Posted on 04/14/2007 11:08:02 AM PDT by wagglebee
You cannot offer friendship to tyrants and murderers ... without advancing the cause of tyranny and murder. – Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis. (circa early 1950s)
There's always a conflict of interest when people who don't really like America are called upon to defend it. – Ann Coulter
Perhaps second only Woodward and Bernstein's newspaper articles in the 1970s that exposed the Watergate scandal and forced President Nixon to resign has the liberal propaganda press been so utterly successful at destroying a single Republican – an exhilarating and heady era that predated Watergate by 20 years.
From 1950-54, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, in a series of hearings held in his House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, with irrepressible zeal and courage, sought to root out Communists, Communist sympathizers and spies in the State Department, the Treasury Department, the military and in other areas of the government, but also in Hollywood, in unions, in the academy and throughout American society.
Ironically, HUAC was a committee formed not by McCarthy, but by liberal Democrats 12 years before, in 1938, on the eve of World War II during an era before political correctness and radicalism became the norm; where being a liberal Democrat meant defending America from tyrants abroad and German spies and terrorists at home.
Sen. McCarthy wasn't the first politician to mount a crusade to bring down intrinsic corruption. The annals of American political history are filled with them. There was the Tea Pot Dome Scandal of 1922 that made a national hero out of the heretofore unremarkable Montana Democrat Sen. Thomas J. Walsh, when he exposed the land for oil deal of the Warren Harding administration. The Truman Committee investigated charges of war profiteering and shoddy materials sold to the military during World War II by U.S. corporations, which lead to numerous reforms and elevated Truman to vice president and, at the death of FDR, to the presidency.
There was Robert F. Kennedy's stentorian questioning of Mafia dons and corrupt union leaders like Jimmy Hoffa in the early 1960s; this feat lead to RFK's presidential run, which was tragically brought to an end by the assassin's bullet in June 1968. However, politics does make strange bedfellows because RFK made his bones as a staffer to none other than Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his anti-communism crusade of the early 1950s. Despite his close association with McCarthy, however, RFK's memory is kept pure by the propaganda press even until this day. Why? Two reasons – RFK was a liberal Democrat and a Kennedy. McCarthy was neither.
Finally, and who could forget Newt Gingrich who in 1989 dethroned powerful Texas Democrat Speaker Jim Wright over a fraudulent book deal scandal, only to resign six years later for literally the same bogus book deal.
Back to McCarthy. As I revisit this tragic Promethean figure of the early 1950s, let us first answer two basic questions lucidly without emotion: 1) Did McCarthy find Communists, Communist sympathizers and Soviet spies in the State Department, in Hollywood, in the academy, in the literary world, in the military, in the media during his House Un-American Committee hearings? 2) Does an unbiased account of history show that McCarthy abused his power? Yes on the first question, No, on the second.
Conservative political writer Ann Coulter said this of McCarthy and the 50 years of incessant demonization by the liberal propaganda press:
I know he got a bad rap because there are no monuments to Joe McCarthy. Liberals had to destroy McCarthy because he exposed the entire liberal establishment as having sheltered Soviet spies. ... There's always a conflict of interest when people who don't really like America are called upon to defend it.
Today, McCarthy's name has been turned into a vile epithet (McCarthyism) and is stricken from the congressional record, from the marketplace of ideas and from public memory. Ironically, neither Marx, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Mussolini, Idi Amin, Pol Pot nor Hitler's names engenders such malediction from the left as does Sen. McCarthy, despite the fact that those leaders and the tyrannical ideals they propagated killed hundreds of millions of people.
In my opinion, Joseph McCarthy is the only man that can be put in the same sentence with the two other great Republican leaders of the 20th century, and they were both presidents – Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Yet McCarthy's face isn't carved into Mount Rushmore as TR's is, nor does even a statue or a $5 plaque appear of him in Washington, D.C., or in his home state of Wisconsin. Yet a few weeks ago the fine people of Amsterdam, Holland, erected a magnificent statute to one of their greatest leaders – no, not Rembrandt, not Grotius, not Spinoza, not van Gogh, but to that great ubiquitous figure … The Prostitute, and to the ancient glorious art of prostitution. Take that, Spinoza!
