"[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 facilities at 57th Street, New York City. They managed to get the interest of Senator McCarthy, who assumed chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953. After clearing the VOA hearings with the Republican senate leaders, McCarthy hired Rushmore as director of research that spring. The 1953 televised hearings would be held in New York City. Chief counsel Roy Cohn set up headquarters at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where witnesses would be questioned and evidence collected. During the hearings, McCarthy himself would repeat the Rushmorean flourish of waving a suspect list. But before the hearings were over, Rushmore resigned from the subcommittee for a brief return at the "Journal-American." As director of research, Rushmore channelled all pre-hearing testimony through his office, which he would use as raw material for sensational newspaper articles. The public would read about the subcommittee's plan of attack before it could be presented at the hearings, thus sabotaging the entire purpose of the proceedings. As chief counsel, Roy Cohn could have fired Rushmore and initiated felony charges against him for leaking evidence, but Cohn instructed the staff not to release information to Rushmore unless it was cleared with him. Despite Cohn's restraint, Rushmore quit in outrage. After criticizing his estranged friend in print, Rushmore was fired from the paper. Then old his mentor, Walter Winchell, got him a new editorial job. Under Winchell's sponsorship, Howard Rushmore became the chief editor of a New York scandal magazine, "Confidential." Its publisher, Robert Harrison, began as an office boy and later writer for Bernarr McFadden's "New York Graphic" during the 1920s, an ancestor of the supermarket tabloids that would emerge in the 1960s. It was at the "Graphic" where the young Harrison first met Walter Winchell. As an adult Harrison was on the editorial staff of the "Motion Picture Herald", a trade publication whose conservative Catholic owner, Martin Quigley, Sr., had close ties to the Hays Office. Having learned from Quigley what he could get away with legally, Harrison struck out on his own with a series of non-pornographic "cheesecake" magazines.