Transcript
Rachel Maddow Present: Ultra
Episode 8: Mystery Man
With the backing of an eccentric billionaire and powerful voices on the American far-right, a high-stakes effort to make Sen. Joseph McCarthy president surfaces at the Republican convention, as the years-long manhunt for American fascist Francis Yockey finally reaches its strange and dramatic end. Francis Yockey and Joe McCarthy become martyr figures for an ascendant and aggressive ultra-right intent on reshaping American life and politics for decades to come.
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)
Rachel Maddow: He was the richest man in America. Everyone was pretty sure of that, even if no one was exactly sure just how much money he had.
Narrator: Estimates of the value of this empire range $2.5 billion to $3 billion, figures difficult for ordinary mortals to comprehend.
Maddow: He was a Texas oil man. And his oil holdings were huge, not just in Texas terms but on an international scale. “Texas Monthly” calculated that, during World War II, his holdings alone produced more oil than Germany, and Italy, and Japan, not the United States altogether, just his oil fields alone.
He was also what you might call eccentric.
Narrator: He has, it appears, only three abiding interests, making money, combating communism in his own way, and enjoying his large family.
Maddow: You’ve heard stories about men who somehow found the time to have a second secret family, in addition to the one everyone knew about?
H.L. Hunt, this Texas oil man, he somehow had time to run the largest privately held oil empire in the Western world, and also to have a second secret family, and then also to have a third secret family on top of that.
H.L. Hunt had seven children with his first wife. When she died, he quickly remarried to a secretary from his company. She was raising four children who were supposedly from a previous marriage. But H.L. Hunt soon admitted those four were his children as well.
When he died, yet another woman came forward with four more kids, all of whom he had also fathered and supported in yet a third secret family. And who knows, maybe there were more someplace else. But there were at least those three families, two of them secret, and at least those 15 children.
His eldest child, a son, he had sent for a lobotomy for the destruction of part of his brain, a crippling so-called treatment for some poorly understood mental condition. H.L. Hunt himself had a fifth-grade education.
He was devoted to the idea that the best form of exercise, the only truly natural form of exercise, was crawling, crawling around on the floor like a baby, which he did every day, fully dressed in a shirt and tie, including on several occasions in front of reporters.
He called it creeping. He shouted to a Dallas Morning News reporter — quote — “I’m a crank about creeping.”
H.L. Hunt believed that even Republican presidents, including Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower, were socialists, if not communists. After General Douglas MacArthur was fired during the Korean War for disobeying orders from the commander-in-chief, H.L. Hunt supported him, MacArthur, for President in 1952.
He was also becoming increasingly devoted to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. By then, H.L. Hunt had also started his own media empire.
Narrator: The dissemination of right-wing educational materials, as he calls them.
Maddow: A low-profile, but fast-growing network of radio shows and TV shows and syndicated columns and newsletters.
Announcer: It’s “Facts Forum” time.
Maddow: At the launch of a H.L. Hunt TV program called “Facts Forum,” he hired a new staffer from the office of Senator Joe McCarthy, a young staffer who would soon become McCarthy’s wife. McCarthy himself was the first guest on the show.
Announcer: A program designed and presented to interest you in a subject of vital national importance.
Maddow: Reporters soon noticed that a majority of the programming on Hunt’s various broadcasts was dedicated to promoting McCarthy: plugging his speeches, bringing on other guests to say how great he was.
Narrator: Hunt spends millions each year in spreading his religious, super patriotic messages. He is a strong advocate of right-wing causes and is considered by some to be a serious threat to American institutions.
Maddow: In politics, it is no small thing to have the support of the richest man in the country, even if he is a little eccentric, especially if that man controls media outlets that echo and reinforce and amplify his support.
But Joe McCarthy’s support wasn’t just from eccentric right-wing billionaires like H.L. Hunt.
Radio anchor: McCarthy will jump into the fray with a battle cry that the fight on communism must not be hindered, and he will have support.
Maddow: In the lead-up to the 1956 presidential election, a group described as nationalists, including former Congressman Hamilton Fish, former Senator Burton Wheeler, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, they all met at the Harvard Club in New York City to plot the next step up for Joe McCarthy.
Congressman Fish emerged from that meeting to tell the press that McCarthy would achieve the presidency in 1956, even if he had to do it with an independent or a third-party bid.
By that time, McCormick’s group, For America, had been promoting a wild election gambit, to qualify their own electors in multiple states to try to insert chaos into the count of the Electoral College.
Clarence Manion, Radio Commentator: We can get our wish by qualifying a slate of American presidential elector candidates in our respective states. In a number of states, patriots are already far advanced on these necessary prerequisites.
Maddow: To win the presidency without becoming the nominee of either major party, you’d need a gambit like that, because, of course, under normal electoral processes, it’s all but impossible for any third-party candidate to win, whether it would be McCarthy, or an anti-income tax candidate they also liked, or a Dixiecrat segregationist, or anyone else.
But even conservative columnists were sounding the alarm that, if anyone could do something like that, if anyone could pull it off, it would be McCarthy — quote — “McCarthy will have no compunctions at all about wrecking the Republican Party if this seems to serve his purposes. McCarthy has plenty of financial backing. He has important support in the press and on the radio. His supporters have the true mark of the fanatic. They are not interested in facts. The endless exposure of McCarthy’s endless untruths do not affect them.
His opportunities to stay in the news are unlimited. Can McCarthy reach the White House? Serious observers on Capitol Hill take seriously the possibility that McCarthy could ride to national power on the wreckage of the Republican Party. The idea does seem fantastic at first glance. But McCarthy has been consistently underrated. And this has been one of his greatest assets.”
With loud static like that coming from the far right, by the time the 1956 Republican National Convention loomed…
Anchor: From San Francisco’s Cow Palace, the NBC radio coverage of the 1956 Republican National Convention.
