Alright, there are some
serious competitors for that title, even if we limit ourselves to books on the
cold war era. Notably, Witness by
Whittaker Chambers is a more literary, though less learned,
revelation. Yet beyond the hyperbole (courtesy of Miss Coulter)
there lies a kernel of truth, or at least an application of the marginal
utility theorem. Unless you have, Blacklisted by History: The untold story of Joe McCarthy is
the most important book that you have not yet read on American politics.
Indeed, it bears some faint likeness to the Bible, in that it centers around a
resurrection, albeit in this case the resurrected reputation of a man who has
been damned repeatedly by the Pharisaic court of American establishment
history. Like a Biblical epic, this damnation of Joe McCarthy transcends
the fate of any particular man, however laden with interesting vices or
admirable virtues. Rather, this verdict has shaped the moral and legal
precedents which have become the rotting core of modern America’s
extra-constitutional political framework. McCarthy and so-called
“McCarthyism” (a term which is taken as synonymous with “witch-hunting”) have
become the bywords and shibboleths of partisan conflict within our body
politic, entailing the suppression of ideological meaning and accountability.
Indeed, the very contours of
American history since WWII have been distorted through the astigmatic lens of
Anti-McCarthyism, a standard narrative by which we presume to distinguish not
just right from wrong, but left from right. Yet, what if the standard
narrative were itself wrong? What if, instead of an ogre, Senator Joe
McCarthy were a mid-20th century Paul Revere, cruelly shot off his horse while
attempting to warn his fellow citizens of a stealth attack on their freedom and
fortunes? What if the opprobrium of “McCarthyism” were a better
characterization of the malicious and deceitful tactics of those who sought to
thwart McCarthy’s investigation and subsequently endeavored, with near total
success, to destroy his reputation? If we are to believe M. Stanford
Evans (1934-2015) the answer to all these questions is in the
affirmative. Moreover this is not just an impassioned cry by the late
Evans, who as a libertarian and anti-communist might be expected to favor “tail
gunner Joe”, but a measured verdict drawn from the vast amount of relevant
empirical evidence which had become available by the time he started doing
research for Blacklisted by History (2007).
This work stands at the apex of Evans’ long labors in the field of American
political history, during which he was able to sift and reassess much of
standard cold war narrative.
The
currently available evidence, together with Evans’ skillful unraveling of the
historical incidents which impacted McCarthy’s investigations, has newly
empowered the pro-McCarthy narrative. Yet even today, or rather
especially today, truth telling is not a safe occupation. Perhaps some
future Oswald Spengler will pronounce the first half of the 1950s and the last
half of the 2010s as the upper and lower harmonics of the same historical
chord, or discord. Evans termed the McCarthy story “the third rail” of
cold war history, containing dangerous truths which, once grasped, might prove
fatal to apprentice historians who long to stay respectable, employable, and
keep up relations with polite society. Fortunately Evans had the
courage to grab the story and explore it with solid documentation and readable
prose. Hence today in the Trump era, as we labor under corresponding
tales of deceit and betrayal, we can at last draw on the analogous events of a
highly relevant historical period for our intellectual ammunition. In the
long run, Americans and all humanity have a vested interest in the vindication
of truth, however distasteful such revelations may prove to be. Where
such revelation is rendered impossible, factions will be reduced to those modes
of conflict resolution where the ammunition has ceased to be intellectual.
Context not pretext
Much of the value, and readability,
of Blacklisted by History stems from the late Evans’
patient work as a re-educator, explaining the forgotten historical context of
the cold war era, without which we can hardly form an intelligent judgement on
its politics and policies. The fact is, regardless of political opinion,
that era, though within living memory, has become a persistent blind spot for
the American public. There are two reasons for this historical amnesia,
the first being the conspiratorial motives of those who want the whole period
either distorted or dropped down the proverbial memory hole. However the
public’s understandable distaste for an ugly era is perhaps an even greater
factor. American history nerds who can rattle off the precise number of
musket balls embedded in the soil of Gettysburg are likely to profess
astonishment on learning there were Soviet moles embedded in Washington
just sixty years ago…not to mention before or since. As Evans
notes, the fruit of this ignorance (whether willful or on account of deception)
often leads to ridiculous error, like the popular image of SenatorMcCarthy chairing the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC). After all, you may not like the
Electoral College, but you can hardly abolish bicameralism, at least not
retroactively.
