SEN. JOE MCCARTHY – A BALANCED ACCOUNT 31

I will attempt to do the impossible. Not literally, of course, because the impossible is by definition impossible. I will try to do the extremely difficult, which is to summarize a balanced story of the late junior Republican senator from Wisconsin – Joseph Raymond McCarthy.

There are few Americans who have been criticized, maligned, marginalized, shunned, demonized, disparaged, and just plain reviled as much as Joe McCarthy – not completely without cause I might add. If one wants to bludgeon opponents just accuse them of “McCarthyism” which to imply they use tactics of smear, deception, lying, demagoguery, and guilt by association to destroy a person’s good name and reputation. McCarthy was sometimes guilty of doing that and so were his opponents – in spades. The word “McCarthyism” has long ago become an obscenity; however with some exceptions (Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, and Pol Pot [born Saloth Sar] for example) people are the sum of their parts. It is not useful or accurate to completely demonize or deify them.

Kvetching writers such as Richard Rovere, Ellen Schrecker, and David Caute compared McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusades to Hitler and Stalin’s Great Terror. Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions, including an estimated 6 million innocent Jews, and the suffering of tens of millions of blameless people. Soviet Union scholar Robert Conquest estimates that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 14 ½ million Soviets from 1930 to 1937. Millions more were killed or caused to die by Stalin in the years of WWII and after, continuing until his death in 1953.

Author Arthur Herman says in his 2000 book Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator “We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947-58, no American citizen was interrogated without benefit of counsel, none was arrested or detained without due process, and no one went to jail without trial.” Who was way over the top, McCarthy or his critics?

It is interesting to contrast the disrepute McCarthy is held in with the respect given to the Kennedy family despite the friendship and support given to McCarthy by the Kennedy clan. Joseph Kennedy Sr. greatly admired and agreed with McCarthy about the threat to America by Communists. He was delighted that during his bachelorhood McCarthy dated two of Joe’s daughters, Patricia and Eunice; Robert Kennedy served as assistant counsel on McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations until a personal quarrel with chief counsel, Roy Cohn, caused him to quit. McCarthy was the godfather of Robert and Ethel’s first child; and John F. Kennedy’s views on Communism and the Soviet threat were not much different from McCarthy’s. Author Arthur Herman recounts how one night in February 1952 when he heard one speaker at Harvard’s Spree Club denounced McCarthy in the same breath as Alger Hiss, Kennedy shot back, “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” Herman states that Kennedy backed the Communist Control Act, a measure that went far beyond anything McCarthy ever proposed by virtually outlawing the Communist party in the United States (good for Kennedy for doing that).

Conservative Republicans were also supporters and admirers of McCarthy. Among theses were William F. Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell jr. (the father of the founder and publisher of the Media Research Center, L. Brent Bozell III) and currently the comely columnist Ann Coulter.

There is confusion in many people’s minds about investigation of Communists in the United States by McCarthy and by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). McCarthy essentially searched for Communist spies, Communist non-spies, and Communist dupes, security risks all, in the U.S. government as the chairman of a Senate sub-committee starting in 1951. HUAC was formed in 1937, but started interrogating Communists outside the government under its chairman Martin Dies (D-TX) in 1947. It was HUAC, not McCarthy, which compelled the entertainment elite, including the infamous “Hollywood Ten”, to testify under oath whether they, “are now or ever have been a member of the Communist party?” It made those Hollywood snobs very cross to have to admit whether they were supporters of the evil regime of Joseph Stalin – one of history’s most villainous mass murders. The mainstream media, apologists then as now for malevolent groups and governments, were beside themselves with indignation over the treatment of those traitorous or complicitous buffoons.

