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Of myth and reality
Joseph R. McCarthy and
The Historians
Stephen J. Sniegoski
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I
FOROVER THREE decades Joseph R. McCarthy has been a central figure in liberal
demonology. His name has become part
of common parlance to mean the practice
of making baseless accusations and engaging in the character assassination of innocent victims. According to the liberal McCarthy myth, his alleged witch hunts for
Communists ruined the lives of countless
upstanding Americans. His antics paralyzed the federal government and caused
the American people to live in fear. As
Fred J. Cook writes in The Nightmare
Decade: The Life and Times o f Senator Joe
McCarthy, “In this atmosphere, as in the
time of Robespierre, any accusation was
tantamount to conviction and brought a
thumbs-down vote from the Madame
Defarges eager to guillotine reputations.”’
Furthermore, according to the antiMcCarthy legend, McCarthy’s personal
character was totally depraved. He was an
alcoholic, took political bribes, lied in
political campaigns, and faked his combat
record as a marine in World War 11.
McCarthy was a crude, headline-seeking
fraud, but a very dangerous fraud. For McCarthy had a demagogic appeal with
average Americans and the support of
right-wing power brokers. In short, McCarthy was a definite fascist figure.
While the McCarthy myth remains intact among the laity, even liberal
historians have pointed out some of its in-
accuracies. As early as 1959 Richard
Rovere in his Senator Joe McCarthy,
which repeated most of the myth, admitted that McCarthy had not brought on a
reign of terror.2 Furthermore, Rovere
acknowledged that McCarthy was not a
fascist figure since he lacked both
ideological single-mindednessand a thirst
for total power.
More recently, Thomas C. Reeves’s
highly acclaimed comprehensive biography, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy,
published in 1982, does much to rehabilitate McCarthy’s personal character. As
Reeves writes, “The real Joe McCarthy, I
think, is more interesting than the ape-like
cartoon figure that haunts our imaginations and our textbook^."^ Concomitant
with his partial rehabilitation of
McCarthy’s personal character, Reeves
points out the extreme slander and
character assassination heaped on McCarthy by his liberal enemies.
While historians have rejected certain
aspects of the McCarthy myth, it still remains unrevised as far as the central
meaning of McCarthyism is concerned. In
essence, it is still maintained that McCarthy engaged in a “witch hunt” - that he
never found any pro-Communist subversives. The only major work to differ from
this consensus is McCarthy and His
Enemies, by William F. Buckley, Jr., and L.
Brent Bozell, published in 1954 during the
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McCarthy p e r i ~ d .Referred
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to by Willmoore Kendall as “the book no liberal
reads,’I5 Buckley and Bozell’s book makes
a strong case in defense of McCarthy; but
the work is usually shrugged off by
historians as a contemporary right-wing
apologetic.
Among the standard histories of McCarthyism, the only difference is between
what might be called liberal and leftist accounts. To generalize, liberal accounts do
not rule out completely the existence of
pro-Communist subversives and the need
to root them out. But they assume that the
number of these subversives was small
and that the executive branch was successfully taking care of them. Leftist versions, on the other hand, attack the
federal government’s loyalty-security program. They deny the existence (or even
the concept) of loyalty-security risks. It is
implied that even if there were proCommunists in the federal government,
they should not have been removed from
their positions. McCarthyism, according to
the leftist view, was but the logical extension of Truman Cold War anticommunism.
In the liberal category would fall such
works as Richard Rovere’s Senator Joe
McCarthy and, with a tinge of the leftist
viewpoint, Thomas Reeves’s The LiFe and
Times of Joe McCarthy. On the right flank
of the liberal accounts are When Euen
Angels Wept: The Senator Joseph McCarthy Affair-A Story Without A Hero, by
Lately Thomas (pseudonym for Robert V.
Stee1e)‘j and The Communist Controversy
in Washington:From the New Deal to McCarthy, by Earl Latham.7Both these works
imply a laxity in the federal government’s
enforcement of its loyalty-security regulations but deny that McCarthy uncovered
any subversives. Robert Criffith’s The
Politics o f Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and
the Senates and Fred J. Cook’s The
Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times o f
Senator Joe McCarthyg mix together the
liberal and the leftist interpretations.