Maddow: …the Republican Party writ large determined that they would renominate Eisenhower and that there would be no convention shenanigans to get in the way of that.
Reporter: As the nation waits for the opening sound of the gavel, indications are that the convention will carry out its main purpose smoothly and efficiently.
Maddow: Smoothly and efficiently. That was the idea. McCarthy’s devotees did not want to oblige.
Day three of the Republican National Convention, headline: “Dump Eisenhower Move Appears at Convention.”
A so-called Conservative Republican Headquarters opens up on Market Street in San Francisco, not far from the official convention proceedings at the Cow Palace. They’re distributing anti-Eisenhower pamphlets and pins. They’ve got a petition with a hundred thousand names on it. They’re recruiting delegates at the convention to their cause.
The activists there, including a young man by the name of Willis Carto, tell reporters their plan. They just need one convention delegate to start it, maybe a delegate from the South who doesn’t like how soft Eisenhower is on segregation. That delegate will pry open this convention by putting forward the name Joe McCarthy for the nomination. They’ll start an open convention. They’ll start a fight.
One columnist points out to the activists that McCarthy isn’t even there in San Francisco. He isn’t even at the convention. The activists brush this off — quote — “If he’s nominated, we can get him to fly here at a moment’s notice.”
It’s a good try. It’s an earnest try. But Joe McCarthy isn’t flying in to anywhere. And Eisenhower’s not budging off the Republican ticket, because the movement that has built itself around Joe McCarthy is about to outlive him.
Within days, it will be clear that Eisenhower will have the nomination.
Within five months, Eisenhower will be sworn in for a second term. And within nine months…
NBC Anchor: The news in brief, Wisconsin’s controversial Senator Joseph R. McCarthy is dead. McCarthy died at Bethesda Naval Hospital here about an hour ago from a liver ailment.
Maddow: Joe McCarthy has drunk himself to death at the age of 48.
Among the things that will make it into McCarthy’s instant obituary the night of the shocking news of his death is his defense of the Nazis involved in the Malmedy massacre.
Anchor: There are those in this country who will see in his passing the loss to the nation of a great patriot. Then there are those who rejected this description and saw in Mr. McCarthy not a red hunter, but a headhunter.
Several times, he seemed about to burst out of the relative obscurity of just another member of the Senate, notably when he came to the defense of Germans held involved in the ghastly World War II Malmedy massacres.
The quiet, droning quality of his voice, boring into witnesses before his Senate committee, became known everywhere on this globe, known and imitated. His actions were cited by foreign governments, to the detriment of this country. He was soundly blasted here at home, but he had millions upon millions of devoted followers.
Maddow: Millions of devoted followers, who, it turns out, were all but inconsolable when he died.
Far-right preacher Gerald L.K. Smith suggested that McCarthy might have been murdered, or at least targeted fatally somehow by his opponents.
He said a secret and Satanic campaign had been launched to — quote — “tax the resistance of the mind, the nerve and glandular system” of Senator McCarthy.
The neo-Nazi group the National Renaissance Party, which had started calling themselves Patriots for McCarthy, they went into full-blown mourning, holding annual requiem masses for Joe McCarthy in New York. They held them annually for years.
Radio host Clarence Manion, who had been the voice of that For America electoral vote scheme, he said McCarthy had been spectacularly martyred.
Manion: Many years from now, readers of history may wonder why President Eisenhower did not use the spectacular martyrdom of McCarthy as an example of communist ruthlessness.
David Austin Walsh, Historian: There’s something to the idea that McCarthy is this martyr figure who is embraced by conservative Americans across that sort of right-wing political spectrum as a martyr figure.
Maddow: Historian David Austin Walsh.
McCarthy biographer Richard Rovere said that McCarthy was — quote — “in many ways, the most gifted demagogue ever bred on these shores. No bolder seditionist ever moved among us, nor any politician with a surer, swifter access to the dark places of the American mind.”
On those terms, Joe McCarthy had set in motion something that did not stop when he died, when he died so suddenly and so young.
Anchor: The Capitol, shocked by the suddenness of the death of Senator McCarthy, is piecing together the story only now.
Maddow: Rovere described “the world of the daft and the frenzied, the compulsive haters who had followed earlier and lesser demagogues in the fascist and semi-fascist movements of the ‘30s and ‘40s.”
He said McCarthy had certainly locked up the support of that world, but he also greatly enlarged that world by adding to it — quote — “large numbers of regular Republicans who had coolly decided that there was no longer any respectable way of un-horsing the Democrats and that only McCarthy’s wild and conscienceless politics could do the job.”
In the wake of McCarthy’s death, that mix, wild and without conscience, would show itself, and soon, right there in San Francisco, where the FBI was finally about to get its man.
This is the final episode of “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”
Reporter: We’re coming up onto Geary Street now, and I can see the Saint Francis Hotel, and confetti is flying out into the air.
Anthony Mostrom, Journalist: They could see that there was a little bit of evidence of burning on his lips.
Manion: The spectacular martyrdom of McCarthy, an example of communist ruthlessness
Thruston Morton, Republican National Committee Chairman: I have been asked if I think the election was stolen. My comment is this. Many people do.
Mostrom: He was standing in the kitchen trying to remain calm, kind of knowing that the jig was up.
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Maddow: Episode 8: “Mystery Man.”
Narrator: This is the route of the flagships of American Airlines, serving 21 states from border to border, from coast to coast…
Maddow: Wayne Kemp was working for American Airlines as a ticket clerk at Carter Field, the main airport in Fort Worth, Texas. It was a Friday afternoon, June 1960. During his shift that day, Wayne noticed a stray piece of luggage that had apparently been separated from its owner.
Nobody had come to pick it up. Maybe it had been overlooked and left behind on a connecting flight.
