Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy -- M Stanton Evans

[Mark LaRochelle]

I'm talking about the actual Chinese Civil War. The sheer scale and scope of that war was so large as to be beyond our control....

Short of an actual invasion of China, that whole thing was outside our ability to meaningfuly impact....

Clearly, the Soviets disagreed with your assessment. That's why they invested so much effort in getting Soviet agents like Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White and Chi Chao-ting into positions (such as the White House or Chinese Currency Stabilization Board) where they could manipulate the Chinese currency and subvert U.S. policy, for example, choking off Roosevelt's crucial gold loan to China, at the exact moment the Soviets were massively stepping up their aid to the Communist rebels.

The same can be said later about Vietnam as we make essentially the same mistakes there too.

That's true. The same State Department coterie that plotted the assassination of the effective anti-Communist Chiag Kai-shek in China was later able to actually carry through its plot to assassinate the effective anti-Communist Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam.

 

[Mark LaRochelle]

It's also not overly impressive when you hit the broadside of a barn with a machine gun and a 1000 or so bullets.

I have no doubt that McCarthy actually found a few Communists. During the Red Scare so many people were accussed of being Communists that you practically had to have hit someone. Somewhere.

Could you list the McCarthy suspects who were innocent?

 

[CrusaderFrank]

It's also not overly impressive when you hit the broadside of a barn with a machine gun and a 1000 or so bullets.

I have no doubt that McCarthy actually found a few Communists. During the Red Scare so many people were accussed of being Communists that you practically had to have hit someone. Somewhere.

Could you list the McCarthy suspects who were innocent?

We've been asking for a while and the answer we get are either: Zero Mostel or

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8E_zMLCRNg[/ame]

And it's more likely that crickets were at US State than Zero Mostel

 

[Cecilie1200]

It's also not overly impressive when you hit the broadside of a barn with a machine gun and a 1000 or so bullets.

I have no doubt that McCarthy actually found a few Communists. During the Red Scare so many people were accussed of being Communists that you practically had to have hit someone. Somewhere.

Could you list the McCarthy suspects who were innocent?

We've been asking them that all this time, so don't hold your breath waiting for an answer.

 

[JakeStarkey]

Ceclie1200 won't tell you that she has been given the lists over and over and over. And she will continue to lie about that over and over and over.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Ceclie1200 won't tell you that she has been given the lists over and over and over.

I must have lost my copy. Could you repost it, Amazing Randy?

 

[Cecilie1200]

Ceclie1200 won't tell you that she has been given the lists over and over and over.

You're right, I WON'T tell him that . . . because it's not true.

 

[JakeStarkey]

The reactionary wing of the right attempts to rehabilitate McCarthy.

For their support of Evans' work, you can read 147 reviews at [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Blacklisted-History-Senator-McCarthy-Americas/product-reviews/140008105X/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2]Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies[/ame]. How amazing they almost every last one support the work. How about that.

A nuanced comment comes from a writer who is does not hate the work but is concerned about it. In part, it reads "As a child, following these events with a juvenile mind, I was very greatly turned away from Senator McCarthy when I heard this kind of accusation — not only of General Marshall, but also of General Eisenhower. In the period after World War II, those two leaders — unsurprisingly — were held in very high esteem. Senator McCarthy did himself no favors when he attacked their loyalty. " For the more favorable parts in this review of the work, go to Reader Comments | Blacklisted by History

 

[CrusaderFrank]

The reactionary wing of the right attempts to rehabilitate McCarthy.

For their support of Evans' work, you can read 147 reviews at Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies. How amazing they almost every last one support the work. How about that.

A nuanced comment comes from a writer who is does not hate the work but is concerned about it. In part, it reads "As a child, following these events with a juvenile mind, I was very greatly turned away from Senator McCarthy when I heard this kind of accusation — not only of General Marshall, but also of General Eisenhower. In the period after World War II, those two leaders — unsurprisingly — were held in very high esteem. Senator McCarthy did himself no favors when he attacked their loyalty. " For the more favorable parts in this review of the work, go to Reader Comments | Blacklisted by History

Well, once you and the writer grow out of your juvenile minds we can have a real talk.

How are you making out on the list of "State Dept Officials Ruined by McCarthy"?

 

[JakeStarkey]

CrusaderFrank, you are as hypersensitive as the other reactionary toids, aren't you? Read the reviews. I will put you back on ignore.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

CrusaderFrank, you are as hypersensitive as the other reactionary toids, aren't you? Read the reviews. I will put you back on ignore.

The Reviewers hated "Houses of the Holy" when it came out and my attitude then as now is, "Why listen to reviewers when you can just read the source material and form your own opinion"

Jake's List of State Department Officials Ruined by McCarthy.

End of List.