Evans
begins by recounting the historical background which gave both meaning and
impetus to McCarthy’s political mission. Prior to some indefinable
tipping point, possibly as early as the German defeat at Stalingrad, the
synergy of the Soviet-American military alliance was nudging the two societies
in the direction of an insidious moral convergence. One concrete
manifestation of this was the participation (at the time not considered
infiltration) of Communists in the intelligence and foreign services of the
United States. Evans notes that it would have been miraculous if there
had been no Communist personnel in key governmental positions, given the
political dynamics of the period. However all this changed with the onset
of the cold war, after which Communist staffers were considered, quite rightly,
to be a security risk. During the immediate post-war period two broad
developments occurred which were to have significant impact on the subsequent
“McCarthy era” of 1950-1954. First there were a series of preliminary
investigations which identified, and presumably routed out, known Communists
working for the American government. Second, there was a changing of the
old guard in the diplomatic and intelligence services, with stodgy conservatives
being replaced by younger, more progressive, officials. The new guard
included such rising luminaries as Dean Achenson. These two developments
(the termination of the early investigations, and the rise of the new guard)
would prove to be somewhat more than coincidental.
Two
years after these preliminary investigations had been concluded, Senator Joe
McCarthy raised the question of whether Communists were still being employed in
sensitive government positions, issuing his challenge at first in a speech
given in on February 9, 1950 in Wheeling West Virginia. Clearly, the
salient assumption in McCarthy’s mind was that the preliminary investigations
had somehow been stalled, and the work which had commenced with great
earnestness had at some point been broken off and left incomplete. It is
equally clear that, for whatever reason, certain people in the State Department
and other agencies of the government didn’t want the issue of Communists
working in the government reopened in public fora and, from the moment that
McCarthy began speaking out, launched efforts to discredit his claims.
For the next several years a titanic battle waged over security and espionage
in the Congress, the courts, and the media. During these conflicts “tail
gunner Joe” won some and lost some, but in the end was forced to retire from
the field of battle in disgrace. For several subsequent decades the moral
credibility of Joseph McCarthy was generally ranked on a par with the divines
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the aftermath of the Salem witch trials.
However during these same
decades, new archives and records have been made available to researchers such
as Evans, frequently containing evidence which have compromised the exculpatory
claims of McCarthy’s opponents. Foremost among these are the Venonadocuments. These are deciphered
messages from the correspondence between Soviet intelligence headquarters
(predecessor agencies of the KGB) and its operatives. Actually cracked
early in the cold war, this data could not be released during the “McCarthy
era” for the same reason that the Enigma machine
decodes could not be revealed until the Axis powers were defeated. The
personae mentioned in Venona bear a damning
resemblance, not just to such celebrated Soviet assets as Alger Hiss and Robert
Oppenheimer, but to many lesser targets of McCarthy’s investigations.
Apart from, and corroborating Venona, were piles
of documents made available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in
1991. Last but not least were the dribs and drabs of documentary evidence
released by the FBI and other alphabet agencies of the American government
after their various statutory periods of sequestration had expired.
From these sources and others (i.e., retrospective witnesses and confessions) a
very different image of the “McCarthy era” has emerged, and it is from these
that Evans has assembled the most through vindication to date of the much
maligned senator.
Manufacturing “McCarthyism”
At
the beginning of the 1950s the Democratic party was still in control of
Congress, and in response to the allegations which McCarthy had been making
since the Wheeling speech, a select sub-committee of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee was empaneled to examine the possibility of security risks
lurking in government employ. The chair of this sub-committee was Millard
Tydings (Dem-Maryland) who from the outset of the proceedings assumed an
adversarial stance towards McCarthy and his claims. Rather than pursuing
the question of whether there were in fact Communists and Soviet infiltrators
embedded within the State Department and related agencies, Tydings focused on
McCarthy himself, faulting him for reopening cases which had already been
disposed of by previous committees.
