The Republican senator who dared to call out a dangerous colleague

Boston Globe

30-04-2025

With her was her top aide, Bill Lewis. During the journey they chewed through a subject that had been worrying the senator for months: what to do about her vociferous, and in her mind increasingly dangerous, colleague from Wisconsin, Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Smith knew that many of her fellow Republicans privately detested McCarthy, but none were willing to speak out. And so, by the time they got to Maine, Smith had decided to take a stand where no one else would, even if, as she told Lewis, it meant the end of her political career.
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Today that courage once more stands in sharp relief to the fear among other Republicans of calling out gross political malpractice.
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Smith had initially welcomed McCarthy's campaign to root out Soviet spies and sympathizers within the federal government, which he had begun with great fanfare in February 1950. But she quickly realized that McCarthy's incendiary charges were often baseless smears — a fact that didn't stop him from lacing into a new target every day, leaving wrecked lives and political norms behind him.
As Smith watched McCarthy dominate the news, she waited for a more senior colleague to speak up. But no one did. In an interview years later, she said it became clear that when it came to McCarthy, there were three camps: those who believed him, those who feared him, and those who cynically saw him as a useful tool against the Democrats.
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On that daylong road trip to Maine, she and Lewis hatched a plan.
In between speeches, they sat at her dining table in Skowhegan, a small city in central Maine, and drafted what she called a 'Declaration of Conscience.'
She planned to deliver it on June 1. Smith and Lewis kept the content of her address a secret, for fear that someone would try to stop her. By coincidence, the only person who got a hint of what was coming was McCarthy himself, whom she ran into on the way to the chamber that day.
She told him he wouldn't like what she was going to say. He just smiled and said he was sure it would be fine.
Standing at her desk, two rows ahead of McCarthy's, she outlined what she called 'a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.'
There was enough blame to go around, and she laid much of it at the feet of the Truman administration for failing to make the country feel secure at the dawn of the Cold War. But, she went on, people had taken advantage of that fear and made it much worse with baseless accusations and dangerous smears, including, she said pointedly, in the Senate itself. Smith never mentioned McCarthy by name; she didn't have to.
'As a United States senator, I am not proud of the way in which the Senate has been made a publicity platform for irresponsible sensationalism,' she said. 'I don't like the way the Senate has been made a rendezvous for vilification, for selfish political gain at the sacrifice of individual reputations and national unity.'
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She ended her speech with a call to action, challenging her colleagues to join her Declaration of Conscience, a five-point platform that concluded, 'It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques — techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.'
Lewis stood at the back of the chamber holding 200 copies of the speech to give to senators and reporters. The initial reaction was positive: Mail to her office ran 8-to-1 in favor, and the editorial boards of The Washington Post and The New York Times supported her.
But geopolitics was not on her side. The Korean War broke out a few weeks later, and with it came a circle-the-wagons mentality in Congress and the press that shut down incipient support for her declaration. Five of her six initial cosigners backed out; the holdout, Wayne Morse of Oregon, left the Republican Party and later became a Democrat.
McCarthy's retribution came soon after. He attacked Smith and her cosigners as 'Snow White and the Six Dwarves.' He got her removed from the Subcommittee on Investigations, replacing her with Senator Richard Nixon of California. Meanwhile, McCarthy continued his campaign unbowed.
For some of her colleagues, Smith was a cautionary tale. To others, she was a source of envy and shame, having taken a stand they were unwilling to take themselves. It would be almost four years before any more Republicans had the courage to oppose McCarthy, and then only because the public itself was turning against him.
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The damage to Smith's Senate career was not permanent. In 1952 and again in 1968, she was seriously considered for vice president. In 1964 she ran for president in the Republican primary, and though she lost badly, her name was put forward at the national convention that summer, making her the first woman nominated for president by a major party.
She died in 1995, long enough to see herself canonized as a secular hero. She was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame, and her portrait hangs in the Old Senate Chamber in the Capitol.
But in time the urgency of her courageous stand was forgotten, filed away as a relic of a tumultuous era in American history, long past. But now, in 2025, her story needs to be appreciated once more. The country could use another Margaret Chase Smith today.