Mccarthyism - The Man

By  Ron Unz

 The Unz Review

April 29, 2025

Donald Trump and the Shadow of McCarthyism

Last month the Trump Administration launched an unprecedented assault against academic and intellectual freedom in America, targeting many of our most elite institutions of higher education.

As an example of this, enormous pressure was exerted against Columbia University in New York City by withdrawing $400 million in annual federal funding and demanding its full cooperation with the arrest of foreign students who had been critical of Israel's massacre of Gazan civilians. Trump officials also required that Columbia's prestigious Middle Eastern Studies program and other research centers be placed under "academic receivership," ensuring their tight ideological control by pro-Israel overseers.

Faced with the dire threat of such a massive loss of funds, Acting President Katrina Armstrong acceded to those demands, but then resigned, much like her predecessor had done seven months earlier.

For similar reasons, the top leadership of Harvard University's Middle Eastern Studies Center was forced to resign, seemingly destroying the academic independence of that prestigious institution eighty years after it had first been established. But apparently that preliminary academic concession was deemed insufficient, and Trump officials soon  froze more than $2 billion in such federal funding to America's most prestigious university. When Harvard resisted further demands, Trump illegally threatened to revoke Harvard's non-profit status, ban all foreign students, and  essentially attempt to destroy it.

Our government declared that all these attacks upon America's top academic institutions were part of its sweeping ideological campaign to root out campus antisemitism, with that term now extended to include "anti-Zionism," namely sharp criticism of the State of Israel and its policies.

The successful Hamas raid of October 7, 2023 had been followed by relentless Israeli attacks against the helpless civilians of Gaza, and these had prompted a huge wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests during 2024, outraging the Israeli government and its pro-Israel American supporters. The latter included many Jewish billionaire donors who exerted their enormous influence to successfully demand unprecedented crackdowns that involved the arrest of some 2,300 students and soon stamped out those demonstrations.

Despite that major success, the Zionist donors regarded their victory over the protesters as incomplete. With the pro-Israel Biden Administration now replaced by the even more strongly pro-Israel Trump Administration, they demanded that this campaign be extended to rooting out the ideological forces that they deemed responsible.

Under their influence, Trump and his top aides declared their intent to arrest and deport any foreign students who had participated in those campus protests or otherwise expressed their sharp criticism of Israel, and this soon resulted in a series of shocking incidents.

For many decades, legal permanent residents of the U.S. were assumed to possess all the same rights and privileges as American citizens, certainly including the Constitutional protections of our Bill of Rights. Their Green Cards could only be revoked for very serious crimes such as rape or murder, and cancelling student visas for ideological reasons was almost as rare.

But under Trump this completely changed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that a central foreign policy goal of the American government was combatting antisemitism everywhere across the world and anti-Zionism fell into that same category. Therefore those foreign students who strongly criticized Israel should be removed from American soil, and he cancelled the visas or Green Cards of some 300 of them, ordering their immediate deportation, with the total eventually rising to 1,500.

Some of the resulting scenes were quite shocking. A young Turkish doctoral candidate attending Tufts University on a Fulbright Scholarship was snatched off the streets of her Boston-area town by six masked federal agents, hustled into an unmarked car, and transferred to a holding cell in Louisiana in preparation for her deportation. Other raids on Columbia student housing by teams of federal agents picked up a Palestinian Green Card holder with an American citizen wife eight months pregnant. A South Korean undergraduate who had lived in the U.S. since the age of seven went into hiding to avoid a similar fate, while a student from India quickly fled to Canada to avoid arrest.

None of these university students had committed any crimes, but they were seized by federal agents in campus raids or grabbed from the streets of their cities merely for having expressed public criticism of the foreign government of Israel. Nothing as bizarre as this had ever previously happened in America.

For example, the Tufts student was abducted for having co-authored an op-ed in her campus newspaper a year earlier supporting the implementation of policies passed by an overwhelming vote of her own university's Community Senate. The  text of the piece that prompted her arrest was so anodyne and dull that I found it difficult to read without nodding off.

Repressive police states that arrest students for criticizing the government have hardly been uncommon throughout history. But I'd never previously heard of one that only implemented such measures for criticizing a foreign government. This demonstrated the true lines of sovereignty and political control governing today's American society.

The declared aim of the Trump Administration and its ideological allies has been to completely root out and eliminate anti-Zionism across American universities. However, I think the likely outcome of this harsh ideological crackdown may be to destroy intellectual freedom at those institutions, thereby also destroying much of their global influence. Several weeks ago, I discussed these strange and alarming developments in an article.

•  The Zionist Destruction of American Higher Education
• Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 31, 2025 • 7,300 Words

The Forgotten Menace of Soviet Communist Subversion

As might be expected, these dramatic Trump Administration attacks against free speech and academic freedom provoked a huge wave of sharp criticism, both across the mainstream media and among private individuals, and the word most often used to condemn such policies was "McCarthyism." Throughout the month of March, I saw that term regularly expressed in angry YouTube interviews, published opinion pieces, and even in some of my personal email exchanges.

Yet although my own very critical article ran well over 7,000 words, it included no mention of either Sen. Joseph McCarthy nor his anti-Communist political crusade of the early 1950s. Trump's actions seemed orders-of-magnitude more serious and unjustified than anything ever proposed by McCarthy, so I regarded any such comparisons as absurd and ridiculous.

Over the last three generations, the political methods employed by that notorious Republican junior senator from Wisconsin have become an almost universal byword for attacks against freedom of thought and speech, so much so that in recent years they have often been found in the angry accusations of Republicans, conservatives, and right-wingers as well as by their more leftward counterparts. Indeed, with  a few notable exceptions, any popular defense of McCarthy or his policies has become so rare that "McCarthyism" has almost been transformed into a generic, non-ideological term for totally unjustifiable political repression.

Two-term President Ronald Reagan was widely credited by his supporters with having won our half-century long Cold War against the Soviet Union and they also claimed that he had revitalized our economy, so at the time they hailed his policies as "Reaganism." Yet although he loomed very large during his own era, his political stature has dwindled away so rapidly during the last couple of decades that I almost never see him favorably cited by conservatives younger than fifty, nor any mention of his eponymous package of policies. Indeed, no one has even bothered creating a Wikipedia page on "Reaganism."

Meanwhile, McCarthy and his brand of politics are still widely discussed, and I think that no other political figure from our nearly 250 year national history has inspired a similar term that remains in common use. Indeed,  many have suggested that McCarthy ranks as the single most universally vilified figure in American political history, while "McCarthyism" has become the shorthand for spewing forth careless, error-prone, and often dishonest accusations of treachery against political opponents. The Wikipedia page for that term runs a massive 14,000 words.

As I've often explained, I spent most of my life paying little attention to modern American history, drawing my limited understanding from introductory textbooks and the mainstream media coverage that I absorbed. Therefore, I never questioned that the accusations of Communist espionage and subversion made by Sen. McCarthy had been wildly exaggerated and often fallacious, nor that the resulting McCarthyite era had represented a terrible black mark in American politics. According to that standard account, his dark shadow over American society was only lifted when he over-reached himself and was politically destroyed through the joint efforts of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, the Democratic Party, and the American Army establishment.

But as I began reading more serious historical works, my perspective changed. I discovered that Communist spies and agents of influence in America had been far more numerous and powerful than I had ever imagined, and this became an important early strand in my  American Pravda series.

Almost exactly a dozen years ago I opened  my original article of that name by describing these shocking revelations, although I still expressed great skepticism toward McCarthy himself and his methods:

In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried  a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America's representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.

Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, when a dying Franklin Roosevelt negotiated the outlines of postwar Europe with Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta summit, one of his important advisors was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet side. Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.

The Cold War ended over two decades ago and Communism has been relegated to merely an unpleasant chapter in the history books, so today these facts are hardly much disputed. For example, liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein matter-of-factly referred to White as a "Soviet spy" in the title of his column on our postwar financial system. But during the actual period when America's government was heavily influenced by Communist agents, such accusations were widely denounced as "Red-baiting" or ridiculed as right-wing conspiracy paranoia by many of our most influential journalists and publications. In 1982 liberal icon Susan Sontag ruefully acknowledged that for decades the subscribers to the lowbrow Readers Digest had received a more realistic view of the world than those who drew their knowledge from the elite liberal publications favored by her fellow intellectuals. I myself came of age near the end of the Cold War and always vaguely assumed that such lurid tales of espionage were wildly exaggerated. I was wrong.

•  Our American Pravda
• Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words

Since my knowledge of American history ran no deeper than my basic textbooks and mainstream newspapers and magazines, the last decade or so has been a journey of discovery for me, and often a shocking one. I came of age many years after the Communist spy scares of the 1950s had faded into dim memory, and based on what I read, I always thought the whole matter more amusing than anything else. It seemed that about the only significant "Red" ever caught, who may or may not have been innocent, was some obscure individual bearing the unlikely name of "Alger Hiss," and as late as the 1980s, his children still fiercely proclaimed his complete innocence in the pages of the New York Times. Although I thought he was probably guilty, it also seemed clear that the methods adopted by his persecutors such as Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon had actually done far more damage to our country during the unfortunate era named for the former figure.

During the 1990s, I occasionally read reviews of new books based on the Venona Papers-decrypted Soviet cables finally declassified-and they seemed to suggest that the Communist spy ring had both been real and far more extensive than I had imagined. But those events of a half-century earlier were hardly uppermost in my mind, and anyway other historians still fought a rear-guard battle in the newspapers, arguing that many of the Venona texts were fraudulent. So I gave the matter little thought.

Only in the last dozen years, as my content-archiving project made me aware of  the 1940s purge of some of America's most prominent public intellectuals, and I began considering their books and articles, did I begin to realize the massive import of the Soviet cables. I soon read three or four of  the Venona books and was very impressed by their objective and meticulous scholarly analysis, which convinced me of their conclusions. And the implications were quite remarkable, actually far understated in most of the articles that I had read.

Consider, for example, the name Harry Dexter White, surely unknown to all but the thinnest sliver of present-day Americans, and proven by the Venona Papers to have been a Soviet agent. During the 1940s, his official position was merely one of several assistant secretaries of the Treasury, serving under Henry Morgenthau, Jr., an influential member of Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet. But Morgenthau was actually a gentleman-farmer, almost entirely ignorant of finance, who had gotten his position partly by being FDR's neighbor, and according to numerous sources, White actually ran the Treasury Department under his titular authority. Thus, in 1944 it was White who negotiated with John Maynard Keynes-Britain's most towering economist-to lay the basis for the the Bretton Woods Agreement, the IMF, and the rest of the West's post-war economic institutions.

Moreover, by the end of the war, White had managed to extend the power of the Treasury-and therefore his own area of control-deep into what would normally be handled by the Department of State, especially regarding policies pertaining to the defeated German foe. His handiwork notably included the infamous "Morgenthau Plan," proposing the complete dismantling of the huge industrial base at the heart of Europe, and its conversion into an agricultural region, automatically implying the elimination of most of Germany's population, whether by starvation or exodus. And although that proposal was officially abandoned under massive protest by the allied leadership, books by many post-war observers such as Freda Utley's  The High Cost of Vengeance have argued that it was partially implemented in actuality, with millions of German civilians perishing from hunger, sickness, and other consequences of extreme deprivation.

At the time, some observers believed that White's attempt to eradicate much of prostrate Germany's surviving population was vindictively motivated by his own Jewish background. But  William Henry Chamberlin, long one of America's most highly-regarded foreign policy journalists, strongly suspected that the plan was a deeply cynical one, intended to inflict such enormous misery upon those Germans living under Western occupation that popular sentiment would automatically shift in a strongly pro-Soviet direction, allowing Stalin to gain the upper hand in Central Europe, and many subsequent historians have come to similar conclusions.

Even more remarkably, White managed to have a full set of the plates used to print Allied occupation currency shipped to the Soviets, allowing them to produce an unlimited quantity of paper marks recognized as valid by Western governments, thus allowing the USSR to finance its post-war occupation of half of Europe on the backs of the American taxpayer.

Eventually suspicion of White's true loyalties led to his abrupt resignation as the first U.S. Director of the IMF in 1947, and in 1948 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he denied all accusations, he was scheduled for additional testimony, with the intent of eventually prosecuting him for perjury and then using the threat of a long prison sentence to force him to reveal the other members of his espionage network. However, almost immediately after his initial meeting with the Committee, he supposedly suffered a couple of sudden heart attacks and died at age 55, though apparently no direct autopsy was performed on his corpse.

Soon afterward other Soviet spies also began departing this world at unripe ages within a short period of time. Two months after White's demise, accused Soviet spy W. Marvin Smith was found dead at age 53 in the stairwell of the Justice building, having fallen five stories, and sixty days after that, Laurence Duggan, another agent of very considerable importance, lost his life at age 43 following a fall from the 16th floor of an office building in New York City. So many other untimely deaths of individuals of a similar background occurred during this general period that in 1951 the staunchly right-wing Chicago Tribune ran an entire article noting this rather suspicious pattern. But while I don't doubt that the plentiful anti-Communist activists of that period exchanged dark interpretations of so many coincidental fatalities, I am not aware that such "conspiracy theories" were ever taken seriously by the more respectable mainstream media, and certainly no hint of this reached any of the standard history textbooks that constituted my primary knowledge of that period...

The particular timing of events may sometimes exert an outsize influence on historical trajectories. Consider the figure of Henry Wallace, probably still dimly remembered as a leading leftwing Democrat of the 1930s and 1940s. Wallace had been something of a Midwestern wonder-boy in farming innovation and was brought into FDR's first Cabinet in 1933 as Secretary of Agriculture. By all accounts, Wallace was an absolutely 100% true-blue American patriot, with no hint of any nefarious activity appearing anywhere in the Venona Papers. But as is sometimes the case with technical experts, he seems to have been remarkably naive outside his main field of knowledge, notably in his extreme religious mysticism and more importantly in his politics, with many of those closest to him being proven Soviet agents, who presumably regarded him as the ideal front-man for their own political intrigues.

From George Washington onward, no American president had ever run for a third consecutive term, and when FDR suddenly decided to take this step during 1940, partly using the ongoing war in Europe as an excuse, many prominent figures in the Democratic Party launched a political rebellion, notably including his own two-time Vice President John Nance Garner, who had been a former Democratic Speaker of the House, and James Farley, the powerful party leader who had originally helped elevate Roosevelt to the presidency. FDR selected Wallace as his third-term Vice President, perhaps as a means of gaining support from the powerful pro-Soviet faction among the Democrats. But as a consequence, even as FDR's health steadily deteriorated during the four years that followed, an individual whose most trusted advisors were agents of Stalin remained just a heartbeat away from the American presidency.

Under the strong pressure of Democratic Party leaders, Wallace was replaced on the ticket at the July 1944 Democratic Convention, and Harry S. Truman succeeded to the presidency when FDR died in April of the following year. But if Wallace had not been replaced or if Roosevelt had died a year earlier, the consequences for the country would surely have been enormous. According to later statements,  a Wallace Administration would have included Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State, Harry Dexter White at the helm of the Treasury, and presumably various other outright Soviet agents occupying all the key nodes at the top of the American federal government. One might jokingly speculate whether the Rosenbergs-later executed for treason-would have been placed in charge of our nuclear weapons development program.

