No wonder I moved on so promptly in 1957. Joe McCarthy may
have been the most destructive demagogue in American history.
As a small-town reporter obsessed with national affairs, I
was certain during the years of McCarthy’s political dominance
that he was uniquely villainous, his sins against democracy
not to be forgiven or forgotten.
However interminable those years seemed to me, they were in
fact relatively few. Joe McCarthy first became visible to the
nation on February 9, 1950, when he delivered a Lincoln Day
address to local Republicans in Wheeling, West Virginia. That
night, according to various and differing accounts, he
declared something like “I have here in my hand a list of 205”
members of the Communist Party, “still working and shaping
policy in the State – Department.”
Just less than five years after that speech, following
December 2, 1954, McCarthy virtually disappeared. That day the
United States Senate-his power base, his political
bunker-voted by sixty-seven to twenty-two to “condemn” him
for conduct bringing that body into disrepute. Every
Democratic senator except John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts,
who was in the hospital, voted for what most senators believed
to be a resolution of “censure.” Twenty-two
Republicans-members of the party that had done the most to
advance and sustain McCarthy-joined the Democrats, some with
relief at the end of a political reign they had considered an
ordeal.
Even this climactic moment of defeat brought out McCarthy’s
peculiar jauntiness:
“It wasn’t,” he told the reporters who had done so much to
spread his fame and power, “exactly a vote of confidence.”
He then added with characteristic bravado and exaggeration:
“I’m happy to have this circus over, so I can get back to the
real work of digging out communism, corruption, and crime.”
He never did. Strictly speaking, he never had.
McCarthy’s Wheeling speech in February 1950 is one of the most
consequential in ntry-region w:st=”on”U.S. history without a
recorded or an agreed-upon text, nor was it connected to a
noteworthy cause such as an inaugural or a commemoration;
instead, it resulted from ordinary political bureaucracy. The
Republican Party’s speaker’s bureau had routinely assigned
McCarthy, then a little-known one-term senator regarded
unfavorably by many of his colleagues, to a five-speech
Lincoln Day tour that began in Wheeling and ended in Huron,
South Dakota-hardly major political forums. Party elders had
no idea what he would say, other than the usual political
balderdash; neither, probably, did McCarthy, who arrived in
Wheeling with two rough drafts-one concerning housing, then
his Senate “specialty,” the other on communists in
government.
The origins of the second speech are undetermined but not
totally obscure. As early as his winning Senate campaign
against Democrat Howard McMurray in 1946, McCarthy had used
“Red scare” rhetoric, enough so that McMurray complained in
one of the campaign debates that his loyalty had never before
been challenged by a “responsible citizen … [T]his
statement is a little below the belt.” That did not deter
McCarthy from repeating the accusation and others like it.
In later years McCarthy gave different reasons for his
ultimate turn, after four relatively undistinguished years in
the Senate, to all-out Red hunting. On various occasions
McCarthy cited a warning from Secretary of the Navy James
Forrestal about the dangers of communist infiltration; an
investigation of fur imports that uncovered the Soviet
Union’s use of its fur trade to advance its espionage; an
invitation from an unspecified FBI team to take on the
communist problem; the defeat of Leland Olds for reappointment
as chairman of the Federal Power Commission after hearings in
which senators led by Lyndon B. Johnson decided that Olds was
maybe a Red or anyway at least too radical; and the exposure
of Alger Hiss and his conviction for perjury on January 21,
1950, just before the Wheeling – speech.
None of these events is convincing as a real turning point.
Forrestal, for example, was dead when McCarthy’s claim
appeared, so that it could not be checked with him, and the
fur-import yarn is implausible on its face. More believable
is a story first published by the late columnist Drew Pearson
about a dinner in January 1950 at Washington’s once-popular,
now-defunct Colony Restaurant. That night, Pearson reported,
McCarthy entertained Father Edmund Walsh, dean of the
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service; William A.
Roberts, a Washington attorney who represented Pearson; and
Charles Kraus, a fervently anticommunist speechwriter for
McCarthy. The senator sought advice, Pearson wrote, on
building a record for his reelection campaign in 1952; Father
Walsh suggested “communism as an issue,” and McCarthy
supposedly leaped at the idea.
