William Atwood reported on the House vote to deny funds to the State Department's intelligence unit. The unit had been formed by executive order in October after the dissolution of the wartime OSS and was part of a compromise between those who wanted the intelligence function to be in the State Department and those who, like William J. Donovan, former head of the wartime OSS, wanted the creation of a separate centralized intelligence agency. Earlier in 1946 the Central Intelligence Authority was formed to oversee clandestine activities but the new State Department unit had the job of compiling and analyzing the reports.
Fiscal conservatives felt that the State Department did not need a separate investigation unit but could return to relying on reports from field agents, as they had before the War. Proponents of the unit pointed out that the old system had proven inadequate, particularly in the case of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which had taken the nation by surprise. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was appealing for a restoration of the $4-million appropriation, whittled down from the inital $5-million request.
The issue was muddied when Representative Andrew J, May (D-KY) charged that pro-Soviet intelligence officers had been brought into the agency from Army intelligence by Alfred McCormack who headed the unit. Some in Congress opposed the appropriation on these grounds. McCormack was outraged and asked for an investigation of the charge, which he asserted would prove it wrong, but May ignored him. J. Edgar Hoover also was hostile to the new agencies seeing them as trespassing on FBI turf.
Atwood wrote that a full investigation most likely would have given the unit a clean bill of health. McCormack wouldn't countenance subversive activities as he was a Princeton grad, a former corporate lawyer and a close associate of Thomas Dewey, New York's Republican governor. “The men he brought with him to the State Department have the kind of backgrounds which make preposterous the suggestions that they have 'pro-Soviet' leanings,” Atwood wrote, revealing the class argument probably shared by many Herald Tribune readers. It would later be revealed that several wartime intelligence agencies and the State Department did harbor some Soviet agents, although not to the extent that McCarthy and his crowd asserted. Some of them, like Alger Hiss, had all the correct social credentials.
According to the article, several congressmen such as Rep. James W. Wadsworth (R-NY) intended to protest the action when the House returned from Easter recess. Senators Claude Pepper (D-FL) and Carl A. Hatch (D-NM), best known today for the Hatch Act preventing civil servants from engaging in politics, said elimination of the unit would be tragic. Sen. James M. Mead (D-NY) agreed it was needed. Atwood expressed the hope that the UN would prove effective enough at some time in the future that such efforts would not be needed, but felt it was vital at this time.
The Red-baiting May headed the House Military Affairs Committee. He was defeated for reelection in 1946 after revelations that he had taken bribes from a defense contractor. He was later tried, convicted and sentenced to nine-months in prison. Wadsworth was an Old Guard Republican who previously had served two terms in the US Senate and in 1946 represented a district in Northwest New York state. The Old Right of which he was a part proclaimed nineteenth century values that are seeing a resurgence today. Wadsworth opposed Prohibition, women's right to vote, anti-lynching laws, the minimum wage and the New Deal as infringements on individual liberty. But he also opposed the isolationism of many of his ultra-Conservative colleagues. Meade was a liberal Democrat from the Buffalo area who had been in the US Senate since a special election in 1938. In 1946 he chose to run for Governor against Thomas Dewey rather than seek reelection to the Senate. He lost. Pepper was an outspoken liberal who was pro-union, anti-segregation and an advocate of peaceful relations with the Soviet Union. In 1950 he would be defeated in the Democratic primary in an exceptionally dirty, red-baiting, racist campaign conducted by his political protege George Smathers. In the 1960s he was elected as a congressman from Miami as a firm anti-Communist, Castro opponent and advocate for the elderly.