Purely leftist accounts would include
David Caute’s The Great Fear: The AntiCommunist Purge under Truman and
Eisenhower and Athan C. Theoharis’
Seeds o f Repression: Harry S. Truman and
the Origins OF McCarthyism.lo
This article’s purpose is twofold. First, it
will attempt to determine whether McCarthy uncovered any evidence of proCommunist individuals in the federal
government. In so doing, the article will
focus on the Tydings Committee hearings
of 1950, which investigated McCarthy’s
first charges of pro-Communist infiltration
and which placed McCarthy in the national spotlight. Buckley and Bozell, who
go over this episode in detail, appropriately regard it as a “testing ground for judging both McCarthy and McCarthy’s
enemies.”’ Since the standard historical
version of McCarthyism denies that McCarthy ever found any subversives or
security risks in government, to show
even one instance when McCarthy was
right, or even partially right, would be a
significant revision of historical orthodoxy. Second, this article will attempt
an overall assessment of McCarthy and
M cCarth yism .
From Lenin onward Soviet Communist
leaders have always preached the necessity of underground activities. Government
has been the key target for infiltration. Actual evidence of this in numerous countries is overwhelming. In government
Communists have engaged in espionage
and acted to influence government policies in a pro-Communist direction. Many
of the individuals engaged in these activities were Communist Party members;
others were fellow travelers, who despite
the lack of party discipline, sought to advance the interests of Soviet Communism.12
Support for the Soviet Union as the
“workers’ paradise” was highly fashionable among American intellectuals in the
Depression-ridden 1930s. During the time
of the Popular Front, Communists worked
easily with non-Communists of leftist and
liberal views. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939
had a disillusioning impact on these nonCommunists, but the later wartime
alliance between the Soviet Union and the
United States renewed their sympathy for
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Communism. Given this milieu and the
fact that large numbers of intellectuals
entered the federal government during
Franklin Roosevelt’s administrations, the
existence of significant numbers of Communists and pro-Communists in the
federal government was ine~itab1e.l~
While the United States had enacted a
number of laws and regulations proscribing Communists from the federal government, these were loosely enforced during
World War 11, despite evidence from the
FBI and elsewhere of extensive Communist subversion and espionage. In large
part, this inaction was explainable by the
prevailing pro-Soviet climate of opinion
resulting from the wartime alliance. The
Soviet Union was painted in glowing
terms by American government propaganda organs and by most of the private
media. There seemed to be no need to be
wary of allies who were engaged in the
common cause of combating Nazi Germany. The Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) actually cooperated with the NKVD
(the forerunner of the KGB),and President
Roosevelt even went so far as to consider
allowing an official NKVD headquarters in
the United States.I4Obviously, in such an
atmosphere, charges of Communist infiltration, even if proved true, would be little cause of concern.
As American hostility toward the Soviet
Union began to develop in 1945, however,
evidence of Communist influence in the
government became looked upon in a
wholly different light. Simultaneously,
evidence of Communist penetration
mounted rapidly. In February 1945
federal officials found numerous classified
government documents, some marked
“top secret,” in the New York office of the
pro-Communist journal Amerasia. Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers
told their stories of Communist espionage
to the FBI. And in the fall of 1945 a Soviet
cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected to
Canadian authorities, bringing documentary proof of the existence of a far-flung
Soviet spy apparatus operating in the
American, British, and Canadian governments. Ottawa quickly conveyed this in-
formation to Washington.15
These various revelations genuinely
alarmed the Truman administration, but
out of a desire to avoid publicity it only
slowly began to counteract this subversion. In part this hesitation was probably
due to the desire to acquire greater proof
so as not to alarm innocent individuals. At
least as significant, however, was the fear
of open scandals that not only would be
detrimental to the heads of various government agencies but also might discredit
the Democratic Party and its policies.
Conventional histories have stressed the
self-interest of Republicans and conservatives in exploiting any possibility of
Communist penetration. They have failed,
however, to point out that leading government officials in the Truman administration had nothing to gain and everything to
lose by publicly exposing pro-Communists
in government. Undoubtedly, the natural
reaction of a politician is to keep the
skeletons locked in the closet. Where
evidence seemed conclusive and where
posts of the highest American security
were involved, such as the cases of Alger
Hiss and Harry Dexter White, the Truman
administration tried quietly to reduce
those individuals’ authority, and they
were slowly eased out of the federal
government.
A fundamental concern was how to
remove subversive individuals from
government civil service positions without
violating their rights as civil servants. During the first century of the United States’
existence, federal employees were appointed on the basis of political belief and
party loyalty and could be removed at the
whim of the administration. A new administration brought in its own set of
federal employees. This so-called spoils
system was eliminated by the Civil Service
Act of 1883, which made it unlawful for
the federal government to inquire into an
employee’s political beliefs. This prohibition was altered by later legislation and
executive orders to deal with security
risks.”
During World War I President Woodrow
Wilson issued a confidential executive
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order to the heads of federal departments
and agencies that employees considered
to be security risks should be removed.
