as of the moment there are Communists in the State Department?
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy: Communists or worse.
Maddow: Young Bob developed a strong suspicion that McCarthy was going to come back for him. That McCarthy would haul him before his committee in Congress, berate him live on television about these communists that Young Bob had admitted to knowing about on his Senate committee staff. He’d admitted to it in that magazine article. Well, why hadn’t he sounded an alarm about it at the time? Why hadn’t he called the FBI? Why was he so soft on this issue? In the end, McCarthy never got his chance to ask.
Reporter: Headlines, Washington. Former Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr. of Wisconsin was found shot to death in his Washington home today. Apparently he died by his own hand. He was 58.
Maddow: Robert La Follette, Jr. drove home from work, closed himself in the bathroom, and shot himself with a pistol his father had given him when he was a kid. Young Bob was known to have had a long history with depression. He also reportedly harbored deep regret about losing the U.S. Senate seat once held by his dad.
But according to his own son, it was the threat of being dragged in front of Congress by Joe McCarthy that most directly contributed to him taking his own life. La Follette told multiple people in the days before he died that he thought McCarthy had him in his sights. La Follette’s son told McCarthy biographer Larry Tye that he was fairly sure that McCarthy himself had actually called up Young Bob and personally made the threat that he was going to investigate him.
His son said, quote, “My dad committed suicide instead of being called before McCarthy’s committee. No question at all.”
McCarthy: I don’t much give a tinker’s damn what anyone says about the methods. I don’t much care about the advice to stop. This job must continue, my good friends. It will continue as far as I am concerned, as long as I am in the United States Senate, regardless of whether we hurt Democrats or Republicans or anyone else.
Maddow: During his time in the Senate, Joe McCarthy racked up a long list of people he hurt. Principled members of both parties who couldn’t stomach what McCarthy was doing and who tried to stop him. There was Senator Raymond Baldwin.
Steven Remy: Raymond Baldwin was a moderate Republican senator. He was fair-minded and he was conscientious.
Maddow: Baldwin chaired the Malmedy investigation in Congress, the committee McCarthy hijacked and turned into a forum to spread false anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. Baldwin was so exhausted by McCarthy’s behavior, so repulsed by dealing with him, that he up and quit the Senate altogether once the Malmedy investigation was done. The Malmedy report came out in October. Raymond Baldwin resigned his seat and left the Senate by December.
Senator Raymond E. Baldwin: It has been indeed a rare privilege and opportunity to serve this grand little state of Connecticut.
Maddow: Next was Maryland Senator Millard Tydings. Tydings was the conservative Democratic senator who had investigated and disproven McCarthy’s claims about supposed communists running rampant in the U.S. State Department.
Senator Millard E. Tydings: Have you in your possession any memorandum, any affidavit, any paper?
Maddow: McCarthy took revenge on Tydings by fabricating that fake photo of the senator posed next to a famous communist. Thanks to that dirty trick and to a blizzard of anti-Tydings attacks in the pro-McCarthy conservative press, Millard Tydings lost his seat in the Senate. McCarthy gloated about it, deriding him as Little Millard.
McCarthy: Little Millard is with us no longer.
Maddow: Next would be Senator William Benton.
Announcer: Our distinguished guest for this evening is the Honorable William F. Benton, United States senator from Connecticut.
Maddow: William Benton introduced an expulsion resolution against McCarthy to kick him out of the Senate altogether. In an hours-long exposition, which was more like an indictment, Benton laid out McCarthy’s record in detail on the Senate floor. Everything from his lies on behalf of the Nazis in the Malmedy investigation to his personal financial corruption to that fake photo dirty trick he used against Senator Tydings.
Benton called McCarthy “an amoral man of corruptibility, mendacity, and gross irresponsibility who had followed a pattern of distortion and deceit.” In response, McCarthy declared war. He hired a lawyer, believe it or not, yet another lawyer who defended Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. And with the assistance of that counsel, he filed a multimillion-dollar libel suit against Senator Benton. He baselessly accused him of having distributed lewd material during his time at the U.S. State Department. He called him the hero of every communist, and he taunted him as Little Willie Benton, Connecticut’s mental midget.