As it happens, Roosevelt lived until 1945, and instead of running the American government on behalf of Stalin, Duggan and White both died quite suddenly within a few months of each other after they came under suspicion in 1948. But the tendrils of Soviet control during the early 1940s ran remarkably deep.

As a striking example, Soviet agents became aware of the Venona decryption project in 1944, and soon afterward a directive came down from the White House ordering the project abandoned and the records of Soviet espionage destroyed. The only reason that Venona survived, allowing us to later reconstruct the fateful politics of that era, was that the military officer in charge risked a court-martial by simply ignoring that explicit Presidential order.

In the wake of the Venona Papers, publicly released a quarter century ago and today accepted by almost everyone, it seems undeniable that during the early 1940s America's national government came within a hair's breadth-or rather a heartbeat-of falling under the control of a tight network of Soviet agents. Yet I have only very rarely seen this simple fact emphasized in any book or article, even though this surely helps explain the ideological roots of the "anti-Communist paranoia" that became such a powerful political force by the early 1950s.

Obviously, Communism had very shallow roots in American society, and any Soviet-dominated Wallace Administration established in 1943 or 1944 probably would sooner or later have been swept from power, perhaps by America's first military coup. But given FDR's fragile health, this momentous possibility should certainly be regularly mentioned in discussions of that era.

