Anti-Communist Warrior

On a journey from Rockford, Illinios to Door County, Wisconsin in the summer of 1983, my family and I stopped at a museum in Ripon, which is the home of a small college and one of the two birthplaces of the GOP (the other one being Jackson, Michigan). The museum housed Republican memorabilia; and in one cluttered corner were newspaper clippings and campaign paraphernalia relating to the career of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957), who hailed from Appleton, about 25 miles northeast of Ripon. The curator looked embarrassed as I examined the collection of material in the McCarthy exhibit, and particularly when I noticed the bouquet of flowers set above it. “They just keep sending them,” he explained with noticeable embarrassment. “We can’t send them back.” 

My response may have shocked the speaker. Instead of sharing his discomfort, I complimented him for honoring someone who had been the victim of historical misrepresentation. This exchange transpired several decades before M. Stanton Evans brought out his exhaustively researched Blacklisted by History in 2007, a study that proves (at least to my satisfaction) that most of McCarthy’s “witch trials” were investigations of people with very unsavory leftist associations that in many cases indeed led back to the Soviets.

But already many years before reading Evans, I thought McCarthy was a far more defensible figure than his leftist and neoconservative critics wish us to believe. As a young person, I already digested the defense of his Senate investigations, McCarthy and His Enemies, published by William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell in 1954; and I became convinced that something like McCarthy’s investigations were necessary to reveal the extent of Communist infiltration of the American government during the World War II.

That was when the Soviets were our less than trustworthy allies. Their agents had actively infiltrated the U.S. government, as Sean McMeekin reminds us in Stalin’s War, the opening of the Venona Files showed, and the Army’s decrypted messages Soviet espionage activities during World War II confirm. At that time, many U.S. government employees were busily advancing the interests of their Soviet masters, a problem that our scribbling class has generally declined to recognize. Yes, the Truman administration had begun to remove the more obvious of those agents during the beginning stages of the Cold War, but it did so under the prodding of hardline anti-Communists, including those in the Democratic Party, like Truman’s estimable Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal.

The junior senator from Wisconsin, who was a World War II veteran, was perfectly justified in using his political position to pursue an investigation of Communist subversion. Contrary to what much of the American left still believes, there was nothing sinister about fighting communism as an ideology or resisting Soviet imperialism. Among the evils of the last century, Communist rule claimed even more lives than Nazism. Although the 100 million figure sometimes given for the deaths caused by Communist tyrants may be overstated, we may assume that the real number was many times higher than that of those who died from Christian intolerance or from living under regimes that the left is now zealously denouncing. 

Although there were undoubtedly innocent leftists who were affected by the anti-Communist mood that swept this country in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most of our academic institutions, national newspapers and certainly our cultural industry remained securely in the hands of anti-McCarthyites. In comparison to what the woke left has done in the last 30 years to transform Western societies and the crusade it has successfully waged from a position of power throughout the Western world, “McCarthyism” seems to have been a very minor threat to our constitutional freedoms. 

In fact, it’s supposed horrors have been inflated for decades to justify the left’s suppression of dissent and accelerating discrimination against mainstream Americans. The anti-Communist “crusade” of the early 1950s pales in comparison to the never-ending Red Terror that our ruling class has unleashed, one that touches every corner of our society in the forms of cancel culture, government surveillance, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1908 to an Irish-German farm family. Although he worked his way up to becoming a lawyer and then circuit judge in 1940, two years later he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served with distinction. In 1946, the returned veteran unexpectedly won a primary as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate against the incumbent Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr. This victory was achieved against the scion of a famous Progressive Republican Wisconsin family; McCarthy’s war record helped him win. McCarthy was reelected in 1952, by which time he had become famous as an anti-Communist crusader.

McCarthy first gained prominence in this role in February 1950, in a Lincoln Day speech delivered in Wheeling, West Virginia. In that now-demonized oration, the senator held up a paper with the names of 57 people who had been in government service and who the speaker identified as Communist agents. Most of those names had already been collected by the FBI, and some of them had been classified as security risks. While naming these names did not yield any shocking revelation, pretending they were all victims of an anti-Communist witch hunt is pure nonsense. McCarthy did ride anti-Communism at least partly as a career move, but those whom he exposed were rarely the harmless victims that his enemies want us to imagine.

After his reelection in 1952, McCarthy obtained the chairmanship of the Senate’s Committee on Government Operations and its permanent subcommittee on investigations. For the next two years, he used his chairmanship to investigate those in high places whom he suspected of having Communist associations. Although McCarthy allegedly failed to make a plausible case against anyone he investigated, this assessment depends on dismissing certain compelling evidence of Communist affiliation, a practice that McCarthy’s critics continue to pursue.

Leftist organizations like the National Lawyers Guild, which Wikipedia assures us is a fine “progressive organization,” were in fact particularly susceptible to Communist infiltration. In the early 1950s, it was entirely reasonable to assume that their members included those who were actively promoting Communist causes and who in some cases were working, knowingly or not, as Soviet agents. It would have been counterproductive for the Soviets to recruit the actual members of the Communist Party USA for espionage and public relations purposes. The sympathies of these activists were too obvious, and the U.S. government already had party members under surveillance.

By 1954, however, McCarthy’s focus had become too broad. By then his sweeping, imprecise accusations were reducing his credibility. Accusing the very popular Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower of not paying sufficient attention to Communist infiltrators and making unwarranted charges against Truman’s Secretary of State General George Marshall, did not represent the senator’s finest moments. A marathon 36-day hearing on Communist subversion of the U.S. military also put the committee chairman in a bad light. As M. Stanton Evans has proved, however, McCarthy’s charges during the hearings, that Fort Monmouth in New Jersey was honeycombed with Communist agents, turned out to be correct. 