McCarthy investigated the State Department for Communist spies or communist sympathizers and, contrary to popular belief, found some. Also there is confusion about the Army – McCarthy hearings of 1954. It was not McCarthy who was investigating the Army, it was the Senate who was investigating McCarthy for his charges that the Army was infiltrated with Communists spies and was covering up. It was those hearings starting on June 9th, 1954 which sank old Joe (actually he wasn’t old – McCarthy died at age 48 in 1957). Weepy old (he really was old) Joseph Welsh, the lead lawyer for the Army, put on a thespian performance that should have won an Academy Award. When Welsh repeatedly baited and ridiculed McCarthy’s lead counsel, Roy Cohn, about revealing the names of any real Communists, “before sundown” McCarthy could take it no longer and told Welsh that he should look to his own staff if he wanted to find Communists in the form of one of Welsh’s young assistant lawyers by the name of Fisher. That revelation became a trap and the sly old fox Welsh sprang it. With words that are remembered to this day Welsh told McCarthy: “Until this moment Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us…..Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel [he repeated the words ‘reckless’ and ‘cruel’ just to make sure nobody missed them] as to do injury to that lad……Let us not assassinate this lad further. Senator you have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” From that moment McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was effectively over. And it wasn’t long before his senate career and his life too were over. After the exchange between Welsh and McCarthy the committee chairman, Carl Mundt quickly called an adjournment. Outside the hearing room Welsh, with tears streaming down his face, repeated his oration in front of television cameras. When he finished and rounded a corner, out of sight of reporters and cameras, he asked a colleague: “Well, how did it go?”

Edward R. Murrow’s television broadcast, See It Now, on March 9th, 1954 inflicted a serious wound to the reputation of McCarthy. Like the performance of the sanctimonious fraud, Joseph Welsh, three months later, Murrow’s broadcast was intellectually dishonest. According to Arthur Herman, Murrow and his staff spent two months cutting and editing film clips to put McCarthy in the worst possible light. Murrow added his own sardonic commentary: “Upon what meat does Senator McCarthy feed?” The answer: “Two of the staples of his diet are investigations (protected by immunity) and the half-truth.” The broadcast was a hatchet job without any pretense of being fair and balanced. Murrow himself had engaged in innuendoes and half-truths. Liberals loved it of course. I have not seen it, but just as a wild guess I am willing to bet that the movie good night, and good luck produced by clueless liberal George Clooney is a paean to Murrow showing him to be a paragon of virtue and McCarthy the personification of evil. Any takers? Has anyone heard of Lawrence Duggan? Ann Coulter says that Duggan was a close friend of Murrow. Duggan was also a Soviet spy who did great harm to the security of the United States. After being questioned by the FBI, Duggan leapt to his death from an office window. His death was ruled a suicide, but as Coulter said, given the people he was doing business with, he might have been pushed. Murrow, along with others in the news media, vehemently denied that Duggan was a spy. So much for the perception skills of Murrow and his cronies – decrypted Soviet cables (the Venona Project) and documents from the Soviet archives have since proved beyond any doubt whatsoever the culpability of Duggan.

Arthur Herman tells how in 1953 the former McCarthy critic Alistair Cooke noted “a developing discrepancy between ‘McCarthyism’ and McCarthy.” The cultured Cooke, a graduate of Cambridge and a naturalized American and political liberal was famed for his radio program Letter from America which was broadcasted on the BBC (I remember listening to it when I was in Libya from 1957-65) and lasted for 58 years being the longest running series in history to be presented by a single person. Cooke and others realized that McCarthy was proceeding “with careful planning and masterful discretion. He is patient with witnesses whose FBI files would give ordinary citizens the creeps. He has consistently protected the anonymity of highly suspect witnesses.” This judicious and discreet McCarthy was “a new turn which,” Cooke added, “liberals are loathe to acknowledge.”

Asking how many spies McCarthy exposed in his anti-Communist crusade is to ask the wrong question. A more important and pertinent question is to ask whether McCarthy helped or hurt the cause of identifying and rooting out Communist spies, dupes, and sympathizers from the federal government. The 1930’s and 1940’s were lax times as far as awareness of Communists was concerned and certainly many people did not consider them security risks. After Alger Hiss in 1949 and the Rosenbergs in 1950 were charged with espionage the mood in the country changed even if the major news media did not. That there were numerous Communist spies or people otherwise favorably disposed toward the Soviet Union in the Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations is beyond dispute. How much harm they did to the United States and how enthusiastic an effort was made to identify and excise these people from their sensitive positions in the government is a matter of a great deal of dispute. Who were these Communist spies and fellow travelers (a term coined by Stalin himself)?