Radio Host: So if you are a member of the Senate next year —
Senator William B. Benton: You mean when I’m a member of the Senate next year.
Host: Yes, when you’re a member of the Senate next year.
Maddow: After the onslaught from McCarthy, William Benton did lose his seat. He was voted out. Joe McCarthy just plowed down any opponent who stood up against him. And even though he went after Republicans as well as Democrats, members of his own Republican Party mostly just stood by and watched it happen. In awe of his power, how nothing seemed to take him down, how every confrontation, every scandal just seemed to increase his standing with his supporters.
McDaniel: When they didn’t stand up to him, it only got worse. It only emboldened him. And the number of lives that he ruined continued to mount up.
Maddow: That’s Wyoming author Roger McDaniel. By the time Joe McCarthy had taken down Senator Baldwin and Senator Tydings and Senator Benton, there was almost no one left in the Senate who was brave enough to stand up to McCarthy. Almost no one.
Senator Monrad C. Wallgren: It gives me pleasure to introduce to you at this time the Honorable Lester Hunt.
Maddow: Lester Hunt, senator from Wyoming. Like Raymond Baldwin and Millard Tydings and William Benton, Lester Hunt was disgusted by the way Joe McCarthy conducted himself in politics. Not only what he was doing to his political enemies, but what McCarthy’s type of politics was doing to the country. Unlike his colleagues, though, Lester Hunt had a unique vantage point to it all. Literally.
McDaniel: Buddy Hunt told me that their home overlooked Joe McCarthy’s apartment.
Maddow: Lester Hunt and Joe McCarthy were not just fellow senators. They were neighbors in Washington. They shared a property line, which gave Lester Hunt literally clear sight lines into not just how Senator McCarthy behaved in the halls of the Senate when the lights and the cameras were on him, but how he behaved in private, too.
McDaniel: From their backyard, they could look across the way and see the apartment where McCarthy had a patio and they would watch him womanizing and drinking. It was just disgusting to this, well, this man of Lester Hunt’s integrity.
Maddow: Lester Hunt had learned from the senators who came before him that publicly calling out McCarthy’s bad behavior came with real risk.
McDaniel: By now, he had seen McCarthy ruin people’s lives, cost them their jobs, their livelihoods, in some cases, drive people to suicide.
Maddow: But Lester Hunt was undaunted and he found a way to fight back. For years, going all the way back to the Malmedy investigation and to McCarthy’s false attacks on Anna Rosenberg, back before Joe McCarthy was famous, Lester Hunt had watched McCarthy at work. He had watched him traffic in disinformation and defamation and just lies, lies that McCarthy told with impunity and also with immunity.
McDaniel: He came to understand that McCarthy was protected from any liability for slander or libel by the Constitution.
Maddow: McCarthy was shielded by the U.S. Constitution, by the Speech and Debate Clause, which protects members of Congress from being sued for anything they say in Congress, even if it’s slander or defamation. It’s a constitutional protection for the freedom and independence of the legislative branch of government. It makes sense, but it is also open to abuse, abuse that Senator Joseph McCarthy made into an art form.
And so, problem solver Lester Hunt proposed a reform, one that was designed to hit Senator Joe McCarthy right between the eyes.
Theodore Granik: Senator Lester C. Hunt of Wyoming has introduced a resolution making members of Congress legally responsible and legally liable for their words and actions. Senator Hunt, is our congressional immunity being used today for the purposes originally intended by our founding fathers?
Lester Hunt: It is not. I would say we’re using it today for an entirely different purpose.
Maddow: Lester Hunt introduced legislation. He wrote newspaper op-eds. He did interviews. He went on the radio speaking as a senator. He said it was time to stop, to legally stop, senators from making false allegations and lying about people to hurt them. Lester Hunt’s proposal was to limit congressional immunity, basically to allow regular citizens to sue senators for slander.
