"The American Communist Party was a clear and present danger, as McCarthy and Evans would have it, in the early Cold War. But its chief threat was that of political subversion, not espionage, and therein lies the dividing line between a positive view of McCarthy and a negative appraisal. Had American Communists and their allies retained the influence they had achieved in the labor movement and the broad New Deal coalition, it is difficult to imagine that the United States would have undergone the political mobilization necessary in the crucial, early years of the Cold War. And the absolutely vital, perhaps irreplaceable, political elements in this mobilization were the leaders who would come to be derided in the 1960s as “Cold War liberals.”
From 1946 to 1950, a civil war raged within labor and liberal institutions over the postwar direction of their movement. Initially, it looked as if Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, with its secret Communist leadership, might wrest Roosevelt’s mantle from a faltering Harry Truman and the Democratic Party. But after an uncertain start, Truman reformulated the New Deal for the postwar era, and adopted a policy of confronting Moscow that transformed him into the greatest of the Cold War’s liberal presidents. By the time the 1948 election was over, Wallace and his followers had ceased to be a viable alternative to Truman and the Democrats. Soon afterwards, the last bastions of Communist institutional strength were leveled when the CIO expelled its Communist-led unions.
In addition to ideological rejection of Communism, one must note a practical aspect of the Democratic Party’s embrace of Cold War liberalism. From 1945 onward Republicans had been unrelenting in their criticism of the covert presence of Communists in the New Deal coalition. Many Democratic professionals realized that in the context of the developing Cold War, continued tolerance of the Communist presence opened the party to devastating Republican attack.
The heroes in this political marginalization of the extreme left were such figures as Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Eleanor Roosevelt from Americans for Democratic Action; liberal Democratic politicians such as Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas; and labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and Philip Murray. Yet they were not McCarthy’s allies — indeed, these were the kind of people against whom McCarthy railed.
By the time McCarthy’s Wheeling, West Virginia speech in February 1950 launched what came to be labeled “McCarthyism,” an anti-Communist consensus dominated the American landscape. The Democratic Party was firmly in the hands of Cold War liberals; the CIO free of Communist influence; and only remnants remained of the once-significant Communist role in mainstream politics, civic institutions, and the labor movement. Yet McCarthy threatened the anti-Communist consensus that liberals had helped create because he attempted to make anti-Communism a partisan cudgel."
...snip
Go Joe!
The debate amongst conservatives continues.
Ann Coulter also did a pretty good job of vindicating McCarthy in “Treason”.
“Initially, it looked as if Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, with its secret Communist leadership, might wrest Roosevelt’s mantle from a faltering Harry Truman and the Democratic Party.”
Setting that one aside for reading-challenged lurking DU types.
Call out the reds by name he did and they swore they would never let it happen again.
Anybody who is opening up a big mouth criticizing this book is a guaranteed communist or sympathizer.
Naw, that assumes he was habilitated.
McArthy simply needs the truth told about him. Thats not rehabing. Its exposing the liberal socialist historical lies about Joe.
And the libs want to call it rehabing?
Buahahahahahaha!
The libs are afraid that we will have another McCarthy era. In fact we need one quite badly, what with 5th Column operatives in the CIA and the State Dept. leaking secure info. to the NY Slimes, and purposfully traducing presidential policies.
Yup, we need another Joe right now!
Maybe Reid and Pelosi, as well as that *urd Murtha would end up behind bars where they belong, for their Unamerican conduct of aiding and abetting the enemy.
The American Communist Party IS a clear and present danger.
Now they are called the Democratic Party however.
I’m not quite sure what this guy has been smoking. Aside from Reuther kicking the Communists out of the unions and possibly some sense from Schlesinger, the Democrats have never been willing to admit how thoroughly FDR’s administration had been infiltrated. It wasn’t until the Venona papers emerged that Alger Hiss wasn’t regarded as a martyr who had been unfairly prosecuted by Nixon.
The reality of the political landscape was that the U.S. government had engaged in blatant pro-Stalin propaganda during the later war years in order to sell the “lend-lease” program to the American public.
