Posted on 01/28/2008 11:50:07 AM PST by smoothsailing
History Shows Joe McCarthy's Reputation is Undeserved
By Phyllis Schlafly
Monday, January 28, 2008
Ronald Reagan was dismissed by the intelligentsia as just an actor who read speeches written by others until Kiron K. Skinner discovered a box of Reagan's original radio scripts written in his own hand on ruled yellow paper from 1975 to 1979.
Since he had no staff to research and write for him in those years, the scripts prove that Reagan was a one-man think tank, well versed in political philosophy and history, fully capable of writing his own speeches.
Skinner is the W. Glenn Campbell Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and an associate professor of history and political science at Carnegie Mellon University. In December 2005, he was appointed to the National Security Education Board by President George W. Bush.
Skinner's discovery, and the subsequent publication of many of Reagan's more than 1,000 handwritten radio commentaries, changed the way history now respects Reagan.
M. Stanton Evans, journalism professor and board member of the American Conservative Union, has performed a similar transformation for the most reviled American in modern U.S. history, Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Evans' 663-page work, "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies" (Crown Forum, $29.95), is the result of six years of reading primary sources. Evans proves that almost everything about McCarthy in current history books is a lie and will have to be revised.
It's an interesting sidelight that one of Reagan's old radio commentaries referred to Evans as "a very fine journalist." He is, indeed, but this book shows that he also is a Sherlock Holmes-type detective who chased every clue to find the truth and to write accurate history in elegant prose.
Evans' vindication of McCarthy was made possible by recently released files, such as the Venona papers (the secret messages between Moscow and its U.S. agents decrypted by our government and released in 1995), data from Soviet archives, and executive-session transcripts of Senate committees that were finally opened after a 50-year ban. Evans' book is copiously documented and reproduces some critical pages from never-before-released files.
In the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy was one of the most popular men in America. Average U.S. citizens recognized him as Horatio at the Bridge battling against our nation's sworn enemies, the Soviet Communists.
McCarthy understood, long before Reagan, that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, one of whose strategies was to infiltrate agents into our government in order to guide our policy to favor Communist goals. In fact, our government was much more infested with Soviet agents than McCarthy imagined.
It's now well known that Communist agents imbedded in high-ranking positions included White House confidant Lauchlin Currie, State Department official Alger Hiss and Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White. Evans quotes FBI files identifying atom bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer as a secret Communist as early as 1942.
Taking on the anti-communist mission locked McCarthy in mortal combat against powerful forces: two U.S. presidents, the vast federal bureaucracy, malicious adversaries in Congress, left-wing lobby groups and the left-wing media who made him their daily target.
McCarthy was concerned only with Communist security risks who influenced U.S. policies. He never targeted Communists in Hollywood or academia.
One of McCarthy's early investigations exposed the gang of Communist agents embedded in our government whose mission it was to change U.S. policy to abandon our wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek and turn China over to the Communists. Owen Lattimore was the point man for articulating the Communist line, and the magazine Amerasia was the communications outlet for an interlocking network of soviet agents.
Evans describes how McCarthy deserves the credit for exposing the Amerasia scandal. Evans publishes for the first time McCarthy's lists of security risks employed by the State Department, proving that his charges were amply supported by FBI files.
Recent unrelated political controversies have shown that the cover-up is often worse than the crime, and the cover-up was McCarthy's prime target. He fought the federal bureaucrats who tolerated and even encouraged the widespread infiltration of our government by Communists whose first loyalty was to Russia.
The administration of President Harry S. Truman and the Democrats in Congress engaged in a massive cover-up, circling the wagons with their media friends. Their game plan was to deny the problem, evade political responsibility for tolerating security risks in government, and kill the messenger.
Evans' book proves that there was not a single innocent victim of McCarthy's investigations. The Senate committee transcripts prove that he was patient with witnesses, and never allowed anyone to be named a Communist or subversive unless he was given the chance to respond directly.