 

[Mark LaRochelle]

Mark, go ahead and carefully check out the footnotes and then the source. Do your due diligence. Your opinion may well change.

Please identify the particular footnotes or sources that are in error, so I can bring the errors to the author's attention. Thank you in advance for your help.

It's also not overly impressive when you hit the broadside of a barn with a machine gun and a 1000 or so bullets.

I have no doubt that McCarthy actually found a few Communists. During the Red Scare so many people were accussed of being Communists that you practically had to have hit someone. Somewhere.

Could you list the McCarthy suspects who were innocent?

"As a child, following these events with a juvenile mind, I was very greatly turned away from Senator McCarthy when I heard this kind of accusation — not only of General Marshall, but also of General Eisenhower. In the period after World War II, those two leaders — unsurprisingly — were held in very high esteem. Senator McCarthy did himself no favors when he attacked their loyalty. "

McCarthy submitted more than one hundred names to the Senate for investigation. It's odd that whenever one asks for a list of those innocents whose lives he ruined, the response is never any of these suspects, but always a reference to McCarthy's infamous speech attacking Secretary of State George Marshall. Far from ruining Marshall's life, this speech may be said to have ruined McCarthy's, by making an enemy of Marshall's protege and strategic co-planner Eisenhower.

Regarding this notorious oration (penned by Forrest Davis), the writer you quote, retired State Department official Bob McMahon, agrees with M. Stanton Evans, who not only explains in Blacklisted by History that McCarthy and Davis were wrong about Marshall, but shows why. (See pp. 413-414)

Regarding Eisenhower -- I recall Ike attacking McCarthy, but when did McCarthy attack Ike's loyalty? Can anyone supply a quote and a source?

Regarding the sophistication of children with respect to what they see on television, Jack Shafer of Slate has written on the naivete even of adult Americans of the 1950s regarding the techniques of TV propaganda. (It's often said that a substantial number of Americans bought their first TV sets during the Army-McCarthy hearings.) Shafer makes some important points. (I am not yet permitted to post links, but will post some excerpts below.)

Susan Fries Falknor of Blue Ridge Forum writes, “I remember watching, fascinated, at the age of 13, as the Army-McCarthy Hearings unfolded on the family black-and-white TV set.” Of course, very few people actually watched these 36 days of hearings, at the end of which the Mundt panel exonerated McCarthy of the Army's charges (a generally forgotten fact). What the vast majority of Americans did see was a series of dishonestly-edited vignettes (cherry-picked to put McCarthy in the worst possible light), taken out of context and cobbled together by Edward R. Murrow for “A Report on Joseph R. McCarthy,” an episode of his popular CBS show, See It Now.

Murrow targeted McCarthy in a misguided crusade to avenge the suicide (or SMERSH 'liquidation') of his close friend Laurence Duggan, a disgraced State Department official and Soviet agent -- even though McCarthy had nothing to do with Duggan, who was caught by the FBI.

During the Army-McCarthy hearings, the American public was largely unaware of the overwhelming media bias against anti-Communism, as demonstrated by the actual round of applause the attending Washington press corps gave the dissembling Army lawyer Robert Welch for his phony stage-hysterics -- just as it had given Alger Hiss for his perjured testimony. As Saturday Evening Post writer Joseph Keeley revealed, such bias affected even the networks' placement of lighting and microphones.

Andrew Ferguson called Murrow's film “a compendium of every burp, grunt, stutter, nose probe, brutish aside, and maniacal giggle the senator had ever allowed to be captured on film.” (McCarthy may not be the only senator to have burped in the chamber, but he is the only one whose burp was not edited out, but preserved for posterity, repeatedly broadcast and featured in documentaries.)

Ms. Falknor recalls, “With the limited acuity of a Bethesda school girl, I judged McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn repellent and Senator McCarthy himself repulsive. My parents fervently believed in the evil of 'McCarthyism'—already the most hateful political epithet in the lexicon.”

Into this atmosphere Murrow's program injected what Shafer calls “manipulative and partisan techniques.”

“Despite CBS's pretensions,” agrees McCarthy biographer Arthur Herman, it “was not a report at all but a full-scale assault, employing exactly the same techniques of 'partial truth and innuendo' that critics accused McCarthy of using.”

“It is a peculiar work of journalism—there's very little reporting in it, as the transcript shows,” observes Shafer. “Murrow makes no attempt to determine if there is any substance to McCarthy's charges.”

The late William F. Buckley recounted how the television critic for The New Yorker made the point that there wasn’t anybody in the world you couldn’t demolish by doing to him what Murrow did to McCarthy: “If there were five million feet of film on St. Francis of Assisi, you could probably find a shot of him running away naked from his father’s house (he did), and Ed Murrow could prove he was an exhibitionist and a poseur (he affected to talk to the birds!).”