With the emergence of the threat of
totalitarian communism and fascism, Congress in 1939 enacted Section 9A of the
Hatch Act that prohibited federal
employees from belonging to organizations that advocated the overthrow of
America’s constitutional form of government. And in 1942 the Civil Service Commission enunciated loyalty criteria for hiring. In cases of “reasonable doubt” as to
loyalty, it held that an individual must be
denied government employment.18
With the revelations of Communist infiltration, Congress in 1946 granted the
right of summary dismissal to the heads of
several federal agencies, including the
Department of State. The particular
legislation dealing with the State Department was the so-called McCarran Rider to
the State Department Appropriations Bill,
initially passed on July 6, 1946, and
renewed yearly until 1953. Finally President Truman, on March 22, 1947, trying to
head off more extensive demands made
by several committees of Congress, issued
Executive Order 9835, which established
a comprehensive loyalty program for the
federal g0~ernment.l~
Much of the impetus for the discharge of
federal employees came from congressional investigations of Communist
subversion. This congressional scrutiny of
federal employees so irritated the Truman
administration that, on March 13, 1948,
President Truman issued an order prohibiting the release of loyalty and security
information to anyone outside the executive branch. Congress was, in short, to
be left in the dark as to security matters;
the executive branch would be policing
itself. Given the natural instinct for
political self-preservation, there would be
no incentive for the Truman administration to dig up problems for which it, at
least in part, was responsible.
By depriving Congress of the relevant
information necessary to investigate the
workings of the executive branch,
Truman was denying the investigatory
power of Congress. Congress had asserted
such an authority since the early days of
the Republic, and it would seem to be a
fundamental power of a legislature,
without which, as James Burnham writes,
“Congress would retain only the name of
legislature.”20 Certainly, the liberal
establishment later championed congressional investigations of the executive
branch during the Nixon, Ford, and
Reagan administrations. In claiming complete authority for administering federal
security practices, it would seem that
Truman was taking on the role of the “imperial presidency” that liberals since the
1970s have so vociferously decried.
Given this information blackout, it was
only natural for many Americans to think
that the White House was covering up
security problems. The greatest concern
was the State Department, where only
two security risks had been detected between 1947 and 1950. What made antiCommunists especially leery about the
State Department was the Communist victory in China in 1949.
Since the last years of World War 11,
American aid to Chiang Kai-cheks Nationalist Chinese government had been
less than firm. A number of State Department officials had been highly critical of
the Nationalist government and had sympathized with the Chinese Communists,
alleging that they were not really Communists but “agrarian reformers.” They
advocated that the United States transfer
its official recognition from the Nationalists to the Communists. Since these
views were similar to the official Communist Party line during this period, antiCommunists attributed the Communists’
victory in China to pro-Communist subversion in the State Department.”
The standard liberal interpretation of
these events rejects out of hand the idea
that American officials could have played
any role in the Communist victory in
China. “China was not ours to lose” is the
common refrain. Writing in this vein,
Thomas Reeves maintains that the State
Department admirers of the Chinese Communists “were not Communists or part of
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a conspiracy to turn China over to the
Communists. . . . They were, however, extremely displeased with the military footdragging, reactionary politics, and sordid
corruption of Chiang’s regime and, like
many journalists on the scene, were impressed by the Communists’ personal
austerity and charm and by their espousal
of liberal economic policies and orderly
democratic growth.”22
Reeves’s argument evades the actual
issue. Reeves seems to presume that
Chinese Communism was good and that
the United States should have backed it
rather than the Nationalist government. In
short, American policy should have been
other than what it was. But the actual
question was whether the Chinese Communist sympathizers in the State Department carried out the official American
policy of supporting the Nationalist
government, or whether they acted to
undermine that policy. (Whether China
would have gone Communist without any
such subversion is irrelevant.) Moreover,
there was some doubt that these same individuals could be trusted to carry out a
foreign policy directed against Communist
governments.
In this climate of suspicion, Senator
Joseph R. McCarthy made his famous
speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on
February 9, 1950, in which he claimed
that the State Department had harbored a
large number of pro-Communist subversives. (The exact number is in dispute: McCarthy later claimed to have used the
number 57; his critics contended that he
said 205.) As a consequence of the publicity generated by these charges, which McCarthy repeated in subsequent speeches,
the Senate on February 22, 1950,
authorized the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee to conduct “a full and complete study and investigation as to
whether persons who are disloyal to the
United States are or have been employed
by the Department of State.” The Senate
Foreign Relations Committee established
a special subcommittee headed by Senator
Millard Tydings of Maryland to conduct
the investigation.
