At the start of 1950, Joseph McCarthy’s political future did not look promising. McCarthy had been elected senator from Wisconsin in 1946, after switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and running as a decorated Marine veteran with the nickname Tail Gunner Joe. Even then, he had a reputation as a scofflaw. He had exaggerated his war record. He first ran for Senate (and lost) while he was still in uniform, which was against Army regulations, and he ran his second Senate campaign while he was a sitting judge, a violation of his oath. Questions had been raised about whether he had dodged his taxes and where his campaign funds had come from.
When McCarthy got to Washington, he became known as a tool of business interests, accepting a loan from Pepsi-Cola in exchange for working to end sugar rationing (he paid it back), and money from a construction company in exchange for opposing funding for public housing (which he eventually voted for). He plainly had no ethical or ideological compass, and most of his colleagues regarded him as a troublemaker, a loudmouth, and a fellow entirely lacking in senatorial politesse.
So when, in 1950, Lincoln’s birthday came around, a time of year when the Republican Party traditionally sent its elected officials out to speak at fund-raisers around the country, McCarthy was assigned to venues where it was clearly hoped that he would attract little notice. His first stop was the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club, in Wheeling, West Virginia, then a diehard Democratic state.
McCarthy didn’t know what he was going to talk about (he never planned very far ahead), so he brought notes for a couple of speeches: one about housing for veterans, and one, consisting mostly of clippings cobbled together by a speechwriter, about Communists in the government. McCarthy had seemingly had very little to do with that second speech, but he decided to go with it.
It is not known exactly what McCarthy said in Wheeling, and he later claimed that he couldn’t find his copy of the speech. But a local paper reported him as having waved a piece of paper on which, he said, were the names of two hundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The story was picked up by the Associated Press, and soon it was everywhere.
McCarthy had, in fact, no such list. He did not have even a single name. He may have calculated that a dinner speech at a women’s club in West Virginia was a safe place to try out the “I have in my hand” gimmick, and, somewhat to his surprise, it worked. In subsequent appearances on his Lincoln’s-birthday circuit, he gave the same speech, though the numbers changed. In Reno, the list had fifty-seven names. It didn’t matter. He had grabbed the headlines, and that was all he cared about. He would dominate them for the next four and a half years. Wheeling was McCarthy’s Trump Tower escalator. He tossed a match and started a bonfire.
Larry Tye’s purpose in his new biography, “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is to make the case that Donald Trump is a twenty-first-century Joe McCarthy. Tye draws on some fresh sources, including McCarthy’s papers, which are deposited at Marquette, his alma mater, and unpublished memoirs by McCarthy’s wife, Jean, and his longtime aide James Juliana, who served as his chief investigator.
Tye also quotes from transcripts of the executive sessions (that is, hearings closed to the public) of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee, which McCarthy essentially hijacked in 1953 and put to the business of exposing Communists in the government.
Tye describes these transcripts—almost nine thousand pages—as “recently unveiled . . . and never before closely examined.” This is a little misleading. The transcripts were released in 2003, and they have been quoted from extensively, notably by Ted Morgan, in “Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America.”
But they are important. The other senators on McCarthy’s subcommittee stopped attending the hearings, since McCarthy dominated everything, and so it became his personal star chamber. He could subpoena anyone (Tye says he called five hundred and forty-six witnesses in the year and a half he ran the show), and was answerable to no one. These transcripts give us McCarthy unbound. As for Tye’s McCarthy-Trump comparison? He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny.
McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single “subversive” to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.
McCarthy had the support of a media conglomerate, the Hearst papers, which amplified everything he said, and he had cheerleaders in the commentariat, such as the columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, both of whom reached millions of readers in a time when relatively few households (in 1952, about a third) had a television set. He tried to block a hostile newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, from his press conferences, and he egged on the crowds at his rallies to harass the reporters.
Right from the start, McCarthy had prominent critics. But almost the entire political establishment was afraid of him. You could fight him, in which case he just made your life harder, or you could ignore him, in which case he rolled right over you. He verbally abused people who disagreed with him. He also had easy access to money, much of it from Texas oilmen, which he used to help unseat politicians who crossed him.
To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong. Tye quotes the pollster George Gallup, in 1954: “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him.” His fans liked that he was a bully, and they liked that he scandalized the genteel and the privileged.
McCarthy forced government agencies, by the constant threat of investigations, to second-guess appointments, and to fire people he had smeared just because he had smeared them. He didn’t need to prove anything, and he almost never did, because it didn’t matter. Your name in McCarthy’s mouth was the kiss of death. He was a destroyer of careers.
