You forgot to mention that McCarthy’s critics include prominent conservative anti-communists such as Whittaker Chambers, former FBI informant Herbert Philbrick, and Roy Cohn — not to mention J. Edgar Hoover and senior FBI officials who initially assisted McCarthy and who were directly involved with the matters that McCarthy investigated.
This is what is wrong with the debate about McCarthy. His admirers portray him as saintly and heroic — and incapable of grave flaws and mistakes — whereas ALL critics of McCarthy are, by definition, characterized as “liars” or “smearing” McCarthy.
In fact, there is one rule about the McCarthy controversy that I have found to be incontrovertible: the more adamant, effusive, and unconditional the praise -— the more impervious to fact-based arguments his admirers are.
Obviously, there is something much more profound in operation here. The controversy over McCarthy has assumed cosmic-truth proportions i.e. it is no longer a question open to careful examination of factual evidence and the possibility of falsifying aspects of what McCarthy believed or wrote or said.
Instead, McCarthy admirers insist upon absolute affirmation of every predicate, premise, assertion, and conclusion presented by McCarthy. Any deviation —no matter how small— is impermissible.
In short, McCarthy admirers have enthusiastically adopted the Soviet-style of history telling. ONLY that data which they think advances their argument and the conclusions they want believed is acceptable. Any contradictory data must be ignored, suppressed, or de-valued. Any data which falsifies something which McCarthy said or wrote — is anathema and must immediately be discarded.
As I pointed out in my webpage on Evans’ book:
“To his credit, Evans has no problem acknowledging that the complete story about the ‘McCarthy period’ in our history is still murky, and it is open to conflicting interpretations of available data by entirely honorable and principled analysts, so it certainly deserves considerable further fact-based research.”
However, as Dr. John Earl Haynes (one of our nation’s most accomplished and respected scholars on the McCarthy period) has observed in an email to me:
“Klehr and I have repeatedly made clear that neither Venona, Moscow archival material, nor Vassiliev’s notebooks provide any meaningful vindication for McCarthy. First, that there had been significant Soviet espionage and Communist infiltration of key government agencies was not a view originating with McCarthy. That point had been publicly and vigorously advanced years before McCarthy arrived on the scene by, among others, Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, and Louis Budenz. The evidence that has emerged since the early 1990s certainly corroborates and vindicates their charges and the particulars of their testimony.
Second, Joseph McCarthy, however, went beyond them by claiming that the espionage and infiltration occurred with the knowledge and assistance of key Truman administration officials, namely Secretary of Defense and State George Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, both part of McCarthy’s “a conspiracy so immense”. There is no support in the new evidence for what was new in McCarthy’s charges or for the particular persons he named such as Acheson and Marshall. When McCarthy was right, he was not original and was only repeating charges made years earlier by others. When he was original, he was wrong.
For my view of McCarthy, see:
http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page58.html and http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2007/12/mccarthy-accord.html
John”
For further discussion re: McCarthy see my webpage here:
https://sites.google.com/site/ernie124102/cpusa/mccarthy
It is also useful to keep the following comment by J. Edgar Hoover in mind:
“The Communist Party in this country has attempted to infiltrate and subvert every segment of our society, but its continuing efforts have not achieved success of any substance. Too many self-styled experts on communism, without valid credentials and without any access whatsoever to classified factual data regarding the inner workings of the conspiracy, have engaged in rumor-mongering and hurling false and wholly unsubstantiated allegations against persons whose views differ from their own. This is dangerous business. It is divisive and unintelligent, and makes more difficult the task of the professional investigator.” [Hoover statement in February 5, 1962 letter to Mrs. W.R. Brown of Bountiful Utah; also published as letter-to-editor in Tri-Cities Daily newspaper of Sheffield, Alabama on Sunday March 31, 1963. Copy of Hoover letter in FBI HQ file 94-1-369, serial #1676]