Before continuing the chronology, it is
necessary to mention a misapprehension
which often mars the understanding of the
Tydings investigation and McCarthy’s role
in it. In his speeches McCarthy sometimes
stated that there were actual Communist
Party members in the State Department.
Thus, his critics have argued that he failed
to prove the existence of any such Communists. But before the Senate McCarthy
spoke merely of loyalty risks, and these
were what the Tydings Committee was
authorized to i n v e ~ t i g a t e . ~ ~
The Tydings Committee opened its
hearings on March 8, 1950. McCarthy submitted information on 110 individuals for
investigation. The Truman administration
reluctantly agreed to let the Tydings Committee study the loyalty files of 71 identifiable cases cited by McCarthy. Nine of
the cases were discussed publicly, with the
accused individuals invited to appear personally before the Committee to reply to
the charges. Six of these individuals
availed themselves of this opportunity.
On July 17, 1950, the Tydings Committee released its final report signed by the
three Democrats on the Committee Tydings, Brien McMahon of Connecticut,
and Theodore Green of Rhode Island. The
two Republicans on the Committee Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts
and Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa - refused to sign the majority report. Lodge
filed a dissenting minority report, and
Hickenlooper opted not to sign or write
anything.
The majority report scathingly attacked
McCarthy’s charges as “a fraud and a hoax
perpetrated on the Senate of the United
States and the American people.” It unambiguously cleared all the individuals cited
by McCarthy. While anti-Communists and
Republicans at the time branded the majority report a “whitewash,” liberal
historians have been in complete accord
with the Committee’s findings. For example, Reeves writes of the majority report’s
“painstaking and impressive compilation
and analysis of evidence.’Iz4
In contrast, Buckley and Bozell, who
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dividuals cited by McCarthy, concluded
that McCarthy did provide the Tydings
Committee with a considerable number of
security and loyalty risks. Of course, the
finding of only one risk would overturn
the conventional interpretation that McCarthy’s charges were totally without
substance. To determine whether McCarthy’s charges had any validity calls for a
review of his two most significant cases.
The individual whom McCarthy considered his major find was Owen Lattimore, whom he labeled “the top Russian
spy.” While not formally a member of the
State Department, Lattimore had numerous close connections with it. He had
served as the American political advisor to
Chiang Kai-chek. In 1944 he had accompanied Vice President Henry Wallace on
his trip to Siberia and China. In 1945 he
had been appointed by President Truman
as a member of the Pauley reparations
mission to Japan. Furthermore, Lattimore
was a leading figure in the Institute of
Pacific Relations, which had many ties to
the State Department.25
Lattimore’s numerous writings showed
him to be an ardent apologist for Soviet
and Chinese communism. Even Reeves
admits that “Lattimore himself was no
doubt a fellow traveler” and that the Institute of Pacific Relations was “infiltrated
by Communists and fellow travelers”; but
he maintains that the IPR and its publications had “no demonstrable effect on the
White House or the State Department.”26
Similarly, Lately Thomas writes that Lattimore “apparently had helped smooth the
way for the Communists’ eventual
triumph. All this, however, even when
viewed in the least creditable light, added
up to far less than ‘espionage agent’ or
even ‘bad security risk.’ “z7
While McCarthy did not prove the
charge that Lattimore was “the top Russian spy,” the arguments by Reeves and
Thomas would seem to imply that Lattimore was a security or loyalty risk,
rather than exculpate him from this
charge as they think. In 1952 the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee, headed
by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada,
probed much deeper into Lattimore’s
background in its Institute of Pacific Relations Hearings. It discovered that his
writings were not only pro-Communist but
dovetailed completely with the Soviet
Communist line of the particular moment.
And considerable evidence showed that
he was aware that reality differed from
what he wrote. For example, he had
repeatedly contended that (Outer)
Mongolia was free from Soviet control, yet
when seeking to visit that country he had
sought permission from Soviet authorities.
Former Soviet General Alexander Barmine testified that Lattimore was an actual
member of Soviet Military Intelligence.
(Ex-Communist Louis Budenz had testified
at the Tydings Committee hearings that
Lattimore was a Communist.) The final
report of the McCarran Committee, which
had the unanimous support of the
members, concluded that Lattimore was a
“conscious articulate instrument of the
Soviet conspiracy.”28
The conclusions of the McCarran Committee report, of course, are not accepted
by liberals. For example, Fred J. Cook, in
The Nightmare Decade, while acknowledging that Lattimore’s activities and
writings followed the Soviet Communist
line, responds that “all of this easily could
have been read as an ideological blind
spot, such as many had in the different
crises of that time, when the great menace
of the world was posed by the Fascist
powers.” Besides, “Just how was one to
define a ‘sympathizer’? One man’s ‘sym’ pathy’ is another’s common sense.”2g
Questions of motivation, however, have
nothing to do with the issue of whether
Lattimore was a loyalty risk. Vidkun Quisling no doubt believed he was aiding Norway by supporting Nazi Germany; this
made him no less a traitor to his country.