Lester Hunt: Are you contending that as a United States senator, you have the right on the floor of the Senate to call somebody a communist? Not with the true knowledge or facts that he is a communist. He may be an enemy of yours. You may have some ulterior motives. That man is smeared, then, throughout the United States for the rest of his life. Now, do you mean to say that there should be no means whereby that man can get redress for that injury that has been done to him?
McDaniel: That was a direct attack on McCarthy. Lester Hunt was motivated by what he had seen.
Lester Hunt: I say it’s being used as a special privilege for a few, very few, irresponsible members of Congress who say things in their remarks and get them printed in the record that never should have been in there.
Maddow: When Lester Hunt made this proposal, when he argued for it in public, he started getting piles of mail from all over the country, people thanking him for what he was doing. One man wrote to him, “It is certainly about time that irresponsible members like Senator McCarthy be prevented from defaming average citizens.” One woman from New York wrote to him, “Millions of decent real Americans read with great pleasure your denunciation of certain senators, and we know whom you have in mind.”
McDaniel: He thought that somebody had to make a drastic proposal, and so he chose to do that. There was no mistake who it was aimed at, and McCarthy knew that, but so did everybody else.
Maddow: One of the people Lester Hunt reached out to at the time he was pushing this proposal was the journalist Drew Pearson.
Drew Pearson: This is Drew Pearson. I’ll be back in a minute with an exclusive story —
Maddow: Drew Pearson had his own history with McCarthy, and he was about to break some news about exactly what kind of lies McCarthy had told back when Hunt and McCarthy first met during the Malmedy investigation. McCarthy’s actions during that investigation, his promotion of disproven Nazi propaganda, it had remained a bit of a mystery. Why had this American senator acted as a mouthpiece for the Nazis? How had he ever gotten hooked up with that barrage of false information that was coming out of Germany?
Pearson: McCarthy abused American army officers because they convicted the Nazis who shot American soldiers in cold blood at Malmedy.
Maddow: Drew Pearson now reported that during the Malmedy investigation, Joe McCarthy had been receiving packages in brown manila envelopes in the Senate. McCarthy had in fact left behind one of those big brown envelopes in one of the Malmedy hearing rooms. Inside the envelope was the information he had been citing at the hearings and in his speeches and press releases about Malmedy.
This was the inflammatory disinformation about the supposed torture of the innocent Nazis by Jews in the U.S. Army. Where had he gotten that information? Well, funny story. Drew Pearson reported that on the envelope McCarthy left behind in the hearing room, there was a return address listed in the upper left-hand corner. It said, quote, “Rudolf Aschenauer, Munich, Germany.”
Remy: He’s a cagey character and he’s deeply embedded in the quasi-underground post-war German far-right.
Maddow: U.S. Army counterintelligence in Germany had told the Senate investigators that the false attacks on the Malmedy prosecution were coming from unrepentant Nazis in Germany who were trying to get back into power. In their report, the senators had described Nazi defense lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer as the key man in that effort.
Remy: Rudolf Aschenauer was a German lawyer and a former Nazi who had not really renounced his allegiance to national socialism.
Maddow: What Drew Pearson was now reporting was that McCarthy’s disinformation on Malmedy, what he was pushing to the American public, the so-called evidence that he said demanded an investigation into the Malmedy trial, it was coming to him from the source.
Remy: The evidence indicates that Rudolf Aschenauer was indirectly an important source of the torture stories for Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Maddow: Through a pro-German advocacy group, Rudolf Aschenauer, the Nazi mastermind of the Malmedy torture hoax, the leader in Nazi groups trying to return to power in Germany, he personally was stovepiping totally false, anti-American, anti-Semitic propaganda to an American senator. That senator ripped open the envelopes in which he received this stuff, and then he fed it as propaganda right to the American public.
Reporter: The senators are probing reports that the Germans were beaten and starved to get confessions from them.
Maddow: Drew Pearson now reported that the evidence of what McCarthy had done, his involvement with that Nazi lawyer, had been, quote, “locked in the secret files of the Senate Armed Services Committee, known only to the committee members themselves.” Committee members like Lester Hunt.