Tyding’s
overall strategy was to portray McCarthy as a hothead and a dissembling
researcher who had failed to turn up any new evidence since the previous
investigation of security risks at State. That previous
investigation, conducted in the late 40s, had managed to generate a list
of persons considered security risks, called the “Lee list” after the clerk
responsible for assembling eighty or so cases. This was a masked
compilation of data in which the persons described were designated by numbers
rather than names, preserving their privacy. Tyding’s initial strategy
was to trivialize McCarthy’s claims by insinuating no new research had actually
been added to the Lee list by McCarthy and his staff. Since names were
not mentioned at the outset, identifying how many security risks McCarthy had uncovered,
rather than who they are, became the focus of inquiry. This derailed the
hearing into a ludicrous debate on the number of people under investigation,
with Tydings and his allies focusing exclusively on the number (was it 57 or 81
or 108, or did it keep changing?) rather than the substance, of the
charges. All of this, of course, for the purpose of making McCarthy look
like a fool who couldn’t even keep the accurate number of cases straight in his
head. The possibility that there were still active Communist cells
operating in government employ took a back seat to debates over McCarthy’s
competence and character.
As
bad as such misdirection might be, as Mr. Evans reveals, there was worse to
come. Today our politically correct language virtually equates
“McCarthyism” with slander. Yet Senator McCarthy’s initial intention was
to preserve the anonymity of his cases to avoid any stigma being attached to
possibly (though unlikely) innocent individuals. However, with the
validity of McCarthy’s research in question, Senator Tydings pressed him to
reveal the identities behind the cases, presumably in order find out if new and
ongoing security risks had been uncovered, or if McCarthy was just trying to
ride to glory on the back of the now stale Lee list. Evans, with the
benefit of historical retrospect, informs us that McCarthy had indeed uncovered
a significant number of new cases and data, and furthermore that many persons
initially placed on the Lee list were still in government service. However,
at that time, McCarty was under tremendous pressure from Tydings, and consented
to release the names at the outset of the investigation, proving that there
were indeed real persons connected with the suspicious, but hitherto anonymous,
case histories. Thus McCarthy evaded the ridicule of conducting a snark
hunt only by putting his investigation in danger of being called a witch hunt.
Hence, as Evans painfully
demonstrates, the cruel Inspector-Javert-like persecution which we wrongly
denominate “McCarthyism” was initiated by this unmaking of identities upon the
insistence of Tydings and his allies on the sub-committee. Indeed,
if our language accurately memorialized historical realities, we would be
calling this kind of hounding “Tydings-ism”! The procedure adopted by
Tydings was that of slandering the innocent (McCarthy himself) or one might say
“McCarthying” (here the term is apt!) his opponent. However in terms of
outcomes, this Tydings-ism, rather than convicting the innocent, protected the
guilty. Even unmasked, the targets of McCarthy’s accusations were
generally able to deny the charges, either through skillful evasion or invoking
the Fifth amendment clause prohibiting self-incrimination. In the
meanwhile many of them continued to work in their government positions.
In hindsight, theVenona transcripts and
other corroborating evidence indicates that many, if not most, of these were
Soviet agents. To maintain that no innocents were convicted at the time
is not to say that, as a result of the miscarried proceedings, great and
incalculable harm was not done to many innocents, however indirectly.
Truman or Truth?
Hence Tydings and his allies
nearly succeeded in obscuring the actual security issues involved, deflecting
the investigation with procedural, technical, and ad hominim material which resulted in a committee
report which largely exculpated the targets of McCarthy’s investigations.
Evans notes that this report (and others of a similar nature) was written by a
then-anonymous staffer at the behest of Tydings, and its unequivocal findings
did not accurately reflect the give-and-take of the bipartisan sub-committee.