The craven cowardice and historical ignorance regarding this great man's contributions to America is appalling, but not surprising to me. Therefore, I also praise Ann Coulter. If it weren't for her prolific, courageous writings, and the radio and TV appearances of this bold, beautiful political commentator, McCarthy's memory would be all but totally forgotten or continually and utterly reviled by the political left without challenge. On this point, I'll let Ann Coulter speak in her own voice:
Among the most notorious Soviet spies in high-level positions in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations – now proved absolutely, beyond question by the Soviet cables – were Alger Hiss at the State Department; Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, later appointed to the International Monetary Fund by President Truman; Lauchlin Currie, personal assistant to President Roosevelt and White House liaison to the State Department under both Roosevelt and Truman; Laurence Duggan, head of the Latin American Desk at the State Department; Frank Coe, U.S. representative on the International Monetary Fund; Solomon Adler, senior Treasury Department official; Klaus Fuchs, top atomic scientist; and Duncan Lee, senior aide to the head of the OSS.
Is there no man, no conservative, no Republican during this upcoming 2008 presidential election who has pledged to continue McCarthy's magnificent legacy of combating radical liberalism, Country Club Republicanism, Communism, totalitarianism and civilization's newest enemy, Islamic terrorism? From way in the back of the room, Ann Coulter stood tall like a man and didn't ask for it, but took McCarthy's mantle.
And that is why I praise Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Oh, the black cleaning woman and the kid lawyer! That clears it up for me. Nothing like some specifics to really help clarify the “thousands” of ruined lives. I think the “kid lawyer” you speak of is Ray Kaplan. Here is how NewsMax report that information and how it was distorted:
“A classic example of historical distortion emerged when the hearings surfaced. A Senate “historian” on May 5 put his own spin on the newly revealed McCarthy hearings before others had a chance to see them.
Associate Senate historian Donald Ritchie, in his “Editor’s Note,” quotes one committee witness, William Marx Mandel (who had taken the Fifth Amendment when asked about his Communist affiliations) as publicly declaring McCarthy “murdered” a prospective witness, Ray Kaplan, an alleged suicide.
Ritchie doesn’t bother to inform researchers that Kaplan was expected to be a friendly committee witness, eager to tell McCarthy of his frustration that some with whom he worked had placed a Voice of America transmitter in such a way as to prevent VOA from reaching the freedom-loving people behind the Iron Curtain, thus rendering it useless.
Nor does this “historian” add that some of Kaplan’s colleagues told McCarthy afterward that they suspected Kaplan’s “suicide” actually resulted from foul play. Nor is Mandel’s credibility questioned, even though behind closed doors he had openly threatened to give the committee a public-relations black eye.”
You also might want to read this article from “Human Events” on what actually happened in these sessions behind closed doors and the evidence presented against Annie Lee Moss and the real story of Ray Kaplan. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=689
McCarthy was the one who charged Owen Lattimore with close ties to communism and questioned the role that Lattimore played in U.S. foreign policy, especially toward communists in China, which Lattimore famously claimed threatened America in no way.
Lattimore has been shown frequently to have stonewalled questions about his views and activities and to have lied about those things. He was editor of Pacific Affairs, the official journal of the Institute for Pacific Relations, a notorious and officially cited Soviet front. He was formally described by the Senate Internal Security subcommittee as “from some time in the 1950s a conscious, articulate instrument of the ‘Soviet conspiracy.’” Former top communist Louis Budenz testified to five separate experiences within the Politburo of the Communist Party in the United States in which Lattimore was involved as a Soviet conspirator.
Ann Coulter cites these names in her book: Among the Soviet operatives in government jobs who were named by McCarthy, Coulter informs us, were T.A. Bisson, Mary Jane Keeney, Cedric Belfrage, Solomon Adler, Franz Neumann, Leonard Mins, Gustavo Duran and William Remington.
Leonard Mins had contracted to write manuals for the armed forces. In that pursuit, he handled sensitive material. “Oh, yes, much of it was classified,” he told Sen. McCarthy’s committee. He had also worked for the OSS, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mins pleaded the Fifth Amendfment when asked if he were a member of the Communist Party, either at the time he was working for the government or at the moment of the hearing; whether he had discussed classified material with a member of the Communist Party or turned any of it over to an espionage agent; whether he had engaged in espionage or illegal Communist activity; whether he had been on the payroll of Soviet military intelligence, either at the time he prepared the pamphlet or when working for the OSS; whether he attended the Lenin School of sabotage and espionage; and whether he believed in the overthrow of the United States by force and violence.
