Joe McCarthy and the historians

How standard references distort the record and misrepresent the evidence on subversion

We have learned a lot in recent years about the ways of Soviet subversion-long denied but now confirmed by secrets from the Kremlin archives, and our own. What was once considered unthinkable stuff about spies and agents in lofty places turned out to be not only thinkable, but true.

However, the widely held "progressive" view that it was all just Cold War paranoia retreats but slowly, clinging to dug-in defenses and staging sporadic guerrilla raids against the new disclosures. On many media-ac mic fronts, indeed, the old falsehoods march on as aggressively as ever, still spreading their confusions.

Nowhere is this more obviously so than in the case of Sen. Joe McCarthy .-Wis.), roufinely treated in our political comment as a reckless, lying bully. Despite a string of revelations that show McCarthy was correct in many of his uproarious battles (his set-to with Prof. Owen Lattimore and the amazing Amerasia scandal, to name a couple), virtually every extant book about the era repeats the tale of his tremendous evil.

Thus Oxford University Press is currently selling a multi-volume series called A History of US, by one Joy Hakim (discussed in HUMAN EVENTS, Sept. 12, 1997). This contains a venomous essay on McCarthy, firing slurs in all directions with no visible shred of fact included in the package. It's obvious Ms. Hakim knows less than nothing of McCarthy. Yet this work, it's said, is a successful textbook. Small wonder American students know so little about the history of their country.

Even worse in some respects, because much more would be expected, is English intellectual historian Paul Johnson. His History of the American People, acclaimed by many on the right, also provides some odd misstatements on McCarthy, making it plain that Johnson too is sadly ignorant of the subject. This is the more disturbing in that the prolific Briton will be believed by people who would dismiss, or nei cr read, the clueless musings of Hakim.

These ventures into Cold War pseudo-history are not unique, but merely two in an endless sequence, all bitterly hostile to McCarthy. Given the vast amount of historical error thus being heaped before the public, plenty of digging is required to find the ore beneath the rubble; not only to do justice to the man (though this is surely called for) but because the facts about these matters are crucial to any serious treatment of the epoch: Who told the truth, who was lying, and why they did it.

In contrast to earlier surveys here that reviewed a dozen or so McCarthy wrangles, this focuses on a single aspect of the storythough one of great importance: His first sensational charges of Communist or proCommunist penetration of the Federal government, and the grounds he had for these assertions. In the Hakim-Johnson books, and most others now available to readers, these are depicted as monstrous lies, conclusively shown to be such. As shall be seen, the facts of record are quite different. McCarthy first came on the national stage in February 1950 with a series of political speeches charging security breakdown in the State Department under President Harry Truman. Beginning with a speech in Wheeling, W. Va., February 9, followed by a speech in Reno, Nev., two nights later, he said a considerable number of Communists and Communist sympathizers had been holed up in Foggy Bottom, that top officials had been incredibly lax in dealing with the matter, and that the Truman White House seemed more inclined to hide this problem than to fix it.

A side dispute in the resulting fracas was exactly how many Communists or pro-Communists at State McCarthy was alleging. rn Wheeling he reportedly claimed he had a "list" of 205-though he would (persuasively) deny he said this. In Reno, where at least the numbers aren't in doubt, he referred to a group of 57, "who would appear to be either card-carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party." Nine days thereafter, before the Senate, he claimed to read from "State Department files" (or summaries thereof) regarding 81 individuals who were working in the department (or sometimes with it), or had done so.

To judge by the usual comment, McCarthy's use of these statistics blew out the mental circuits of his opponents, unable to grasp the abstruse idea of three separate numbers-albeit applying to separate matters. While this is a subject of some interest, space constraints forbid discussion in much detail (a few aspects are touched on later). Rather, the questions to be considered here are the substance of what McCarthy said, the accuracy of the resulting message, and the sources of his data-all topics that the standard histories have buried deep in layers of denial.

In the ensuing attempt at excavation, our focus will be on the initial speech McCarthy gave before the Senate. This was the formal proffer of his charges (or as formal as it could be in the conditions), in which he laid out the individual cases, and summarized the evidence he had to back them. These data, he said, clearly showed security failure at State, and the need for strong congressional action to correct things. It is the alleged evidence of this speech that is in turn denounced in all the usual write-ups.