Lester Hunt: You will agree with me that certain derogatory, certain slanderous, certain libel, certain smearing statements are made in the halls of Congress. Not often, but they are made.
Senator John C. Stennis: Unfortunately, yes.
Maddow: And then Drew Pearson had more. He would soon report that that Nazi lawyer, Aschenauer, had been running a number of agents inside the United States, pro-Nazi operators who were working to advance the Nazi cause in post-war Germany and around the world and here in the U.S. One of those agents was a senior figure in the National Renaissance Party, the uniformed street-fighting Nazi militia headquartered in Yorkville, New York, where McCarthy had accepted an invitation to speak at a rally chaired by one of the group’s members.
He only backed out after reporters described the list of Holocaust deniers and fascists with whom he was set to be sharing the bill. The second operator Aschenauer was running in the United States was registered as the official agent for the Socialist Reich Party, the successor to the Nazi party that had been banned by law from competing in Germany’s elections.
The third agent being run by Aschenauer, Pearson reported, was Francis Yockey, whom Joe McCarthy had recently brought in to write a speech for him to deliver at that rally in Yorkville. Pearson reported that the FBI was, quote, “most interested in Yockey. “
Anthony Mostrom: Drew Pearson named Yockey. He named some of Yockey’s other associates.
Maddow: This guy, whom McCarthy was being the mouthpiece for in the U.S. Senate, he was the lawyer who Yockey had been secretly helping at the Nazi war crimes trials. He was a leader of the post-war successor to the Nazi party in Germany. He was running pro-Nazi agents in the United States, including in a uniformed neo-Nazi militia in New York. Drew Pearson had figured it all out. Journalists like Drew Pearson were doing their best to inform the public about what McCarthy had been up to, about who he was involved with.
Pearson: What he doesn’t like from his fellow senators now, is anyone who opposes him or exposes him.
Maddow: Among McCarthy’s fellow senators, Raymond Baldwin, Millard Tydings, William Benton, they had all confronted him, and they’d all been run out of the Senate by McCarthy one way or the other. Senator Robert La Follette Jr., Young Bob, had killed himself rather than face what he thought it would mean to become McCarthy’s next target. Practical, problem-solving, devoted dad Lester Hunt was intent not just on confronting McCarthy the way his colleagues had, but on stopping McCarthy’s ability to operate the way he did.
Lester Hunt: Outstanding men in the country today do not care to come into the government and subject themselves constantly to the smearing and remarks, slanderous remarks —
Maddow: Lester Hunt knew what he was up against. And he also knew how McCarthy was likely to respond.
McDaniel: This opportunity presents itself for him to take revenge on Lester Hunt.
Maddow: That’s next.
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Maddow: It’s a summer night in 1953. Buddy Hunt is 25 years old. He’s walking through Lafayette Park right by the White House. And he makes eye contact with another man who’s passing by. Buddy would later say that the man looked like he was trying to catch Buddy’s attention. The two men held each other’s gaze. They started to talk. A proposition was made. But nothing physical happened between them. The man took out a police badge, and he put Buddy Hunt under arrest.
McDaniel: It was an undercover officer that he had made eye contact with that night in Lafayette Park. And there was some discussion about having a homosexual relationship and Buddy gets arrested.
Maddow: The man Buddy had met that night in the park was part of something called the Morals Division of the D.C. Police. Morals Division officers would go out in D.C. at night. Lafayette Park was a frequent target. And they would try to induce gay men to proposition them, to solicit them for sex. And then they’d arrest them.
Buddy Hunt says that he wasn’t gay. He wasn’t sure what he was. This was more of an experiment than anything. But he was taken to the police station. Mugshot. Fingerprints. He was too embarrassed to call his parents, too embarrassed to call his father, the senator. So he spent the night in jail. But the charges against Buddy were pretty quickly dismissed.
McDaniel: He was not a federal government employee. He was a young man in the seminary. There was no reason to believe that he would offend again. And so it would have been the normal course of events that the charges would have been dismissed.
