Haynes Johnson is a 74-year-old journalist known for his reporting skills as well as his evenhanded treatment of sources and subjects. Centered on a career at the Washington Post, Johnson has managed to complete 15 books, with the first appearing in 1963.
Most of the books are about American politics. All of them are worth reading, but “The Age of Anxiety,” book 15, stands out. It is a superb book, not only because it is skillfully reported, clearly written and timely, but also because Johnson employs controlled outrage to demonstrate that the administration of George W. Bush is relying, as Johnson sees it, on the same sort of civil liberties violations, scare tactics and big lies as U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy and his fellow Republican politicians used 50 years ago to damage American democracy. The centerpiece of the book is the career of McCarthy, a Wisconsin senator who gained fame for accusing many upstanding citizens of becoming communists in an effort to aid purported Soviet Union efforts to undermine the U.S. government.
McCarthy accused citizen after citizen falsely, creating an atmosphere of suspicion so inexplicably strong that most politicians, journalists and scholars refused to confront the demagogue, even though they knew he was lying.
After nearly a decade of tearing the fabric of American democracy, McCarthy lost respect, dropped from sight and died in 1957 before reaching his 50th birthday. Johnson adds little new to the often-told rise and fall of McCarthy. But his retelling is skillful, and some of the details he emphasizes are rarely mentioned so prominently in previous accounts.
An example is the gutsy Senate speech opposing McCarthy at the height of his power, a speech made by a fellow Republican who was the only woman in the chamber, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. Another example is a visit to McCarthy’s Wisconsin hometown of Appleton, where the local museum exhibit about the senator is surprisingly candid regarding his flaws.
To hear Johnson tell it, McCarthy’s legacy survives. In his view, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their compatriots feel free to imprison human beings without specifying the charges, discriminate on the basis of religion and physical appearance, snoop into the library borrowing practices of the citizens they are supposed to serve, arguably lie about the justification for invading a sovereign nation thousands of miles away, all while continuing to hold office, just like the reviled senator from Wisconsin.
Johnson is grateful that darkness has not descended completely upon the land. He understands that a nation grounded in individual liberty cannot be degraded completely by any cadre, not even one with headquarters at the White House.
Still, the disreputable past is too often prologue. Johnson has documented too many parallels between McCarthy and Bush to rest easy. Those parallels “tell a terrible, and terribly familiar, story: how fear can produce abuses that damage individuals and dishonor America in the name of making both safer.”
Steve Weinberg is a former Washington correspondent for newspapers and magazines who now writes from Columbia, Mo.
“The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism
By Haynes Johnson
Harcourt, 624 pages, $24