It was a really generic-looking suitcase: a large, gray Samsonite bag with no I.D. tag. But the airlines have protocols for these things, and so Wayne Kemp did what he was trained to do. He made doubly sure that no one was there in Fort Worth to claim it and then he took it aside and he carefully opened it to see if there was any identification inside.
The first thing he found was a passport. And that seemed like good news. Obviously, a passport would provide some identifying information. But the second thing he found was another passport. And then he found another one. Three passports from three different countries, all three with the same photo, but with three different names.
There were also credit cards, and travelers checks, and checkbooks, and driver’s licenses, and German press credentials, and seven different birth certificates, all with different names.
Ticket clerk Wayne Kemp called the FBI.
Tracing where the luggage had come from, which was New Orleans and where it seemed to have been heading to, which was California, the Dallas FBI agents got in touch with the FBI field office in San Francisco. The airline told them that, yes, in fact, a passenger had just landed in California and had reached out to them looking for his lost bag.
The passenger gave the name Richard Hatch. He told them he was staying in Oakland. The FBI told the airline to contact the man again and tell him to stay put: “Don’t go anywhere. We’ll bring the bag to you.”
Soon, that gray Samsonite suitcase was on its way to an address in Oakland, along with a car full of special agents from the FBI, because the owner of that luggage, the man calling himself Richard Hatch, was someone the U.S. government had been searching for, for more than a decade.
It was American fugitive Francis Parker Yockey.
The agents waited for Yockey at the address he’d given. He told them his name was Richard Hatch. He said he was a photographer. He said he was living mostly in Mexico. They asked him to open the bag. At first, he expressed surprise at all these passports inside, all these birth certificates, these different forms of I.D., all in different names.
As the agents started to question him more aggressively, Yockey got tense. He finally conceded that he had known that the passports and the documents were there, but he said there was a logical explanation for it. The agents would later file in their report that Yockey said he refused to give them that logical explanation — quote — “on the basis that he would be misunderstood.”
As the grilling intensified, one of the FBI agents later wrote in the report that he noticed the man — quote — “moving toward the door.”
The agent asked him if he wanted to sit down, but he said, no, that he would rather stand.
And then, with these FBI agents standing just a few feet away, he bolted.
Mostrom: Yockey was standing in the kitchen of this little duplex trying to remain calm, kind of knowing that the jig was up, and an FBI agent was keeping his eye on Yockey, when Yockey suddenly bolted out the door and attempted to run down the stairway and take off.
Maddow: That’s journalist Anthony Mostrom.
Yockey bolted out of the apartment. An agent leapt after him in pursuit. Yockey slammed the door on that agent’s hand, cutting it open. The agent would end up needing 28 stitches. Yockey ran down a back staircase. He started making a break for it down the street.
Another agent came rushing out of the front door, and tackled him. Got him.
Yockey was put under arrest after more than a decade on the run, after going AWOL to avoid questioning about the Nazi sabotage plot in the U.S. during World War II.
Anchor: They brought with them a great store of explosives.
Maddow: After flipping against the American government to help the Nazis in Germany at the Nazi war crimes trials.
Reporter: All of the defendants have been taken out of the courtroom.
Maddow: After fleeing Army counterintelligence to go to Ireland to write his fascist book, “Imperium,” after hooking up with escaped Nazis in South America and trying to sell black market plans for a cobalt bomb in the Middle East.
Drew Pearson, Journalist: The radioactive dust would reach California in about a day.
Maddow: After somehow eluding years of FBI surveillance including while he spoke at segregationist, antisemitic U.S. rallies and wrote a speech for Senator Joe McCarthy.
Fmr. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI): Communists or worse.
Maddow: After all that, Francis Yockey was finally in custody.
And then, because of course, things got even weirder.
His arrest was front-page news in the Bay Area.
Mostrom: The San Francisco Chronicle’s front page blared out “Mystery Man Seized With Three Passports. Passport Subject Called Top Fascist.”
Maddow: The mystery man seized with fake passports. It — quote — “caused the wires to hum between here and Washington last night.”
Quote — “‘This is definitely a security matter,’ a government spokesman said. Both the State Department and the Department of Justice are interested in this man. One government source said last night: ‘This is not a small fish. This is a man that we are very, very interested in.’”
A photo of Yockey handcuffed in custody appeared in the papers, as reporters there started trying to piece it together. Yockey soon had a series of court appearances.
Mostrom: The reporters who covered Yockey’s bail hearing in a San Francisco courtroom described a sullen, silent mystery man with an odd stare.
Maddow: At his bail hearing, prosecutors cited — quote — “the unusual circumstances of this case” in making a bail request that was extraordinarily high. They asked for $50,000 bail, more than half-a-million dollars in today’s money.
The FBI said they didn’t want to go into detail about the case and the bail request, telling reporters only — quote — “There are lots of questions that haven’t been answered and we want him around.”
The judge overseeing the bail hearing told the government — quote — “I don’t know what you may have in your minds, but to justify this kind of bail, you’re going to have to make a case on the record.”
The federal prosecutor handling the hearing was William P. Clancy. He said that the U.S. attorney’s office had been instructed by Washington to not say anything more. Prosecutors did tell the judge that the high bail was indicative of the government’s great interest in the man. They also explained that they’d found him with a weapon in the first cell that they put him in, a comb with all the teeth removed and the end sharpened.
The prosecutor, William Clancy, told the court that Yockey was — quote — “an extreme risk of flight.”
And maybe he was.
You don’t accumulate three passports and seven birth certificates all in different names without some kind of weird resources. Prosecutors then told the judge that they had learned of an escape plot. In the San Francisco jail, Yockey had approached another prisoner who was being held on a $1,000 bail. Yockey had had more than twice that amount on him in cash when he was arrested.