•  American Pravda
• Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 2, 2018 • 5,700 Words
•  Sen. Joseph McCarthy as "Blacklisted by History"
• Over the last decade, I gradually digested the undeniable reality that during the early 1940s agents of Soviet Communism had come extremely close to seizing control of the American federal government but that none of my history textbooks had ever even hinted at that shocking possibility. No Hollywood film nor made-for-TV movie had ever told that story, and any such script would have immediately been ridiculed and rejected as absurd McCarthyite paranoia.
• Indeed, so forbidden were such thoughts that I haven't come across a single anti-Communist conservative or right-wing writer who ever dared to mention those obvious historical facts in anything more than a vague sentence or two buried in a long book or article.
• Meanwhile, Hollywood has consistently exposed ordinary Americans to an entirely different perspective of that same political era.
• 
• This may be seen in the story of Dalton Trumbo, one of the American Communists who suffered most from the Congressional investigations of that era. Trumbo had ranked among Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriters and he was not only blacklisted from such employment for more than a decade, but even spent eleven months in federal prison for contempt of Congress. For those reasons, he has always been portrayed as one of the leading martyrs of America's anti-Communist witch-hunts of that era and his story was told a decade ago in  Trumbo, an Oscar-nominated 2015 film starring Bryan Cranston,  now freely available on TubiTV.
• All the basic facts presented in that movie may be correct, but other important elements were omitted. As a committed Communist Party member, some of Trumbo's actions clearly demonstrated that his primary loyalty was to the Soviet Union.
• For example, the outbreak of World War II was triggered by the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact and after it was signed, Trumbo became a fierce isolationist, strongly opposing any American support for the Allies or involvement in the military conflict. His strident anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun won an early National Book Award, and he soon followed it up with another novel along similar lines.
• But the moment that war broke out between Germany and the Soviets in June 1941, Trumbo completely reversed himself and became an equally fervent American interventionist, withdrawing his own novels from circulation. Even more ironically, when he continued to receive fan mail from individuals who praised his anti-war writings, he reported their names to the FBI as possible subversives who should be investigated.
• Given these facts, it's hardly unreasonable that many Americans became concerned during the postwar era that so much of our film industry had fallen into the hands of individuals whose primary loyalty was so blatantly to a foreign government, and an enormously murderous one at that.
• Trumbo was hardly alone in performing such political acrobatics. During 1940 and 1941, a Communist front group called American Peace Mobilization organized large demonstrations in DC denouncing the Allies and FDR's efforts to intervene in the conflict. In June 1941, they had scheduled a large "peace march" in front of the White House with signs reading "The Yanks Are Not Coming!" But one day earlier, the Germans attacked the USSR, so their signs were quickly replaced with new ones reading "Open the Second Front!"
• I'd become more and more aware during the last dozen years of the vast scale of Communist subversion targeting the American federal government throughout most of the 1930s and 1940s, and I realized that this history was still almost entirely concealed by our dishonest mainstream media. But despite those revelations, my appraisal of McCarthy remained extremely negative.
• 
• About a decade ago, I'd read Richard Rovere's 1959 classic  Senator Joe McCarthy. That work portrayed its subject as a dishonest, ignorant buffoon, whose political antics fully matched the very negative popular conception of "McCarthyism." That account of McCarthy's rise and fall strongly influenced my own perceptions.
• Although relatively short, Rovere's book was  so widely praised after its publication that I think it may have played a leading role in shaping the academic and media verdict on McCarthy that remained in place during the generations that followed.
• 
• Hollywood also helped form my perceptions. In 2005 I had seen Good Night, and Good Luck, a portrayal of CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow's courageous and successful effort to expose McCarthy and his tactics, a show that became an important factor in the latter's political downfall. George Clooney directed the film and also played one of the major parts, and the production seemed excellent, certainly worthy of the six Oscar nominations it received, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor.
• Historical dramas are not necessarily accurate, but they nonetheless influence our understanding. Clooney's film was particularly effective because it only showed McCarthy in actual television clips from that era rather than having him portrayed by an actor. Indeed, according to the Wikipedia page, test audiences complained "that the actor playing McCarthy was too over the top, not realizing that the film used actual archive footage of McCarthy himself."
• So these books and films merely reinforced the very negative image of McCarthy that I'd absorbed from all my history textbooks and decades of media stories.
• 
• However, several years ago I happened to finally read a lengthy work presenting the other side of the McCarthy story, an account that seemed deeply researched and made all sorts of points that I'd never considered. M. Stanton Evans was a longtime conservative journalist, closely associated with William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, and in 2007 he published  Blacklisted by History, running nearly 700 pages. His descriptive subtitle was "The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies."
• Given my rather scanty and very one-sided view of the McCarthy story, I was greatly impressed by the author's claims that so many of the most common accusations and criticisms leveled against the controversial senator had been entirely unfair and distorted.
• For example, McCarthy's celebrated Red-hunting career began in February 1950 when he was an obscure first-term U.S. senator seeking an issue for his 1952 reelection campaign. Never having previously been identified as an anti-Communist, he gave a speech before a Republican women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia at which he denounced the very lax security procedures of the State Department and allegedly claimed to have in his hands a list of 205 "card-carrying" Communists who were still employed at that important federal department, helping to shape our foreign policy. That public accusation unexpectedly attracted an enormous outpouring of national media coverage, launching him on what quickly became his hugely successful anti-Communist crusade. But no such list actually existed, and McCarthy's critics have always branded him a liar for making that provocative declaration.
• However, Evans devoted a full chapter to that incident, and persuasively argued that there was no solid evidence that McCarthy's speech had ever included that claim regarding a list of 205 names. Instead, that widespread media account had been based upon the senator's casual and preliminary draft notes never used in his talk. So the leading early item always cited to demonstrate that McCarthy was a liar might actually have been based upon a lie.
• According to Evans, this early pattern of false, slanderous accusations against McCarthy continued throughout his entire career, with his many political enemies employing every possible dishonest tactic in order to vilify and destroy him. But for the first several years, their efforts completely failed, and instead a large portion of the American people rallied behind him.
• Finally, in 1954 McCarthy held public hearings to investigate the allegedly lax security practices at Army bases, and these resulted in his political destruction. One of his main allegations centered upon the case of an alleged Communist dentist serving at the Monmouth base in New Jersey. The media successfully portrayed McCarthy as ridiculous for arguing that our national security was endangered by "a Red dentist," and that stinging mockery has echoed down to modern times in books, articles, and films.
• But Evans noted that the base in question held some of our most important military technology secrets involving radar, and many of its documents had apparently been successfully stolen by Soviet spies and shipped to the USSR, greatly enhancing Soviet development work in that cutting-edge field. Meanwhile, the dentist in question had apparently worked to create a Communist Party cell at his base. So although there was no evidence connecting his activities with the stolen military secrets, the focus of McCarthy's investigation was not nearly as unreasonable as I'd always believed it to be.
• In another very notorious incident late in McCarthy's career, the senator relied upon the claims of an FBI infiltrator to identify a black Pentagon code clerk named Annie Lee Moss living in DC as a Communist Party member, and he condemned the military for having allowed such a serious breach of security. But when he hauled Moss before his committee and interrogated her, she strongly denied ever having been a Communist, explaining that there were three different individuals of her same name listed in her city's telephone book and suggesting that she was the victim of mistaken identity. That case had the strong racial overtones of McCarthy badgering and falsely accusing a frightened and entirely innocent black woman, so it was mentioned in some of my textbooks as a perfect example of the senator's careless attacks on the innocent and was also prominently featured in the George Clooney film.
• However, as Evans demonstrated, there was no mistaken identity involved, and the Communist Party records had identified the correct woman. He noted that Clooney was even aware that his film severely distorted that reality for propagandistic reasons, but obviously didn't care.
•  Ann Coulter's Treason
• As I digested the revelations in the Evans book I began to wonder whether my understanding of McCarthy's tumultuous career had been entirely mistaken. Perhaps the senator had actually been something much closer to the courageous hero his followers had always claimed rather than the incompetent buffoon I'd long assumed. So with Trump's policies having so strongly—if incorrectly—revived the McCarthyism issue, I finally decided to undertake a much more careful investigation of this important history.
• During my lifetime I had absorbed an enormous quantity of anti-McCarthy material with the Evans book having been about the only major exception. So although I reread the short 1959 Rovere book and watched the Bryan Cranston and George Clooney films an additional time, I otherwise decided to confine all my new reading to the very limited amount of pro-McCarthy literature that had appeared over the last seventy years, and see what sort of case the authors could make for that long-dead senator.
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• Although the Evans book  had been praised by conservatives and even had its own short Wikipedia page, I saw no mention that it had ever reached any bestseller lists, so I doubted that it sold too many copies. In recent decades so many right-wingers had regularly accused their liberal and leftist adversaries of "McCarthyism" that the audience for his solid attempt to overturn the settled history of that much-demonized figure may not have been too large.
• 
• However, a different book covering some of the same ground had become a huge bestseller several years earlier, reaching an enormous audience and probably reshaping the perceptions of many conservatives about McCarthy.
• In 2000, right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter had published  Slander, a ferocious attack on the Clinton Administration and its various scandals that became a #1 national bestseller, and in 2003 she followed it up with  Treason, another bestseller.
• In that latter work she convicted the Democrats and liberals who were her longtime ideological targets of having consistently supported treason for at least the last three generations. Half or more of her text dealt with the Communist espionage rings of the postwar years and the 1950s often very loosely called the McCarthy Era, and most of that coverage was devoted to defending and praising the work of the Wisconsin senator after which it was named. So to the extent that ordinary rank-and-file conservatives today have a positive image of McCarthy, I'd guess that her book may have been heavily responsible.
• But my appraisal of Treason was very negative. I'd only previously read one of Coulter's books, and this one was even worse, being a disorganized, ranting screed obviously aimed at the angry right-wingers who were her intended audience. Even in the chapters supposedly focused on McCarthy and the 1950s, almost every other page seemed to include references to the Clinton sex scandals of the 1990s, with copious mentions of Kenneth Starr, Monica Lewinsky, and the rest of that notorious cast of characters.
• The 9/11 Attacks and our looming war with Iraq had been very hot topics when she wrote her book, so she also included many references to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but these hardly helped her overall project. For example, she denounced Democrats and liberals as traitors for questioning the reality of the Iraqi WMDs, the direct links between Saddam and Osama, and the wisdom of President George W. Bush's Iraq War, identifying them with the previous generations of Democrats and liberals who had questioned McCarthy's Red-hunting efforts. By so strongly linking McCarthy's claims of Communist espionage with the notorious lies of the Neocons and our hugely disastrous Iraq War, she unintentionally made a strong case for the other side.
• Although she correctly argued that the Venona Decrypts had conclusively proven the existence of a huge network of Soviet agents in our federal government, she presented that important material in such a shrill and hectoring fashion that I suspect many less informed readers might have been suspicious about her account.
• Coulter also seemed to be a rather "politically correct" right-winger, often denouncing her Democratic villains of the 1950s for being segregationists or engaging in gay-baiting, while her entire narrative had simple heroes and villains, being a black and white morality tale, lacking any serious analysis.
• Moreover, her book contained some gigantic howlers. Although not directly connected with McCarthy, Harry Dexter White had been one of the most important Soviet agents, largely running FDR's Treasury Department and by late in the war also exerting huge influence over the State Department, so Coulter mentioned his nefarious activities on more than a dozen pages. But she identified White as an elite WASP although absolutely anyone with the slightest knowledge of Soviet espionage history knows that he was a Lithuanian Jew from an immigrant background.
• Frankly, after reading that egregious blunder, I found it very difficult to take any of her other material seriously. I also chuckled when she strongly denied the "apocryphal" claims that longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had been a closeted homosexual.
• Put bluntly, her entire book seemed of very little value, and this allowed me to read it much more rapidly than I usually would.
•  Arthur Herman's Joseph McCarthy
• 
• But although I was unimpressed by Coulter's ignorant screed, it did provide me with one very useful piece of information. Her book included hundreds of footnotes and I noticed that many of these referenced  Joseph McCarthy, published in 2001 by Arthur Herman. This turned out to be a lengthy, well-documented, and favorably reviewed biography of the senator that was everything the Coulter book itself was not, and reading it proved extremely useful to my understanding.
• Although it covered much the same ground as the Evans book and was also heavily researched, the Herman book seemed quite a bit more even-handed and objective, so I found it somewhat superior. One oddity was that although it had appeared more than a half-dozen years before Evans published his own 2007 work, the latter never mentioned it anywhere in his text except for a rather dismissive half-sentence buried in the Acknowledgements section at the very end, a reference so fleeting that I'd never even noticed it.
• Much like Evans, Herman came to generally pro-McCarthy conclusions and his book  had been very favorably reviewed by all the same conservative publications, while also drawing respectful coverage in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Therefore, I found Evans' near-total silence about the work of his predecessor a little peculiar. I suspect that Evans produced his apologia of McCarthy as a long-planned labor of love, and was therefore a little resentful that a different conservative intellectual had beaten him to the punch years earlier, especially since the latter was somewhat less uniformly pro-McCarthy in his conclusions but perhaps more credible for that same reason.
• Herman certainly recognized the enormously difficult task of political rehabilitation that he was attempting. On the very first page of his Introduction, he explained:

• Joe McCarthy was and remains the single most despised man in American political memory—far more reviled that Aaron Burr or Richard Nixon or even George Wallace.