Another of McCarthy’s significant loyalty risk cases involved John Stewart Service, a career diplomat stationed in China
during World War 11. Service’s prolific
diplomatic dispatches had consistently
portrayed the Nationalist government as
totalitarian, inefficient, and corrupt, while
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the Communists were depicted as
democratic, progressive, and honest.
Upon returning to the United States in
1945, Service was caught transmitting
classified documents to the editor of a proCommunist journal, A r n e r a s i ~ . ~ ~
The Arnerusia case was a complex affair
which t h e Tydings Committee investigated. The story of the case is as
follows: After noticing the appearance of
confidential material in Arnerusia, Office
of Strategic Services (OSS) agents broke
into the journal’s office in March 1945 and
discovered a large number of highly
classified government documents, some
labeled “top secret.” Keeping the break-in
secret, the FBI undertook physical
surveillance of those people thought to be
involved in the theft of the documents. On
June 6, 1945, the FBI arrested six persons,
among whom was Service, and seized a
large number of government documents
that were in their posse~sion.~~
The six suspects were arraigned on
charges of conspiracy to steal government
documents related to the national defense.
The lawyers of the accused argued that
the government documents, although
classified, were innocuous and that their
clients were guilty of nothing more than
the accepted practice of obtaining
background information from government sources. The grand jury indicted only three of the individuals, Service being
exonerated. In the end the Justice Department prosecuted on the lesser crime of
merely conspiring to steal government
documents, and two of the suspects, including Amerusiu editor Philip Jaffe,
pleaded nolo contendere and received
minor fines. (The charge against the third
person was dropped.) By November 1945
the Arnerasia case was officially cl0sed.3~
Republicans and anti-Communists were
enraged that the Justice Department had
not prosecuted more vigorously - that it
had failed to emphasize Arnerusiu’s proSoviet orientation and Jaffe’s extensive
Communist connections. In contrast, the
Justice Department held that an insufficient number of the seized documents
were related to national defense, that
there was no evidence that they were
passed beyond the confines of the journal,
and that much of the evidence was tainted
- illegal searches and seizures, unauthorized wiretaps. Service was subsequently
cleared by the State Department LoyaltySecurity Board on six different occasions,
and the Tydings Committee merely chided him for being “extremely i n d i ~ c r e e t . ” ~ ~
The facts of the case allow for a less
sanguine interpretation. Even if the information passed along was innocuous, it
would seem that the very transmission of
classified documents to a journal with
Communist ties would be sufficient to
make Service a security risk. Moreover,
while the documents seized may have
seemed harmless, there is no assurance
that these included all the documents
Furthermore,
transmitted to Arner~siu.~4
the innocuous nature of the seized
documents was not universally apparent.
Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew did
not regard them as such in 1945 when he
ordered the arrests. As Anthony Kubek
writes in The Amerasia Papers, “Many of
the pilfered documents were of vital
diplomatic and military importance in
wartime, just as the original classifications
indicated.” In addition, one of the FBI’s
secret recordings of Service’s meetings
with Jaffe revealed a discussion of military plans which Service termed “very
secret .”35
Summing up the case, Earl Latham, who
is hardly a McCarthy sympathizer, writes:
Although it seemed to be virtually impossible to establish espionage by
courtroom standards, there is the silent
testimony of the documents themselves. There was either espionage in
the Amerusiu case or the security procedures of the Department of State
were so grotesquely lax that the
responsible officials should have been
disciplined.36
All of this does not conclusively prove
that Service was consciously disloyal. But
it would seem to place him in, at least, a
questionable category. In December 1951,
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ings, the Civil Service Loyalty Review
Board concluded that there was
“reasonable doubt” as to Service’s loyalty
and ordered his removal from the State
Department.37
Service fought in the federal courts for
reinstatement, and the Supreme Court in
1957 ruled in his favor on a technicality:
that Service’s discharge violated State
Department regulations which required
an adverse ruling from the State Department’s own Loyalty-Security Board. Service’s dismissal was expunged from the
record, but given his background it seems
hardly unreasonable for McCarthy to have
doubted his r e l i a b i l i t ~ . ~ ~
A fundamental difference between the
liberal historians and McCarthy and his
supporters revolves around the definition
of a loyalty-security risk. It should be
pointed out that the State Department was
operating under dual authority during this
period. It was not only under the overall
Civil Service loyalty program established
by Truman’s executive order, but it was
also under a security program originally
established by the McCarran Rider of
1946. Suspect employees were investigated by the State Department’s LoyaltySecurity Board. And the security standard
was less lenient toward the employee,
lacking the jurisprudential safeguards of
the Civil Service loyalty program. It simply called for summary dismissal in the “interests of national security.” And there
needed to be only a “reasonable doubt” of
the employee’s reliabilit~.~s
Still, all this does not clarify the definition of a security risk. Perhaps it could be
argued that the definition was purely subjective. McCarthy thought Lattimore a
security risk, but the State Department did
not. Liberal historians, however, do not
accept a subjective standard, since they
categorically maintain that McCarthy
failed to find any security risks. They cannot hold that a security risk is what the executive branch regards it to be because
the executive branch later validated a
number of McCarthy’s charges. In short,
liberal historians assume an absolute
standard in determining a security risk.
