Tydings Committee

On February 20, 1950, McCarthy had delivered a 5-hour speech to the Senate in which he presented the cases of 81 "loyalty risks" who he claimed were working for the State Department.

It is widely accepted that most of McCarthy's cases were taken from the so-called "Lee list"—a report that had been compiled three years earlier for the House Appropriations Committee.

This list included persons whom Lee had deemed security risks for a variety of reasons, such as marital infidelity or drunkenness, and all of them had been cleared by the State Department's review process.

Its final report, written by the Democratic majority, concluded that the individuals on McCarthy's list were neither Communists nor pro-communist, and said the State Department had an effective security program.

Republicans responded in kind, with William Jenner stating that Tydings was guilty of "the most brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history."