To call McCarthy a conspiracy theorist is giving him too much credit. He was more like a conspiracy-monger. He had one pitch, which he trotted out on all occasions. It was that American governmental and educational institutions had been infiltrated by a secret network of Communists and Communist sympathizers, and that these people were letting Stalin and Mao have their way in Europe and Asia, and were working to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship.
What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy. In 1951, he claimed that George Marshall, the Secretary of Defense, the former Secretary of State, and the author of the Marshall Plan, had been, throughout his career, “always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin.” Marshall, he said, sat at the center of “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.”
Even Republicans were aghast. Marshall was almost universally regarded as a selfless public servant and a model of personal probity. The leader of the Party’s conservative wing, Robert Taft, expressed regret that McCarthy had overstated his case. But that was about as far as most Republicans had the nerve to go. Nothing came of McCarthy’s attack. For McCarthy, though, the important thing was that he had said something that was manifestly preposterous and had got away with it. He must have realized that he could get away with anything.
McCarthy lied all the time. He lied even when he didn’t need to lie, as Tye thinks is the case with the war record. When he didn’t have any facts to embellish, he made them up. He found that, if he just kept on repeating himself, people would figure that he must be onto something.
He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.
At the end, when he was about to be condemned by the Senate for his behavior toward his colleagues, he was invited to sign letters of apology that would probably have got him off the hook. He refused, and is supposed to have thrown the pen across the room. He was like the Don in Mozart’s opera: he preferred eternal damnation to admitting that he had ever been wrong.
Like many bamboozlers who succeed by preying on the earnest and the credulous, McCarthy was easily bamboozled. He often tied witnesses who had little to hide in knots, but the actual spies who testified (and there were one or two) completely fooled him. He hired rashly, and he valued loyalty over ability. He was also loyal to those he believed were loyal to him—and that, ironically, turned out to be his undoing.
I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way, but, to a certain extent, McCarthy is a scapegoat. His excesses and his political vulgarity have made him a convenient symbol of Cold War anti-Communism—its ideological intolerance, its disregard for civil liberties, its exaggerated warnings about Communist infiltration and expansion. But McCarthy was responsible for none of those things. The work he is credited with doing—purging the government of spies and “security risks,” typically people suspected of Communist sympathies—had already been done before he got up to speak in Wheeling.
This is the main reason (along with his general disorderliness) that no one McCarthy investigated was ever convicted of anything. There were almost no Communists left to fire or spies left to convict. McCarthy can be blamed for continuing the official practice of witch-hunting long past the point it made any sense, but he cannot be blamed for creating it. The blame for that rests with a man who hated McCarthy, Harry Truman.
After the war ended, in 1945, it was not immediately clear what our future relations with the Soviet Union would be. But, by early 1947, many in the American government had concluded that the Soviet Union was a hostile power, and that Communist parties in Western Europe were threats to democracy there.
On March 12th, in a speech before a joint session of Congress, Truman relieved the situation of any remaining ambiguity. He announced that it was the policy of the United States “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” “Armed minorities” meant Communist insurgents, and “outside pressures” meant the Kremlin. The policy was quickly named the Truman Doctrine. That speech was the start of the Cold War.
Nine days later, Truman signed an executive order establishing the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which tasked the F.B.I. and other agencies with undertaking investigations of government employees suspected of disloyalty—specifically, anyone with “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group, or combination of persons, designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.” According to the Columbia scholar Ira Katznelson, between 1947 and 1953, 4,765,705 federal employees had to fill out forms initiating loyalty investigations. Of these employees, 26,236 were referred for further scrutiny, and five hundred and sixty were fired or not hired. Homosexuals were targeted as security risks (being vulnerable to blackmail) or as generally undesirable. There were no anti-discrimination laws to protect them. They were simply fired.
At the same time, Congress began its own loyalty investigations. Hearings on Communists in Hollywood, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), began in October, 1947, and resulted in the convictions for contempt of Congress of the so-called Hollywood Ten, all of whom served prison terms. The following July, Elizabeth Bentley, a former member of the American Communist Party (C.P.U.S.A.), gave HUAC the names of American spies, among them Harry Dexter White, formerly a senior official in the Treasury Department.
A month later, another ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers, gave testimony that led to the most spectacular unmasking of the anti-Communist crusade, that of the former high-level State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss was convicted of perjury in January, 1950, and sent to prison. The same month, an atomic spy ring was busted when the physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to being a member. His confession would lead, in 1951, to the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for espionage, and, in 1953, to their execution.
