Here is an interesting review of Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator By Arthur Herman (New York: Free Press, 2000. Pp. vi, 404. $26 cloth.)
McCarthy and His Enemies, Revisited by Larry I. Bland
A POLITICAL TRACT DISGUISED AS A SCHOLARLY history, this book is intended to be a contribution to the right-wing side of the current “culture war” in the United States. Nevertheless, it could have been written in 1956 as a companion piece to William Buckley and Brent Bozell’s McCarthy and His Enemies. Contrary to appearances, the author is not McCarthy’s defense lawyer but a cultural historian who received his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University (1985), is adjunct professor at George Mason University, and coordinator of the Western Civilization Program at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1997 he published The Idea of Decline in Western History.
According to Herman, McCarthy was justified and correct in all important political ideas and actions. The senator’s liberal enemies in academia, government, and the media were elitist gullible fools (at best). Sometimes they were irresponsibly blind (“in complicity with evil”
to the enormous danger communist subversion and propaganda posed to American society, but just as often they were actual traitors or Marxist-inclined dupes. Revisionist and antiwar writers of the 1960s and after are the ideological descendants of this evil crew.
The author uses several techniques to defend the senator.
The first is to admit that his hero had certain human flaws, which he then explains away. Was McCarthy an alcoholic? Yes, but not “an abusive or violent drunk.”
Second, tu quoque arguments. Did McCarthy do deed X of dubious fairness or morality? Yes, but the liberals did it first and worse.
Third, everybody-does-it (i.e., lies, distorts, leaks documents, etc.).
Fourth, it was worse elsewhere or at another time (i.e., not that many people were sent to jail or had their careers damaged between 1947 and 1954, and besides the Red Scare of 1919-20 was worse, and McCarthy’s actions were trivial compared to Stalin’s purges and gulags).
Fifth, be certain to select only the most outrĂ©, context-less quotes by McCarthy’s critics.
Sixth, be entirely innocent of the content of the past half century of diplomatic history writings when you assert such silly chestnuts such as: Harry Hopkins believed every lie that the Marxists told him, that Alger Hiss played an important role in the “disastrous decisions at Yalta,” or that China was lost when George C. Marshall — encouraged by Commie-symp types like John Stewart Service — embargoed military supplies to Chiang Kai-shek in 1946, thereby causing Mao’s victory and high U.S. casualties in the Korean War.
Finally, assert that every charge you (or Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, et al.) have made against liberals has been proven true by the Venona transcripts or recent documentary revelations.
Most of the author’s sources are secondary, but he also uses contemporary publications, published congressional hearings, a few interviews, and some manuscript collections. The book is nicely published, illustrated, and indexed. Nobody left of Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond will be convinced by the author’s exegesis, but the book is a must for all conservatives and conspiracy buffs. One presumes that right-wing foundations and corporations will wish to buy it in bulk for distribution to true believers.
Bland | McCarthy and His Enemies
While interesting, the views of the late Dr. Bland tend to be conclusory, if not altogether convincing...
While at the library you might pick up Mitrokhin's book...
Mitrokhin kept the archives for the KGB, and therefore, I contend his view to be more dispositve as to the veracity of Senator McCarthy and other fighters of communist infiltration.
‘The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archives, the History of the KGB,” by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.
But, if you are too busy, here are some of my notes on the tome.
1. This top archives was described by the FBI as “the most complete and extensive intelligence ever achieved from any source.”
2. Vasili Mitrokhin worked for 30 years in the foreign intelligence archives of the KGB. In 1972 he was made responsible for moving the entire archives to new headquarters in Moscow. But Mitrokhin spent over a decade making notes and transcripts of these classified files. In 1992, British Secret Intelligence Service exfiltrated the defector, and his presence in the west remained secret until the publication of this book.
3. December 20, 1917 The KGB traces its origins to this date, six weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, with the foundation of the Cheka, the first Soviet security and intelligence agency. KGB officers were, in fact, paid on the 20th of each month in honor of the Cheka’s birthday. The KGB adopted the Cheka symbol’s of the sword and the shield: the shield to defend the revolution, and the sword to smite its enemies.