While liberal historians assume such an
absolute standard, however, they do not
define it. If belonging to front groups,
following the Communist line, being identified as a Communist, illicitly transmitting
classified documents to Communists were
not enough to label one a security risk,
what was?
Sometimes it seems that McCarthy’s
critics assumed that McCarthy had to
prove individuals guilty of overt crimes treason, espionage, or at least membership in the Communist Party. But such was
not necessary. Other laws dealt with actual crimes. The purpose of the loyaltysecurity regulations was to provide the
government with reliable personnel, keeping potential spies and subversives out of
sensitive positions.40
Since there would seem to be no absolute definition of a loyalty or security
risk, one means of judging McCarthy’s
(and his critics’)view of the issue is to look
at other episodes of American history
when America’s leaders believed the nation’s survival to be threatened. During
and immediately after the American
Revolution, suspected pro-British Tories
were denied political and property rights
by most of the states. The Alien and Sedition Acts enacted in John Adams’s administration were intended to restrict
criticism of the Federalist government
during the Quasi-War with France.
Thomas Jefferson’s government infringed
on many American freedoms (being most
extreme in engaging in illegal searches
and seizures) during the period of the Embargo Act. During the Civil War Abraham
Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the country and jailed individuals for simply criticizing the war effort. During World War I the Woodrow
Wilson administration had numerous alleged subversives and radicals imprisoned. And Franklin Roosevelt’s most notorious infringement of civil liberties was the
internment of Japane~e-Americans.~~
Compared with these infringements on
traditional American liberties, the impact
of McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities
would seem to be rather mild. For McCar-
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thy provided at least prima facie evidence
of an individual’s being a security threat.
In contrast, during the Civil War hearsay
evidence of one witness was often enough
to have someone jailed. And Franklin
Roosevelt did not require any evidence of
individual subversive activity to intern the
Japanese-Americans as a group.
Not only was McCarthy’s evidence
much more substantial, but the punishment meted out was considerably milder.
The penalty resulting from McCarthy’s
findings was the loss of a government job,
which, at the time, was not considered a
right. In fact, the Truman administration’s
loyalty board commonly stated that a
government job was a privilege.42In sum,
while McCarthy’s actions did not deprive
any citizen of any traditional American
liberties, the security practices of Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin
Roosevelt did deny rights traditionally
protected by the Constitution. Historians,
however, have not criticized those
presidents as they have McCarthy.
Throughout various eras in American
history, civil liberties have been restricted
when the nation’s security has been
perceived as endangered. Thus, in the late
1940s and early 1950s the United States
government established loyalty and
security restrictions because it was widely
believed that Soviet communism threatened the country. McCarthy merely
sought to enforce the laws that were on
the books.
To point out that McCarthy did expose
some pro-Communist security risks, while
going contrary to the conventional liberal
historiography, does not deal with what
can be called the anti-Communist critique
of McCarthy. Individuals who have held
this view, such as Ralph de Toledano and
Whittaker Chambers, supported congressional investigations of communism but
viewed McCarthy’s methods to be
counterprod~ctive.~~
As Guenter Lewy
writes in a recent American Enterprise Institute publication, “Perhaps the greatest
damage that Senator Joseph McCarthy
has caused this nation is that he succeeded
in casting doubt upon the need for a
serious and responsible concern with
Communism and domestic security. His
excesses have discredited the cause of
anti-Communi~rn.”~~
In short, from this
point of view, McCarthy was detrimental,
not because of any alleged harm done to
American civil liberties, but because he
weakened the cause of anti-communism.