McCarthy had to resort to a degree of sensationalism in order to overcome the results of this propaganda campaign and the image of “Uncle Joe” Stalin that resulted.
Even when Kruschev emerged in the late 1950’s to lead the Soviet Union the American MSM portrayed him as a grandfatherly figure ignoring that he had presided over much of Stalin’s purge activities and was internally known as the “butcher of the Ukraine” by the Soviet populace.
I read a book recently by William F. Buckley (title escapes me) about Joe M. Even though a work of fiction, I think it contained enough truths for me to do a complete reevaluation of the man.
It is not true that by the time McCarthy arrived on the scene, an anti-communist consensus had swept away all communists in government. If it had, he would have had no ammo, as the author of this piece pretends. Instead, the State Department in particular was still a communist subsidiary, and Dean Acheson was a large part of the reason why. He made it his business to protect the chums from his "correct" class, and they in turn made it their business to see asia delivered to communism, along with whatever espionage they could get away with.
In case everybody forgot, on Truman's watch, American citizens deliberately gave atom bombs to Joe Stalin.
Evans is fair to the real anticommunist hawks in the Democratic party, notably Scoop Jackson and JFK. He notes that both worked just fine with McCarthy, despite his alleged hyper-partisanship supposedly ruled way out of bounds. Morever, and again as Evans makes clear, it was far from partisanship to McCarthy, it was policy substance. If it *had* been just politics, he would have soft peddled it once Republicans won the 1952 elections - and there can be little doubt that is exactly what Ike wanted and expected him to do.
For all of them, Truman and Acheson, this author and Ike, McCarthy was just a partisan weapon. But he wasn't that to himself. He went after reds wherever he smelled them - or more accurately, wherever internal bureaucratic fights and the FBI told him they were being coddled by politicos interested only in credit and spin. That meant he crossed Truman yes, it also led him to cross Ike - the definition of non-partisan.
It was the latter than actually destroyed him, by undercutting his own political base on the right. It was as much that internal Republican fight - not now, back in 1954-56 - that let the Dems back into control of congress. I realize modern liberals think control of congress is their birthright, but really it simply isn't and wasn't.
Evans was entirely fair on the subject of Marshall in the book. He even went soft on him, because an objective reading of the record shows he treated security issues like a spin dominated prima donna, and backed off sensible seriousness about it as soon as he got the first whiff of bad liberal press over it.
This article writer pretending it was because the right was isolationist is utter horsefeathers, as is his imaginary asia first charge. The right simply didn't think writing off all of Asia was a good idea - and it wasn't - and Acheson's hamfisted rhetoric in that direction sparked the Korea war and killed tens of thousands of Americans trying to stem the damage. Acheson was not a cold war hero but a walking foreign policy disaster.
The article also claims there was no evidence of any Truman complicity in any of the latter security problems, but this is demonstrably false. Evans has the FBI on the subject and Truman justice is caught, dead to rights, fixing cases to get off communist spies. And why? Because they are concerned about partisan embarrasment. In other words, the hyperpartisanship the author pretends McCarthy was guilty of, was in fact the problem with Truman - and is also his own.
The richest bit, though, is the pretence that McCarthy deserved to be destroyed because he was such a partisan demagogue and he was scoring heavily painting the left as soft on communism, and politics requires restraint in such things and not painting enemies as so evil they can't be tolerated. Um, that is precisely what the left did to McCarthy. And to Nixon, come to that.
They murder the man and then claim it was self defense because after all, they were mortal enemies.
Then there is the spin control aspect of it all. He can't understand why magazines let people even talk about it. I mean, it is supposed to all be beyond the pale Bircherism, and nobody is ever to be allowed to talk about it, unless they agree that the left were wronged saints throughout.
Evans is winning this one going away. If this is all they can say against him - attacking others for being allowed to speak without genuflecting to the sainted Marshall - then he is entirely right in all his main points.
We have lived through what the left does to such moderate and principle men as Bush, and we will never believe their histrionics against men like McCarthy again. Instead of the smear campaign working one more time, it just shows us how little it takes to set them off - any effective attack on their claims to power.