4. Mitrokhin named some rather diverse individual in whom Soviet placed high hopes on the eve of WW II: Laurence Duggan (agent ’19,’ later FRANK) in the State Department; Michael Straight (NIGEL), State Department; Martha Dodd Stern (LIZA), daughter of the former US ambassador to Germany, and the wife of Alfred Kaufman Stern (also a Soviet agent); Martha’s brother William E. Doss, jr. (PRESIDENT), who had run for Congress as a Democrat; Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department (KASSIR and JURIST); an agent codenamed MORIS, probably John Abt in the Justice Department; Boris Morros (FROST), Hollywood producer; Mary Wolfe Price (KID and DIR), secretary to Walter Lippman, and Henry Buchman (KHOSYAIN, ‘employer’
owner of a woman’s fashion salon in Baltimore. [p106]
5. “But for the remarkably lax security of the Roosevelt administration, the damage to NKVD operation might have been much worse than the arrest (May 1941) of (Gayk) Ovakimyan” [head of NKVD legal residency department]. P.107
6. “On September 2, 1939, the day after the outbreak of war in Europe, Whittaker Chambers had told much of what he knew about Soviet espionage in the United States to Adolph Berle, Assistant Secretary of State and President’s Roosevelt’s advisor on internal security. Immediately afterwards, Berle drew up a memorandum for the President which listed Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and the other leading for whom Chambers acted as courier. One was a leading presidential aide, Lauchlin Currie….Roosevelt, however, was not interested. He seems to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd.” p.107
7. “Henry Wallace, vice-president during Roosevelt’s third term in office (1941-1945), said later that if the ailing Roosevelt had died during that period and he had become President, it had been his intention to make Duggan his Secretary of State and White his Secretary of Tresury…The fact that Roosevelt survived into…a fourth term…deprived Soviet intelligence of what would have been its most spectacular success in penetrating a major Western government.” P.107-8
8. In 1944, in addition to Fuchs, there were two more spies at Los Alamos. “The first, David Greenglass, was recruited through a group of S & T agents run by Julius Rosenberg (codenamed ANRWNNA and LIBERAL), A 26-year-old New York Communist with a degree in electrical engineering. Like Fuchs, the members of the Rosenberg ring, who included his wife, Ethel, had been rewarded with cash bonuses in the summer.” Ibid, p.128
9. “The New York residency also reported in November 1944 that the precociously brilliant nineteen-year old Harvard physicist Theodore Alvin “Ted” Hall, (codename MLAD) then working at Los Alamos, had indicated his willingness to collaborate. As well as being inspired by the myth-image of the Soviet worker-peasant state, which was an article of faith for most ideological Soviet agents, Hall convinced himself that an American nuclear monopoly would threaten the peace of the post- war world. Passing the secrets of the MANHATTAN project to Moscow was thus a way ‘to help the world’ as well as the Soviet Union.’ ”Ibid, p.128
10. In November of 1944, “according to Elizabeth Bentley, there came an urgent warning from an agent in the White House, Roosevelt’s administrative assistant Lauchlin Currie. Currie reported that ‘the Americans were on the verge of breaking the Soviet code.’ The alarm appears to have subsided when it was discovered that Currie had wrongly concluded that a fire-damaged NKGB codebook obtained by OSS from the Finns would enable Soviet communications (which went through a further, theoretically impenetrable, encipherment by ‘one-time pad’
to be decrypted.” The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archives, the History of the KGB,” by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.p.130
11. “The most valuable S & T concerned the atomic program. Kurchatov (scientific head of the Soviet atomic project) reported to Beria on September 29, 1944 that intelligence revealed the creation for the MANHATTAN project ‘a concentration of scientific and engineering-technical power on a scale never before seen in the history of world science, which has already achieved the most priceless results.’…On February 28, 1945 the NKGB submitted to Beria its first comprehensive report on atomic intelligence for two years- also the first to be based on reports from inside Los Alamos….based chiefly on intelligence…from Hall …and Greenglass. It was probably Hall who first revealed the implosion method of detonating the bomb, thoug a more detailed report on implosion by Fuchs reached Kurchatov on April 6.” Ibid, p.131.
12. “It is probable that both Fuchs and H all independently furnished the plans of the first atomic bomb, ….Thanks chiefly to Hall and Fuchs, the first Soviet atomic bomb, successfully tested just over four years later, was to be an exact copy of the Alamogordo bomb” Ibid. p.132
13. Alger Hiss succeeded in becoming part of the American delegation at Yalta. Stalin managed to win the policy debates, mainly about the future of Poland (which had been conceded to Soviet dominance at Tehran) since he was kept informed about classified intelligence. An idea as to how important Hiss was to Moscow is conveyed by Moscow’s congratulations to Hiss. Gorsky reported… in March 1945, after a meeting between Akhmerov and Hiss: ‘Recently ALES (Hiss) and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations. After the Yalta conference, …passed on to him their gratitude and so on.’ ” ‘The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archives, the History of the KGB,” by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.p.134 (quoting the Venona decrypts)
14. “In September (1945) J. Edgar Hoover reported to the White House and the State Department that (defector) Gouzenko had provide information on the activities of a number of Soviet spies in the United States, one of whom was ‘an assistant to the Secretary of State’…On November 7 (Elizabeth) Bentley…began revealing what she knew of Soviet espionage…Next day Hoover sent President Truman’s military aide a first list of fourteen of those identified by Bentley as supplying information to ‘the Soviet espionage system’: among them Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, OSS (CIA) executive assistant Duncan C. Lee, and Roosevelt’s former aide Lauchlin Currie.” Ibid, p.142
15. Ted Hall (code name MLAD), who with Klaus Fuchs, were agents of the Soviet union who gave the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviets when they worked on the Manhattan project at Los Alamos, while working for his PhD at Chicago University, joined the Communist Party, …(intending) to work for the Progressive candidate, the naively pro-Soviet Henry Wallace, in the presidential election.” Albright and Kunstel, “Bombshell,” pp.176-8
