Senator Joe McCarthy
--a brief excerpt from Richard H.
Rovere's Senator Joe
McCarthy
The late Joseph R. McCarthy, a United States Senator from Wisconsin, was
in many ways the most gifted demagogue ever bred on these shores. No
bolder seditionist ever moved among us--nor any politician with a surer,
swifter access to the dark places of the American mind. The major phase
of McCarthy's career was mercifully short. It began in 1950, three years
after he had taken his seat in the Senate, where he had seemed a dim and
inconsiderable figure. It ended in 1954, when the Senate passed a
resolution of censure against him. That was three years before his death
at the age of forty-eight. Both his rise and his
fall were accomplished with breathtaking speed. At the start of 1950, he
was a jackstraw in Washington. Then he uncovered Communism--almost by
inadvertence, as Columbus discovered America, as James Marshall
discovered California gold. By the spring of the year, he was a towering
figure, and from then on, except for a few brief weeks early in that
summer, no man was closer than he to the center of American consciousness
or more central to the world's consciousness of America. He filled,
almost to the letter, the classic role of the corsair of democracy,
described twenty four hundred years ago by Aristophanes, who in The
Knights had Demosthenes describe the future of an incredulous
sausage-seller in whose very coarseness and vulgarity the great
connoisseur of both irony and integrity discerned "a promise and an
inward consciousness of greatness":
Now mean and unregarded;
but tomorrow
The mightiest of the mighty, Lord
of Athens....
The sovereign and ruler of them
all,
Of the assemblies and tribunals, fleets and armies;
You shall
trample down the
Senate under foot
Confound and crush the generals and
commanders.
Through the first part of the decade, McCarthy was all of
these things, and then he found the Senate and the generals and
commanders rising up against him, and he collapsed. His decline was more
difficult to account for than his ascent. He suffered defeats but not
destruction. Nothing of a really fatal consequence had happened. He was
in a long and sweaty rumble before television cameras in the spring; in
the late summer, a Senate committee recommended that he be
censured; and in the winter he was censured--or, in the language of the
resolution, "condemned" for conduct that "tended to bring the Senate into
dishonor and disrepute." But other Senators, less powerful than he, had
been censured and gone on to greater triumphs--among them, an earlier
Senator from Wisconsin, Robert M. La Follette, whose son and namesake
McCarthy had defeated in 1946. (In the year of McCarthy's death, the
Senate voted the elder and censured La Follette one of the five greatest
men ever to grace the chamber, the other four being Henry Clay, Daniel
Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Robert A. Taft.) Still he had five years on
stage, and he was at stage center almost all of that time. He walked,
then, with a heavy tread over large parts of the Constitution of the
United States, and he cloaked his own gross figure in the sovereignty it
asserts and the powers it distributes. He usurped executive and judicial
authority whenever the fancy struck him. It struck him often. He held two
Presidents captive--or as nearly captive as any Presidents of the United
States have ever been held; in their conduct of the nation's affairs,
Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, from early 1950 through late
1954, could never act without weighing the effect of their plans upon
McCarthy and the forces he led, and in consequence there were times when,
because of this man, they could not act at all. He had enormous impact on
American foreign policy at a time when that policy bore heavily on the
course of world history, and American diplomacy might bear a different
aspect today if McCarthy had never lived. In the Senate, his headquarters
and his hiding place, he assumed the functions of the
Committee of the Whole; he lived in thoroughgoing contempt of the
Congress of which he was a member, of the rules it had made for itself,
and--whenever they ran contrary to his purposes--of the laws it had
enacted for the general welfare. At the start of 1950, McCarthy was an
empty vessel to the general public outside Wisconsin. There he was known
as a cheap politician of vulgar, flamboyant ways and a casual approach to
the public interest. It is unlikely that one in a hundred Americans knew
of his existence. He was a voice making no sound in the wilderness. Then,
on February 9, 1950, he made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in the
course of which he said that the Department of State was full of
Communists and that he and the Secretary of State knew their names. Later
there was some dispute (there was always dispute whenever he said
anything) as to whether he had stated that there were 205, 81, 57, or "a
lot" of Communists, but the number was of slight importance alongside
what he insisted was the fact that Communists "known to the Secretary of
State" were "still working and making policy." A Senate committee was
immediately appointed to look into his startling assertions. It was the
first of five investigations, held by four different committees, to be
concerned exclusively with the problem of whether Senator McCarthy was
telling the truth, about others or, mutatis mutandis, others were
telling the truth about Senator McCarthy. In the spring of 1950, only the
first question was considered. Through March and April and May, when
Communist power in the Far East was being mobilized for the war in Korea,
life in Washington, political life in the United States, seemed largely a
matter of determining
whether American diplomacy was in the hands of traitors. Little of
importance was learned except that McCarthy had little of importance to
say. He had been talking through his hat; if there were Communists in the
State Department, he did not know who they were. Nevertheless, he had
clued himself in. The lights played over him. Eyes were upon him. The show
was his. Within a matter of weeks, his name was known and heard
everywhere, and his heavy, menacing countenance was familiar to newspaper
readers, to moviegoers, to television viewers everywhere. Henceforth it
would be hard to find anyone who was unaware of him. And he became,
quickly, an eponym. Barely a month after Wheeling, "McCarthyism" was
coined by Herbert Block, the cartoonist who signs himself "Herblock" in
the Washington Post. The word was an oath at first--a synonym for the
hatefulness of baseless defamation, or mudslinging. (In the Herblock
cartoon, "McCarthyism" was crudely lettered on a barrel of mud, which
teetered on a tower of ten buckets of the stuff.) Later it became, for
some, an affirmation. The term survives both as oath and as
affirmation not very usefully as either, one is bound to say and has far
broader applications than at first. Now it is evocative of an almost
undifferetiated evil to a large number of Americans and of a
positive
good to a somewhat smaller number. To the one, whatever is illiberal,
repressive, reactionary, obscurantist, anti-intellectual, totalitarian,
or merely swinish will for some time to come be McCarthyism, while to the
other it means nothing more or less than a militant patriotism. "To many
Americans, McCarthyism is Americanism," Fulton Lewis, Jr., a radio
commentator
and the official McCarthyite muezzin, said. Once the word caught on,
McCarthy himself became intrigued with it. "McCarthyism is Americanism
with its sleeves rolled," he told a Wisconsin audience in 1952, and, sure
enough, there was the eponym, with his hairy arms bare to the biceps.
That year he published a book of snippets from his speeches and his
testimony before committees, and it bore the modest title of McCarthyism:
The Fight for America. There is injustice as well as imprecision in both
meanings; if patriotism can hardly be reduced to tracking down Marxists
in the pastry kitchens of the Pentagon or the bindery of the Government
Printing Office, neither is the late Senator's surname to be placed at the
center of all the constellations of political unrighteousness. He was
not, for example, totalitarian in any significant sense, or even
reactionary. These terms apply mainly to the social and economic order,
and the social and economic order didn't interest him in the slightest.
If he was anything at all in the realm of ideas, principles, doctrines,
he was a species of nihilist; he was an essentially destructive force, a
revolutionist without any revolutionary vision, a rebel without a cause.
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