“Give a skilled editor 15,000 feet of film of Barney the purple dinosaur,” agrees Shafer, “and he could perform a similar demolition.”

Former Kennedy administration official Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., observed that “Even anti-McCarthy commentators criticized the technique of offering as a 'report' what was in fact a superbly calculated attack.” Two of McCarthy's most hostile foes in the press, John Cogley and Gilbert Seldes (died-in-the-wool liberals both), agreed that Murrow's attack on McCarthy “was not a proud moment for television journalism.”

Cogley, a consistent McCarthy critic, writing in Commonweal, “sharply attacked Murrow and his producers for their distorted summary and selected use of video clips,” to produce a “simplistic view ... of a more complicated truth.” He observed that a different selection of footage could have easily portrayed McCarthy in an extremely positive light, warning against Murrow's abuses: “Television is dynamite. Combined with selectivity, it could explode in any person's or group's face.”

Seldes, another McCarthy foe, writing in the Saturday Review, critiqued Murrow's program as not a “report,” but “an all-out attack on McCarthy... the summing-up of a hanging judge... [T]he evidence and the argument” supporting McCarthy's side, he wrote, “were copiously available, but were not used.”

“Telecasts openly sponsored by political groups might indulge in one-sidedness without harmful effects, because allowance for bias would be made,” wrote Lately Thomas (Robert V. Steele) of the Los Angeles Times. But for a news report like Murrow's to inject such bias, he wrote, was utterly unfair, not just to the target, but to the audience.

Many insiders were disgusted by Murrow's dishonesty. According to Schlesinger, when Murrow rose to address a banquet honoring Robert F. Kennedy in 1955, Kennedy, who had served as assistant council to the McCarthy subcommittee, "grimly walked out."

Even Murrow himself “was always uneasy about” his attack on McCarthy, writes biographer A.M. Sperber, “almost anxious at times to disown it.” When See It Now published its greatest hits as a hardcover book in 1955, observes Sperber, it did not include “A Report on Joseph R. McCarthy.”

After reading Blacklisted by History, Ms. Falknor reflected, “thanks to a dissembling media, our family had no comprehension of the brutal forces the senator was fighting.”

The late Robert Novak agreed, “The combination of forces against Joe McCarthy from the Left, from the news media, from both parties and his own president, had succeeded in aligning people like me against him. Stan Evans has described why we were wrong--because, indeed, McCarthy was fighting 'a conspiracy so immense.'”

Which brings us back to McMahon, the writer you quote above. He actually reviewed Blacklisted by History for Foreign Service Journal. In that review, he summed up thus:

"This book will change forever how you think about Sen. McCarthy and the Soviet penetration of the U.S. government and society."

I think that's true, but only if you actually bother to read it.

 

[JakeStarkey]

OK, so the fauxconservatives are trying to rehabilitate him. This is merely PC upgraded to MR 2.0. Fail.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

OK, so the fauxconservatives are trying to rehabilitate him. This is merely PC upgraded to MR 2.0. Fail.

Translation: I'm ignorant about McCarthy and I choose to keep being nourished by the Progressive intellectual pablum I was spoon-fed over a generation ago.

Facts run off Jake like water off a ducks back

 

[JakeStarkey]

I have read about Joe McCarthy for forty years. The left misunderstands him because there were truly commies among their ranks. The fauxright refuses to understand him because he is one of theirs. The fact is this: he castigated true Americans like Eisenhower and Marshall. Screw him. He is where he belongs: in historical purgatory, and Evans and the others will not rehabilitate in mainstream America's collective mind in even the next fifty years.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

I have read about Joe McCarthy for forty years. The left misunderstands him because there were truly commies among their ranks. The fauxright refuses to understand him because he is one of theirs. The fact is this: he castigated true Americans like Eisenhower and Marshall. Screw him. He is where he belongs: in historical purgatory, and Evans and the others will not rehabilitate in mainstream America's collective mind in even the next fifty years.

Progressives are still making the painful transition to a world where they no longer control the media.

 

[Mark LaRochelle]

Joe McCarthy ... castigated ... Eisenhower.... Screw him.

Hubert Humphrey castigated Ike; Walter Lippmann castigated Ike; Adlai Stevenson certainly castigated Ike. Do you want to "screw them," too?

Moreover: When did McCarthy castigate Ike? Could you provide a quote and source?

 

[JakeStarkey]

Mark, you don't stand any more chance of carrying the field than did PC.

(1) Lippman and Stevenson called Ike soft on communism? What McCarthy did when he attacked people like Bohlen, a great friend of Eisenhower, was to castigate Eisenhower's choice.

(2) You are equating the rough and tumble of politics as equal to smearing two great men's characters? All will notice also that, yes, you ignored the remarks by your hero against Marshall.

