Career
Until 1929, Woltman taught Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, when the Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot had him fired for an article he had written in the American Mercury about police brutality during a coal strike. Roy Howard of the New York World-Telegram hired him because of it.[4]
After World War II, Woltman received assistance from Victor Lasky on articles about communist infiltration within the United States.[5]
In 1946, Woltman beat out other newspaper investigators into the accusation of Louis F. Budenz that a high-level communist spy was working in the United States and discovered that person was Gerhart Eisler.[1][4][6]
Woltman, a reporter with a long-standing reputation as a staunch anti-communist, wrote a five-part series of articles criticizing McCarthy in the New York World-Telegram. He stated that McCarthy "has become a major liability to the cause of anti-communism", and accused him of "wild twisting of facts and near facts [that] repels authorities in the field".[7] In 1954, Time magazine described Woltman as follows:
Long acknowledged the No. 1 newspaper specialist on Reds, he has been exposing Communists since 1938, and, unlike many other anti-Communist writers, he was never a Communist himself. A hard-digging reporter, he backed his stories with solid documentation—e.g., he exposed Gerhart Eisler as the top Kremlin agent in the U.S. the day before the FBI picked Eisler up. ... This week the World-Telly and other Scripps-Howard papers splashed Woltman's five-part series across their pages. His appraisal: McCarthy is "a major liability to the cause of anti-Communism." By making it harder for real Communist-fighters to operate effectively, wrote Woltman, McCarthy has actually become an asset to Communism. "He has introduced a slambang, rabble-rousing, hit-and-run technique into the serious business of exposing the Communist conspiracy ... and thereby disarranged ..."[8]
The story was so controversial that it stirred up coverage itself, including again by Time two issues later: "In their series on Joe McCarthy, the Scripps-Howard papers ... stirred up an even bigger furor than they had expected".[9]