• But just a couple of pages later, after cataloguing some of the many books portraying "the McCarthy Era" as an American nightmare or directly comparing it with Stalin's Great Terror, he effectively placed all those seething traditional condemnations of McCarthy within a much more realistic context:

• We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947 to 1958, no American citizens were interrogated without benefit of legal counsel, none was arrested or detained without due judicial process, and no one went to jail without trial...All through the "worst" of the McCarthy period, the Communist Party itself was never outlawed, membership in the party was never declared a crime, and it continued to maintain public offices, publish books and the Daily Worker, and recruit new members (admittedly a tough sell by then.)

• In fact, most of what people ordinarily mean when they talk about the "red scare"—the House Un-American Activities Committee; anti-Communist probes into Hollywood, labor unions, and America's schools and universities; the Rosenberg trial; blacklisting in the media and schoolteachers fired for disloyalty—had nothing to do with McCarthy and he had nothing to do with them (although when asked, he generally approved of them, as most other Americans did.)...
• Of those who lost their jobs...in perhaps forty cases McCarthy himself was directly or indirectly responsible for their being fired. In only one case—that of Owen Lattimore—can anyone make the argument that McCarthy's allegations led to any actual legal proceedings, and there a judge eventually threw out most of the indictment...
• In fact, the number of people who did spend time in prison remained small. A grand total of 108 Communist Party members were convicted under the antisubversion provisions of the Smith Act, which Congress passed in 1941 (long before McCarthy was a member) and applied as equally to Nazi and fascist organizations as it did to Communists. Another twenty Communist Party members were imprisoned under state and local laws. Fewer than a dozen Americans went to jail for espionage activities (one of them being Alger Hiss, who was convicted of perjury). Exactly two were sentenced to death for conspiracy to commit espionage: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
• We need to contrast all this with the three and a half million people who, according to the KGB's own official numbers, were arrested and sent to the gulag during the six years of Stalin's Great Terror, from 1935 to 1941. None had the benefit of any genuine legal protection; Stalin's secret police seized, interrogated, and sentenced the lot. The KGB states that of that number, 681,692 were executed in 1937-1938 alone. Taken with the four or five million people who died in Stalin's Great Famine of 1932-1933, the total number of human beings executed, exiled, imprisoned, or starved to death in those years comes to ten to eleven million. These are the official KGB numbers released at the end of the cold war. They are almost certainly low.
• Herman's book was about McCarthy, but the activities of the senator and the enormous support and coverage that he initially received could only be understood given the climate of the times. So after recounting McCarthy's personal origins and the early campaigns culminating in his upset election to the U.S. Senate in 1946 as the youngest member of that body, the author devoted a couple of chapters to discussing the very real threat of Communist subversion and Soviet espionage that had become such an important part of our political life during most of the 1930s and 1940s.
• He also emphasized that the harsh crackdown on political opinion so strongly condemned by McCarthy's later critics had originally been deployed against right-wing critics of FDR and American intervention. Indeed, although the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was later so massively demonized by liberals, it had originally been established in 1938 with strong liberal and Democratic support because its main targets were fascists or right-wingers and conservatives who were falsely accused of such beliefs.
• Moreover, wartime hysteria had also resulted in an unprecedented violation of civil liberties, with noted liberals playing a crucial role. As Herman explained:

• Another significant fruit of that same fear would be the round-up and internment of Japanese-Americans on the Pacific Coast. Probably the most massive violation of civil liberties of American citizens in this century, it offers a strange reversal of stereotypes. Opponents to internment included J. Edgar Hoover (who thought it unnecessary) and Robert Taft, the only member of Congress to oppose the internment bill in March 1942. Supporters included leading liberals such as Justices Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black; the governor of California and future champion of civil rights Earl Warren; and Joseph Rauh of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). A leading organizer of the internment program, Charles Fahy, would later win his reputation as the liberal judge on the Washington D.C., Court of Appeals by regularly overturning loyalty board decisions in the 1950s.

• Herman's central point was that however much the particular details of McCarthy's accusations may have been exaggerated or wrong, the broader message of his campaign against the domestic dangers that Communism and Soviet agents had posed to the United States was essentially correct. McCarthy's willingness to loudly make those charges when so many others feared to do so probably explained the very widespread public support he attracted.
• However, Herman hardly attempted to sugar-coat McCarthy's personal and political failings. These were legion, though almost all of those sins seemed like venal ones.
• The senator was often crude, drunken, bullying, careless with the truth or facts, and prone to wild exaggerations or outright dishonesty, hardly being the ideal vessel for the political crusade that became attached to his name.
• For example, he had won his first local judgeship race by falsely claiming in all his speeches and campaign materials that the incumbent he faced was an elderly man of 73 when the latter's age was actually 66. Such bald-faced dishonesty earned him the permanent enmity of the local Wisconsin news media.
• One reason for McCarthy's remarkable success with the Communism issue was his tendency to make the wildest sort of accusations against his targets or his political opponents. These public statements drew coverage from the headline-hungry news media, which had generally ignored the more cautiously framed accusations of Communist subversion made by other, far more scrupulous anti-Communist politicians or journalists.
• Herman emphasized that during the first half of the 1950s McCarthy exerted enormous influence over the national media, allowing him to often drive headlines merely by announcing that he planned to hold a press conference later that day or the next, with only Presidents Truman and Eisenhower attracting greater media coverage. Furthermore, he became quite skillful at deploying that media coverage and his signature issue of anti-Communism to successfully attack his political opponents. According to Herman, McCarthy probably played an important role in the defeat of eight different Democratic senators during a couple of election cycles, a feat that established him as one of the most powerful and feared political figures in America.
• But the nature of some of those victories hardly redounds to McCarthy's credit. Soon after his original attack against the Democratic Truman Administration for allegedly allowing known Communists to remain in government, Sen. Millard Tydings of Maryland, a right-wing Democratic grandee of that body, held public hearings aimed at refuting McCarthy's accusations and destroying him politically, but the junior senator successfully held his own in the resulting media battle.
• McCarthy then counter-attacked by campaigning against Tydings' reelection later that same year, accusing the long-established officeholder of being soft on Communism, with one of his top staffers joining the campaign of Tydings' Republican challenger. The anti-Tydings forces widely distributed a doctored photo montage showing the elderly reactionary segregationist seemingly side-by-side in friendly conversation with Communist Party boss Earl Browder. Although no direct claim was made that the two men were actually comrades-in-arms, the implication may have resonated with a confused and gullible electorate, and Tydings went down to defeat after 24 years in office. McCarthy helped defeat Democratic Majority Leader Scott Lucas that same year using the same Communism issue.
• Once so many of McCarthy's leading Senate opponents had seen their careers ended at his hands, few of the survivor were willing to publicly oppose him. Political power is largely the perception of political power, and McCarthy quickly amassed a great deal of it.
• Even some staunch Democrats soon clambered onboard his anti-Communism crusade. Sen. Hubert Humphrey, the liberal's liberal, sponsored provisions of the Communist Control Act of 1954 that  would have made mere membership in the Communist Party a federal felony.
• It's undeniable that the senator successfully made anti-Communism a powerful political issue and probably played a leading role in the Democratic defeats that gave Republicans control of both Houses of Congress in 1952 and elected Dwight Eisenhower as the first Republican President in twenty years. But McCarthy's actual role in successfully uncovering Communist subversives or important Soviet agents was rather minimal.
• One source of major confusion has been that McCarthy was very much of a latecomer to the Communism issue, and had absolutely nothing to do with most of the celebrated cases from the era often rather loosely named after him.
• By the time that McCarthy gave his maiden 1950 speech on Communist subversion in Wheeling, West Virginia, falsely claiming to be holding a list of the names of 57 (or 205) known Communists in government service, the vast majority of the important Communist agents had already been identified and removed from government. Indeed, one of the reasons that McCarthy's speech on the ongoing infiltration of Communists attracted so much media attention was that just two weeks earlier Alger Hiss had finally been convicted of perjury regarding his espionage activities and sentenced to prison.
• During the several years of his power and influence that followed, McCarthy named a very long list of accused Communists, but almost all of his targets were obscure individuals of little if any importance. A few of them were actually Communists and most of the remainder were fellow travelers or at least somewhat pro-Communist, but until they were named by McCarthy no one had ever heard of them, and the only role they ever played in history was as individuals whom the senator had publicly accused.
• One of the very few exceptions to this pattern of obscurity was Owen Lattimore, a prominent academic scholar specializing in China, whose views probably did substantially influence American foreign policy regarding that country. Lattimore was certainly supportive of Mao's Communist movement and was also pro-Soviet, so it's hardly surprising that he often associated with Communists and Soviet agents. But McCarthy's public statements were far more dramatic, claiming that Lattimore was the #1 Soviet agent in America, and declaring that he would stake his entire reputation on that accusation. However, although Lattimore's career was ruined and he was later prosecuted for concealing some of his Communist associations, there seemed no evidence that he was actually a Communist let alone a Soviet agent, and his name never appeared anywhere in the Venona Decrypts.
• Furthermore, Lattimore's behavior should be put into its proper historical context. During the period that he was pro-Soviet and friendly towards Communists, exactly the same could have been said about FDR and most of the top leadership of the American government. The only real difference was that Lattimore perhaps unwisely continued to hold those same views for a few years after they had become politically inadvisable.
• One of McCarthy's most lurid accusations was made against Gen. George Marshall, and this cost the senator an enormous amount of goodwill. Marshall had been our top military commander in World War II, widely hailed as "the architect of victory," and he was currently serving as Secretary of State under Truman. After the end of the war, Truman had sent Marshall on a mission to China aimed at resolving the growing conflict between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao's Communists, and conservatives later claimed that his favoritism toward the latter was a major factor behind the subsequent Communist victory, with some of them darkly speculating that the general was a Communist dupe.
• In 1951 one of those rightwing journalists named Forrest Davis encountered McCarthy at a cocktail party and handed him the manuscript of an unfinished anti-Marshall book. The senator soon gave a three hour Senate speech based upon a slightly modified version of that text, then entered the remainder into the Congressional Record. Given the many obscure classical allusions, everyone knew that the lengthy work could not possibly have been written by McCarthy nor even by any of his staffers, but the senator soon published the work as a book under his own name, perhaps doing so with the permission of the real author.
• Apparently the original Davis manuscript had entirely focused upon Marshall's supposed blunders and incompetence, but McCarthy added a few outrageous touches of his own, clearly accusing America's highest-ranking World War II military officer and current Secretary of State of being a deliberate agent of the Communist conspiracy:

• How can we account for the present situation unless we believe that men high in the Government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men....What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. If Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve his country's interest.

• Accusing such a pillar of the DC and military establishments of being a Communist traitor outraged many of the senator's erstwhile supporters, notably including Henry Luce of the Time-Life media empire, who soon published a cover story denouncing McCarthy as a demagogue. Eisenhower had been one of Marshall's proteges and although he was forced to hold his tongue during his 1952 presidential run, even campaigning alongside McCarthy in a supportive manner, he never forgot nor forgave that outrageous accusation against his mentor and merely awaited the right opportunity to destroy McCarthy politically. Even Evans, who made such extreme efforts to defend all of McCarthy's activities admitted that his attack on Marshall's loyalty was "deplored by friend and foe alike."
• It is useful to contrast McCarthy's anti-Communist efforts with those of Richard Nixon, who had been elected to the House in 1946, the same year that McCarthy entered the Senate.
• In 1948 Alger Hiss stood near the pinnacle of the American elite establishment, serving as president of the Carnegie Endowment after having held numerous important government posts, including as founding Secretary-General of the original United Nations conference. He was clearly destined for very high future political office when he was accused of being a Soviet agent by Whittaker Chambers, a rumpled, overweight former Communist whose name meant nothing.
• Hiss insisted upon appearing before HUAC in order to clear his name, and his high public standing and forceful, emphatic denials convinced almost all of the members that the accusations against him had no merit. But Nixon took the enormous political risk of believing and championing Chambers, and he gradually accumulated the evidence that Hiss was lying, ultimately leading to the latter's conviction and imprisonment two years later.
• Hiss's momentous fall played a crucial early role in revealing the extent of past Communist infiltration of the American government. That huge success also launched Nixon's meteoric political career, carrying him to the U.S. Senate in 1950 and the vice presidency in 1952, reaching that latter position before his 40th birthday as one of the youngest such officeholders in our national history.
• But unlike McCarthy, Nixon was generally quite cautious and restrained in his accusations regarding Communist activity, and partly for that reason he never attracted a fraction of the enormous media coverage and popular following produced by McCarthy's wild accusations.
• In 1954, Eisenhower directed his vice president to obliquely condemn McCarthy's methods in a public speech, and Nixon did so, soon suffering a huge backlash from McCarthy's devoted right-wing following. A contemporaneous Time Magazine article  effectively summarized Nixon's statements:

• Nixon turned to methods as employed by McCarthy. He did not name his man, but there could be no misunderstanding his meaning: "The President, this Administration, the responsible leadership of the Republican Party insist... that whether in the executive branch of the Government or in the legislative branch... the procedures for dealing with the threat of Communism... must be fair and they must be proper." But some Red-hunters feel that Communists deserve to be shot like rats. "Well. I'll agree; they're a bunch of rats, but just remember this. When you go out to shoot rats, you have to shoot straight, because when you shoot wildly, it not only means that the rats may get away more easily, you make it easier on the rat, but you might hit someone else who's trying to shoot rats, too. And so we've got to be fair... And when through carelessness, you lump the innocent and the guilty together, what you do is to give the guilty a chance to pull the cloak of innocence around themselves."