That McCarthy was a flawed individual
has been acknowledged even by his supporters. His knowledge of communism
was limited. His judgments were hasty. He
often resorted to crude exaggeration. He
was not the foremost congressional investigator of Communist subversion. As
the pro-McCarthy William Rusher, who is
publisher of National Review and who
served for over a year as special counsel
to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, writes:
McCarthy’s substantive contributions to
the documentation of the important
story of domestic Communist subversion, while valuable, were not in most
cases achievements of the first rank not comparable, for example, to
HCUA’s brilliant probe of the HissChambers case, or the ISSC‘s investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relation~.~~
As Buckley and Bozell emphasize,
however, McCarthy’s primary function
was not that of a scholarly investigator of
Communist subversion but of a publicist.
To get the public’s attention American
politicians have traditionally resorted to
exaggeration. For example, Franklin
Roosevelt and Harold lckes continually attacked “economic royalists” and branded
the World War I1 isolationists as pro-Nazi
trait01-s.~~
In 1964 Democrats and liberals
repeatedly labeled the Republican
presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, a
fascist, a racist, and an insane proponent
of nuclear holocaust.47About McCarthy’s
method, Buckley and Bozell conclude:
“McCarthy’s record is nevertheless not only much better than his critics allege but,
given his metier, extremely good.”48If this
assessment be excessive, it does not seem
that McCarthy’s method differed from
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1
what has been commonplace in the roughand-tumble of American politics.
Buckley and Bozell attribute McCarthy’s
success in popularizing anti-communism
to his free-swinging method. Since
Buckley and Bozell published their work
in 1954, it could conceivably be said that
they had not yet witnessed the ultimate
negative effects of McCarthy’s method.
While this method achieved the shortterm success of making Communist
subversion a popular issue, in the long run
it may have contributed to the demise of
anti-communism.49
McCarthy did provide a much-needed
target for American liberals, who in the
early 1950s found themselves on the
defensive. Liberals feared that the investigations of communism could undermine American liberalism - its domestic
as well as its foreign policy agenda - and
they believed that this was, in fact, the
real intent of the anti-Communists. Such a
view has been enshrined in the conventional histories of the McCarthy era. For
example, Fred J. Cook writes that anticommunism was actually an attack on the
New Deal “through a propaganda campaign that would equate all liberalism with
socialism and communism in a formula
designed to frighten the wits out of the
least volatile electorate in the
Similarly, Earl Latham describes McCarthyism as an “agent of fundamentalist conservatism.” “The Communist issue was the
cutting edge for the attack” on entrenched
l i b e r a l i ~ m . ~Believing
~
that the antiCommunists’ main goal was the destruction of American liberalism, most liberals
became more fearful of anti-communism
than of communism.
To ward off the anti-Communist
challenge, liberals could not just remain
on the defensive, denying the validity of
the numerous charges of Communist infiltration. Such a piecemeal defensive
strategy was bound to be overwhelmed.
To achieve success it was necessary to
take the offensive and discredit the entire
anti-Communist effort. McCarthy’s freeswinging methods (though objectively not
differing from the usually rough American
political milieu) gave them this opportunity. Focusing on and distorting McCarthy’s
methods, liberals were able to shift the
major political issue in American politics
away from that of the threat of Communist subversion to McCarthy’s alleged
threat to civil liberties. Liberalism came to
depict McCarthy as the personification of
evil and linked all anti-Communists with
McCarthy. The liberal counterattack, of
\course, proved a total success. Since the
mid-1950s any charge of Communist infiltration has been quickly silenced by the
charge of McCarthyism, without any concern about the merit of the allegation.
While McCarthy as an issue was the particular means by which liberal anti-antiCommunists quashed anti-communism, it
would be incorrect to blame McCarthy for
this turn of events. Since in the early
1950s (like today) liberalism dominated
the centers of power - media, education,
government - the anti-Communist rnovement faced a veritable Catch-22 situation.
To be successful anti-communism needed
to be popularized among the American
people. But it required the emergence of
visible anti-Communist champions. Given
the dominance of liberalism, especially in
the information sector, any highly visible
anti-Communist would have been vilified
just like McCarthy. (Observe the liberal
establishment’s character assassination of
its perceived enemies: Whittaker
Chambers, Barry Goldwater [now rehabilitated], Douglas MacArthur.) Perhaps if the
individual were extremely careful, it
would have taken longer, but the ultimate
result would have been just the same.
While the conventional liberal portrayal
of McCarthy is an almost total distortion of
his record, the anti-Communist critique of
McCarthy errs in underestimating the
power of liberalism. Anti-communism
failed not because of McCarthy’s personal
flaws, but because of the overwhelming
dominance of liberal ideology, which rules
out any strong strike at communism. And
it is only when the liberal stranglehold
over public discourse in America is broken
that Joseph R. McCarthy will finally
receive a fair hearing.