He told the prisoner that he’d pay for his bail if the man would then get a gun once he was out. Yockey told him he should hide in Dunbar Alley, where the U.S. Marshals picked up prisoners from the jail to take them for their federal court hearings. When the Marshals brought Yockey out of the jail, the man was supposed to ambush them, so Yockey and another prisoner could make a run for it.
Unfortunately for Yockey, the prisoners who he approached about this plan went straight to the FBI. After the escape plan was exposed, Yockey was moved to a new cell. He was searched thoroughly for anything that could be used as a weapon, for anything that could be used in a suicide attempt.
FBI records show jailhouse informants telling them that Yockey bragged that he had plenty of money from something involving all those forged passports, from something involving Egypt. One informant remembered him using the word “Suez.”
Informants told the FBI that Yockey — quote — “expressed admiration for the late Senator Joseph McCarthy.”
While he was in jail, prosecutors and the FBI and other interested government agencies were awkwardly negotiating among themselves and with Washington about who was allowed to know what about this case and about this man.
In an FBI memo that is still heavily redacted today, an FBI special agent in charge is described as having received some important information about Yockey on the night of June 16, 1960, while Yockey was still in the San Francisco jail — quote — “Special Agent in Charge Auerbach, on the evening of June 16, received the following information: ‘Blank. Blank related that blank reportedly has a complete file pertaining to blank, which contains considerable information that is in conflict with other information received to date. Blank. In view of the source of the aforementioned information, this data should not be disseminated to other agencies, and not discussed with personnel outside the bureau.”
Then the memo continues — quote — “Assistant U.S. Attorney Clancy,” the prosecutor in Yockey’s case, “indicated during the evening of June 16 that he had come into the possession of a — quote — ‘super secret’ file regarding Yockey, which was — quote — ‘dynamite.’”
It is noted that Special Agent Blank and Blank were planning to contact Assistant U.S. attorney Clancy during the afternoon of June 17 to determine the nature of the aforementioned file.
So, on the night of June 16, with Yockey in jail, the FBI learns that someone has a — quote — “complete file” on Yockey that the bureau is concerned should not be shared with other agencies. That same night, the prosecutor handling Yockey’s case tells the FBI that he has obtained a super secret file on Yockey, which he calls dynamite. It is not an FBI file.
The FBI, in fact, makes plans to get its hands on that file the following day. But the following day, June 17, the whole case changes fatally. Guards come to Yockey’s cell to wake him for breakfast. They find him lying on his cot arms crossed, nonresponsive. There are no visible injuries that the guards can see, except for what looks like it might be a chemical burn on his lips.
Mostrom: They could see that there was a little bit of evidence of burning on his lips, which told them right away that he had probably taken something, taken poison, like Hermann Goering and all the Nuremberg defendants, you know, before him.
Maddow: Yockey had just been moved to a new cell and thoroughly searched days earlier. There were no bottles or containers or envelopes found in his cell. But, somehow, he had got ahold of a capsule of cyanide, which did have an echo of Nuremberg.
Reporter: Wilhelm Hermann Goering, guilty on four counts, escaped his fate of hanging by committing suicide less than three hours before he would have been executed, taking cyanide of potassium.
Maddow: The newspapers soon reported strange details about Yockey’s death. He was found lying on his cot in his underwear and in a pair of — quote — “storm trooper-style boots,” which raises the question, among other things, how? How did he manage to get storm trooper-style boots in jail, and how did he get the poison? How did any of this happen?
Mostrom: He did manage to obtain potassium cyanide, and that, of course, is one of the enduring mysteries of the Yockey saga. Who slipped him the cyanide?
Maddow: It’s worth noting that Francis Yockey did have one final visitor from the outside just before his death, a man who came to see him at the jail.
Mostrom: Yockey received one visitor that we know of in the San Francisco jail. And that was an obscure right-wing activist and publisher named Willis Carto.
Maddow: Willis Carto. The same Willis Carto who had helped lead the doomed effort to get Joe McCarthy nominated for president at the Republican Convention in San Francisco.
Reporter: We’re coming up onto Geary Street now, and I can see the Saint Francis Hotel, and confetti is flying out into the air.
Maddow: When Willis Carto wasn’t trying to get a soon-to-be-dead Joe McCarthy onto the Republican presidential ticket he had been busy in ways that kept catching the eye of the FBI.
There was the German American Bund leader who had been arrested and imprisoned after he was found to be linked to the Operation Pastorius Nazi sabotage plot during World War II. When he got out of prison and FBI agents paid him a visit, they found that he had started a new pro-Joe McCarthy group in the Midwest, and that his new Nationalist Conservative Party was listed in a directory of far-right groups that was assembled by Willis Carto.
The FBI had infiltrated the neo-Nazi National Renaissance Party in New York, which was publishing Yockey’s antisemitic essays, and which Yockey himself had joined under one of his aliases. Willis Carto was in correspondence with the group’s leader, James Madole, exchanging complaints about white people — quote — “standing at the gateway of racial extinction.”
Carto was in correspondence with segregationist leaders organizing support for federal legislation that had been put forward by America First Senator Bill Langer, a bill that proposed to round up Black Americans and send them to Africa.
When groups advocating for that bill came under suspicion in connection with a series of anti-Black and anti-Jewish bombings in the American south, Carto was interviewed about his ties to anyone who might have been involved. The FBI also asked Carto whether he knew the whereabouts of a man named Francis Yockey.
And so, when San Francisco papers erupted with the news of this mysterious fascist, this man Yockey who had turned up at the San Francisco jail, Willis Carto knew enough to know that he had to meet him. Carto wrote about attending one of Yockey’s court hearings as if he had come face to face with a god — quote — “As his gaze swept across, and then to me, he stopped and, for the space of a fractional second, spoke to me with his eyes. In that instant, we understood that I would not desert him.”
Carto then wrangled a private visit with Yockey in jail.
