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.
