One can hardly claim to be a Liberal, Progressive, Democrat, Obama-voter, and not be prepared to rage and foam at the mouth at the mention of the American hero, Senator Joseph McCarthy.
But I'll bet that much of this post was never known...or too soon forgotten by the aforementioned folks.
1. "John Kennedy's views, on communism and the Soviet threat, were not so different from McCarthy's. Although a loyal Democrat, Kennedy had also bashed the Truman administration for its dismal China record. One night in February 1952 he heard a speaker at Harvard's Spree Club denounce McCarthy in the same breath as Alger Hiss. Kennedy shot back, "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!"
Later he would back the Communist Control Act, a measure that went far beyond anything McCarthy had ever proposed, by virtually outlawing the Communist Party in the United States. During the debate on McCarthy's censure in 1954, while most Democrats lined up against him Kennedy warned that censure might have serious repercussions for "the social fabric of this country." And when the actual censure vote came, John Kennedy carefully contrived to be in the hospital for a back operation, so that he would not have to cast a vote against a man who was wildly popular with not only his father but his Irish and Italian constituents.
2. A better comparison is not with John Kennedy (or even Richard Nixon, whom he resembled in certain other ways), but with another Senate colleague, Lyndon Baines Johnson. It was Johnson who arranged for the Senate to censure McCarthy in December 1954, the move that effectively ended McCarthy's career .Less than a decade after Joe McCarthy had been interred in St. Mary's cemetery, Lyndon Johnson would learn what it was like to be the target of hostile liberals and an unsympathetic national press. People would regularly attack him as a murderer, a tyrant, and a psychopath, and compare him to Hitler, much as they had McCarthy.
3. Then there was about J. William Fulbright, Democratic senator, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and nearly secretary of state under Kennedy. He and Joe McCarthy were long-standing adversaries .And liberal though he was on most matters, on the matter of race Fulbright was a stalwart segregationist and an ardent opponent of civil rights for black Americans. McCarthy took the opposite view. His position on race and ethnicity was recognizably "liberal" in a fifties sense and even in a later sense (associates recalled him campaigning as vigorously in black neighborhoods in Milwaukee and other Wisconsin cities as in white ones), Fulbright the liberal segregationist versus McCarthy the color-blind Republican -- a strange juxtaposition, but perhaps not so strange. Most Republicans in the fifties, including Taftites, were aware that theirs was the party of Lincoln and Reconstruction, while Fulbright had learned to support his fellow Southern Democrats on Jim Crow in order to consolidate his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
4. Fulbright himself nourished secret doubts about whether the United States could really resist what seemed to him an inevitable tide of historical decline, of which the rise of communism was only one part. Those doubts about America's ability to fulfill its self-imposed global mission would eventually spill over into his opposition to the Vietnam War, and filled the pages of his book on American foreign policy, The Arrogance of Power. Both McCarthy and Fulbright agreed that the fate of civilization hung in the balance in the cold war. McCarthy believed that in the end, it and America would survive; Fulbright, in his own sardonic, cynical way, did not.
5. We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947 to 1958, no American citizens were interrogated without benefit of legal counsel, none was arrested or detained without due judicial process, and no one went to jail without trial. As George Kennan, no admirer of the investigations, stated, "Whoever could get his case before a court was generally assured of meeting there with a level of justice no smaller than at any time in recent American history." All through the "worst" of the McCarthy period, the Communist Party itself was never outlawed, membership in the party was never declared a crime, and it continued to maintain public offices, publish books and the Daily Worker, and recruit new members (admittedly a tough sell by then).
a. In fact, most of what people ordinarily mean when they talk about the "red scare" the House Un-American Activities Committee; anti-Communist probes into Hollywood, labor unions, and America's schools and universities; the Rosenberg trial; blacklisting in the media and schoolteachers fired for disloyalty had nothing to do with McCarthy and he had nothing to do with them...
6. contrast all this with the three and a half million people who, according to the KGB's own official numbers, were arrested and sent to the gulag during the six years of Stalin's Great Terror, from 1935 to 1941. None had the benefit of any genuine legal protection; Stalin's secret police seized, interrogated, and sentenced the lot. The KGB states that of that number, 681,692 were executed in 1937-1938 alone. Taken with the four or five million people who died in Stalin's Great Famine of 1932-1933, the total number of human beings executed, exiled, imprisoned, or starved to death in those years comes to ten to eleven million. These are official KGB numbers released at the end of the cold war. They are almost certainly low.
And during all the years when this was taking place, men and women like Trumbo, Robeson, and Hellman insisted that Stalin was the just and compassionate father of his people, asserted that Soviet citizens enjoyed a freedom and happiness unknown in American society, and celebrated the Soviet Union as the model society for the future. Others, such as Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon, Martin Sobell, and Steve Nelson, willingly served the Stalinist regime, as other espionage agents or as part of the Communist underground apparatus."
