Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 15:57:18 -0500
From: jonathan flanders <72763.2240-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: M-I: McCarthy


I have followed the McCarthy discussion with interest fueled by my own
family's history. As it happens, My great-uncle, Ralph E. Flanders, was the
U.S. Senator that introduced the motion of censure in the Senate that ended
McCarthy's rampage.

I agree, broadly speaking, that the move to terminate McCarthy's witch-hunt
came from the eastern establishment who felt he had gone too far, and my
great-uncle was definitely a representative of that group; a liberal
Republican from Vermont.

I have always wondered, though, how he came to be the point man for the
termination. I was too young during his lifetime to be informed enough to
ask him personally, perhaps now I will have the time to  peruse his papers
in the U of Syracuse library for clues. One possibility lies in protecting
his immediate family. 

His youngest brother Donald, a was a close friend of Alger Hiss, and as
such was forced to renounce his friendship as a condition of continued
employment at the Argonne National Laboratory. Donald was a mathematician
who headed up the T 5 computing group of the Manhattan project, under
Johann Von Neuman. I have a copy of the transcript of the AEC hearing
questioning Donald on the  Hiss connection. Partially due to the trauma of
this renunciation, Donald committed suicide in 1958, another victim of the
purge.







Jon Flanders


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