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IFred J. Cook, The NightmareDecade: The Life and
Times of Senator Joe McCarthy (New York, 1971), p.
20. 2Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New
York, 1959). 3Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times
of Joe McCarthy: A Eiography (New York, 1982), p.
xi. ‘William F. Buckley, Jr., and L. Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning
(Chicago, 1954). 5Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Chicago, 1963), pp. 57-58. %tely
Thomas (Robert V. Steele), When Even Angels Wept:
The Senator Joseph McCarthy Affair
A Story
Without a Hero (New York, 1973). ’Earl Latham, The
Communist Controversy in Washington: From the
New Deal to McCarthy (Cambridge, MA, 1966).
8Robert Criffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Lexington, KY, 1970). gDavid
Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge
under Truman and Eisenhower (New York, 1978).
IOAthan G. Theoharis, Seeds o f Repression: Harry S.
Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Chicago,
1971). llBuckley and Bozell, p. 67. I2Forexamples of
Communist spies in other countries see: Gordon W.
Prange, with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V.
Dillon, Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring
(New York, 1984); Harry Rositzke, The KGB: The
Eyes of Russia (Garden City, NY, 1981). I3Eugene
Lyons, The Red Decade, The Stalinist Penetration of
America (Indianapolis, 1941); Harvey Klehr, The
Heyday of American Communism: The Depression
Decade (New York, 1984). “Bradley F. Smith, The
Shadow Warriors:O.S.S. and the Origins of the CLA.
(New York, 1983), pp. 338-59. I5Anthony Kubek, “Introduction,” The Amerasia Papers: A Clue to the
Catastrophe of China, vol. 1. Prepared by the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the
Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security
Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S.Senate,
91st Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, 1970), pp. 1-113;
James Barros, “Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White:
The Canadian Connection,” Orbis, 21:3 (Fall 1977),
pp. 593-605. IGBarros, pp. 593-605. ”Eleanor
Bontecou, The Federal Loyal&-Security Program
(Ithaca, NY, 1953), pp. 1-34. I8lbid. IgIbid.,pp. 22,
-
290; Guenter Lewy, The Federal Loyalty-Security
Program: The Need for Reform (Washington, 1983),
p. 4. 2oJamesBurnham, “The Investigatory Power of
Congress,” in William F. Buckley, Jr., ed., The Committee and Its Critics: A Calm Review of the House
Committee on Un-American Activities (Chicago,
1962), p. 60. 21Anthony Kubek, How the Far East
Was Lost: American Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941-1949 (Chicago, 1963). 22Reeves,
p. 217. 23Buckley and Bozell, pp. 54-55. Z‘Reeves, p.
304. 25For a critical account of Lattimore’s
background see John T. Flynn. The Luttimore Story
(New York, 1953). 26Reeves,p. 255. 27LatelyThomas,
p. 144. 28U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Internal Security Subcommittee, Institute of Pacific
Relations, Hearings, 82d Cong., 1st sess., Final
Report (Washington, 1951), p. 224. 2gCook,pp. 372,
376. 30K~bek,Amerasia Papers, pp. 31-34. 311bid.
Ybid., 43-57. W i d . , 57-61; Reeves, p. 305. 3‘James
Burnham, The Web ofSubversion (New York, 1954),
p. 214. 35Kubek, Amerasia Papers, pp. 78, 39.
36Latham, p. 207. 37K~bek,
Amerasia Papers, pp.
65-66. %id., pp. 66-67. 39Buckley and Bozell, pp.
18-30; Bontecou, pp. 48-51. *Lewy, p. 14. “For
discussions of these infringements on civil liberties
see Leonard W. Levy, Jefferson& Civil Liberties: The
Darker Side (Cambridge, MA, 1963); Dean Sprague,
Freedom Under Lincoln (Boston, 1965). 42Bontecou,
pp. 205-7. .%eorge H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New
York, 1976), pp. 114-15. 44Lewy,p. 2. 45WilliamA.
Rusher, Special Counsel: An Insider’s Report on
Senate Investigations into Communism (New
Rochelle, NY, 1969), p. 242. @Stephen J. Sniegoski,
“Unified Democracy: An Aspect of American World
War I1 Interventionist Thought,” The Maryland
Historian, 9: 1 (Spring 1978). “Lionel Lokos, Hysteria
1964: The Fear Campaign Against Barry Coldwater
(New Rochelle, NY, 1967). “Buckley and Bozell, p.
277. 49By the early 1970s William F. Buckley had
come to believe that McCarthy had been injurious to
American conservatism. Nash, p. 123. “Cook, p. 32.
51Latham,p. 423.
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