Joe McCarthy and the (old) politics of mean-ness

Back to the themes of Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, Joe McCarthy, Communism...

Here are some excerpts from a review of M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies by Brian Domitrovic in The Intercollegiate Review....

Washington used to be a nice town, the reminiscence goes. Before our own day, when “the personal is political,” time was when the partisan fighting was fierce at the Capitol, but everyone played by the rules and went out for drinks together after all the wrangling was done. This is one of the most intransigent clichés in American politics.

In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he said he had a list of 57 names of Communists working in the State Department. The next month, a Senate committee chaired by Maryland’s Millard Tydings convened to discuss the McCarthy list. The committee did not devote itself to investigating the accuracy of McCarthy’s list, much less to forming policy about what to do about the situation if it were true. Rather, its effective purpose was to frame McCarthy in a criminal act.

McCarthy was set in the dock before the Tydings committee and permitted to give his statement. In “his first 250 minutes on the stand [McCarthy] was allowed to read a statement for 17 minutes, and was interrupted 85 times,” as one historian counted it years later....

As the proceedings went on (and as other deponents were treated graciously), it became clear that the committee chairman, Tydings, was determined to hang a perjury charge on McCarthy.

The idea was that McCarthy, under oath before Tydings, said falsely that he had used the number 57 in Wheeling. The local paper (the Wheeling Intelligencer) had reported at the time that McCarthy had used the number 205. The reporter, but not his editor, was sticking by the story and had an audio recording. So if McCarthy, under oath before the Senate committee, said he had said 57 at Wheeling, he was making a false statement to the Senate—a punishable offense.

The problem for the committee’s argument was that all the evidence for the number 205 lay in the newspaper account and the reporter’s vouching for it. The recording had been erased, and nobody outside the newsroom, including those who had heard McCarthy’s speech, verified 205. Indeed, in various addresses made by McCarthy in the days after Wheeling, he by all accounts used the number 57....

The case was a closed one—according to the canons of evidence, the 205 figure was poorly sourced, whereas the 57 number was better sourced. No matter to Tydings. He said that he had an LP of the event and had photographers take pictures of him with the record, of which he claimed he had multiple copies. McCarthy would be proven a liar before the Senate once the thing was played—but that event never came to pass. A few years later, after McCarthy was disgraced, Tydings admitted that the record was a phony....

For all we have heard about the blustery and bullying tactics of McCarthy himself, Evans has compiled a thick book’s worth of examples of just this sort of behavior toward McCarthy by his colleagues and other high-placed mandarins. It is Evans’ inescapable conclusion that others treated McCarthy worse than he treated others....

McCarthy’s charges met evasions....It is a sordid story, made the more sordid by the likelihood that McCarthy had people in his sights who really did malignly influence American policy because of their philo-Communism....

What to make of the mess that has become our culture’s memory of Joseph McCarthy? To be sure, the man deserves a fairer hearing, and Evans has supplied it....