So ended the first “round” in the McCarthy era battles. Tydings was soon
to get his comeuppance when he lost a bid for reelection to his Maryland
seat. Yet during the process of the Senate investigation a broad range of
institutional actors had been brought into play, ostensibly to cooperate with,
but more often to hinder, McCarthy’s investigations. These included
Truman’s White House and the State Department. The FBI, then under J.
Edgar Hoover, was savvy to the truth of McCarthy’s claim that espionage within
the government had managed to survive the investigations which had generated
the Lee list a few years earlier. However the FBI was largely sidelined
due to its subordination within the executive branch teamed with an often
adversarial legislative branch.
Indeed,
with so many (and such opaque!) agencies, actors, cases and claims involved,
the McCarthy era is difficult to resolve into a simple narrative. Thus
the unbiased but superficial observer of the era is likely to turn away, citing
the tangle as an excuse for moral indecision. However Evans copes with
the complexity by taking up each cluster of actions, organizations, individuals
and outcomes separately, weaving each thread into a loose chronological
order. It is the task of the reader to keep this overall chronology in
mind, as each strand of narrative weaves into and reinforces the other.
The end result is a unity and a vindication. Not necessarily a
vindication of McCarthy the man so much as of the essential rightness of his
cause.
Many of the narrative strands
which Evans picks up for the edification of today’s reader concern well
recognized institutions and personalities of the WWII and cold war eras which
have since dropped below the horizon of public recollection. Outstanding
in this regard was the notorious Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR) and its
associated journal Amerasia. both of
which operated as poorly disguised Communist fronts. This is one of the
major strands woven back and forth within the chronological framework of Blacklisted by History, in such a way as to illustrate
the intimate connection between blatant Communist propaganda and the
manipulation of American foreign policy during the 1940s. The often cited
(by Evans) Amerasia case is a good
example of the kind of evidence which should have been common knowledge among
McCarthy’s contemporaries, as opposed to the kind of evidence (like Venona) which we are only privy to in historical
retrospect. Thus, while we are on firmer grounds today than ever before
in validating McCarthy’s claims, those claims ought not to have initially
outraged his contemporaries since they were made against the background of, and
links to, cases of betrayal and infiltration which had already received public
censure. Rather, any skeptical reception of McCarthy’s claims about
ongoing espionage and sedition within the government had less to do with the
plausibility of the cases, than with obstruction by gate-keepers who both
withheld information from the investigations and harbored their targets from
any severe sanctions.
This
obstruction took a number of forms during the period of the Tydings
investigation. First of all, under Truman, a doctrine of executive
privilege had been promulgated, which placed severe restrictions on the ability
of Congress to subpoena documents from executive departments without the
authorization of the President. For those of us who interpret the
Constitution as a document establishing the supremacy of the Congress, this
seems like an odd practice. None the less, under ongoing conditions of
war (both cold and hot) the American people and Congress itself have long
acquiesced to executive prerogatives which seem contrary to constitutional
principles. In this instance, as detailed by Evans, background dossiers on
the subjects of McCarthy’s investigations were either embargoed or
delayed by the State Department, which pleaded the necessity of authorization
by the Truman White House, a Democratic administration which was in no rush to
grant any such authorization.
Another
way in which the Truman administration ran interference to McCarthy, albeit in
place prior to the Tydings hearings, was through the institution of an in-house
loyalty system which seemed to obviate the necessity of any outside audit of
executive personnel. As Evans documents, both the Congressional
interviews with suspect officials and, presumably, the in-house loyalty system,
were based on the honor system. A denial that one were a subversive
or the agent of a foreign power was always taken at face value by Tydings, the
majority report, and the Truman administration itself.
McCarthy agonistes
None
the less, in spite of vigorous opposition on the part of a Democratic
establishment, McCarthy was able to raise public awareness of the espionage threat.
One by one, the more egregious cases on McCarthy’s list were exposed and turned
out of the government. Of course, the anti-communist momentum in Congress
and the country wasn’t an exclusive result of McCarthy’s efforts. Alger
Hiss, the biggest fish in the barrel, had been brought down by the testimony of
Whittaker Chambers with the support of a young Senator from California, Richard
Nixon. In those days Nixon was still a hero, and his time of demonization
was still far in the future, but McCarthy’s nemesis was much closer at
hand. Initially McCarthy benefited from the common front among
Republicans, then operating as a minority. Thus even future enemies such
as liberal Republican senator H. Cabot Lodge were in momentary alliance with McCarthy
during the Tydings period.