Mostrom: “Dimly, I could make out the form of this man, this strange and lonely man, through the thick wire netting. I knew that I was in the presence of a great force and I could feel history standing aside me.”
Maddow: Oh, get a room.
Willis Carto’s jailhouse meeting with Yockey came under the guise of an antisemitic, pro-segregation newsletter he was publishing that was called “Right.”
When Yockey turned up dead, Carto claimed in his newsletter that Yockey’s death should be blamed, of course, on the Jews — quote — “Convinced that only his dynamic philosophy of cultural vitalism could save the white race, he went to Brittas Bay, Ireland, in 1948. Isolated, he wrote ‘Imperium,’ a book which will live 1,000 years.”
Carto said — quote — “From the moment of publication of this book, his doom was sealed, for it must have become apparent to international Jewry at that time that Yockey had to be destroyed.”
Carto would soon begin reprinting and selling “Imperium.” It had previously been almost impossible to get only a few hundred copies published in England in the 1940s. But under Willis Carto, “Imperium” would be available as a cheap paperback with an eye-catching cover and a long new introduction by Carto praising the book, praising Yockey as the salvation of the Western world and the White race.
Mostrom: Carto was completely converted to it. He sold “Imperium” by mail for years and years through his newspaper, “The Spotlight.”
Maddow: Willis Carto soon founded something called Liberty Lobby. He began publishing a newspaper for it called “The Spotlight.”
Within ten years, the Liberty Lobby would be one of the most aggressive and effective far-right political pressure groups in the country “The Spotlight” would be the highest-circulation right-wing publication in America, by far.
All the while, as Willis Carto’s organizations and publications rose in influence in Republican and conservative politics, he would stay true to what he had decided in 1960 would be his life’s mission, to carry on the legacy and the message of his hero, Francis Yockey.
But, in 1960, in the immediate aftermath of Yockey’s death, there was more to do. With McCarthy gone and Yockey gone, and both of them mourned and celebrated as martyrs, the movement they had both been part of and built and left behind, it had something else to offer American politics and this so-called democracy that kept failing them again and again.
The conclusion of “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is next.
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It should have been clear on election night, when the Republican candidate’s supporters refused to accept the results. It’s November 1960. The country is gripped by a nail-biter, down-to-the-wire presidential election between the Democrat, John F. Kennedy, and Republican Richard Nixon.
It’s around 3:00 a.m. on election night. And as it’s finally starting to become clear that Nixon has lost — by a thin margin, but he’s lost — Nixon goes out to talk to his supporters. He wants to let them down gently.
Richard Nixon, Presidential Candidate: As I look at the board here, while the — there are still some results still to come in, if the present trend continues, Mr. Kennedy, Senator Kennedy, will be the next president of the United States
(CROWD YELLS NO!)
Maddow: In any presidential campaign, especially on election night, passions run hot. Sometimes, it’s harder for supporters to accept defeat than even for the candidate himself. Nixon knows that.
But he also knows the math. He knows it’s over.
And so, following that initial reaction from his supporters, that chorus of “No, no, no” that had just rained down on him, Nixon tries again. He thanks the crowd for their enthusiasm and their support, but he wants to assure the country, he wants to assure the incoming president-elect that he and his supporters will accept the election’s results.
Nixon: I want to say that one of the great features of America is that we have political contests, that they are very hard-fought, as this one is hard-fought, and once the decision is made, we unite behind the man who is elected. I want all of you to know…
(SHOUTING)
Nixon: I want all of — I want — I…
(APPLAUSE)
Nixon: I want — I want Senator Kennedy to know and I want all of you to know that, certainly, if this trend does continue and he does become our next president, that he will have my wholehearted support and yours too.
(BOOING)
Maddow: In that moment, it might have been clear where all of this was heading
In the immediate aftermath of that very-closely-contested election, Willis Carto decided it was time to debut the new national publication of his group, Liberty Lobby. The mailing list was surprisingly large. Carto had always been good at that logistical side of his organizing.
But where his previous newsletter had been targeted to an extreme right-wing audience, with screeds against Jewish people and racial mongrelization and all-but-explicit endorsements of Nazism, this new publication, “The Liberty Letter,” would aim for a more mainstream audience, a more mainstream Republican audience.
And there was good reason now, a good hook, for rushing out this first issue just after the election. Republicans needed to know that this election had been stolen, or at least it was in the process of being stolen, but there was a way to stop it, to stop the steal.
This was the big headline from Carto, page one: “Kennedy Has Not Won the Election.”
He explained that the votes apparently cast for Kennedy had been fraud, that the fraud could and would be proven, but, in the meantime electors in the contested states, for example, from Georgia, those electors should not be counted for Kennedy under any circumstances.”
Carto wrote: “Unless some action is shown at once, Kennedy will claim the White House.” Quote: “Will no one stop them?”
Carto said a mass mobilization on the right could prevent the transfer of power to Kennedy. He wrote: “This urgent event can happen between now and January.” The electors plot that they had promoted, but never tried in 1956, they should actually do it now in this next election, in 1960.
And Carto would not be alone. The cause would soon be joined by Gerald L.K. Smith.
Gerald L.K. Smith, Preacher: God, let me be a rabble-rouser!
Maddow: Gerald L.K. Smith, the antisemitic far-right preacher, blasted out a message to his followers, that at that very moment he was in discussions with — quote — “governors, congressmen, judges, and crusading patriots” about reversing the results of the election.
He said he was working — quote — “to persuade at least four Southern Governors to assert their leadership in this crisis moment in world history.”
Specifically, Smith was telling governors to change the results in their states, to send Nixon electors to Washington, even though Kennedy had won the vote in those states. He said the — quote — “campaign of pressure” he was overseeing would persuade Republican elected officials all across the country that they could overturn the election results in their states to — quote — “save the nation.”