• Certain Republican rat-shooters, said Nixon, have not followed the principle of fairness. "Men who have in the past done effective work exposing Communists in this country have, by reckless talk and questionable methods, made themselves the issue... And when they've done this, you see, they not only have diverted attention from the danger of Communism, diverted it... to themselves, but also they have allowed those whose primary objective is to defeat the Eisenhower Administration to divert attention... to these individuals who follow these methods."
• Not only did I find Nixon's criticism entirely accurate, but I thought it represented one of the best summaries of the terrible flaws in McCarthy's approach.
• Nixon's sharp public attack against McCarthy and his methods came in March 1954, just as the senator was launching his own official investigation of what he claimed were the lax security procedures of the American Army. The resulting Army-McCarthy Hearings received weeks of live, gavel-to-gavel television coverage and drew an enormous national audience estimated at 80 million, representing half of all Americans. But the hearings severely backfired against McCarthy and ultimately destroyed him politically.
• After the Republicans regained control of the Senate in January 1953, McCarthy had become chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and its powerful Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that he used as the vehicle for his anti-Communist campaigns.
• Joseph Kennedy was a strong McCarthy supporter and heavily lobbied for his son Robert to be named chief counsel, but McCarthy instead selected Roy Cohn, a well-connected Jewish prosecutor from New York City, with Robert serving as assistant counsel under him. The two young men, both in their mid-20s, soon clashed and Robert resigned a few months later, while Cohn began exerting enormous influence over the senator.
• Cohn was a closeted homosexual and brought on board David Schine, a close friend from a wealthy family with no apparent qualifications, who was widely suspected of being Cohn's lover. The two young men attracted numerous damaging headlines when they began touring Europe together in 1953, using McCarthy's name to brow-beat the senior managers of the U.S. Information Agency for maintaining overseas libraries that included books written by pro-Communist authors, demanding the removal of any such controversial material. But President Eisenhower sharply criticized these efforts, denouncing any such "book burners."
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• By fall of that year, Cohn had persuaded McCarthy to begin investigating the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, and perhaps in retaliation, the Army drafted Schine, who had previously used his connections to avoid military service. The sudden loss of his close friend enraged Cohn, who personally called the top Army leadership on more than three dozen different occasions, demanding all sorts of special privileges for Schine, including numerous weekend passes so that the two young men could continue to spend a great deal of time together. Cohn also urged that Schine be immediately made an officer and assigned to McCarthy's committee for his military service, using the senator's name to threaten the Army with severe political repercussions unless all his demands were met.
• This private, very personal battle between Cohn and the U.S. Army high command was probably a major factor behind McCarthy's decision to hold public hearings a few months later on Army security lapses, and McCarthy and Cohn were both deeply embarrassed when these sordid underlying motives came out during the televised 1954 hearings.
• A decade earlier hundreds of thousands of American draftees had died in combat, and the recently concluded Korean War had raised that body-count by tens of thousands more. So in that era, avoiding the draft or demanding special privileges were viewed quite negatively by the public, and the growing suspicion that McCarthy's attacks on the Army were part of Cohn's efforts on behalf of Schine was hugely damaging. Cohn's own sworn testimony was regarded as especially disastrous, and public polls soon showed a large rise in McCarthy's disapproval, leading Eisenhower to decide that the opportunity had finally come to destroy him politically.
• Cohn resigned from McCarthy's committee soon after the conclusion of the hearings, and with the Republican president, the Senate Democrats, and the now extremely hostile media all working together, McCarthy began losing his remaining public support, including among his own fellow Republican Senators.
• By December 1954, he was officially censured by an overwhelming Senate vote, and politically broken. Although he remained in office for more than two years, his reputation was ruined, he was avoided by nearly all of his colleagues, totally ignored by the media, and banned from any White House events, while his outside speaking engagements dwindling away to almost nothing. With his public standing and career destroyed, he gradually drank himself to death, dying in May 1957
•  Buckley and Bozell on Joseph McCarthy
• After digesting the material in Herman's heavily documented book, my verdict on McCarthy's political activities was quite negative. Although the dangers of the Communist subversion that the senator claimed to oppose had certainly been real, I concluded that his political methods were ineffective at best and more likely had been strongly counter-productive, considerably damaging and discrediting his own ideological camp during the years of his great prominence. This may not have been Herman's own opinion and I'm sure that Evans would have strongly disagreed, but the evidence seemed plain to me.
• 
• This highly critical appraisal of McCarthy was only reinforced once I read the famous book published during the height of the senator's career, widely regarded as taking his side against the bitter media attacks that he faced.
• In 1954, William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell published  McCarthy and His Enemies, a work I'd always seen described as a ringing defense of their controversial subject and an endorsement of his anti-Communist efforts. Indeed, soon afterwards Bozell joined McCarthy's own staff and became one of his speechwriters, also helping to ghost some of his publications, while Buckley was always regarded as one of McCarthy's few public champions in that era. Moreover, their book was written prior to the last, disastrous phase of the senator's career, during which the Army-McCarthy Hearings caused the collapse of his public support.
• Yet in reading their book of more than 400 pages, I discovered something very different than what I'd expected to find.
• Buckley and Bozell were writing at a time when McCarthy's public activities were well known to all of their informed readers, and they were both young intellectuals still in their late twenties, so any attempt to completely conceal the unpleasant facts would have failed and also would have severely damaged their future credibility. Therefore, their candid appraisal seemed just as fair and even-handed as they claimed it would be. And the story they told was absolutely devastating to the reputation of their subject.
• In dozens of different cases, they fully admitted that McCarthy's public accusations were wildly exaggerated and unfair, so much so that these clearly amounted to lies.
• They devoted the first section of their book to documenting the often lax security standards of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, failings that McCarthy had correctly later emphasized, but then they moved on to the latter's specific public statements. Regarding his initial accusations that provoked a national media firestorm and launched his influential career, they wrote:

• The following day, McCarthy wired President Truman the flat statement "I have in my possession the names of 57 Communists who are in the State Department at present." Six paragraphs further on, in the same telegram, McCarthy repeated his unambiguous charge: "Despite this State Department blackout, we have been able to compile a list of 57 Communists in the State Department"...

• McCarthy did not actually name 57 Communists...McCarthy never offered proof that he had in hand the names of 57 State Department employees loyal to the Communist Party, much less "card-carrying" members...
• ...it quickly became evident that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for him to pull himself out of the hole he had dug himself into.
• The authors then spent nearly 100 pages on a careful examination of the "Nine Public Cases" that McCarthy had focused upon during the Tydings Hearings that cemented his national reputation, devoting an individual chapter to each of these. In some of these cases, they argued that McCarthy's claims were correct, but in many others his accusations largely seemed false.
• For example, with regard to some of the charges he made against a State Department official named Esther Brunauer, they admitted "McCarthy hadn't a leg to stand on," and many of his claims regarding the other cases were also greatly exaggerated or completely erroneous. So the best they could say is that at least some of McCarthy's highest-profile accusations seem to have been correct, providing this summary at the end of that long section:

• McCarthy's own behavior during the Tydings episode was far from exemplary. He showed himself to be inexperienced, or, worse still, misinformed. Some of his specific charges were exaggerated; a few had no apparent foundation whatsoever... McCarthy never redeemed his unredeemable pledge to reveal the names of "57 card-carrying Communists."

• Given that this statement came from McCarthy's strongest and most vigorous public defenders, I considered it a devastating admission.
• One of McCarthy's leading critics in the media was influential liberal columnist Drew Pearson, a writer notorious for smearing his targets, and they condemned some of the latter's unfair attacks on McCarthy. But they also quoted a very long paragraph of some of McCarthy's public statements that explicitly accused Pearson of operating under Communist Party orders:

• "One of Pearson's extremely important tasks, assigned him by the Communist Party...Again, Pearson is assigned the job by the Communist Party...the man through whom Pearson receives orders and directions from the Communist Party...He is the man who assigns to Pearson the important task of conducting a character assassination of any man who dares to stand in the way of international Communism." [italics added.]

• They summarized their verdict:

• McCarthy, in short, accomplished that rather improbable feat: he smeared Drew Pearson.

• The authors then described some of McCarthy's "unwarranted attacks" against leading newspapers, often identifying these with the Communist Party's Daily Worker:

• He is especially fond, for example, of referring to the Washington Post as the "Washington edition of the Daily Worker"; to the New York Post as the "uptown edition of the Daily Worker"; to the Milwaukee Journal as the "Milwaukee edition..." etc...

• On one occasion, for example, McCarthy advised certain advertisers in Milwaukee to withdraw their support of the Journal. "Keep in mind when you send your checks over to the Journal," he said, "[that] you are contributing to bringing the Communist Party line into the homes of Wisconsin."
• On another, he wrote about Time: "There is nothing personal about my exposing the depth to which his magazine will sink in using deliberate falsehoods to destroy anyone who is hurting the Communist cause...they are flooding American homes with Communist Party material..." (Italics added.)
• They explained that "McCarthy's method is traceable to several untenable assumptions" including:

• One cannot at one and the same time vigorously oppose Communism and McCarthy...Distortion of the facts about McCarthy indicates not merely malice, unbalance, naivete, or unscrupulousness, but also pro-Communism...if you don't agree, you are not anti-Communist...opposition to it is prima facie evidence of party-lining...

