Posted on 09/02/2003 12:16:25 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The recent publication by the Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee of 50-year-old transcripts of executive-session hearings chaired by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) have inspired the usual blizzard of political horseradish. Liberal knights in armor, who were in knee-pants at the time, have been holding forth on McCarthy's sins with the authority that ignorance bestows, repeating the false and pious litany. These diatribes studiously avoid specifics but fulminate loudly as to McCarthy's alleged character and motivation - he was accused by outraged Protestants of (horrors!) eating meat on Friday - and it is never mentioned that all the formal Senate charges prior to the Army-McCarthy brouhaha were thrown out.
Fearless commentators, wet behind the ears in the 1950s, inveigh that McCarthy caught no spies. But that was not his purpose. The thrust of his investigations was to show that open and secret communists had heavily infiltrated high and medium levels of governments - and the Venona intercepts, as well as the Kremlin records made public after the Soviet collapse, far outreach McCarthy's charges. One charge, however, still resounds - namely, that McCarthy destroyed "hundreds of innocent lives."
I remember running into Richard Rovere, one of the leaders of the anti-McCarthy onslaught, at the National Press Club (NPC) in 1954. I had known Dick Rovere in the days after his resignation from the New Masses, a Communist Party publication, and his joining the staff of The Nation, only slightly less leftist. He was, when we had lunch at the NPC, covering Washington politics for the New Yorker from a New York City suburb, venturing to the banks of the Potomac perhaps every six weeks or so. Dick also had written a small book about the "Wastrel from Wisconsin."
Rovere held forth about the "hundreds of innocent people" that Joe had destroyed. "Name one," I said. There was silence, and then he changed the subject, calling McCarthy unprincipled because communist labor unions had supported him in his 1946 run for the Senate. When I pointed out that Franklin D. Roosevelt had not only accepted the endorsement of the communists in 1932 but had brought many of them into his administration, Rovere became abusive. But he never named one of those "hundreds of innocent people" - nor has anyone else successfully done so.
Time magazine, however, made an attempt. In a cover story notable for setting the carefully documented research of its Washington bureau on its head, Time did name one. He was Bustavo Duran, a McCarthy case who, according to Time, had not only never been a communist, but was in fact an anticommunist. Yet Duran's true history had been included in the file that Time's Washington bureau had sent to its Manhattan editorial offices. During the Spanish Civil War, Duran had served with the Servicio de Information Militar (SIM), the Spanish secret police, organized and run by the NKVD (later the KGB) to continue in Spain the Josef Stalin purges of those he considered not sufficiently faithful to him. The SIM had been responsible for the "liquidation" of thousands of socialists, anarchists and liberals who had gone to battle against the Franco uprising.
There were other mass-destructive efforts against McCarthy. The New York Post, then edited by a one-time leader of the Young Communist League who had broken with the party but still joined in some of its vendettas, ran a series on McCarthy, including all the usual myths but going one step further by "exposing" his "inglorious" war record as a Marine Corps officer in the South Pacific. So "inglorious" was that record that the Marine Corps commandant and McCarthy's commanding officer wrote glowing commendations of the then-obscure McCarthy.
McCarthy was no angel, but neither was he the devil incarnate. He had taken on a task that would have won opprobrium for the most judicious lawmaker - the exposure of communist infiltration. And those around him suffered in tandem. When Jean Kerr, his office manager, suffered a broken pelvis because a balcony on which she was standing collapsed, the rumor mill whispered, "A botched abortion." When J.B. Matthews, his research director, wrote a piece for the American Mercury accurately detailing scores of names and dates of the Stalin-directed infiltration of American religious groups, he was hounded into resigning. Sen. Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, who obviously had not read the article, accused Matthews of smearing religion and shouted on the Senate floor, "Why didn't he mention a single name?"
As the evidence accumulates, it becomes clear that Joe McCarthy was more sinned against than sinner, and that his sins were of the daily garden-variety type which get little attention when others more politically correct are involved. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower was excoriated because he remained silent about McCarthy's harsh criticism of Gen. George C. Marshall. "Political cowardice," some said. The fact is that Ike privately believed that Joe was not entirely wrong about Marshall.
Ah, Whitaker Chambers, Alger Hiss?
We can include the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities here. Whose lives did it ruin? The witnesses behavior before the committee dictated whether or not we'd pay to see a movie they'd helped produce. What "black list?" Many continued on anonymously or with assumed names. Hey! All they would have had to do was answer the questions respectfully! We would have. Right, Dizzy Chicks? It's called choice. Theirs and ours.
We little people of the era knew McCarthy and the House Committee were right. Those smearing both were the ones most tolerant of the Soviet Union and even Uncle Joe Stalin himself. Take Edward R. Murrow (Please!) Even us hillbillies learned to add two and two.
I think it's germane and speaks volumes about the times and the "intellectuals'" and some in the ruling class acceptance and tolerance of communism to point out that the Export-Import Bank was originally created for the express political purpose of lending money to the Soviet Union. It speaks volumes about today also -- one of the biggest benefactors of the Ex-Im Bank is communist China.
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