This
was all to change when the Democrats were swept out of power in 1953.
With the 83rd Congress, the Republicans were in the (what would seem) enviable
position of having captured the Presidency as well as both branches of Congress.
Yet with hindsight the historically informed know that this will be McCarthy’s
apogee, and his doom is near, irrespective of our sympathies and whether we
focus on the hubris of the man or the nemesis of his enemies. Yet, while
Evans prepares us for this fall from grace by titling one of his chapters “The
Perils of Power” it would seem that McCarthy handled the temptations of power
about as well as anyone could. It was during this time that the junior
Senator from Wisconsin, still a relative rookie, got his chance to chair the
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). Obviously this was a
prize bully pulpit, apart from any implication that the man who filled it was a
bully. Again, Evans informs us that our current state of illumination has
benefited from the unsealing of the Senate’s own records, which for fifty years
had shielded confidential and security-related testimony. Out of this
mass of data Evans has extracted a picture of McCarthy completely at variance
with the prejudicial stereotype. Unchained and in charge of his own
subcommittee, McCarthy was, if not quite a perfect gentleman, “politic” in the
mannered sense of the word. More fundamentally, due process and
confidentiality seem to have been upheld in the PSI hearings. As Evans explains
it,
Another salient rule of the
McCarthy hearings was the rule that no one should be named as a Communist or a
pro-Communist or subversive unless the person named was given notice and
opportunity to respond directly–though there were exceptions when another
witness would do such naming on an impromptu basis. McCarthy repeatedly
admonished people testifying not to use the names of those they were accusing
until these conditions could be met with. One result of this procedure
was a series of face-to-face encounters in which accusers and accused were
brought together in dramatic fashion. Blacklisted by History p.
457
Apart
from the success or otherwise of the PSI at the start Eisenhower era, at this
juncture the bitter divisions between ideological and establishment Republicans
were starting to manifest themselves publicly. In part this was a
reaction to McCarthy’s activities, and would soon would lead to dire
complications for the crusading senator. Furthermore, a dedicated
anti-McCarthy cabal was growing in numbers and sophistication, with the
senatorial cudgel taken up by the newly elected Benton of New York after
the defeat of Tydings. With the Democratic recapture of the 84th
Congress, Benton was able to launch his own counter-investigation of
McCarthy. This counter-investigation did not restrict itself to the
refutation of anti-communist claims, but began to burrow deeply into McCarthy’s
private affairs and character. Brick by defaming brick, the towering
mythology of “McCarthyism” was being patiently constructed by the enemies of
McCarthy.
Diverging legends of
demonization and sanctification
A
surprising plus for McCarthy, albeit one which failed to save him in the long
run, was his capacity for genuine bipartisanship. As an anti-Communist first
and a Republican second, he welcomed allies wherever they could be found, and
find them he did. There is nothing more shocking to modern political
sensibilities than to discover that the Kennedys, Democrats to the core, were
ardent supporters of tail gunner Joe in his heyday. Undoubtedly, today’s
identity-obsessed left would dismiss this as no more than Irishmen scratching
each others backs. Yet, in those days there were plenty of Irishmen
in politics, but not so many political philosophers, let alone potential
martyrs. There appears to have been some zealous affinity at work here,
especially between McCarthy and the solidly anti-Communist Robert F. Kennedy.