Smith told his followers he had rock-solid evidence that Kennedy — quote — “stole the election.”
Quote — “Convincing evidence concerning thievery in numerous states is being assembled.”
He called it “a deadly moment in American history,” but he said it could all be stopped if they mobilized together. The election may be done, the votes may be in, but the result hasn’t been finalized, so it isn’t over. There’s still a way to stop it, in Washington, in Congress, when the Electoral College votes are cast, and when they’re counted in the first week of January. That’s where they could stop it.
Gerald L.K. Smith and Willis Carto, one who had campaigned for president on a platform of sterilizing and deporting all Jewish people from America, one who would be the publisher and most fervent evangelist for America’s “Mein Kampf,” both brought into electoral politics through their allegiance to the same shockingly powerful, deeply flawed Washington demagogue, now they’re working together to try to discard the democratic process and its outcomes, to throw out the results of an election.
The Nixon campaign and the Republican Party, which had effectively conceded the race already, they nevertheless had their heads turned by this new effort led by the Republican Party chairman.
Morton: I have been asked if I think the election was stolen. My comment is this. Many people do. And many people have come to me with examples of fraud and irregularity. It’s my responsibility to investigate. Where there’s so much smoke, I must look for the fire.
Maddow: “Many people do” believe the election was stolen.
The Republican Party chairman vowed that he would leave — quote — “no stone unturned” in investigating all of this supposed fraud.
Morton: I have also been asked who I think will be the next president of the United States. I predict an inauguration will take place on January 20th, and, of course, I feel that it will be Jack Kennedy, although, as always, the possibility that enough states may be overturned in the recount to negate what we think today are the election results.
Maddow: Yes, we know how this is going to turn out, but what’s the harm? What’s the harm in just indulging these stolen election fantasies just a little bit? There’s always the possibility.
In the end, of course, it didn’t work. JFK was sworn in as president. There was an uninterrupted peaceful transfer of power. But that move, that move after that election to stop the steal, to call the election results false, to try to get election officials to overturn the results, in some ways, it was a kind of flag on the timeline, a bullet point reminder of what happens when fundamentally antidemocratic forces get brought in to work their dark magic in real politics.
If you come from a world where democracy is not your preferred choice. If, for example, you think we should have fought on the other side in World War II. If you come from a world where there are whole groups of other Americans who you think should be sterilized, or deported, or exterminated. Let’s be honest, you’re not all that excited about casting your vote alongside those Americans with everyone as equal citizens.
If you have told yourself that Jewish people or some other cabal secretly controls everything and what appears to be democracy is really a sham, then what do you care about the product of that democracy? What do you care about election results?
And if you believe those things, but you’re a lonely crank on the fringe shouting at a cloud about it, well, knock yourself out.
But if you’re invited in, if you, Gerald L.K. Smith, are invited to the Senate to bring your fake story about the Jewish Defense Department official Anna Rosenberg being a secret communist.
If you, Eustace Mullins, author of “The Biological Jew,” is invited to supply anti-communist research for a senator’s staff.
If you, the uniformed storm troopers of the National Renaissance Party, are to host the senator for his speech which will be written for him by the author of America’s “Mein Kampf.”
If innocent American G.I.s are to face sheafs of made-up antisemitic cartoon caricature horror stories shipped direct to Capitol Hill from Munich from a leader of Germany’s successor Nazi party.
If violent forces that seek the end of the American system of government are tapped and brought in to electoral politics, there’s no reason to expect that what happens next will be constrained by respect for election results.
There have always been some Americans who liked the idea of other systems of government better than ours, who admired foreign dictators and authoritarians, who wanted something like that here, a system with their own strongman, with them on top, and everybody else can finally just shut up, or face the consequences.
Americans with ideas like these have flocked to movements like America First, which tried to keep us from fighting the Nazis. They have flocked to demagogues like Joseph McCarthy and others, politicians who understood the kind of dark wells they were drawing from, and they liked it, politicians who stayed themselves mostly in electoral politics, but they drew in and cultivated and used the menace of the persistently and legitimately antidemocratic forces in our country to give the movement around them not just a thrillingly transgressive vibe, but a real air of menace, a real air of threat.
Activating the real radicals, radicalizing the normies, causing real fear among Americans who would oppose them or stand in their way.
These politicians’ followers don’t much care about the electoral program of the politician they embrace. They don’t much care about deficit spending or relations with China or whether he actually exposes any real communists, or whether he cheats on his wife or on his taxes or on them in what always seems to be a constant grift.
What they care about is that he’s powerful. He’s willing to be brutal, and crude and mean. He does instill fear. He doesn’t shrink from violence. He colors outside the lines without guilt or hesitation. He’s uncontrollable, unstoppable, unshameable. That appeals, because that means he will break this system.
That is the appeal. That’s the whole idea.
You don’t take down a figure like that by pointing out his hypocrisies and his policy shortcomings. You take him down by stopping him from doing what he’s trying to do, by showing that he can’t actually break the American system of government, because, look, there it is holding firm against him, showing his followers that he’s not superhuman, he’s not stronger than how this country was built.
The American system of government, our democracy and our rule of law is far from perfect. But it is the kind of system that, when it works well, it works against cheats and frauds and violent thugs.
And so, against a man and a movement arrayed against the American system of government, it takes Americans in government and inside the American system to push back hard, like senators, Tydings, Benton, Flanders, Hunt.
It takes Americans in the free press like Drew Pearson and Marquis Childs.
These Americans did nothing particularly inventive to fight Joe McCarthy. They were just brave enough to actually fight him. And it didn’t seem like it was working at the time. And it was costly to all of them. And it took all of them, but it worked.
