Don't know that Kessler would be bothered by that though.
It's a two-bit slander piece that doesn't hurt Sen. McCarthy any; but surely sets its author amongst the lowest of the low.
And pumping syllables for Newsmax isn't exactly an honor, either.
Not too long ago the WSJ editorial page was on our side.
So from this hack's POV, the 'truth' about Joe McCarthy is:
He was self aggrandizing.
He was too aggressive.
He drank.
He was also right more then he was wrong.
The first three traits describe 90% of the politicians and the last is what really ticks off the libs.
Anyone who focuses upon the number of Communists in the State Department claimed by McCarthy in his Wheeling speech is part of the problem.
As for charges that weren't true, could we maybe have two or three examples instead of a generalization?
ML/NJ
Unfortunately Kessler apparently doesn’t know much about the operations of the Communist Party USA during the 30’s-50’s, esp. in government departments. Using agencies created during the New Deal/Depression, CPUSA members infiltrated the government in a flood-like manner, including a number of key congressional committees.
In fact, the chairman of the Special Committee on UnAmerican Activities, Rep. Dickstein (D-NY), was a paid Soviet agent for a number of years (See; Alan Weinstein, “The Haunted Wood”).
McCarthy was a bastard but he did shine a light on the failure of the Truman administration to clean the reds out of the government.
There will be more coming out on this period as research continues at the National Archives.
The "revulsion" this fool says McCarthy spawned against spy-hunting was actually another coordinated propaganda effort by the American left at that time. There was an actual term for it that was fashionable amoung leftists then...anti anticommunist.
Then CP/USA over-reacted when they invented the word "McCarthyism" and it spread like wildfire among the "progressives" and employees of much of the MSM of that day?
Edward R Murrow that night in 1953, I think it was, should not have signaled, "Get McCarthy!" He should have let McCarthy finish destroying himself. I suppose.
Sure.
The target wasn't McCarthy it was us "little people." We knew he was right -- and decades later, behold!
So he wasn't telegenic and had little to no charm and.. well, there were indications that he .. er, drank too much.
His leftist enemies (and some on the right) made him the "issue" and virtually every employee of the MSM promptly forgot the real issue.
This book is both a great in-depth treatment of McCarthy's Senate career and an excellent broad survey of information newly available under the FOIA, the Yale Study of the Soviet /Archives, Inside the CP USA and, of course, Venona.
McCarthy is one of the most unjustly vilified men in our history. Whatever his personal failings, and whatever nonsense "historians" may write McCarthy did get results, and that is the ultimate criterion upon which to judge him.
Modern conservatives can take these lessons away from McCarthy (they could have taken them away from the Dies/UAC hearings, the Hiss-Chambers case, the Nixon Impeachment, Trent Lott's downfall, the Thomas confirmation hearings, the Clinton impeachment, etc. etc., but we just never seem to learn):
McCarthy was a direct victim of every one of these conservative failures to understand the nature of their enemy, or their failure to act.
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, Christian 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.
A final note on McCarthy. Maybe there were Russian spies in the USA for 20 years after McCarthy—but none were caught. When spies did start to turn up again in the1970’s their motives for spying were not ideological. They were for pride or money. Why the 20 year gap? Any why no ideological spies? Maybe old Joe did do the job he set out to do.
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
Unmitigated claptrap! No one has stated the obvious; maybe because it's universally understood on FR, so I will: The "revulsion" was created by whom exactly? Why, the MSM of course. The Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers within our(and the world's???) MSM were, and are, true believers in the cause.
"News" is the name; socialism's the game. Where is Joe McCarthy when we REALLY need him???
Herewith a letter sent to The Wall Street Journal a week ago in response to the recent anti-McCarthy article by Ronald Kessler.
By way of explanation for the staccato nature of this letter, I was told that I could have 750-800 words to reply to Kessler (whose article ran to 1,059 words). I overran this by 85 words, but even so it's difficult to answer so many misstatements in such a constricted format.
It's significant, for instance, that Kessler (falsely) invokes the authority of Willard Edwards to support his attack against McCarthy. I point out that Edwards said something very different from this hearsay, but couldn't go into the even more important point that he wrote a very extensive defense of McCarthy—devoted mostly to Fort Monmouth—in Human Events for November 10, 1954.
I have held off on circulating this letter until The Wall Street Journal had ample chance to run it. As of today, a week after the letter was received, it hasn't shown up in the Journal, so I am using this alternative method of conveying its contents. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Unreal Ronald Kessler
By M. Stanton Evans
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.) 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.)
Likewise with the face-value quote of Army Counsel Joseph Welch's lachrymose denunciation of McCarthy for allegedly having outed Welch assistant Frederick Fisher as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, an officially cited Communist front. Omitted from this Welchian morality play—and apparently unknown to Kessler, since he says nothing of it—is that Fisher had already been outed to the press and public as a former member of the Guild—by none other than Joe Welch, six weeks before this set-to with McCarthy.
As to Kessler's hearsay accounts of what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover supposedly said to William Sullivan or what Robert Lamphere then said to Kessler, suffice it to note that these windy generalizations about deceased third parties are uncheckable by their nature. Somewhat more susceptible to proof are comments that McCarthy made false accusations against a host of innocent people (specifics, please) and that the FBI couldn't find any Communists in the State Department to back his charges.
If that were true (which it isn't), then the Bureau was more incompetent than its worst enemies have imagined, as there were indeed Communists in the State Department when McCarthy came along, as shown by the official records. In my book I give a complete list of McCarthy's early suspects, plus now accessible data on many of these cases that show Communist affiliation, hanging out with Moscow spies, identification as Soviet agents in the Venona papers, and so on.
In one notable instance, it's possible to check out Kessler's hearsay stories from the grave, as he quotes a third-party account in which Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune allegedly said McCarthy picked up the "205" number concerning Communists in the State Department from a rumor relayed by Edwards. This, however, is also wrong, as shown by a memorandum on the matter from Edwards himself (provided by his son, Lee). This says McCarthy may have picked up the number 57 (not 205) from an Edwards article listing this number of suspects in the Federal government—a speculation that supports McCarthy's version of the numbers and contradicts the Kessler version.
A final instance to be noted is Kessler's reliance on Senate associate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited the McCarthy executive hearings for publication. Though Kessler quotes Ritchie as an impartial expert, the facts of the matter are quite different. In numerous comments, Ritchie has routinely stacked the deck against McCarthy—most conspicuously and most often in McCarthy's most famous case, that of Annie Lee Moss.
Mrs. Moss, who appeared before McCarthy in March of '54, has been portrayed for 50 years as a mistaken-identity victim because the committee supposedly collared the wrong suspect. Ritchie's treatment of the case, cited to secondary sources, reinforces the standard image of Moss as victim and McCarthy as browbeating tyrant. All of this, however, again is false, as shown by the extensive archives of the FBI and other official records.
When I got Ritchie on the phone I asked if he had by any chance checked out these official sources, rather than simply citing other academics. When I offered to sum up the relevant data proving McCarthy was right about the case, the historian grew irate, said "I am growing very tired of this conversation" and quickly ended our discussion. Such is the supposedly impartial authority quoted by Kessler-all too typical of the recycled error that passes for historical knowledge of McCarthy.