(3) Justification of the victimizer rather than the victim shows your bias. In the eyes of God only, are all sins equal. JM's were far greater than those of Ike or AS or GM.

McCarthy used a good cause for unrighteous, personal aggrandizement. In that, he reminds informed readers of Huey Long and Aaron Burr and other Americans who over reached.

I expected better from you.

"Ike, Milton, and the McCarthy Battle". Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission. http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/stories/Ike-Milton-McCarthy.htm

Parmet, Herbert S. (1998). Eisenhower and the American Crusades. Transaction Publishers. pp. 248, 337, 577. ISBN 0-7658-0437-9. EMC - Eisenhower Stories - Ike, Milton, and the McCarthy Battle

Caute, David (1978). The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671226827

 

[Mark LaRochelle]

(1) Lippman and Stevenson called Ike soft on communism?

Did McCarthy call Ike soft on Communism? If so, when? Please provide the quote and source.

What McCarthy did when he attacked people like Bohlen, a great of Eisenhower, was to castigate Eisenhower's choice.

Are you arguing that senators should not fulfill their constitutional duty of advice and consent, but should just rubber-stamp whomever the President appoints to any position? McCarthy was only one of 13 senators who opposed Bohlen's confirmation. Were they all wicked, or just McCarthy?

To say that McCarthy "attacked" Bohlen is a bit of a stretch. Many others were much harder on Bohlen than McCarthy. McCarthy asked Bohlen if he had second thoughts about his judgment at Yalta; Bohlen said no. McCarthy said Bohlen exercised questionable judgment at Yalta, and Bohlen's inability to see that suggested that his judgment was still too questionable for such a sensitive position as ambassador to the USSR.

Although McCarthy had Bohlen's file, and thus knew that he had been arrested for soliciting sex from another man in a public place, he never mentioned it. Many others made snide insinuations about Bohlen's closeted sexual orientation, suggesting that in Moscow he might be at risk of being blackmailed; others tried to explain Bohlen's behavior by suggesting that he might already have been blackmailed, or might just be a Soviet sympathizer or fellow traveler. McCarthy steered clear of all such talk.

What does "a great of Eisenhower" mean? [I see that after I posted this question you edited your post to read "a great friend of Eisenhower," which makes more sense. Are you now arguing that senators should never vote against confirmation of any appointee who is a friend of the President?]

I notice that you seem to have retreated from your original, startling claim that that McCarthy accused Ike of being "soft on Communism" to the much weaker claim that he "castigated" Ike, then to the still weaker claim that he castigated Ike's choice of Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow. You still have not provided a quote or source; should I take this as an admission that you cannot support your earlier charges?

(2) You are equating the rough and tumble of politics as equal to smearing two great men's characters?

Are you suggesting a double standard, under which something done by McCarthy is "smearing," but the exact same thing done by anybody else is "the rough and tumble of politics?"

How did McCarthy "smear" Ike's character?

All will notice also that, yes, you ignored the remarks by your hero against Marshall.

Just for the record, McCarthy is not my hero. But neither was the the ogre he was depicted as in the fairy-tale version of history I was taught in college. In place of that simplistic fable, Evans has given us a nuanced and realistic understanding. The black-and-white melodrama of McCarthy-as-cartoon-villain versus his opponents-as-mythical-heroes must give way, as all such childish fancies must do, to a more realistic picture, filled with shades of gray on all sides. I agree with Evans that McCarthy was a "flawed" character, but I am no longer so certain as I once was that his antagonists were less so. I am interested in learning the facts of what McCarthy did and said, both the good and bad. That's why I ask for quotes and sources.

Not only did I not "ignore" McCarthy's attack on Marshall, I explicitly wrote that Evans:

not only explains in Blacklisted by History that McCarthy and Davis were wrong about Marshall, but shows why.

I even provided the source (pp. 413-414), so that you could learn for yourself the facts about why McCarthy was wrong about Marshall, so you wouldn't have to be so dependent on argument by strenuous assertion and the ad hominem fallacy.

(3) Justification of the victimizer rather than the victim shows your bias. In the eyes of God only, are all sins equal. JM's were far greater than those of Ike or AS or GM.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. As Evans shows, McCarthy certainly made his share of mistakes. Nevertheless, as a result of reading Blacklisted by History, I found myself no longer able to defend my belief that McCarthy lied about his cases. Moreover, the evidence presented in the book made it impossible for me to evade acknowledging that those who conspired against McCarthy actually did lie about these cases, willfully and repeatedly.

As to whose sins are graver, I leave such judgments to you and God.

 

[JakeStarkey]

Your conclusions are inconclusive to me. JM, in my opinion, did far more harm than good, I think he deserved being pulled down by his own party, and I can leave it at that.