I’ve read the Herman biography, and was pleasantly surprised. Since the Venona decrypts had corroborated McCarthy’s accusations of infiltration by communist agents, I knew that the Wisconsin senator had been correct in his assessment. But I had still seen him as a drunken, blowhard, self-promoter. Herman explained that that was a false image created by McCarthy’s enemies in the media (and there were many) and that he was in truth a mild-mannered, even shy man who was ambushed by his own success.
McCarthy & American Jews.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1927254/posts
Waves of immigrants came to the USA from 1880-1920: the Poles the Italians the Irish the Jews. Most of these ethnic groups voted for FDR by large majorities in 1932, 1936 & 1940, but over time they have assimilated and become less politically monolithic. Yet to this day the American jews still vote democratic by hefty majorities. Why? It is because Hollywood still strenuously maintains the communist lie about the 1950-54 McCarthy era. That lie is maintained by the recent movies “A Beautiful Mind,” and “Good Night and Good Luck”.
Shortly before his death in 1953 Stalin initiated the Doctor’s Plot. There are various reasons given for that. The KGB hated Israel. Many Americans who were enthusiastic supporters of the UN were Jewish. Edvard Radzinsky in his book “Stalin” argues that while at one time Stalin hoped Jewish financial capital would help rebuild the Soviet Union after the WWII, Stalin hated the prospect of suborning himself to the Baruch Plan and he flat out rejected IAEA nuclear controls—presented in 1946 (an attitude is not entirely dissimliar to that of Iran today.) The Russians were working on their own A-bomb based on stolen US designs. Stalin, himself a Geogian, wanted to insure that the Russians saw a Russian face to a Communist Party which was top heavy with Jews.
Whatever the reason, Stalin fomented the Doctor’s plot hysteria and broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. He was within days of preparing to exile the Soviet Jews to the Gulag (as was done previously with various other ethnic minorities such as the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, etc.), and initiate another great purge along the lines of 1938.
Stalin already had the concentration camps set up, and some of the preliminary accusations had gone out for the Doctor’s Plot. 100 or so Russian jews had already been executed when he died in 1953. The important thing to recall is that the Doctor’s Plot happened at the same time as the McCarthy anti communist business from 1950-54. Also in 1953, in the US the Rosenburgs were tried and executed for treason—and this less than a decade after the Holocaust. This naturally caused fear and suspicion in the US Jewish community. This fear and suspicion was played upon by knowledgeable communists and leftists—large numbers of whom were themselves jewish. These folk not only knew about what Stalin had done in the 1930s and had been about to do with the doctor’s plot before he died, but also saw the McCarthy trials as show trials american style . . . that is, a prelude to an american pogrom. For which the Rosenbergs were exhibit A.
In a brilliant piece of jujitsu, leftists and communists imputed to Americans on the right exactly what Stalin had planned to do. But it was done soto voce. Basically, a blood libel was perpetrated on Americans without their knowing it. Worse, Protestant America was painted as the tribal enemy tooth and claw of the US jewish establishment without Christian America even knowing it. Never again! — Was the battle cry. But there weren’t any such enemies of Jews in the USA. If there actually had been Christian tribal enemies in the USA, Meyer Kahane and his Jewish Defense League would have provoked them into a bloodletting. Why did Meyer Kahane behave the way he did? Because he heard the same thing as everyone else - all the Jews, that is. He heard about enemies of the jews in the heartland. But when he went to give battle, the only sorts of fights the JDL could find resulted in unintelligible court disputes in places like Idaho. In the end, Kahane married an American woman & helped expedite Stalin’s last wish—to rid Russia of Jews. When his American wife committed suicide, Kahane lost interest in the USA and focused instead on Israel. When Kahane died in 1990 it was at the hands of a Moslem.
While the American public outside NY/LA were generally given the view that the McCarthy era was an age when innocent men were unjustly tried by suspicious anti semites like McCarthy & Nixon, the NY/LA Jewish establishment was given a very different story. They were given to understand that the democrats/liberals had prevented the US from visiting a holocaust on them - and that American Jews owed their loyalty to the liberal democrats because the liberal democrats were the protectors of the Jews. And this Meme went on untouched for decades after McCarthy.