To
Evans’ credit, the Kennedy connection isn’t used as a magical vindication of
McCarthy. Tail gunner Joe’s reputation must stand or fall on the basis of
whether his investigations were honest and beneficial to the republic, not on
the borrowed glamor of charismatic associations. Regrettably, any
excursion into Kennedy lore entails a certain amount of tabloid voyeurism, but
Evans keeps this to the minimum, focusing on the unavoidable intra-staff
jealousies which played a subsidiary role in derailing McCarthy’s
career. More importantly, the point in history when McCarthy-saffer
RFK was striving (unsuccessfully) to be McCarthy’s right-hand man, was still an
age of aspiring ideologists. Later, as America ripened into an age of
propaganda, principles would become less important than personalities, and a
steamy mysticism would envelop chosen political bloodlines. Evans draws
our attention the disturbing power of this myth-making, which took as its
substance two zealous co-workers in the garden of justice, Robert Kennedy and
Joe McCarthy, molding them into opposing icons of good and evil.
To
schematize a story which Evans tells in satisfying detail, the political
chessboard as it was arrayed at the onset of the Eisenhower era was roughly as
follows,
Pro-McCarthy: old
right Republicans (Taft etc.), the Kennedys and a few other anti-communist
Democrats, some regional press, Hoover’s FBI, conservative groups
Anti-McCarthy: liberal
Republicans (H. Cabot Lodge etc.), most Democrats, most Ike staffers, State
Department, other bureaus of the federal government, national press (New York Times, etc.), left wing press and
organizations
As
the battle lines were drawn with increasing precision, the tendency was for
individuals and groups to defect from the pro-McCarthy camp, and for previously
uncommitted groups to opt in favor of the anti-McCarthy front. Notably,
certain persons connected to the armed services, which at the beginning were
not affected by McCarthy’s crusade, became increasingly critical of him as his
investigation broadened into areas the military considered its own.
McCarthy’s “Waterloo”
Regarding
his taking on of the Army, there might be some, however sympathetic, who would
claim McCarthy’s crusade went a bridge too far. Yet as Evans points out
“Army-McCarthy” taken as terms of opposition, is a misnomer. In the wake
of security concerns being brought to the attention of McCarthy’s committee, he
authorized an investigation of the huge Signal Corps facility at Monmouth
NJ. Initially things went smoothly in cooperation with on-site Army
personnel, who were generally enthusiastic about the senator’s support of their
own internal security investigations. However McCarthy
quickly ran afoul of a supervening bureaucratic apparatus charged with
monitoring loyalty within Monmouth and other facilities. As soon as the
commandant of the Monmouth facility was blackballed for cooperating with
McCarthy, the commander of the next base under investigation suddenly became
uncommunicative. Apparently some network operating within the Eisenhower
administration was running interference. The next obvious step
would have been to ferret out and identify the higher ups who were shielding
the Monmouth moles. This was never done. Not, to be sure, for want
of trying on McCarthy’s part.
A number of factors
contributed to this inability. Foremost among these was the penchant of
his enemies for countering investigations by McCarthy
with investigations of McCarthy
and/or his staff. Evans enumerates a minimum of five separate instances
where hostile inquiries were instituted against McCarthy 1) the Ad hominum attacks which diverted the Tydings
probe, 2) hearings by Benton (pinch-hitting as chief nemesis
post-Tydings) on allegations that McCarthy’s allies had influenced Tydings’
electoral defeat, esp. concerning one particular libelous image (what we would
today call a “meme”) , 3) a spin-off of the same hearing which made a lengthy
foray into McCarthy’s personal finances, 4) the Army-McCarthy hearings, 5)
hearings by Sen. Watson (R. Utah) on McCarthy’s misconduct on 47 counts which
resulted in censure on 2 counts.
Of these,
the most formidable sounding are the Army-McCarthy hearings. However as
Evans tells the tale, it smacks of harassment (by unknown somebodies) of
McCarthy’s staff. G. David Schine, a youthful staffer, was suddenly
called up for military service. This sounds cruel by the sensibilities of
any era post-Vietnam, but even by the compulsory standards of that time
it was a fishy move. People working in sensitive positions (like
congressional security investigations) were frequently granted draft deferments.
Furthermore, as the skeptical Evans is quick to point out, nefarious bigwigs
such as the youthful Alger Hiss had been exempted from conscription during
WWII, enabling them to do their country (dis-) service in other fields.