Baldwin calling out McCarthy’s lies on Malmedy. Tydings calling out McCarthy’s lies on communists in government. That put both of them in the firing line for McCarthy, and they both paid for it with their careers. But the record they built of those lies became the basis for the expulsion resolution against McCarthy from Benton.
And that put Benton on the firing line for McCarthy too, and he too paid with his career. But Benton’s expulsion resolution exposed more about McCarthy. It exposed his financial corruption, which McCarthy couldn’t answer to and refused to answer to.
And that mattered, because when Lester Hunt stood up next, threatening the immunity McCarthy depended on to operate the way he did, the resultant blackmail drive against Hunt led to Hunt’s death.
And that put enough steel in the spines, barely enough, but enough, for Republicans to finally support taking some kind of stand. And, yes, it was barely half of them, and it was none of the so-called leaders. But it was enough.
And that weak censure, that condemnation, that little rules and decorum violation they finally barely felt brave enough to get him on, what that was technically about was his refusal to face questions about that evidence of his financial corruption that had turned up because of the old expulsion resolution that hadn’t seemed to go anywhere, that hadn’t seemed, at the time, to matter. Until, in the end, it did. It all added up.
No one blow was enough, but, together, they all were.
McCarthy’s biographer, Richard Rovere, wrote that McCarthy’s decline — quote — “was more difficult to account for than his ascent. He suffered defeats, but not destruction. Nothing of a really fatal consequence had happened.” But, still, he said — quote — “He collapsed.”
It’s never going to be just one blow that takes down the demagogue. It’s going to take more than that. It’s going to take 10 blows, or 100. But not a million. The American system of government is strong, too. It just needs brave Americans to believe that and to show it and to step up, despite the costs.
Willis Carto did go on to decades of influence on the American right. His group Liberty Lobby had a big office on Capitol Hill. It had the largest-circulation right-wing publication in the country for years. It had its staffers and advisers promoted for government positions in multiple Republican administrations.
All the while, Carto kept the flame burning for Francis Yockey and what Yockey stood for. Drew Pearson dogged Carto for years, reporting relentlessly on his extremism. Carto kept suing Drew Pearson to try to get him to stop, but he lost every case. Pearson never gave up.
Willis Carto died in 2015. At his death, he was remembered as having done more than any other American in history to promote and spread the lie that is Holocaust denial.
Thanks to Carto’s devotion to the cause, Francis Yockey’s book “Imperium” never did go out of print. And it seems like it’s newly discovered every few years now by some new iteration of the very far right.
In 1998, in Jasper, Texas, a Black man named James Byrd Jr. was chained to the bumper of a pickup truck and dragged to his death in a horrific hate crime. Three white supremacists were arrested and convicted. And then there, at the sentencing, was the name Francis Yockey again.
Jackson: At the sentencing of one of the murderers, he quoted Francis Parker Yockey to justify his own actions. So, you know, it’s still out there. It’s still being read.
Maddow: At a Vatican conference, when Republican presidential campaign manager and senior White House adviser Steve Bannon cited an Italian fascist named Julius Evola, it set off a wave of excitement across the very far right.
In most recent reprints of Yockey’s “Imperium,” and there are many, it’s Julius Evola’s glowing review of “Imperium” that is included as an afterword with the book.
Mostrom: It’s very evident that there are people in power who have read “Imperium” and take its neo-fascist message very seriously.
Maddow: Francis Yockey’s peculiar anti-American vision of destroying a multiracial democratic United States, to instead make us a white, fascist nation in league with Russia, it was weird in 1948. It was still weird in 2017, at Charlottesville.
Charlottesville Ralliers: Russia is our friend! The South will rise again! Russia is our friend! The South will rise again!
Maddow: There’s a so-called Dark Enlightenment antidemocratic philosophy that’s taken hold among the very, very online American right wing and their favorite politicians on the ragged edge of the Republican Party. The literary canon of that movement is published in part by Imperium Press.
Yockey’s “Imperium” has even inspired its own modern-fascist political party in Europe, Imperium Europa. It’s active in European parliamentary elections even right now.
Senator Herman Welker of Idaho was one of two Republicans who helped McCarthy in his blackmail campaign against Lester Hunt. Herman Welker was so devoted to McCarthy that his nickname was “Little Joe From Idaho.” After McCarthy died in May of 1957, Herman Welker also died before the end of that year. He was only 50 years old.
The other senator involved in the blackmail plot was Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire. When he died in 1961, he had somehow accumulated millions of dollars in cash, which he had stuffed into suitcases that he stashed with friends and staffers, under instructions that they should deliver the luggage unopened to his widow upon his death.
When it came time to bury Senator Bridges, his widow reportedly asked LBJ what she should do with all that cash. A big chunk of Interstate 93 in New Hampshire is still named after Republican Senator Styles Bridges today.
The retired admiral who headed up the petition effort against McCarthy’s censure, who had ordered the armored truck guards to draw their pistols at the doors of the Senate, he ran for office himself multiple times in his home state of Alabama. He ran as a segregationist and an antisemite.
In his 1956 race for U.S. Senate, he made multiple campaign appearances with a Klan leader who had orchestrated the beating of Nat King Cole on stage in the middle of a performance, at the Birmingham Municipal Auditorium. By 1964, the FBI would be investigating Admiral Crommelin’s alleged role in a plan with other former senior military officers to forcibly overthrow the U.S. government. He was never charged.
John Crommelin and his brothers today have a U.S. Navy frigate named after them. Crommelin was named to the Alabama Military Hall of Fame in 2003, amid some complaints.
Gerald L.K. Smith lived until 1976. He remained a Holocaust denier his whole life. He is remembered most today for a 60-foot-tall statue called “Christ of the Ozarks” which he erected in Arkansas in 1966. He’s buried beneath it. Its detractors call it “Our Milk Carton With Arms.”