This dual track story line didn’t crack until the early 1990’s when the KGB/NKVD/GRU opened up their files on the WWII-McCarthy period. In 1995 the US’s National Security Agency opened up their Venona files. Both Russian and American spy agency files showed that McCarthy was right. The Rosenburgs were guilty. The US government —notably including the Manhattan Project—had been at one time soaked with Russian Spies. While McCarthy had the details wrong, he got the general outline of the story right. Why did McCarthy get the outline right and the details wrong? The reason is that McCarthy’s relationship to Hoover was the same as Hoover’s relationship to the NSA.
The NSA told the FBI about the Venona intercepts but insisted that the FBI could not use NSA intercepts as evidence in court. The FBI had to develop their own leads. As a result most of the spies escaped prosecution. The FBI did not get their man.
In 1950 J. Edgar Hoover began weekly meetings with Joseph McCarthy. Those meetings ended in 1954. The beginning and end of those meetings coincided with the beginning and end of McCarthy star turn in the national spot light. McCarthy got most of the details of the spy story wrong but he got the general outline of the story right. His predicament was the same as that of the FBI. Whatever Hoover told him—McCarthy could not use in the senate hearings. To this day the FBI denies that Hoover told McCarthy anything about the Venona Cables and maybe Hoover said nothing explicit to McCarthy for which Hoover could be liable in court.
Needless to say, an American style shoah was never in the cards.
The reason that Hollywood hated Ronald Reagan so much was that he was an anti communist in Hollywood during the McCarthy period. To be staunchly anti communist in Hollywood or NYC at that time was to be at least vaguely anti semitic because in the 30’s to the 50’s communism was considered to be almost a secular form of Judaism in the Jewish communities of NY/LA. Given the reputation of the Jews in capitalist countries as the quintessential capitalists, this seems ironic. But in Russia, communism was a way to get ahead for the jews. And in addition to the opportunities communism presented to Jews, there was a biblical antecedent for jewish communists in the bible in the person of Joseph in Egypt because the relationship between Jews to Joseph’s Egypt maps over well to that between Jews and Communist Russia. And the history of the Jews from Joseph to Moses looks very similar to the rise to prominence of many Jews in the soviet communist bureaucracy from the 1917-1970 and the decades long expulsion of Russia’s jews after 1970 when it became clear that communism was not working. The Russians blamed Russian jews for the failure of communism.
Reagan was among the first wave of FDR democrats to switch parties. Reagan’s star turn in Hollywood ended after McCarthy, but his experiences in Hollywood served him well when he went into public service. He always understood the jujitsu of media talk of the age. Something that cannot be said of Nixon. Nixon’s rise to prominance began with his role with the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC)—a role for which gained visceral leftist enemies with long memories (in the way John Kerry gained prominence during the Viet Nam era and made visceral enemies of the swift boat veterans.) Nixons fall also coincides with the Russian expulsion of Russia’s jews.
I would not argue that Nixon paid the price for Russia’s expulsion of Russian jews. That stretches the point. However, when I hear American based Moslems talking about McCarthyism being visited on them, I have to laugh. They have unknowingly pronounced themselves guilty in the eyes of many Americans.
The history of the McCarthy period now is forgotten among American Jews except for the vague idea that somehow Republicans are bad and somehow Democrats are good.
As for the Democrats, part of the reason for the loss of their inner coherence in the last decade has been that the part of their foundational raison d’être which stems from the McCarthy era was revealed to be based on a lie. So now the core of the Democratic Party is the sodomites. Those people are not just confusing, they are confused.
David Horowitz interviewed by Rush Limbaugh some months ago — talked about how his parents were communists and he was a communist in college. He said when he was in college his views were always treated respectfully by his professors. But, he said recently, a young Christian college student told him that his homosexual college professor had singled him out in class and asked him “Why do you Christians hate queers?” Asked why he continued to do what he did in the face of all the abuse he gets, David Horowitz said that - like Rush - he took public political positions because he had to. But also he said he did it as a matter of atonement.
He gets it.
Venona Historical Writings that include comparisons of venona and russian spy lists and the changing venona story in the academy. http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page43.html http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/index.html