But by another, more important standard, Mr. Marder, who died on March 11 at 93, was an ace. In nearly 40 years at The Washington Post, he embodied the role of public watchdog, becoming an emblem of meticulous, thorough news gathering when his persistence in laying bare the lies and exaggerations of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade helped bring McCarthy to ruin.
Mr. Marder was fresh from a Nieman fellowship at Harvard — which he had earned covering the perjury trial of Alger Hiss, his first big assignment at The Post — when he took over what came to be called “the Red beat.”
Beginning in February 1950, when he declared that more than 200 Communists were working in the State Department, McCarthy, the Republican junior senator from Wisconsin, gained headlines and power in his campaign to thwart what he called the Communist infiltration of American life. Re-elected to the Senate in 1952, he conducted hearing after hearing and hurled flimsily sourced accusations at American citizens.
Mr. Marder and Phil Potter of The Baltimore Sun covered McCarthy with skepticism, insisting that he substantiate his accusations. In the fall of 1953 McCarthy held hearings at Fort Monmouth, N.J., on suspicions that a wartime spy ring, allegedly created by Julius Rosenberg, who had been executed in June, still existed within the Signal Corps. Cooperating with McCarthy, the Army suspended 33 civilian employees.
Mr. Marder did not believe any of it; his legwork turned up evidence that McCarthy had inflated minor security cases that the Army had investigated and that no espionage was involved in any of them. Attending a news conference after his articles appeared, Mr. Marder relentlessly questioned the secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, forcing him to admit that McCarthy’s spying allegations were bogus and that the Army had known it.
“There was nothing flashy about a Marder story, no one ever accused him of deft or imaginative prose, but he was above all else careful and fair,” David Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book about the news media, “The Powers That Be.” He added:
“Doggedly, he worked out a means of covering McCarthy. Hold him to the record. Not just what he said yesterday, but the day before and the week before. Explain not just this charge, but what happened to the previous charges. Give the people on the other side, the accused or the semi-accused, a chance to answer. Always explain the meaning of the charges. Try above all not to be a megaphone for McCarthy. Expose him to maximum scrutiny.”
The Fort Monmouth episode set the stage for the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, called to investigate a set of charges leveled by McCarthy against the Army and vice versa. The hearings were televised, McCarthy came across as a loudmouthed dissembler and bully, and his popularity plummeted. The next year the Senate censured him.
Murrey Marder was born on Aug. 8, 1919, in Philadelphia, where his father ran a grocery. After graduating from high school he took a job as a copy boy at The Evening Public Ledger, and he became a reporter at 21. During World War II he served in the Marines as a combat correspondent and worked on the corps’ news desk in Washington.
He joined The Post in 1946. In 1957 he opened the paper’s first foreign bureau, in London, and became the chief diplomatic correspondent. In 1964 he wrote about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which precipitated the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, and in 1971 he wrote articles based on the Pentagon Papers.
He retired from The Post in 1985. He died of a hemorrhagic stroke in Washington, leaving no survivors from his immediate family, his nephew Steve Marder said.
After his wife, the former Frances Sokoloski, died in 1996, Mr. Marder used his retirement savings — $1.3 million in Washington Post stock — to help start the Nieman Foundation’s Watchdog Project, which is devoted to examining and supporting public-interest journalism.
Bill Kovach, a former Nieman curator who was a Washington bureau chief for The New York Times and editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said Mr. Marder had been an unsung hero of journalism.
“The pop historians have filled pages of praise for Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, his fellow creator of ‘See It Now,’ as the ones who exposed Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy as the malicious liar that he was,” Mr. Kovach wrote after Mr. Marder’s death. “But the pop historians were and are wrong — dead wrong. Murrey Marder was the pathfinder.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/us/murrey-marder-reporter-who-took-on-joe-mccarthy-dies-at-93.html?partner=rss&emc=rss