Jean proved instrumental in addressing one of the first big challenges to McCarthyism. In the spring of 1950, the Senate attempted to assess McCarthy’s sweeping claims with a new Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees. It was headed by Democrat Millard Tydings of Maryland, then finishing up his fourth term. In the report issued by the Tydings Committee in August of 1950, the Maryland senator called McCarthy’s allegations, which had dragged reputations through the mud and ruined civil servants’ careers, “a fraud and a hoax.”
With Jean’s help, the humiliated Joe decided to punish Tydings by throwing his weight behind the little-known John Marshall Butler, the Republican candidate who was challenging the incumbent’s bid for a fifth term. Joe and Jean headed to Baltimore to treat Butler and his two top aides to dinner. Over filet mignon, the five-member team hatched a plan to publish 500,000 copies of a four-page tabloid, “From the Record,” branding Tydings a communist.
Jean gladly took the reins of this effort. That fall, she took a leave of absence from her job as a McCarthy staffer and moved to Baltimore, where she became an unofficial member of Butler’s campaign. She worked closely with Ruth McCormick (“Bazy”) Miller, an editor of The Washington Times-Herald, to write the tabloid’s largely fictional copy. The first page featured a bogus story alleging that, as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tydings had failed to prevent war in Korea by spending only a fraction of the roughly $500 million that Congress had appropriated for weapons for South Korea before the North’s invasion.
Even worse, the tabloid published a doctored photograph showing Tydings in friendly conversation with Earl Browder, the leader of America’s Communist Party. When Jean first saw the composite picture with Browder in page proofs, she was ecstatic. She saw nothing wrong with this outright deception, later claiming that “there are no lies about Mr. Tydings in this tabloid.” As far as she was concerned, the pro-communist sentiments that Tydings had expressed during the committee hearings were “100 times more damaging” than anything in the picture. Tydings ended up losing the race to Butler by seven points — a startling result that led to a Senate investigation the following year that condemned the Butler campaign for relying on “non-Maryland outsiders” who sought to “undermine and destroy the public faith and confidence in the basic loyalty of a well-known figure.”