The Unreal Ronald Kessler

Campus Report ^ | May 06, 2008 | M. Stanton Evans

[bs9021]

The Unreal Ronald Kessler

by: M. Stanton Evans, May 06, 2008

Herewith a letter sent to The Wall Street Journal a week ago in response to the recent anti-McCarthy article by Ronald Kessler....

(snip)

I have held off on circulating this letter until The Wall Street Journal had ample chance to run it....

(snip)

Like many other critics of Joe McCarthy, Ronald Kessler would be more persuasive if he knew something of the subject.

Kessler’s Journal essay ("The Real Joe McCarthy," April 22), attacking the Wisconsin senator and taking a sidewise shot at my recent book about him, is an odd amalgam of unverifiable hearsay and a handful of items checkable from the record. It’s noteworthy that, on the checkable matters, Kessler is repeatedly, and egregiously, in error. For openers, there is the bizarre assertion in Kessler’s lead that, 54 years ago this April, McCarthy “started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and Communists in the Army.” The point is twice repeated in subsequent paragraphs referring to these sessions as McCarthy hearings.

In fact, the hearings that began 54 years ago this April weren’t hearings conducted by McCarthy, but hearings in which he was the main defendant, brought on by charges lodged against him by the Army. Kessler has obviously confused these sessions with the Fort Monmouth inquest of the previous year run by McCarthy. Anyone who doesn't know the difference between these two sets of hearings can’t be taken seriously as an authority on such topics.

Scarcely better is Kessler’s repetition, as supposed fact, of the discredited notion that McCarthy claimed a list of “205 Communists” in the State Department, then crawfished and changed the number to 57. (McCarthy’s version was that he never claimed 205, but had said 57 all along.)...

(snip)

....Omitted from this Welchian morality play—and apparently unknown to Kessler...

[steve-b]

Scarcely better is Kessler’s repetition, as supposed fact, of the discredited notion that McCarthy claimed a list of “205 Communists” in the State Department, then crawfished and changed the number to 57. (McCarthy’s version was that he never claimed 205, but had said 57 all along.)...

Oh, puh-leeze. The fact that a politician issues a denial when caught in an embarassment does not "discredit" it. By this logic, every single charge ever made against Clinton (either one) has been "discredited".

[vk45]

bs9021, too bad your snippet didn’t include the next few
sentences in the article. It might have changed steve-b’s
response.

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The next sentences from the M. Stanton Evans article:

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I devote two chapters to this issue, showing (a) that the
alleged documentation of McCarthy’s supposed lying about the
numbers was a backstage concoction of the State Department, and
(b) that the charge of McCarthy’s having claimed 205 was
debunked in 1951 by investigators for a Democratically controlled
committee of the Senate. (Curiously, after the investigators
turned in a 40-page report that in essence backed McCarthy,
their memo would abruptly vanish—to be recovered later.)

[bs9021]

It’s the whole “excerpts must be 300 words” problem—AIM doesn’t let us post their full articles.