Thus the staffer’s drafting smacked of a gambit in which a McCarthy pawn was
being put in jeopardy in order to exert pressure on the senator and his
investigation. Unfortunately another staffer (Roy Cohn) took the bait and
began pestering the Army on behalf of his erstwhile colleague, whether for
deferral or promotion or either. This was portrayed as political
interference with on-duty military personnel. It was this petty
and misdirecting affair which formed the basis of the Army-McCarthy hearings,
and which managed to distract and irritate a senator in mid-investigation, a
veteran himself, who had initially tried to enter into an alliance with the
security hawks of the armed forces. Of necessity, Evans goes into
the matter in great detail, but this becomes less a history of the cold war
than a history of the degeneration of policy debate into tabloid journalism.
The fifth column and the fourth
estate
Although
inconclusive, the Army investigation served McCarthy’s foes well, forcing him
on the defensive and evoking his ire, consequently viewed as
intemperance. The same distortion and sensationalism which hounded
McCarthy and his staff were also impeding his own attempts at rooting out
Communist agents in the military and the government. Evans covers all the
highlights of the various investigations, not just those of the PSI but those
in which McCarthy himself was the target. More importantly, he explores
the context within which famous testimonies were made, context without which
excerpted highlights serve only to confuse and malign.
The highlights (which
frequently became misleading headlines) analyzed in Evans’ volume are too
numerous to mention within the space of a short review, but a single instance
should suffice. If any one phrase from the “McCarthy era” has survived in
the fading American mind, it would surely be Army prosecutor Joseph
Welch’s famous j’accuse “…sir, have you no
decency!” This was uttered in reference to the supposed victimization of
the Army counselor’s understudy, Frederick G. Fisher Jr.. The indecency
in question was McCarthy’s alleged outing of Fisher’s association with a
Communist front organization, on the grounds of which the assistant counselor
was removed from the prosecuting team. Whether or not this was a
career-ender for the young attorney, it was Joe Welch, not Joe McCarthy, who
first brought Fisher’s fellow-traveling to the attention of the public.
Evans, always scrupulous in documenting the relevant paper-trails, in this case
provides a photocopy from an actual paper. The skeptical reader can find
the clipping from the New York Times story
of April 16, 1954 reproduced on page 568 of Evans’ amply referenced tome.
The relevant passage reads,
Mr.
[Joseph N.] Welch today confirmed reports that he had relieved from duty his
original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher Jr. of his own Boston law
office, because of admittted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild,
which has been listed by Herbert Brownell Jr. the Attorney-General, as a
Communist-font organization. (ibid. p. 568)
By
the date of the article it would seem that the actual outing of Fisher took
place six weeks prior to the famously “indecent” remarks of McCarthy at the
Army hearings. None the less, it is the latter exchange which lingers in
public memory. As Evans remarks elsewhere, “…in political Washington,
then as now, reality often ran second to perception.”
In
similar fashion Evans proceeds to deconstruct the entire litany of incidents
used to build the edifice of the anti-McCarthy legend. Case by
painstaking case he is able to apply new or neglected evidence in support of
McCarthy’s exoneration. Retrospectively, McCarthy can be saved, because
Evans, and we who read his and similar works have what McCarthy’s
contemporaries lacked, time and perspective. However in the rapid flow of
simultaneous events it was indeed perception, not reality, which won the race,
with the Senate’s motion to censure McCarthy being his final lap around the
political track. The censure proceedings were themselves characterized by
a hysterical zeal similar to that which had been used in false
characterizations of McCarthy himself. Thus the Republican dominated
Senate, filled with enemies and fickle friends on both sides of the aisle,
allowed itself to be buffaloed into voting two counts of censure. That
was one out of 46 ad-hock charges submitted by an anti-McCarthy interest group,
plus one for good measure on account of nasty remarks by McCarthy during the
proceedings. After all, the Senate had to look like it was doing something
about the McCarthy “problem.”
