More on Joe McCarthy

“[P]oint by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” — Nicholas Von Hoffman

That was the conclusion of one liberal journalist following the release of the Venona decrypts. But, folks on the far left kept up their defenses of the traitors even after Venona, prompting repeated responses from mainstream, apolitical historians:

And writing in the pages of The New Republic on Dec. 16, 1998, Klehr, Haynes and I answered the allegation of the editors of The New York Times that “a number of American scholars armed with audacity and new archival information… would like to rewrite the historical verdict on Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism.” We responded that “McCarthy was a demagogue whose reckless, irresponsible charges slandered innocent people,” and that his charges allowed actual Communists who engaged in and contemplated espionage to claim the status of victims, using McCarthy’s recklessness to fool people into believing that anyone accused of harming America’s national security was an innocent victim of the Senator’s wrath. Indeed, we concluded in that article that “one bizarre feature of the myths… is that persons who betrayed the United States and assisted Stalin’s Soviet Union through espionage are portrayed as heroic victims.” This, in fact, is precisely what The Nation editors and Victor Navasky in particular always do.

The discussion continues over at Mark Elrod’s blog.

I’m assuming that Dr. Elrod didn’t intend this result when he sparked the discussion. Don said:

I have come away from this whole argument with a new appreciation for McCarthy. Ironic, huh? Good job to all the participants, and thanks for the good reading.

The Baron keeps trying to get Dr. Elrod to admit that McCarthy found Communists. Dr. Elrod clarifies that he meant to say that McCarthy found no Soviet agents. For me the bottom line is this:

Even if you were right that McCarthy never found a Soviet agent, that would not contradict these points: (1) that anti-communists in the 40’s and 50’s were basically right that there was a conspiracy of Soviet agents at high levels of government, (2) that the liberal establishment staunchly defended the most prominent members of that conspiracy for fifty years, (3) that the release of Venona decrypts by the bi-partisan Moynihan Commission in 1995 proved to most reasonable people the accuracy of point #1 despite the efforts of those referred to in point #2, and (4) that all of this makes McCarthy’s excesses seem to be less of a problem than the actual wrongdoing he was trying to expose.

Despite having backed off a bit on how effective McCarthy was in “finding Communists,” Dr. Elrod has not yet backed off on his comparison of Joe McCarthy to Joe Stalin.

As to the previous question of innocent victims of McCarthy’s excesses, this is the upshot:

McCarthy’s flaws have long been known to his supporters even more than to his enemies, but many of those flaws, as Arthur Herman has shown, were hardly unique to him and also characterized much of what his enemies said and wrote about him. Nor does the myth that McCarthy “destroyed hundreds of innocent lives” bear scrutiny. After reading [Ted] Morgan’s bitterly hostile but exhaustive account of him and his career, it is impossible to identify one single innocent individual whom McCarthy seriously harmed through his rhetoric and investigations. There were people who seem not to have been so innocent who lost government jobs, but no one went to jail or was ruined. Indeed, after all his snorting about McCarthy, Morgan acknowledges that, “in spite of McCarthy’s hectoring tactics, not a single witness who appeared before his subcommittee was imprisoned for perjury, contempt, espionage, or subversion” and at last confesses that “There was never a wholesale purge, either in universities or in the entertainment world.”

So, perhaps it depends on what it means to have one’s life “destroyed.” I don’t think it means you had to answer a few questions or assert your Fifth Amendment rights in an Executive Session (scroll down) (i.e. a private meeting) with a few bloviating Senators.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 10:37 pm and is filed under History, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.