This tale has been widely accepted, but it, too, should be
taken with a dash of skepticism. In the first place,
“communism as an issue” had been a Republican staple for
years. (The Republican vice-presidential candidate in 1944,
Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio, had tried even that early on
to make the point: “First the New Deal took over the
Democratic party and destroyed its very foundation; now these
communist forces have taken over the New Deal and will destroy
the very foundations of the Republic.”) Red-baiting was a
Republican tactic in which a leader as respected as Robert A.
Taft of Ohio sometimes indulged. In the second place, a
senator who had used alleged communism against Howard McMurray
in 1946 and who was well aware of communism as a national
political issue could hardly have been knocked off his horse,
like Saul on the road to Damascus, by a suggestion that he
retake a well-trodden path.
Even before the Colony dinner, McCarthy had blasted Secretary
of State Dean Acheson for refussing “to turn his back” on
Alger Hiss. In November 1949, moreover, McCarthy had furiously
attacked one of his most bitter home-state enemies, the
Madison Capital Times, in an eleven-page mimeographed
statement claiming that the newspaper followed the communist
line, aping the Daily Worker in its news treatment; that its
city editor was known to its publisher as a communist; and
that the Capital Times’ anti-McCarthy investigations were
communist inspired. McCarthy raised the question whether the
Capital Times might be “the Red mouthpiece for the Communist
party in Wisconsin?” He also called for an economic boycott of
the paper (an action that never materialized). The statement
was franked and mailed throughout Wisconsin.
The author of such an attack needed no suggestion from Father
Walsh (who later repudiated McCarthy’s extreme brand of
anticommunism) to realize that “communism as an issue” was
headline stuff. The assault on the Capital Times* had already
brought McCarthy more publicity in Wisconsin than any of his
activities in the Senate.
McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, far from being a sudden
inspiration, reflected the senator’s late debut in what by
1950 had become a full-dress Republican campaign against the
communists, “fellow travelers, Reds, and pinks” that party
spokesmen insisted (with good reason) had infiltrated (to an
extent they exaggerated) the Democratic Party and the
Roosevelt and Truman administrations. As far as has been
verified over the years, McCarthy had nothing new or original
to add to the campaign-save, crucially, the drama, hyperbole,
and audacity of which he quickly showed himself a master.
In the rough draft McCarthy handed on February 9 to Wheeling
reporters (who, at his jovial request, had counseled him to
make the anticommunist rather than the housing speech), he
openly plagiarized a newly famous predecessor in the
Red-hunting field, Representative Richard M. Nixon of
California:
Nixon (to the House of Representatives, January 26, 1950): The
great lesson which should be learned from the Alger Hiss case
is that we are not just dealing with espionage agents who get
30 pieces of silver to obtain the blueprints of a new weapon
… but this is a far more sinister type of activity, because
it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy.
McCarthy (in the rough draft of his Wheeling speech on
February 9, 1950): One thing to remember in discussing the
Communists in our government is that we are not dealing with
spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprint of a
new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of
activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our
policy.
The senator also included a three-paragraph article written
by the Chicago Tribune’s Willard Edwards, a journalistic
pioneer in anticommunist “investigations.” Not only was
anticommunism old stuff; Joe McCarthy was parroting a line
frequently laid down by Nixon, reporters such as Edwards and
George Sokolsky, the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC), numerous Republican oligarchs, and even some
conservative Democrats (notably, Pat McCarran of Nevada).
The “real news” at Wheeling, if any, was in the specificity of
McCarthy’s numbers, as they were widely reported, and in the
drama of his presentation-“I hold here in my hand” an
incriminating document, evidence-after all the generalized
perfidy his party had assigned to the Democrats and their New
Deal and Fair Deal. At the outset Joe McCarthy displayed his
gift for drama. He surely recognized then, too, the ease with
which distortion, confidently expressed, could be made to seem
fact.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Shooting Star
by Tom Wicker
Copyright © 2006 by Thomas Wicker.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Copyright © 2006
Thomas Wicker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-1510-1082-X