There were spies to be caught. The historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, who have examined documents from K.G.B. files and from the Venona project—in which the U.S. government intercepted coded messages from Soviet intelligence agencies—say that more than five hundred Americans gave intelligence to the Soviets.
Rooting out spies and informants was therefore a perfectly sensible policy, and that part did not take long. The problem was that the process didn’t stop there. It was allowed to sweep up people who had only a notional connection to national security, like high-school teachers and Hollywood screenwriters. It licensed anti-Communist groups of all types—official (government agencies), quasi-official (educational and ecclesiastical authorities), and pseudo-official (editorialists and ad-hoc organizations)—to pursue their own investigations. And it constantly redefined what made a person a security risk or disloyal.
Espionage was a crime. But it was not a crime to be a member of the C.P.U.S.A. Communists had been on the ballot in every Presidential election from 1924 to 1940. Nor was it a crime to be a fellow-traveller or to belong to a front organization. “Front” and “fellow-traveller” were terms of art, anyway; they meant whatever the authorities in charge of an investigation said they did. By 1950, most of the people caught up in the investigations had already ended their relations with the C.P.U.S.A. and with radical politics generally. Many were committed anti-Communists. But their past was used to brand them as disloyal.
McCarthy had nothing to do with any of this. By the time he took charge of his subcommittee, in 1953, the C.P.U.S.A. was moribund, and the Soviets had run out of sympathetic Americans willing to give them intelligence, and had resorted to conventional means of spycraft.
McCarthy was therefore reduced to making national-security mountains out of molehills like Edward Rothschild, a bookbinder in the Government Printing Office who might have pilfered some classified documents but who had no access to atomic secrets. Rothschild seems to have been the only plausible security risk that McCarthy ever uncovered; he lost his job, but he was never prosecuted.
The case of Irving Peress was another McCarthy extravaganza. Peress was a dentist, drafted by the Army in 1952 because the Army needed dentists. He had declined to answer a question about his political affiliations on his loyalty questionnaire, and he may have had some prior connection to the C.P.U.S.A. But he had no access to secret information—he fixed teeth—and by the time McCarthy got to him, at the end of 1953, he was due to be discharged.
McCarthy made up for the smallness of the fry he was nabbing by claiming that these people had been hired and promoted by higher-ups who knew all about their Communist connections. Peress, McCarthy announced, was part of “the deliberate Communist infiltration of our Armed Forces.”
This case of overkill is one of the things that brought McCarthy to his Waterloo, the Army-McCarthy hearings, held in the spring of 1954 and followed, Tye estimates, by eighty million Americans, half the population. The hearings had nothing to do with Communism. Their purpose was to determine whether the chief counsel on McCarthy’s subcommittee, Roy Cohn, had put improper pressure on the Army to give special treatment to another member of McCarthy’s staff, a wealthy nonentity named David Schine, after Schine was drafted. As he always did when attacked, McCarthy punched right back, countercharging that the Army had been holding Private Schine hostage—putting him on K.P. duty, threatening to send him overseas—in order to get McCarthy’s subcommittee to drop its investigations into the Communist infiltration of the armed services.
It was obvious that Cohn had made threats in an effort to get Schine excused from the ordinary duties of life as an Army private. On the behind-the-scenes advice of President Dwight Eisenhower, who loathed McCarthy, the Army had compiled a detailed chronology of Cohn’s many phone calls to and meetings with Army officials, and a list of his demands. There was no way McCarthy was going to win that argument.
And yet McCarthy didn’t do what almost anyone else would have done. He didn’t throw Schine and Cohn under the bus. McCarthy knew that Schine was worthless, but he also knew that Cohn was deeply attached to him, and McCarthy valued Cohn as a man who was as free of scruples as he was. McCarthy put his career at risk for Schine and Cohn, and he lost. It may have been honor among scoundrels, but it was honor, of a sort.
The most interesting thing about the hearings, looking back, is the story behind the celebrated dénouement, an exchange between McCarthy and the Army’s hired counsel Joseph Welch, seen by millions on television, and by many people afterward in Emile de Antonio’s documentary “Point of Order!” It began when McCarthy, incensed by what he regarded as Welch’s overly aggressive examination of Cohn, revealed that a young lawyer named Fred Fisher, at Hale & Dorr, where Welch practiced, had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization accused of being a Communist front.