Maddow: This is where that whole ordeal probably should have ended. This is where it would have ended had word of Buddy Hunt’s arrest not gotten to Joe McCarthy and to two of McCarthy’s closest allies in the U.S. Senate.
McDaniel: Senator Styles Bridges, who was a powerful Republican senator from New Hampshire, and a senator from Idaho named Herman Welker, they get pretty excited about the idea that this might be an opportunity to force Lester Hunt out of the Senate.
Maddow: These Republican U.S. senators, they’re both on the committee that oversees Washington, D.C., and they use that political power to interfere with this as a law enforcement issue. After the charges had already been dropped, they called the head of the Morals Squad up to Capitol Hill and they told him to file new charges. They threatened his job if he didn’t. And it worked. Charges were refiled against Buddy. In the process, they accused Lester Hunt, Buddy’s father, the senator, of having paid a bribe to get the charges dropped in the first place.
McDaniel: Senator Welker and Senator Bridges claimed that someone had told them that the detective in charge of the case had taken a bribe from Hunt to drop the charges.
Maddow: There is zero evidence that this was true. The detective himself told them it wasn’t true. But McCarthy and his allies, they smelled blood.
McDaniel: You have this opportunity that presents itself for him to take revenge on Lester Hunt.
Maddow: Lester Hunt had publicly called Joe McCarthy a drunk and a liar. And on those two points, he knew of what he spoke. Hunt called out Joe McCarthy’s lies on the Malmedy investigation. Hunt had defended Anna Rosenberg after McCarthy had come for her, also with lies. Hunt was now waging a public crusade to roll back the senatorial immunity that was part of what allowed McCarthy to build all of his political crusades on abject lies.
Lester Hunt: What is the advantage to a member of Congress when he uses such tactics? He gains notoriety, and primarily that’s what he’s looking for, publicity.
Maddow: Well, now, Senator Joe McCarthy could make Lester Hunt pay for all of that, because he could use Hunt’s own son against him. Go for the son. Hit the father in the heart.
Before Buddy’s trial date, McCarthy and his allies got a message to Senator Hunt that this could all be over, this could all be taken care of. The charges against Buddy could be dropped again if Lester Hunt would just leave the Senate. If he would not seek re-election. Senator Hunt refused to do it. And so, Buddy went to trial.
McDaniel: Buddy is tried in October. There’s a week-long trial. The Hunts don’t dodge it. They set through the trial. Some of his friends said you could watch him visibly age during that week as he watches his son on trial for what then was this really egregious charge. And Buddy is convicted.
Maddow: After he was convicted, Buddy Hunt chooses not to appeal. He’s given the choice between jail time or a fine. He chooses the fine. He does get expelled from seminary school. But the whole ordeal, mercifully, is over. At least that’s what they thought. Buddy had been arrested in June. His trial and conviction had been in October. But then in December, Senator Hunt’s home in Washington, D.C. was broken into.
McDaniel: While he and his wife are back in Wyoming for Christmas, somebody breaks into their apartment in Washington and ransacks it. Nothing of significance is stolen. It’s clear they’re looking for something. And that was incredibly unnerving.
Maddow: It’s not a normal burglary. The house is ransacked. Every drawer turned out. But almost nothing is taken. Buddy remembers his father and his mother being profoundly rattled by this.
McDaniel: And then the pressure is really put on.
Maddow: Then the pressure is really put on. McCarthy and his allies try a new approach. Buddy Hunt’s arrest and conviction for soliciting gay sex. How’s that going to play back home in Wyoming? At this point, Buddy Hunt’s arrest and his trial, his conviction, it has made the press a bit, but not a lot. Only in a conservative Washington paper that was part of the Chicago Tribune family. And there was a small AP story, a wire service story. But it didn’t get much pickup.
McCarthy and his allies, Senator Styles Bridges and Senator Herman Welker, they threaten to change that.
McDaniel: The threat is that if he stays in the race, Bridges and Welker will print off 25,000, they look like wanted posters, with Buddy’s picture on it and information about the charges and distribute those to every mailbox in Wyoming. It was truly a significant way to try to blackmail Senator Hunt into leaving the Senate.
