The first half of the review of this book discusses the early days of McCarthy’s attacks on communists in the U.S. government beginning with a speech in 1950 to a Wheeling West Virginia women’s club when he announced he was holding a list of communists or suspected communists in the State Department. This part will talk about the expansion of his attacks and the gathering of forces that eventually tore him down. I’ve suggested that anyone reading this book should also read “Blacklisted by History,” which presents strong defenses of McCarthy and his actions.
The rebuff by his colleagues did not deter McCarthy, and he continued his attacks on powerful people. He called Secretary of State Dean Acheson the “…great Red Dean.” He declared Truman was a drunkard, and that “The son of a bitch should be impeached,” after Truman dismissed General Douglas MacArthur. Truman commented after McCarthy’s attack on General Marshall, “The man who made that attack isn’t fit to shine General Marshall’s shoes.” Edward R. Murrow said that he hadn’t always agreed with Truman, but said “…we are obliged to applaud his choice of shoeshine boys.”
McCarthy would announce on television that presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and five of his key advisors were supporters of communism. He broadened his attack by declaring, “…those who wear the label Democrat wear it with the stain of a historic betrayal.” He later angered Eisenhower with his lengthy speech attacking the Army. Eisenhower told his brother Milton, “I am not going to get into a pissing contest with that skunk.” Richard Nixon, who had gained fame interrogating suspected communists as a member of HUAC, said “When you go out and shoot rats you have to shoot straight…you might hit someone else who is trying to shoot rats too.”
There were other people not in positions of power that McCarty attacked, and those attacks are the ones that I criticize. He browbeat a Voice of America official Reed Harris mercilessly in a televised hearing, and the live coverage ended before Harris could offer a response to the allegations made against him. McCarthy sought coverage from television and the printed media, and the media aided and abetted him. He eventually made the mistake of taking on Edward R. Murrow who had warned against the tactics being used by politicians to gain publicity from the Red Scare. Murrow aired a program about McCarthy that was carefully edited from fifteen thousand feet of film to give the most negative impression possible. Other news commentators criticized the program as being wildly biased despite the fact that Murrow ended the show by saying he wasn’t criticizing just McCarthy but the other politicians who were tolerating his excesses. McCarthy began making negative comments about Murrow, apparently failing to remember the political adage, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” which could be expanded to include, “…or has a daily radio show.” The book provides interesting biographical information about Murrow.
The book agrees that McCarthy’s downfall was his attack on the Army. What is most surprising about the tawdry details is that many of his allegations and the hearings that resulted seem to me to be based on trivial matters that deserved little attention. “The most sensational charge in the thirty-four page indictment was that McCarthy and his top aide Roy Cohn had threatened to ‘wreck the Army’ in an attempt to get special treatment for Pvt. G. David Schine, Cohn’s close friend and erstwhile colleague on the McCarthy committee staff.” This despite the fact McCarthy had written Secretary of the Army Stevens “…a letter that his committee had no further interest in Private Schine and that he hoped Private Schine would be treated the same as other soldiers.” Of course that ignores the off-color jokes being circulated about the relationship between Cohn and Schine with the oft-repeated “Bedfellows make strange politics.” (Progressives apparently didn’t accept homosexuality in the McCarthy era.) Oddly, only McCarthy was accused of character assassination. The author writes that someone could or should have asked, “What are we all doing here? Where is the threat to the Republic? But no one raised such questions. Neither committee members nor television broadcasters were willing to look beyond the petty trivia on which the attention of the committee, the press, and the country had focused.”
There is an interesting mention that Cohn had competed with Robert Kennedy to be McCarthy’s lead assistant. Joe Kennedy had tried to get Robert the position of chief counsel, but Robert had too little experience for the position.
The famous episode involving Fred Fisher, Jr. is described in detail. Fisher was on the staff of Joe Welsh, who would be a chief interrogator of McCarthy and Cohn during the hearings. Fisher had joined the National Lawyers Guild, and the Guild was “…fervently left-wing…” He later worked with a man who was allegedly a member of the Communist party to help establish a new chapter of the Guild. Fisher revealed all of this to Welsh when asked whether there was anything in his past that McCarthy could take advantage of. Welsh preempted McCarthy by giving the New York Times the information about Fisher and announcing that he had been dropped from his staff. The information was printed in an article published six weeks before the hearings began. The hearings were given gavel to gavel coverage by the ABC and DuMont networks. There were 45 million people watching.
The McCarthy-Army hearings gained nationwide interest not because of the content or conduct, but because of the political theatre on live television. The New York Times reported early on that McCarthy started out on top not because of his aggressiveness but because of the “bone headedness” of his adversaries. President Eisenhower said “This McCarthy-Army argument and its reporting are close to disgusting. It saddens me that I must feel ashamed for the United States Senate.” Vice President Richard Nixon said “The quicker the hearings can be concluded and public attention devoted to more important subjects, the better it will be for the country. Roy Cohn, one of the targets of the hearing, said that they “…were less a search for truth than a gigantic personality play.” The book does follow the pattern of giving interesting background on the main characters, such as Joseph Welch, who would become McCarthy’s chief adversary. Welch had been asked to take the position by none other than Tom Dewey, the Republican presidential candidate who had failed to unseat Harry Truman.
Roy Cohn and Joe Welch made a secret agreement to avoid issues. Cohn agreed not to air allegations against Fred Fisher and his membership in the National Lawyers Guild and Welch agreed not to delve into the way Cohn used appointments to West Point to avoid the draft. However, McCarthy brought up the Fred Fisher issue and allowed Welch to launch into the theatrics that would become the dominant memory if the hearings. Welch had removed Fisher from work on the committee, and had given that information to the New York Times weeks before the hearings. However, when McCarthy brought up Fisher’s name, Welch launched into his best play acting to denounce how McCarthy had revealed a secret that would ruin Fisher’s life. His lines included the famous, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Welch would eventually break down into tears, and the galley erupted into prolonged ovation. As Welch was leaving the hearing room with tears still streaming done his face he asked another lawyer, “Well, how did it go?”
The hearings, which caused McCarthy’s popularity to drop from around 50 percent to the mid-30s, consumed 36 days spread over two months. McCarthy would never recover, and the Senate eventually gained the courage to take him on in hearings to censure him. The vote was 67 to 22 to “condemn” him rather than to “censure” him. Regardless, McCarthy’s political clout never recovered. He also was reported to be “…putting away a quart of whiskey a day.” He died in 1957, and the cause of death was officially acute hepatitis.
The last chapter of the book explores the role of television in the Vietnam War and protests against that war, Watergate, 9/11, what the book calls “…the so-called war on terror,” and the Iraqi War. The author is seldom complimentary about the manner in which such events were covered. Ominously, he points out that despite the rise of the internet 70 percent of Americans said their primary source of news was television in 2004.
I intend to post a companion blog to discuss the vast differences between the way this book and “Blackmailed by History” tells the Joe McCarthy story. I also intend to post a definition of the term “McCarthyism” on the expressions link.