Joe McCarthy himself is probably the most investigated man in U.S. history, far more investigated than the Communist agents. Much of his energy had to be spent in defending himself against vindictive investigations initiated by the Democrats.
McCarthy's career came to an end after he was censured by the Senate, but 45 out of the 46 charges had to be dismissed as baseless. He was censured only for failing to pay proper deference to the committees that were maliciously bent on destroying him.
Everyone who henceforth writes about McCarthy will have to check his facts with Evans' documented discoveries.
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Phyllis Schlafly is a national leader of the pro-family movement, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Feminist Fantasies.
Joe just exposed those who had media influence and paid the price as did Nixon.
One of my questions is why Eisenhower would also take action against McCarthy, which he did.
I must read Evans' book.
AS a companion read to Evans's book I strongly recommend "In Denial, Historians, Communism & Espionage" by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. As for the Marxist smear machine, it's been a successful technique in the U.S. for nearly 80 years, along with stealing and suppressing archival documents in the manner of Sandy Burglar.
The number of missing documents relating to McCarthy is simply astounding -- and it was unreported until Evans published his excellent book. He was fortunate to find a treasure trove of original McCarthy data cached by the late Ralph de Toledano. Otherwise much of his book simply wouldn't have been possible.
The book covers the rationale of the many Republicans that aligned with ‘Rats against McCarthy. This is a MUST read.
what really urks me besides their attacks on Joe, is that they toss all this aside, with a ‘well, that was yesterday, we’re not in bed with commies now’.
I however, beg to differ, the left’s continual love affair with anti american dictators, their continual cultural marxism, their pure hatred of anything that smacks of anything good about America....
pleezzzzzz, you’re still in bed with them, in one form or another.
Added to Amazon list.
I must read this book.
Ann Coulter came to the same conclusion in Treason.
Joe McCarthy should be hailed as an American hero!
Wes Vernon did a great 9 part series on the book and McCarthy for the RewAmerica website.
Here's a link to the 9-part series.
The Hollywood fiasco was in the House -- McCarthy was in the Senate.
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 Doctors 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 controlspresented 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 Doctors 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 Doctors Plot. 100 or so Russian jews had already been executed when he died in 1953. The important thing to recall is that the Doctors 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 treasonand 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 leftistslarge 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 doctors 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 werent 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 Stalins last wishto 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 didnt crack until the early 1990s when the KGB/NKVD/GRU opened up their files on the WWII-McCarthy period. In 1995 the USs 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 Projecthad 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 McCarthys relationship to Hoover was the same as Hoovers 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 himMcCarthy 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 30s to the 50s 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 Josephs 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 Russias 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. Reagans 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. Nixons 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 Russias jews.
I would not argue that Nixon paid the price for Russias 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 dêtre 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
I got it for Christmas too.
We are still paying for Soviet disinformation and funding of communists in the arts, media, and universities. Lots of hapless souls sold their birthright for the proverbial bread and pottage of lentils. We pay for it with a twisted history and blocks of voters still opposing freedom without understanding the intellectual lineage of thier views.
**Ann Coulter: MCCARTHYISM: THE ROSETTA STONE OF LIBERAL LIES (LIBERALs LIE???)**
AnnCoulter.Com ^ | November 7, 2007 | Ann Coulter
Posted on 11/07/2007 3:05:59 PM PST by Syncro
THEY'LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU [Ann Coulter on Ron Radosh, Joe McCarthy, "Blacklisted by History"]
AnnCoulter.com ^ | December 5, 2007 | Ann Coulter
Posted on 12/05/2007 3:25:21 PM PST by RonDog
JOE MCCARTHY INVENTED THE INTERNET ... Ann Coulter
Ann Coulter Dot Com ^ | 12 Dec 2007 | Ann Coulter
Posted on 12/12/2007 3:00:06 PM PST by Rummyfan
Right you are, but ironicly, they have found their new communist and he is B.Obama!
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