Scapegoat and Savior
After
the censure McCarthy was shunned, his effective career ended. He died, as
they say, a “broken man” at the ripe age of 48, disheartened but still in
harness. After a mid-term election William Proxmire (Dem-Wisc.) a
veritable photographic negative of everything Joe McCarthy ever thought or did,
gained his seat in the senate. It might be said that if ever someone had
lived in vain, it was old “tail gunner Joe.” Of course, that is precisely
what the authors of the mainstream narrative want you to think. However
the reality is far more complex, and it is gradually being articulated by
dissenting voices, among whom M. Stanford Evans is thus far the most readable and
convincing.
Perhaps you, having read my
summary article, find yourself intrigued with this fallen hero of
anti-Communism, or conversely, it may be that you cannot shake the impression
that Joseph McCarthy was a moral monster. In either case, I urge you to
fortify your knowledge by obtaining and reading Blacklisted by History: the untold story of Senator Joe McCarthy.
I think you will find the late Evans a safe and trustworthy guide into the
underworld of cold war history and the McCarthy era, and not only because the
book is voluminous and packed with footnotes and hints for further
research. I trust this book because it is the fruit of a lifetime of
investigation into the invisible war between freedom and its cruelest
enemies. M. Stanford Evans ran the gauntlet of 20th century scholarship
and journalism, scion of the heartland (Texas) yet Ivy league grad (Yale), conservative
activist and journalist, he knew his sources and their backgrounds with the
immediacy of an insider who was a political outsider. Most importantly,
the theme of his work is not trivial.
It is
not trivial because, as literary anthropologist Rene Girard has taught us, all
regimes are built on the bones of scapegoats. In many ways, the nuances
and taboos of American politics are dependent on a negative evaluation of the
McCarthy era. Now that, for better or worse, the Trump administration
shows signs of violating certain of those taboos, it is important that we
reexamine the origin of those taboos in the past. This is not a matter of
whether one approves or despises the present administration, it is simply that
the course of events are forcing us to ask questions which were long left
dormant.
One
very non-trivial issue concerns how the doctrine of separation of powers should
affect the transmission of information within the government. A study of
the McCarthy era reveals that the present virtually hermetic seal between the
executive and legislative branches is neither an artifact of the constitution,
nor a holdover from wartime secrecy, nor even a promulgation of the security
state and its notorious “three letter agencies.” Surprisingly, it turns out
to have much more to do with “gag orders” instituted by the New Deal
administrations to obstruct prying by the Dies and McCarthy investigations into
security matters. Even more surprisingly, this informational firewall
between the branches was continued and reinforced by the Eisenhower
administration, and for much of the same reasons. You don’t believe
me? Read Evans.
Which leads us to the final
consideration, did McCarthy actually live in vain? Of course not, and
Evans devotes the postscript of Blacklisted by History to
an enumeration of our ingrate inheritance from tail gunner Joe, that
alleged ogre. Without belittling the long list of secret and not-so
secret agents who were turned out of their top-secret clearances, it seems to
me that the salvation of much of Asia is the most relevant legacy which we can
celebrate today. Imagine a world without a Taiwan or a South Korea.
True, it may come about in the near future, but it was scheduled to come about
in the 1950s. I don’t refer to the very understandable cupidity of a Mao
or a Stalin, but of the ideologues embedded in the IPR and Amerasia who had the power, at a perilous moment
in history, to turn off the spigot of American support. Admittedly,
McCarthy was not alone in preventing this, but he was part of the essential
follow up. You don’t believe me? Again, read Evans.
In
conclusion, I must apologize for comparing a profane (although gentlemanly)
work to Holy Writ. Allow me to explain that there is an extenuating
circumstance, apart from merely seconding the redoubtable Miss Coulter’s
opinion. Evans concludes with the Biblical analogy of Samson bringing
down the temple of the Philistines on his own head, and likewise the untamed
McCarthy, whatever his subsequent reputation, was effective in causing a great
deal of collateral damage among the enemies of freedom. It is an analogy
drawn, appropriately, from the Book of Judges. At last in Evans’ book we
may have a valid judgement of McCarthy’s work, and of blood which cries out from
the ground, not just for vindication but for succession and continuation.
Mark
Sunwall [send
him email] studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and
now teaches Rhetoric and Social Science at the University of Hyogo. He is an
Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
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