A serious drinking problem may have led to some of McCarthy’s more reckless verbal indiscretions and ultimately to his downfall. In December 1954, the Senate voted to censure him for conduct “contrary to Senate tradition.” Thereafter, the Wisconsin senator was ignored by his political colleagues, including members of his own party. He died in 1958, without having completed his second term in the Senate. Presumably his public disgrace contributed to his worsening drinking habit and eventually to the total breakdown of his health.

A surprisingly balanced assessment of McCarthy’s career can be found in Arthur Herman’s Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator (1999). Since Herman has enjoyed the steady esteem of neoconservative critics and even liberal ones, his judgments cannot possibly be seen as driven by far-right politics. On the basis of extensive archival research, Herman showed that the Truman government faced a “massive and intractable security problem.” McCarthy addressed that problem but “made good points badly,” Herman wrote. McCarthy’s critical treatment of Communist front organizations was entirely proper because in the Anglophone world, the Soviet spy system operated through seemingly innocuous groups of leftist idealists who were open to Communist control.

The turning point in McCarthy’s fortunes is popularly depicted in his 1954 questioning of Joseph Welch, an attorney who was hired to defend the military against his accusations. Welch fired back with the memorable line, “Have you no sense of decency?” But Welch did belong to a Communist front organization, whatever else McCarthy’s critics might argue. Let us imagine that a critic of FDR’s government who was being investigated by Congress belonged to the German American Bund during World War II. Would that association have been treated as inconsequential?

One of McCarthy’s targets, an older black woman, Annie Lee Moss, an army coder whom McCarthy accused of being a Communist agent, turned out hardly to be an innocent victim. She was in fact a registered member of the Communist Party who worked in a government security position. Again, we may be struck by how infrequently this fact comes up in the left’s account of the McCarthy era.

Although the diplomat to China John Stewart Service was named by McCarthy without sufficient evidence as a “card-carrying Communist Party member,” there’s no doubt that Service was an eager propagandist for the Communist insurgents who were then taking over China. He and another fellow traveler in the foreign service, Philip Jaffe, devoted enormous energy to spreading Communist propaganda in Asia through a government-funded magazine, Amerasia. Given Service’s political statements, the left is guilty of staggering mendacity when it describes him as victim of McCarthyism. Service had been exposed even before McCarthy came on the scene.

Another American diplomat to China, Own Lattimore, may not have been quite the Communist agent that McCarthy described. But the attempt of mainstream history sources to treat Lattimore as a dispassionate scholar of Chinese history whose career was upended by McCarthyite demagoguery is utter nonsense. Lattimore spent many years as a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist cause and worked to get the American government to back Mao’s side in the Chinese civil war. McCarthy may have been rhetorically imprecise in describing the enemy, but his perception that Service and Lattimore were backing China’s Communist totalitarians and mass killers was perfectly correct.

This brings me to two observations bearing on the ever more exaggerated attacks on McCarthy and McCarthyism. On the basis of the political reality provided by our media and “educators,” no Communist ever infiltrated anything in America. These were supposedly just empty charges made by nasty anti-Semites, homophobes, and white nationalists. Yet anyone even a millimeter to the right of America’s mainstream left is still being attacked as a “fascist” or worse.

The second observation concerns the widespread sympathy on the left for Communists and Communist governments, which I’ve been noticing for many decades. Admittedly there were anti-Soviet social democrats and Cold War liberals, and some of them became American and European political leaders who opposed Soviet expansion. But this hardly contradicts my impression that most of the “progressive” intellectuals and journalists I’ve known were squishy soft on the Communists, and this attitude usually expressed itself in the familiar form of anti-anti-Communism. For these people, McCarthy held a special place of infamy, certainly well above Stalin and Mao and perhaps even as high as that of Hitler. 

This strengthened my view of McCarthy as a flawed hero but a hero, nonetheless. He was a precursor of others who have since challenged our increasingly leftist ruling class, even if, like Trump, McCarthy was often inept in the battles he waged. Even more importantly, his crusade brought together a right that is still around. An American right took shape in the 1950s, to which paleoconservatives have at least a derivative relationship. This right defended McCarthyism, if not always McCarthy himself. Its partisans viewed their pro-Communist opponents with understandable alarm and believed that McCarthy’s spotlighting of this problem revealed a deep moral and spiritual crisis. 

The late Willi Schlamm, an Austrian American journalist and close friend of William F. Buckley, always distinguished between slavishly defending McCarthy’s every accusation and recognizing what the senator exposed about internal dangers and a changing American character. Irving Kristol may have put this matter best. “For there is one thing,” Kristol wrote in Commentary in 1952, “that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”

The raging anti-McCarthyites are still around and more hysterical and malicious than ever. And they have traveled from anti-anti-Communism to even more bizarre forms of the left that managed to incorporate their older orientation. Without feeling obliged to defend every detail of every charge that the late senator leveled, any more than did Russell Kirk or Whittaker Chambers, we recognize that McCarthy fought a fight that continues down to the present. For that reason, he remains relevant for our struggles.  

It is not at all surprising that Encyclopedia Britannica has now posted an entry on the supposedly incalculable harm that McCarthy inflicted on the LGBTQ community. We may look forward to another entry on how McCarthy delayed full recognition of biological males competing in women’s sports.