Maddow: Lester Hunt’s son, Buddy, is not only going to be used as a weapon against his father, he’s going to have his life ruined. His face, this incident in his private life, plastered all across the state, delivered to the mailboxes of 25,000 Wyoming homes. For Lester Hunt, that was enough. It was finally enough.
McDaniel: Almost a year to the day from Buddy’s arrest, Senator Hunt announces that he’s decided not to run for re-election and he says it’s because of health problems. That was clearly not the reason, but that’s the reason he gave publicly.
Maddow: After a year of torment, despite having previously announced that he would seek re-election, Senator Lester Hunt changes his mind. He gives in to the threats and the blackmail and the attacks on his son.
McDaniel: I think he did agonize over the decision. The polls showed that he would win, but I think he came to realize that winning would have been ugly. It would have dragged his son through this all over again in a very public way. And so I think he was looking at all of that and thought, this will all end if I don’t run for re-election. But he was wrong about that.
Maddow: It still wouldn’t be the end. Sure, getting Lester Hunt to withdraw from running for re-election, that was what they wanted. But then McCarthy decided he wanted more. If they could get Hunt out now, immediately, if they could get him to quit before his term was even up, then they could flip control of the U.S. Senate, which Democrats held by only one vote.
If Hunt would resign and leave, Wyoming’s Republican governor would then get to appoint a Republican to fill his seat. That would give Republicans Senate control. It would give McCarthy even more power than he already had.
McDaniel: For them, it was not enough for him to simply not run for re-election. He had to leave the Senate. And so they weren’t done yet with their threats.
Maddow: The finale of this blackmail campaign, the endgame, it wasn’t carried out by Senators Welker or Bridges, but by Joe McCarthy himself, through an ominous statement to the press.
McDaniel: Joe McCarthy announces that he intends to open hearings to investigate a Democratic member of the Senate.
Maddow: “A Democratic member of the Senate,” McCarthy said, who was linked to, quote, “very serious charges,” charges he personally had been checking into and would soon reveal.
McDaniel: If you’re Lester Hunt, you know who they’re talking about.
Maddow: Joe McCarthy made this threat. He announced it to the press on a Friday. The Friday before Father’s Day, 1954. The next day, that Saturday, Lester Hunt woke up early. He drove to the Senate, and he took his own life.
McDaniel: I suspect that that night, Friday night into Saturday, was spent thinking about what it meant to be the target of one of Joe McCarthy’s hearings. Everybody had seen what happens. How ugly they were, how the truth was twisted, how reputations were ruined, lives destroyed. He knew that even though he wasn’t running for re-election now, they intended to put him through this through a different means. And that was a public hearing headed by McCarthy. And so the next morning, he took his life.
Maddow: Lester Hunt, 61 years old, 22 years of service to his state and to the country, gone. Senator Hunt left a handful of notes behind before he fired his gun. He laid them on the desk in his office. There was a note for his wife. Another was written to his son, Buddy.
Ewig: After his death, I’ve seen different reports that he left some letters.
Buddy Hunt: Yes, he did leave some. He left one to my mother, one to me. But the one to me was “this has nothing to do with you” sort of thing. You know? Yeah, “You mustn’t think it does” and you know, so on and so forth.
Maddow: This has nothing to do with you. And that is what Buddy Hunt believed about his father’s suicide, up until the day 25 years later when that young grad student, Rick Ewig, walked into his living room in Chicago with the evidence of how Senator Lester Hunt’s love and care for his son had been turned into a weapon against him.
Buddy Hunt: The only blackmail thing I see here is in regard to me. Am I missing something?
Ewig: No, that’s basically it.
Buddy Hunt: I don’t know anything about that. But maybe I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe that was the whole issue.
Ewig: That could be.
Maddow: After the grad student began to lay out the evidence in front of him, the reporting from Drew Pearson and Marquis Childs and others, the links to McCarthy and his allies, Buddy does start to see it.
