- Evans, M. Stanton.
Blacklisted by History.
New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.
ISBN 978-1-4000-8106-6.
-
In this book, the author, one of the lions of conservatism in the
second half of the twentieth century, undertakes one of the most
daunting tasks a historian can attempt: a dispassionate re-examination
of one of the most reviled figures in modern American history, Senator
Joseph McCarthy. So universal is the disdain for McCarthy by
figures across the political spectrum, and so uniform is his presentation
as an ogre in historical accounts, the media, and popular culture, that
he has grown into a kind of legend used to scare people and
intimidate those who shudder at being accused of “McCarthyism”.
If you ask people about McCarthy, you'll often hear that he used the
House Un-American Activities Committee to conduct witch hunts,
smearing the reputations of innocent people with accusations of
communism, that he destroyed the careers of people in Hollywood and
caused the notorious blacklist of screen writers, and so on. None of
this is so: McCarthy was in the Senate, and hence had nothing to do with
activities of the House committee, which was entirely responsible for
the investigation of Hollywood, in which McCarthy played no part
whatsoever. The focus of his committee, the Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations
Committee of the U.S. Senate was on security policy and enforcement
within first the State Department and later, the Signal Corps of the
U.S. Army. McCarthy's hearings were not focussed on smoking out
covert communists in the government, but rather investigating why
communists and other security risks who had already been identified
by investigations by the FBI and their employers' own internal security
apparatus remained on the payroll, in sensitive policy-making positions,
for years after evidence of their dubious connections and activities were
brought to the attention of their employers and in direct contravention of
the published security policies of both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
Any book about McCarthy published in the present environment must
first start out by cutting through a great deal of misinformation and
propaganda which is just simply false on the face of it, but which is
accepted as conventional wisdom by a great many people. The author
starts by telling the actual story of McCarthy, which is little known
and pretty interesting. McCarthy was born on a Wisconsin farm in 1908
and dropped out of junior high school at the age of 14 to help his
parents with the farm. At age 20, he entered a high school and managed
to complete the full four year curriculum in nine months, earning his
diploma. Between 1930 and 1935 he worked his way through college and
law school, receiving his law degree and being admitted to the Wisconsin
bar in 1935. In 1939 he ran for an elective post of circuit judge and
defeated a well-known incumbent, becoming, at age 30, the youngest judge
in the state of Wisconsin. In 1942, after the U.S. entered World War II
following Pearl Harbor, McCarthy, although exempt from the draft due to
his position as a sitting judge, resigned from the bench and enlisted in
the Marine Corps, being commissioned as a second lieutenant (based upon
his education) upon completion of boot camp. He served in the South Pacific
as an intelligence officer with a dive bomber squadron, and flew a
dozen missions as a tailgunner/photographer, earning the sobriquet
“Tail-Gunner Joe”.
While still in the Marine Corps, McCarthy sought the Wisconsin
Republican Senate nomination in 1944 and lost, but then in 1946
mounted a primary challenge to three-term incumbent senator
Robert M. La Follette, Jr., scion of Winconsin's first family
of Republican politics, narrowly defeating him in the primary, and then
won the general election in a landslide, with more than 61% of the
vote. Arriving in Washington, McCarthy was perceived to be a
rather undistinguished moderate Republican back-bencher, and
garnered little attention by the press.
All of this changed on February 9th, 1950, when he gave a speech
in Wheeling, West Virgina in which he accused the State
Department of being infested with communists, and claimed to have
a list in his hand of known communists who continued to work at
State after their identities had been made known to the Secretary
of State. Just what McCarthy actually said in Wheeling remains
a matter of controversy to this day, and is covered in gruelling
detail in this book. This speech, and encore performances a
few days later in Salt Lake City and Reno catapulted McCarthy
onto the public stage, with intense scrutiny in the press and
an uproar in Congress, leading to duelling committee investigations:
those exploring the charges he made, and those looking into McCarthy
himself, precisely what he said where and when, and how he obtained
his information on security risks within the government. Oddly, from
the outset, the focus within the Senate and executive branch seemed
to be more on the latter than the former, with one inquiry digging into
McCarthy's checkbook and his income tax returns and those of members
of his family dating back to 1935—more than a decade before he
was elected to the Senate.
The content of the hearings chaired by McCarthy are also often
misreported and misunderstood. McCarthy was not primarily interested
in uncovering Reds and their sympathisers within the government:
that had already been done by investigations by the FBI and
agency security organisations and duly reported to the executive departments
involved. The focus of McCarthy's investigation was why, once
these risks were identified, often with extensive documentation
covering a period of many years, nothing was done, with
those identified as security risks remaining on the job or, in
some cases, allowed to resign without any note in their employment
file, often to immediately find another post in a different government
agency or one of the international institutions which were burgeoning
in the postwar years. Such an inquiry was a fundamental exercise of
the power of congressional oversight over executive branch agencies,
but McCarthy (and other committees looking into such matters) ran into
an impenetrable stonewall of assertions of executive privilege by both the
Truman and Eisenhower administrations. In 1954, the Washington
Post editorialised, “The President's authority under the
Constitution to withhold from Congress confidences, presidential information,
the disclosure of which would be incompatible with the public interest, is
altogether beyond question”. The situational ethics of the legacy
press is well illustrated by comparing this Post editorial
to those two decades later when Nixon asserted the same privilege
against a congressional investigation.
Indeed, the entire McCarthy episode reveals how well established,
already at the mid-century point, the ruling class
government/media/academia axis was. Faced with an assault largely
directed at “their kind” (East Coast, Ivy League, old
money, creatures of the capital) by an uncouth self-made upstart
from the windswept plains, they closed ranks, launched serial
investigations and media campaigns, covered up, destroyed evidence,
stonewalled, and otherwise aimed to obstruct and finally destroy
McCarthy. This came to fruition when McCarthy was condemned by
a Senate resolution on December 2nd, 1954. (Oddly, the usual word
“censure” was not used in the resolution.) Although
McCarthy remained in the Senate until his death at age 48 in 1957, he
was shunned in the Senate and largely ignored by the press.
The perspective of half a century later allows a retrospective on
the rise and fall of McCarthy which wasn't possible in earlier
accounts. Many documents relevant to McCarthy's charges, including
the VENONA
decrypts of Soviet cable traffic, FBI security files, and agency
loyalty board investigations have been declassified in recent
years (albeit, in some cases, with lengthy “redactions”—blacked
out passages), and the author makes extensive use of
these primary sources in the present work. In essence, what they
demonstrate is that McCarthy was right: that the documents
he sought in vain, blocked by claims of executive privilege, gag
orders, cover-ups, and destruction of evidence were, in fact,
persuasive evidence that the individuals he identified were
genuine security risks who, under existing policy, should not
have been employed in the sensitive positions they held. Because
the entire “McCarthy era”, from his initial speech to
condemnation and downfall, was less than five years in length,
and involved numerous investigations, counter-investigations,
and re-investigations of many of the same individuals, regarding which
abundant source documents have become available, the detailed
accounts in this massive book (672 pages in the trade paperback
edition) can become tedious on occasion. Still, if you want to
understand what really happened at this crucial episode of the
early Cold War, and the background behind the defining moment
of the era: the conquest of China by Mao's communists, this is an
essential source.
In the Kindle edition, the footnotes, which appear
at the bottom of the page in the print edition, are linked to reference
numbers in the text with a numbering scheme distinct from that used for
source references. Each note contains a link to return to the text
at the location of the note. Source citations appear at the end of the
book and are not linked in the main text. The Kindle edition includes
no index.
November 2010 