Eisler, a Comintern agent, used his political authority to make Earl Browder the American "leader" of the CPUSA during a mid-1930s leadership dispute. As a professional anti-communist, even unknowns were targeted by Rushmore beyond the HUAC hearings. At least two suicides resulted from his exposés, including Minnie Gutride, a 40-year-old elementary school teacher and Russian-American widow, who killed herself by putting her head inside a gas oven in her Manhattan apartment after being fired by William Jansen, the NYC school superintendent. The United Federation of Teachers complained that Jansen was influenced by allegations from the Journal-American, which said that Gutride was a secret communist organizer for the longshoremen unions. Rushmore would later boast about causing Gutride's suicide, much to the consternation of his friends. His fame and notoriety increased by such incidents, Rushmore would eventually be seen dining with William F. Buckley at the Stork Club and even inside the club's inner sanctum, the Cub Room with "his wife (Frances), Roy Cohn and his girl-friend." McCarthy On November 27, 1949, Rushmore published in the Journal-American allegations of communist infiltration of U.S. naval vessels. Though the facts of the article were invented by Rushmore, by coincidence the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was conducting its own investigation on the same matter. Initially, J. Edgar Hoover thought that Rushmore had access to genuine intelligence and ordered his telephone tapped. Later, in Olympia, Washington, Rushmore testified before the Canwell Committee, a state committee to investigate subversive activities at the University of Washington. There he switched the subject to Washington, D.C., waving a piece of paper that he claimed was an FBI report that named 150 federal employees as members of a Soviet spy ring. When FBI agents intercepted him in a hotel lobby and asked about the document, he showed them a four-page letter that he typed himself. Then, in the spring of 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy asked Hoover about Rushmore's bonafides. The FBI's reply warned against relying on Rushmore's veracity: "[His] writings have proved unreliable, due to his tendency to sensationalize and blow up fragments of information." Though the FBI regarded Rushmore as a publicity seeker, McCarthy hired Rushmore anyway. During the late 1940s–early 1950s, a group of State Department employees complained about "left-wingers" and "pro-Reds" working at the Voice of America (VOA) facilities at 57th Street, New York City. They managed to get the interest of Senator McCarthy, who assumed chairmanship