Joseph McCarthy
Reexaming the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator
By ARTHUR HERMAN
Joseph McCarthy
But I'll bet that much of this post was never known...or too soon forgotten by the aforementioned folks.
1. "John Kennedy's views, on communism and the Soviet threat, were not so different from McCarthy's. Although a loyal Democrat, Kennedy had also bashed the Truman administration for its dismal China record. One night in February 1952 he heard a speaker at Harvard's Spree Club denounce McCarthy in the same breath as Alger Hiss. Kennedy shot back, "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!"
Later he would back the Communist Control Act, a measure that went far beyond anything McCarthy had ever proposed, by virtually outlawing the Communist Party in the United States. During the debate on McCarthy's censure in 1954, while most Democrats lined up against him Kennedy warned that censure might have serious repercussions for "the social fabric of this country." And when the actual censure vote came, John Kennedy carefully contrived to be in the hospital for a back operation, so that he would not have to cast a vote against a man who was wildly popular with not only his father but his Irish and Italian constituents.
2. A better comparison is not with John Kennedy (or even Richard Nixon, whom he resembled in certain other ways), but with another Senate colleague, Lyndon Baines Johnson. It was Johnson who arranged for the Senate to censure McCarthy in December 1954, the move that effectively ended McCarthy's career .Less than a decade after Joe McCarthy had been interred in St. Mary's cemetery, Lyndon Johnson would learn what it was like to be the target of hostile liberals and an unsympathetic national press. People would regularly attack him as a murderer, a tyrant, and a psychopath, and compare him to Hitler, much as they had McCarthy.
3. Then there was about J. William Fulbright, Democratic senator, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and nearly secretary of state under Kennedy. He and Joe McCarthy were long-standing adversaries .And liberal though he was on most matters, on the matter of race Fulbright was a stalwart segregationist and an ardent opponent of civil rights for black Americans. McCarthy took the opposite view. His position on race and ethnicity was recognizably "liberal" in a fifties sense and even in a later sense (associates recalled him campaigning as vigorously in black neighborhoods in Milwaukee and other Wisconsin cities as in white ones), Fulbright the liberal segregationist versus McCarthy the color-blind Republican -- a strange juxtaposition, but perhaps not so strange. Most Republicans in the fifties, including Taftites, were aware that theirs was the party of Lincoln and Reconstruction, while Fulbright had learned to support his fellow Southern Democrats on Jim Crow in order to consolidate his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
4. Fulbright himself nourished secret doubts about whether the United States could really resist what seemed to him an inevitable tide of historical decline, of which the rise of communism was only one part. Those doubts about America's ability to fulfill its self-imposed global mission would eventually spill over into his opposition to the Vietnam War, and filled the pages of his book on American foreign policy, The Arrogance of Power. Both McCarthy and Fulbright agreed that the fate of civilization hung in the balance in the cold war. McCarthy believed that in the end, it and America would survive; Fulbright, in his own sardonic, cynical way, did not.
5. We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947 to 1958, no American citizens were interrogated without benefit of legal counsel, none was arrested or detained without due judicial process, and no one went to jail without trial. As George Kennan, no admirer of the investigations, stated, "Whoever could get his case before a court was generally assured of meeting there with a level of justice no smaller than at any time in recent American history." All through the "worst" of the McCarthy period, the Communist Party itself was never outlawed, membership in the party was never declared a crime, and it continued to maintain public offices, publish books and the Daily Worker, and recruit new members (admittedly a tough sell by then).
a. In fact, most of what people ordinarily mean when they talk about the "red scare" the House Un-American Activities Committee; anti-Communist probes into Hollywood, labor unions, and America's schools and universities; the Rosenberg trial; blacklisting in the media and schoolteachers fired for disloyalty had nothing to do with McCarthy and he had nothing to do with them...
6. contrast all this with the three and a half million people who, according to the KGB's own official numbers, were arrested and sent to the gulag during the six years of Stalin's Great Terror, from 1935 to 1941. None had the benefit of any genuine legal protection; Stalin's secret police seized, interrogated, and sentenced the lot. The KGB states that of that number, 681,692 were executed in 1937-1938 alone. Taken with the four or five million people who died in Stalin's Great Famine of 1932-1933, the total number of human beings executed, exiled, imprisoned, or starved to death in those years comes to ten to eleven million. These are official KGB numbers released at the end of the cold war. They are almost certainly low.
And during all the years when this was taking place, men and women like Trumbo, Robeson, and Hellman insisted that Stalin was the just and compassionate father of his people, asserted that Soviet citizens enjoyed a freedom and happiness unknown in American society, and celebrated the Soviet Union as the model society for the future. Others, such as Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon, Martin Sobell, and Steve Nelson, willingly served the Stalinist regime, as other espionage agents or as part of the Communist underground apparatus."
Joseph McCarthy
Reexaming the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator
By ARTHUR HERMAN
Joseph McCarthy