Ewig: I have one thing in here I thought you might be interested in. This was found in Senator Bridges’ files. A little note on your arrest. Looking at that, perhaps he did use that against your father.
Buddy Hunt: Well, he might have.
Ewig: Yeah, well, it all seems to point to that way.
Buddy Hunt: Yeah, maybe so. Bridges had that in his files, huh?
Ewig: Yeah, that was in his files, that’s where I got that.
Buddy Hunt: Interesting. I’m learning more from you than you’re learning from me, Richard.
Maddow: Buddy Hunt died just a few years ago, in 2020. Years before he passed, Wyoming author Roger McDaniel spent time with him. Roger had found records confirming that Senator Hunt had told at least two friends before he died about the blackmail plot, about what McCarthy and his Republican allies in the Senate were threatening him with, and how desperate he felt about it.
It was Buddy himself who suggested that Roger McDaniel should write a book about his dad, about what was done to him.
McDaniel: In the end, Buddy called me after he read the manuscript and he said, thank you, this clears up a lot for me and I’m thankful that you wrote the book so that people understand what really happened.
Maddow: Before he died, Senator Lester Hunt had been asked about the widespread expectation that Senator Joe McCarthy would make a run for the White House. Hunt responded that McCarthy didn’t really need to. He said, “As a senator, he’s now acting Secretary of State, acting president, and the chief high executioner of department heads. In the White House, he would merely be a president.”
The list of political lives, in some cases the actual lives, that ended because of Joe McCarthy’s reign in U.S. politics was growing. Young Bob La Follette, Raymond Baldwin, Millard Tydings, William Benton, Lester Hunt. For some in the Senate, losing Lester Hunt specifically, his suicide, was the last straw. They knew they had to do something to try to push back.
Lawyer: Senator McCarthy will vigorously defend himself against these three charges.
Maddow: But how do you push back? What do you do when every attempt to constrain or confront a figure like that just makes his supporters more devoted to him, some of whom would soon turn up to the U.S. Capitol, intent on stopping the proceedings there against him. To do that, they didn’t have to bring along men with drawn weapons, but they did.
David Austin Walsh: An armored car pulls up to the Capitol building.
Maddow: And that is next time on “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”
“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It’s produced by Kelsey Desiderio and Jen Mulraney Donovan. Our associate producer is Vasilios Karsaliakos. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Audio engineering and sound design from Bob Mallory and Catherine Anderson.
Our head of audio production is Bryson Barnes. Senior executive producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our web producer is Will Femia. Aisha Turner is the executive producer for MSNBC Audio. Rebecca Kutler is the senior vice president for content strategy at MSNBC. Archival radio material is from NBC News via the Library of Congress.
Huge thanks to Roger McDaniel, whose book on Lester Hunt is a fantastic read. It’s called “Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt.”
And a special thank you to Wyoming historian Rick Ewig for providing us the audio tape of that amazing interview he did with Buddy Hunt back when Rick was a graduate student in 1979. There’s also another really interesting interview with Buddy Hunt that was done by journalist Michael Isikoff for Yahoo News several years ago. We’ve posted a link to that and much more at our website, msnbc.com/ultra.
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Lester Hunt: The senator from Mississippi doesn’t need the protection of this immunity. Many, many other members of Congress don’t need this immunity or this privilege. You don’t need it. There are a few who do need it, and to my way of thinking, those few shouldn’t have it.
Stennis: Now you say that I do not need it, and I’m flattered by your compliment. I can certainly say, knowing you as I do, that I don’t think you’ll ever need it, as the law is now. But if you repeal that privilege, you will wish you had it. You’ll find the reason there.
Lester Hunt: I hope the time will never come when I need and hope I had that privilege.
Stennis: Take that privilege away, and you will need it as certainly as my father did.
Lester Hunt: May I make one more point, please, before you take questions?
Granik: All right, I want to give him a little privilege.
Stennis: You’ve served the people long and well, and you’ve been subjected to slander and libel yourself, and you love your country more, though, than you did despise the abuse that you had to take. That’s why you’re here.