The departments of State, the Treasury, and Interior harbored the most of these Reds. Prominent among the ones at State were Alger Hiss, John Stewart Service, and the aforementioned friend of Edward R. Murrow, Lawrence Duggan. At Treasury were scofflaws Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Solomon Adler. Owen Lattimore (the hypocritical creep who coined the term ‘McCarthyism’) while never an actual employee at the Department of State was any extremely influential consultant. There were dozens of others in the government, including Noel Field, Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, who were either outright Communists spies or who were so enamored with Communism that they put the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the United States. Of course there were many more agitprop people outside of government - authors, university professors, Hollywood writers, directors, producers, and actors who adhered to the Communist line.

It is sometimes claimed by people on the right that Eastern Europe was ceded to Stalin after WWII and China was “lost” to Mao Tse-tung in 1949 because of the influence of Communists in our government. This charge seems extreme and logically indefensible to me. There is no doubt that as an important State Dept. official in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Alger Hiss, especially while attending the Yalta Conference in early February 1945, tried to expedite the takeover of the Eastern European countries by the Soviets, but since the Red Army occupied those countries at the end of WWII, short of starting WWIII nothing could have prevented the hegemony of Eastern Europe by the Soviets – it was a fait accompli. Harry Dexter White and Owen Lattimore along with John Steward Service worked diligently to prevent or delay the funding of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek by the United States and otherwise promoted the interests of Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists. While their efforts may have accelerated the downfall of the Nationalist government it is highly unlikely that even without their sabotaging machinations the Chinese Communists could have been defeated.

On December 2, 1954 the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure Joe McCarthy. Joining the majority was moderate Republican senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut – father of future president George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of current president George Walker Bush. Senator John F. Kennedy did not vote on the resolution as he was having a back operation at the time. Some say he scheduled it so as not to have to cast a vote. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona said “Of course Joe McCarthy has made mistakes…… Let the members of this body search their consciences and say whether or not they themselves have made mistakes equally regrettable.” Or did the Senate vote to censure McCarthy? Actually the senate resolution did not contain the term ‘censure’, rather it said ‘condemn’. It is an interesting sidelight, but perhaps not an important distinction.

The censure committee considered five categories of charges against McCarthy ranging from contempt of the Senate, abusing colleagues (he had once told a reporter that Senator Hendrickson of New Jersey was “a living miracle, without brains or guts”), and encouraging government employees to violate the law. Even so, abuse of senate colleagues was a time honored practice. Every senator could remember when former majority leader Tom Connally said of Michigan’s Homer Ferguson that “everything he touches is covered with the vomit of his spleen.” Some could even remember when another Wisconsin senator, Robert La Follette, said on the senate floor that God had given one of his colleagues “a hump on his back” because he was “by nature a subservient, cringing creature.” A total of 46 separate counts were considered, but in the end only one count was agreed to. So what was McCarthy censured, or more accurately condemned, for? For lying, perjury, reckless behavior, and without any foundation, falsely accusing innocent people brought before his committee of being Communists? No. The senate resolution charged him with insulting some of his fellow senators by calling them “handmaidens of the communist Party.” McCarthy had hurt their feelings. One is reminded of the incident where Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) implied that Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa) was behaving in a cowardly fashion by calling for the immediate withdrawn of American troops from Iraq. The Democrats on the House floor began braying like, well donkeys, in their feigned indignation. Never mind that Murtha, a former marine colonel who served in Vietnam, had not only lost his nerve, but seemed to have lost a few marbles as well.

Did Senator McCarthy make positive contributions towards raising awareness of Communist activity in our government which was detrimental to the country? And did he wreak havoc on and trample the civil rights of innocent citizens? I believe the first answer is yes and the second is a qualified no. Even some of McCarthy’s friends and supporters admitted he was occasionally too ardent in his zeal to rout out Communists and fellow travelers from the government and his excesses lowered his effectiveness as an anti-Communist fighter and gave ammunition to his enemies to use against him. In his 1964 presidential nomination speech Barry Goldwater famously (or infamously – depending upon your viewpoint) said: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the defense of liberty is no virtue.” Words to ponder when considering the reputation and legacy of Joseph McCarthy. And if the following words apply to Joe McCarthy then they are even more appropriate for his critics: “O shame! Where is thy blush?” Hamlet III, iv.