January 27, 2008 Essay

In the Heart of the Heart of Conspiracy By DAVID OSHINSKY

No American politician of the 20th century is more reviled by historians and opinion makers than Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican whose 1950s anti-Communist crusade is synonymous with witch-hunting and repression. Actually, no politician even comes close. Herbert Hoover? True, the Great Depression occurred on his watch, goes the current wisdom, but Hoover can’t be blamed for a global catastrophe, and his economic programs paved the way for needed reforms. Richard Nixon? True, the Watergate scandal justified his resignation, but Nixon was a master statesman, we are reminded, whose initiatives produced détente with the Russians and an open door to China. For McCarthy, there’s been no such balancing act. Americans have learned to view him as the nation’s most dangerous modern demagogue. Pick up a dictionary and you’ll find the word “McCarthyism” defined as “the practice of publicizing accusations with insufficient regard to evidence” and “the use of unfair investigatory methods to suppress opposition.” To be labeled a McCarthyite is akin to being called a liar or a fraud. His loudest current admirer is Ann Coulter, a fact, I suspect, that even the senator would have found unsettling. My own biography of McCarthy was published in 1983. What most surprised me was the warm reception it got from hard-nosed conservatives like Pat Buchanan, who considered the book more balanced than what had come before. My final judgments on the senator did acknowledge his role in highlighting a number of security problems in the federal government, something previous writers had been reluctant to do. But I also described him as a serial slanderer who poisoned political debate, weakened government morale and made America look ridiculous in the eyes of the world. A few years ago, on assignment for this newspaper, I attended a memorial service for McCarthy at his grave site in Appleton, Wis. It’s an annual event, sponsored by a local group that hopes to turn the senator’s birthday into a national holiday and put his likeness on a postage stamp. Most of the celebrants were elderly, and several belonged to the far-right John Birch Society. “There aren’t a lot of us still around,” an 87-year-old McCarthy supporter told me. “When we die, who’ll be left to tell the truth about Joe?” He needn’t have worried. A full-throated defense of the senator is now in the bookstores. Written by M. Stanton Evans, a conservative journalist whose roots stretch back to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, it carries a title, “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies” (Crown Forum, $29.95), that well explains its thesis. Though a handful of other pro-McCarthy books have appeared over the years — the most recent being Arthur Herman’s “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life

and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator” — none created much interest among conservatives. But “Blacklisted by History” is drawing significant attention on the political right, where the reviews have ranged from gushing (The Weekly Standard) to scathing (National Review). If nothing else, Evans has forced his movement friends to look again at McCarthy. For conservatives, the crazy uncle has finally left the attic. Part of Evans’s appeal is his boast to have unmasked the biases and distortions of previous McCarthy critics, this author included. He begins by describing a massive Russian spy operation in the United States, drawing his evidence from K.G.B. files as well as portions of the Venona project, a top-secret operation that traced Soviet intelligence traffic during World War II. Evans leaves the impression that he has uncovered fresh material, suspiciously overlooked until now. In fact, numerous scholars have used these documents to craft a thorough portrait of Communist espionage in Washington, though most believe that the worst of it was over by the late 1940s, when the F.B.I. began a crackdown on spying and a federal security program was put in place. If anything, they say, this evidence serves to reinforce the standard portrait of McCarthy as a bit player in the battle against Communist subversion, a latecomer who turned a vital crusade into a political mud bath. Evans disagrees, claiming that the Communist problem was very much alive in 1950, when the senator first made his charges of treason in high places. He judges McCarthy to be a skilled appraiser of loyalty and disloyalty and blames his errors, as well as those of his top aide, Roy Cohn, on “their proclivities for multitasking, and the fact that they carried so much information in their heads.” (Those old enough to remember this duo will find the imagery amusing.) Most important, Evans buys into the heart of the McCarthy conspiracy — the belief that leftist elements in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations created a foreign policy to advance the spread of world Communism. How else could one explain the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe or the fall of Chiang Kai-shek to the army of Mao Zedong? “Who lost China?” propelled McCarthy to the national stage. Along the way, he described General George C. Marshall, the nation’s most respected military commander, as a Communist dupe; urged Secretary of State Dean Acheson to seek asylum in the Soviet Union; purposely confused the names of the convicted perjurer and likely Soviet spy Alger Hiss and the 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (“Alger — I mean Adlai”); and called Harry Truman a “son of a bitch” who made his key decisions in the midnight darkness while drunk on bourbon. McCarthy blamed the fall of China on “a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” Evans not only endorses this conspiracy but actually expands it to include “the Eastern, internationalist faction” of the Republican Party, “with ties to Wall Street, large corporations, big Eastern media outlets and Ivy League establishment.” To Evans, the conspiracy passed

from president to president — from Roosevelt and Truman to Eisenhower and even Nixon, a former McCarthyite, who “would fall off the teeter-totter, landing with Henry Kissinger in Red China, thereafter pushing on into the mists of détente with Moscow.” This remarkable fantasy, playing upon the deepest fears of right-wing Republicans, ignores the actual United States foreign policy that gave billions of dollars in aid to Chiang, fought a brutal war in Korea against two Communist nations, propped up an anti-Communist regime in Vietnam at the cost of 58,000 American lives and refused for three decades to recognize the government of Mao. Most historians today view the “loss” of China for what it was: a futile American attempt to aid a corrupt and unpopular regime. And most see Truman — the key bogeyman of the McCarthyites — as a tough anti-Communist who protected constitutional liberties at home and American interests abroad. As McCarthy raged on, the perils of supporting him became apparent to all but his most rabid admirers. In 1954, Whittaker Chambers, a revered figure in conservative circles, expressed his concerns in a prophetic letter to William F. Buckley Jr. “None of us are his enemies,” Chambers wrote, “but all of us ... have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions ... will lead him and us into trouble. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will ... discredit the whole antiCommunist effort for a long while to come.” Fifty years have passed since the senator died of liver failure, at age 48. The fiercely negative judgments of those who lived through the McCarthy era are widely accepted today for good reason: they ring true. These judgments tell a cautionary tale, showing how a nation’s legitimate concern for security in uncertain times can be turned into something partisan, repressive and cruel. McCarthy will continue to resonate on the fringes of the body politic because the conspiracy he championed — the disloyalty of powerful elites — goes back to the founding of our country and beyond. Redeem him? I can best respond by quoting the man himself, on another issue, near the end of his career. “This,” muttered the flummoxed McCarthy as the Senate moved to condemn his behavior, “is the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of.” David Oshinsky, who holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas, is the author of “A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.”

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