Senator Lester Hunt’s son Buddy married. He had kids. He was a well-regarded community organizer and then a college professor. When he was 87 years old, he wrote to the U.S. Justice Department asking for a formal review of the circumstances of his father’s death. After all, blackmail is a crime. As far as we have been able to tell, Buddy never received a response before he died.
The U.S. Justice Department appears to have never investigated the blackmail campaign against U.S. Senator Lester Hunt, nor did the United States Senate.
In 2023, a Republican state legislator in Wyoming whose family had been friends and neighbors with Senator Hunt decided to ask the state legislature in Wyoming to pass a simple resolution commemorating the service of Lester Hunt, who had served as secretary of state and as a two-term governor, and as U.S. senator.
His fellow Republicans in the legislature voted it down.
Nazi defense lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer didn’t die until the 1980s. He was active in Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi causes his whole life. His last publication, in 1983, was a fake autobiography of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, who’d fled Germany and hidden in Argentina after World War II. Aschenauer claimed that he found memoirs from Eichmann that proved that the Nazis had never really wanted to kill any Jews at all, that it was all just a big misunderstanding.
Thanks to the efforts of Aschenauer and the antisemitic Atlanta lawyer Willis Everett and, of course, Republican U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy no one ever served considerable time, let alone faced execution, for Malmedy, for the worst massacre of unarmed American POWs in World War II.
First, the dozens of death sentences were all commuted, and then all of the Nazis were let go. The last one to be released was the Blowtorch Battalion’s commanding officer, Joachim Peiper, who eventually moved to France. In 1976, he was murdered in an arson attack. An underground, anonymous group of Holocaust survivors claimed credit for killing him.
On the wall of Joe McCarthy’s apartment in Washington, McCarthy hung a sledgehammer mounted in a frame. On it were painted the words, “For Drew Pearson Only.”
When crusading columnist Drew Pearson died in the fall of 1969, he was the most widely syndicated columnist in the United States. His funeral was held at Washington National Cathedral.
Pearson: McCarthy abused American army officers because they convicted the Nazis who shot 150 American soldiers in cold blood at Malmedy. What McCarthy did not like from a newspaperman then and what he doesn’t like from his fellow senators now is anyone who opposes him or exposes him. I predict that Senator McCarthy will have no more luck bulldozing his fellow senators than he had in silencing me and that, despite his usual divisive tactics, they will pull together to keep this nation strong and make democracy live.
Maddow: We have these moments in American history. These recurrent, delicate moments where our democracy feels mortal, fragile.
But the Americans who fought these fights before us left us their stories, of courage, to show us how.
“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC.
This episode was written by myself and Mike Yarvitz. The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It’s produced by Jen Mulreany Donovan and Kelsey Desiderio. Our associate producer is Vasilios Karsaliakos, archival support from Holly Klopchin, audio engineering and sound design by Bob Mallory and Catherine Anderson.
Our head of audio production is Bryson Barnes. Our 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.
Additional archival material provided by the Drew Pearson Estate and by the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.
Our enormous thanks to the libraries and archives across the country that have served as just invaluable resources for us in this project.
We do want to offer special thanks to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, and to the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, and to the Columbia University Archives. The patient and dedicated and exceptional librarians and archivists at these institutions really are a national treasure. And we could not do this work without them.
We want to say thank you to Willamette University Professor Seth Cotlar for consistently good advice and some great leads on primary source material.
Thank you to all our journalists and historians, Rodger McDaniel, whose book is “Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins,” John P. Jackson Jr., who’s written a number of great books, including “Science for Segregation,” Anthony Mostrom who you can find, among other places, at the L.A. Review of Books.
Gavriel Rosenfeld, who’s written and edited a number of great books, including “The Fourth Reich.” Steven Remy’s magnificent, definitive book is called “The Malmedy Massacre.” David Austin Walsh, his book is called “Taking America Back.” Bradley Hart, his book is “Hitler’s American Friends.” He’s also got a great podcast called “Star-Spangled Fascism.”
Also, our friend Steven J. Ross, who’s been wise counsel to us. His book “Hitler in Los Angeles” was such a key source for season one of “Ultra.” If you’re curious about whatever happened to the National Renaissance Party and James Madole, that story turns out to be so bizarre, you absolutely will not believe it, but it will all be told in Steven J. Ross’s next book, “The Secret War Against Hate,” which is out in 2025. Cannot wait.
Oh, and one other thing.
In 1957, the British government did test a nuclear bomb with cobalt in it. It was a failed test and a little bit of a scandal. But it wasn’t a doomsday weapon of the kind described on the radio that day by physicist Leo Szilard. That kind of a bomb has never been built.
Wyoming State Senator: This is Senate Joint Resolution 2, recognizing the service of Lester C. Hunt to be presented to us by Senator Case.
State Sen. Cale Case (R-WY): Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. I’m very grateful to be here.
I would just like to read a little of this newspaper to you to start off: “Cheyenne was a quiet, respectful city last night, as the body of Senator Lester C. Hunt was brought home for funeral services. A silent crowd of hundreds watched the Air Force DC-6 carrying one of the state’s best loved statesmen landed.
“Army National Guard units representing every corner of the State snapped to attention and rendered a final salute to the man who gave more than 20 years of his life to public office. A plane carrying 17 Congressional leaders and personal representatives of President Dwight Eisenhower preceded the plane carrying Hunt’s body and members of his family.
“Cars choked the access streets. And at every home — cars choked the access streets. And, at every home, people lined the curb paying a silent tribute to the senator. There were tears in the eyes of many. Old men stood at attention. Children were silent. The group numbered into the thousands, police said.”
My father was there that day. He was one of the honorary pallbearers. I don’t think that this story’s ever gotten the respect from Wyoming that — that, really, it’s called for.
Anyway, that’s the darn story. And it’s a — it’s a big story. And so, I thought it’d be good if we did a resolution to recognize this.