Cedric Belfrage, also mentioned by Coulter, had worked under Army occupation officers. In that capacity, he had been instrumental in setting up newspapers in Germany after World War II. Before the McCarthy committee, he pleaded the Fifth on whether he had been a Communist then or at the time of the hearing; whether he advocated overthrow of the U.S. or British government (he was a British citizen) by force or violence; whether he would fight in the U.S. or British Army if “drafted” to fight Communist aggressors.
And then there is Alger Hiss...
No Communists? You’re kidding, right? Please know history before spouting off about it.
Why is McCarthy a continuing target of the leftwing press? Got to be a reason . . .
Because if you are catching flak, you are over the target.
Things haven't changed much, have they?
sayings “nad” is anal material?
Annal, man, annal!
How can a Senator chair a House Committee? This guy does not know squat. McCarthy was chair of PSI, whose pervue was communist infiltration of the federal government.
Good article.
I do believe however that he was branded a Nazi for questioning our treatment of some German soldiers following the War.
It is his inalienable right to not sign a loyalty oath. He is (was) free to chose a career that does not require affirming one's dedication to all principles of our Constitutional Republic and economic system. He benefited from our system and in returned he provided much entertainment.
As a member of the teaching profession however he would not have had the inalienable rights to indoctrinate students, IMO. Students have inalienable rights too as do the parents paying the bills.
God bless your Dad and what he fought and stood for.
Probably because he wasn't mentioned in the Breaking Mews forum. ;-)
Wonderful article: Mc Carthy was proven correct!
Names, please ?
"terrorized the country,"
Who ?
"forced teachers to sign loyalty oaths,"
After those working in sensitive Government posts, can you think of a another group that should than PS teachers and college profs ?!?
"and has an entire era of shame named after him."
Ironically, dubbed by a group of charlatans that were guilty of precisely what he accused them of (and practiced more ruthlessly by the left in the 50 years since).
Most of those Republicans that voted to censure him were liberals. Quite telling.
The “Black cleaning lady” (she wasn’t, but I’ll go with it) WAS a communist. Annie Lee Moss perjured herself in front of that government committee with her deaf and dumb routine, a great fallback of many liberals when they’re caught with their proverbial hands in the cookie jar.
I’ve seen repeated airings of tv specials and movies (most recently, “Good Night And Good Luck”) portraying Moss as a victim. It’s bull$hit.
Though there are several problems with this article (the McCarthy/HCUA stuff), there was one blockbuster truth never mentioned in the article. HCUA was begun for the purpose of weeding out Nazis. It’s co-founder was none other than Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a Russian born Brooklyn Congressman. Dickstein was a paid agent of the NKVD (later, the KGB), as later revealed in the Venona files. I believe McCarthy was only scratching the surface. He had to be destroyed by TPTB.
Yeah, you’re -way- off on the “black cleaning lady”. Communist Party records listed “Annie Lee Moss” residing at 72 R Street in S.W. Washington D.C. That entire bit in the show trials on how there were “multiple” Annie Lee Mosses in D.C., and how this supposedly proved McCarthy had the wrong Moss? Also bullshit. There was an Anna Lee Moss and an Annie Moss, but only one Annie Lee Moss, and she lived at the exact address where Communist Party records said she did and where the Daily Worker was being delivered. Oh, and it was also delivered to her previous address at a rooming house.
So, yeah, copies of the Daily Worker kept getting mailed everywhere she lived, the Communist Party had updated records of her current address listing her as a member, and she worked in the Code Room of the Pentagon. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
And you buy that she didn’t know who Karl Marx was or what Communism was. Why? Cause she said so. Not like a communist working in the code room of the Pentagon would -lie- or anything.
Talk about gullible. And yes, you’re just as wildly wrong about every other assertion you made.
Qwinn
Amen. For that matter, the campuses are full of leftist students who spend all their time protesting, We should make them sign loyalty oaths or kick them out of school.
bump
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