McCarthy's dirty work done off-camera, papers reveal

Mercury News ^ | 5/6/03 | Dick Polman - Knight Ridder

[Jackson Brown]

Joe McCarthy was more right than he ever knew

Joe McCarthy was more right than he, or others, knew. The problem was he was also more nuts than he, or others, knew.

[NormsRevenge]

Thank you for your professional opinion as a clinical psychiatrist.

[Jackson Brown]

Joe McCarthy hurt the cause of anti-communism in the US because he was "nuts".

I "came of age" with McCarthy...when people like my father -- legislative chief for Sen. Estes Kefauver at the time -- were his allies in the beginning. However, the behavior that lead to his censure by the Senate and to him drinking himself to death at the age of 48 discredited the whole enterprise.

McCarthy, in the 2 short years he was in the forefront, made so many enemies -- MOST who supported him before he went off the deep end. He ended up creating sympathy -- and greater popular acceptance -- of communism/marxism.

"Red Baiter" and "McCarthy-ite" became labels to avoid at all costs...and STILL ARE!

IMO, we would not have some 45 members of the congress today that belong to international communist/socialist groups if it were not for the perceptions he created and exist still today...that anti-communism is "McCarthyism". Also groups like the World Workers party and their creation International A.C.T.I.O.N. might not have been given such a pass on their radical left politics...not by people here, but by the mainstream middle, if they could have been attacked more freely for what they are in the general media.

So, I still maintain he was right...but he was NUTS and, as a result, greatly hurt the cause.

[cynicom]

Flushed out a lot of "democrats" that wore pink underwear, did he not??

[NormsRevenge]

I appreciate your take on Joe. I was born in '54 and missed out on the events of that day.

If nothing else, he made the Reds a bit more careful.. altho, the sympathizers of today, certainly don't seem to hide too well, where their true allegiances lie. I don't see how 50 years after the fact, that that can be laid on Joe, imo.

Thanks for replying.

[DPB101]

McCarthy . . . spent considerable time behind closed doors trying to determine if artists -- such as Howard Fast, Aaron Copland, Dashiell Hammett and Langston Hughes -- were trying to send subliminal communist messages.

Outright distortion of the testimony. Congress was investigating in the first place because $130 million a year in taxpayer money was being spend on books, radio programs and cultural events in Europe to advance a positive image of America and fight a PR war with the USSR.

Copland, Hammett, Hughes and others benefitted financially from these programs. The committee wanted to know if American taxpayers were funding those who were communists while we were trying to fight communism.

The committee did not call Joe Six Pack. Everyone called was tied into a government program one way or the other.

Volume 1 has a fascinating account of goose down purchases by the US government. Goose down was a strategic material. We were building a stockpile of goose down. We spent $30 million buying goose down, mostly from communist China. That was a lot of money in the early 1950s. The only other material we spent more on for our reserve was castor oil.

McCarthy wanted to know why the purchase was not put out to competitive bid and why the books of the American companies which handled the transactions were never examined. At one point, we were paying Communist China over twice what we could have bought the goose down for on the open market.