Welch was a crafty courtroom performer of the “I’m just a simple country lawyer” variety, and he put on his best basset-hound face. “Until this moment, Senator,” he said, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy spoke up again, repeating things he had just said about Fisher. Welch tried to stop him. “Senator, may we not drop this?” he asked. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Again, McCarthy refused to change the subject. Welch let him talk. “Mr. McCarthy,” he said finally, when McCarthy was done, “I will not discuss this further with you. . . . If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.” The room erupted in applause. Even reporters applauded. It was June 9, 1954, the thirtieth day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. The dragon had been slain.
What had actually happened is that the bamboozler was bamboozled. It was not McCarthy who had outed Fred Fisher. It was Joseph Welch. The whole Fisher story had appeared two months before in a front-page article in the Times. “Mr. Welch today confirmed news reports,” the Times said, “that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his own Boston law office because of admitted membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell, Jr., the Attorney General, as a Communist-front organization.” The article was accompanied by a photograph of Fisher. Welch’s lament that McCarthy had ruined Fisher’s reputation was bogus. Fred Fisher was a trap, and McCarthy walked right into it. It has been said that when Welch left the hearing room, with tears in his eyes, he winked at a reporter he knew. I doubt he did this, but he was certainly entitled to.
The hearings had lasted a hundred and eighty-seven hours—long enough for McCarthy to make himself sufficiently toxic in the public mind for the Senate to do something about him. A committee was appointed to prepare charges for a vote of censure. In the end, in a classic profile in senatorial courage, the decision was made to “condemn” McCarthy for a single offense, which was not that he had destroyed the careers of dozens of public servants, or that he had used congressional immunity to libel people, but that he had behaved disrespectfully to other senators. The vote was 67–22. Senator John F. Kennedy, whose younger brother Bobby had served on McCarthy’s staff, did not vote. Back trouble, he explained, had prevented him from coming to the floor.
The vote had no practical consequences. Although McCarthy was relieved of his chairmanship when the Democrats gained control of the Senate, he could have gone on. But the other senators had a way of punishing him that was more effective than condemnation, and, conveniently, less visible to voters. They shunned him. When McCarthy rose to speak, they wandered off the floor. When he approached groups in the cloakroom, they disbanded.
McCarthy had never cared what kind of attention he got, as long as he got it, and he could not handle being ignored. He had always assumed—people found this one of the most twisted things about him—that he could continue to pal around with men whose reputations he had trashed. Already a heavy drinker, he descended further into alcoholism, and he died on May 2, 1957, in Bethesda Naval Hospital. Hepatitis was given as the cause of death; Tye thinks, based on the medical records, that this is wrong, and that McCarthy died of alcohol withdrawal—the D.T.s. Either way, he drank himself to death. He was forty-eight.
Many national politicians would probably have been happy to drop loyalty investigations after 1953, but no one wanted to speak out against them. It was not an issue one could afford to be on the wrong side of. So subversive-hunting lasted until 1957, when a series of Supreme Court opinions curtailed the power of government agencies to inquire into the political beliefs of citizens. The reign of inquiry had lasted ten years. Joseph McCarthy was only one episode in that miserable saga.
Tye wisely does not propose to draw many lessons for today from the story of McCarthy’s career. Our demagogue is far more dangerous than a senator who was not very popular even in his own state. Ours is the President, and he has henchmen running the State Department and the Justice Department who are dedicated to clearing a legal path for him to eliminate whoever stands in his way. The Trump Administration has done serious damage to the entire executive branch. It will take a long time to repair it.
But what is puzzling about McCarthy is also puzzling about Trump. Once McCarthy was in a position of power, he was incapable of modifying his behavior. He could not shut it off, even when everyone around him was begging him to. He had a single explanation for everything, and the only way he knew how to do his job was by threatening and prevaricating. Trump, too, is a one-trick pony. He says the same things on every issue and in response to every crisis.
Voters get tired of one-trick ponies. Not every civil servant with progressive views can be a spy, despite McCarthy’s insistence, just as not every story Trump finds unflattering can be fake, and not every investigation he dislikes can be a hoax. Endlessly recycled charges lose their sting. That is what happened to McCarthy. It was not that the public decided that Communists were not a real danger. They just got sick of the constant snarling and browbeating. They wanted it to go away.
When Joseph Welch arrived in Washington for the famous hearings, some of the people involved in the Army’s defense were shocked that he did not seem to have studied the case. They worried that he was unprepared. But Welch knew that he could not beat McCarthy on the facts, because McCarthy would just make up new facts. He saw that the only way to destroy McCarthy was to give him the opportunity to destroy himself. He let McCarthy rant and bully and interrupt for thirty days, and then, as the clock was winding down, he closed in for the kill. It was pure rope-a-dope, and a lesson, possibly, for Joe Biden. ♦