• This is the most fundamentally false of all McCarthy's assumptions...It was precisely this assumption that prompted McCarthy to impugn the loyalty of General George Marshall.
• On that last point, the authors included a short appendix describing McCarthy's attacks on Marshall, in which they declared:

• It is, however, unreasonable to conclude...that McCarthy was charging Marshall with anything less than pro-Communism...McCarthy therefore inferred that Marshall was pro-Communist...McCarthy's conclusions about Marshall...were based upon a dangerous and unusual brand of reasoning which, followed to its logical conclusions, would also brand Roosevelt and Truman as disloyal.

• Obviously, I have mined the text of these authors for their statements most critical of McCarthy, and left out the many others that were far more favorable. Also, nobody would deny that McCarthy's criticism of Soviet Communism was generally warranted and that at least some of McCarthy's accusations were correct.
• But consider that all this devastating criticism of McCarthy and his methods appeared in a book written by his strongest public defenders, one of whom would soon join his staff, and that the very title of this work suggested that it was intended to defend the senator against the unfair attacks of "his enemies." Moreover, this book was written at the height of McCarthy's favorable public standing prior to the Army Hearings that discredited him and destroyed his public influence.
• Given that context, such a harsh dissection of McCarthy's methods seemed extremely significant to me.
• Buckley's book attracted  a great deal of attention, and the following year he launched National Review, which soon became the flagship publication of America's growing conservative movement, a movement over which Buckley was to reign for the next half-century as its presiding ideological pope.
• 
• Near the end of that long career, Buckley published  The Redhunter, a lightly fictionalized 1999 account of the McCarthy story, with the central protagonist being a young Ivy League graduate who joined the senator's staff, clearly a figure loosely based upon a composite of Buckley and Bozell.
• By the time that book appeared, Buckley was probably one of the very few surviving individuals who had first-hand knowledge of McCarthy's activities and his personal circle, and he also benefitted from the perspective of the 45 years that had elapsed since the senator's political fall. So I found his novel quite informative, noting that it provided many details not found in more conventional biographies.
• Although Buckley obviously sought to portray McCarthy in a generally favorable light, the author's account highlighted numerous negative aspects of the senator's career and behavior. Long before McCarthy's first mention of Communism, we see him as an individual with an extremely loose regard for the truth, even cheating on a crucial public school examination.
• In McCarthy's earliest campaign, an experienced political professional warned the candidate that he couldn't just use blatant lies to defeat his opponent, but later admitted that he had been wrong when McCarthy successfully did exactly that. In 1946 McCarthy manufactured his heroic but totally fraudulent war record as "Tail Gunner Joe," assisting him in winning his first race for the U.S. Senate.
• Buckley also seemed to resolve a historical dispute regarding Roy Cohn. According to Herman, there was no evidence that Cohn and Schine were ever lovers, nor that the latter was anything but heterosexual, and Evans' book pretended that these possibilities didn't even exist. But in Buckley's novel, no one in McCarthy's ideological camp nor his personal circle ever doubted that Cohn and Schine were homosexual lovers, and since Buckley and his brother-in-law Bozell were actually there at the time while Herman and Evans were not, I tend to accept their account of the situation.
•  The Verdict on McCarthy and McCarthyism
• As Buckley told the story, by 1953 more and more leading anti-Communists had concluded that McCarthy was doing their cause far more harm than good, with his very high profile as America's leading anti-Communist crusader actually discrediting all their efforts. This situation became even worse once the senator fully came under Cohn's influence, with the latter's outrageous personal behavior alienating all the last remaining pockets of mainstream support.
• McCarthy fell the following year, and once he did so he dragged his political cause down with him. For decades afterward, any accusations of Communist subversion or Soviet espionage were always met with the devastating rejoinder of "McCarthyism!" and easily deflected.
• By the time McCarthy drank himself to death in 1957, the total failure of both the man and the movement he had once led were widely accepted by most thoughtful individuals all across the ideological spectrum. McCarthy had inflicted enormous damage upon America's domestic anti-Communist movement.
• Evans was about a decade younger than Buckley or Bozell and a fellow Yale graduate who spent his long career closely associated with National Review, publishing  well over 300 articles in that magazine. Yet in revisiting his book exculpating McCarthy, I noticed that he made only a single very brief reference to their famous 1954 volume purportedly defending the senator and none at all to The Redhunter, released just a few years before his own.
• I think the reason for his silence was that both of those other leading conservative figures had been personally associated with McCarthy while he himself had just been a teenager at the time, and their candid portrayal of so many of the senator's major failings sharply contrasted with the sweeping apologia that he was constructing. As direct eyewitnesses, their contrary account would have been extremely difficult for him to challenge.
• 
• This same highly negative verdict on McCarthy may also be seen in the plot of a famous work released forty years before Buckley's novel.  The Manchurian Candidate was a 1959 Cold War thriller by Richard Condon, soon made into an even more famous 1962 film. One of its major characters was a McCarthy-like anti-Communist political demagogue who turns out to be a dupe operating under the tight control of Communist agents, who are positioning him for the White House and planning to use him to gain control of the country.
• So in both the novel and the film, our society faced a threat of domestic subversion and espionage by agents of Soviet Communism that was every bit as severe as the most paranoid anti-Communist activist might imagine. But according to the plot, the political figure behaving like McCarthy was actually serving the cause of America's foreign enemies.
• There is absolutely no evidence that either McCarthy or Cohn had been deliberate political saboteurs, and I'm not aware of anyone who ever made such claims, but they did greatly damage their own cause.
• Thus, strangely enough, my extensive recent reading on McCarthy and his political activities has essentially taken me full circle, returning me back to the same views I'd originally held a decade or more ago.
• Although the cause that McCarthy had symbolized and led—the battle against domestic subversion by agents of Soviet Communism—was an entirely legitimate and important one, he himself was every bit the dishonest blunderer and demagogue that our mainstream history books have always claimed, and he probably did far more damage to the cause that he championed than he ever did to his Communist adversaries.
• Suppose, for example, that McCarthy had never entered the Senate, or that his February 1950 speech had focused instead on the need for more government-subsidized veterans' housing, by some accounts the other topic he had originally considered. If so, then the issue of anti-Communism might have failed to ignite and become as hot a political topic as it did during the early 1950s and perhaps the Republicans would have had a much more difficult time gaining control of Congress. But without the subsequent anti-McCarthyite backlash, the media and academic communities might have been much more willing to acknowledge the huge evidence that many Communist agents had been situated near the top of our government a few years earlier.
• This sort of self-destructive activism is hardly uncommon in controversial movements that challenge the political establishment. It is often the case that those advocates who attract the most public attention are those willing to make the wildest and most unsubstantiated charges, doing so in ways that eventually discredit both themselves and their more sober-minded allies.
• The rapid rise and equally rapid fall of the junior senator from Wisconsin was a momentous event in American history and it had enormous consequences, severely damaging his own political cause. Therefore, it's quite possible that shrewd operatives tasked with defending the political status quo took that lesson to heart and deliberately orchestrated similarly self-destructive efforts regarding other controversial issues during the decades that followed, beginning with so many of the dramatic events and political upheavals of the 1960s.
• A couple of years ago I published an article discussing some of the more recent possible examples of these cynical defensive strategies.
•  American Pravda
• Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 8, 2022 • 5,400 Words

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