Raging Bull

On the night of Feb. 9, 1950, a GOP women’s group in Wheeling, W. Va., heard one of the most deplorable speeches in the annals of American politics when a reckless and bombastic freshman Republican senator from Wisconsin charged that the Truman administration was teeming with communists. Waving a sheet of paper like a battle flag, Joseph McCarthy claimed he had a list of some 205 Red traitors in his hand--a dishonor roll of U.S. State Department employees who pledged allegiance not to the stars and stripes but to the hammer and sickle.

The list, of course, was phony: a cheap ploy by a poker playing charlatan to garner national headlines, slur his Democratic opponents as anti-American and pander to legitimate Cold War fears. Washington Post political cartoonist Herbert L. Block (Herblock), who coined the term “McCarthyism” in March 1950, had a field day lampooning the Wisconsin Redhunter as a rogue menace who slithered his way out of the gutter spewing corrosive lies to smear honorable public servants with whom he disagreed.

Herblock’s early caricature of McCarthy as the embodiment of evil stuck, and even half a century later the mere mention of “Tailgunner Joe,” as he liked to be called in exaggerated reference to his service as a World War II fighter pilot in the Pacific, makes most Americans cringe. The many books written about McCarthy over the years bear such incendiary titles as “The Politics of Fear,” “Conspiracy So Immense,” “The Nightmare Decade” and “Days of Shame” and with good reason. He has become one of our nation’s worst pariahs and justifiably so. Meanwhile, the reputations of those McCarthy impugned--including Secretaries of State George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, U.S. Sen. Millard Tydings (D-Md.), and Presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower--have soared. As for McCarthy’s supporters, liberal journalist Richard Rovere seems to have had the last word in his 1960 book “Senator Joe McCarthy,” in which he dismissed them as “zanies and zombies and compulsive haters.”

But as the 50th anniversary of McCarthy’s Wheeling speech approaches, an attempt is underway among the zanies to rehabilitate the man whose name has become an “ism.” Their goal is to resurrect his image into that of a misunderstood patriot whose conniving was all for duty, honor and country. One such effort is Arthur Herman’s “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator,” a flawed revisionist biography aimed at debunking Herblock’s harsh portrait. Herman, an adjunct professor of history at George Mason University and coordinator of the Western Civilization program at the Smithsonian Institution, boasts that new evidence shows that McCarthy was often right--that Truman’s State Department really was a beehive of communist activity. To prove his point, like a defense attorney fighting to bolster the innocence of his client, Herman prepares a desperate brief to persuade a jury that McCarthy wasn’t all bad.

Certainly there is a need for a reliable comprehensive book on McCarthyism, an assessment incorporating recently opened archival material on Soviet espionage activity by the Communist Party of the United States of America in the 1930s and 1940s. Since 1995, the National Security Council has released more than 3,000 decoded messages, intercepted between 1943 and 1946 from various KGB agents in the United States, proving just how extensive Soviet espionage activity was in America during World War II. Within the last two years, these so-called Venona Cables, missives sent during World War II to Moscow by Soviet spies in the United States, have been analyzed in four landmark studies: Desmond Ball and David Harner’s “Breaking the Codes: Australia’s KGB Secret of the Cold War”; Nigel West’s “Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War”; Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s “The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America” and, most significant, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr’s “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.” In addition, Allen Weinstein’s 1978 book “Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case” and Sam Tanenhaus’ 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers make it clear that McCarthy’s favorite foil, State Department advisor Alger Hiss, was, almost certainly, a Soviet informant. It’s obvious that Herman hoped to launch his rehabilitation of McCarthy from the same sort of scholarly springboard.

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This hagiography begins with the author’s sentimental pilgrimage to McCarthy’s grave in Appleton, Wis., where he meditated on how unfair such liberals as William Fulbright and Rovere had been to the anti-communists. It’s a ridiculous opening, as Herman uses this graveside setting (adopted by the John Birch Society as a shrine to its frantic extremism and paranoia) to set forth his mission: to tell “the real story” of McCarthy’s Cold War crusade. “We paused for a moment, my wife took pictures, and she said something about the visit being a good omen,” Herman writes in his weird introduction. “I turned for one last look and then headed up for the car. Afterwards I thought about the words from the prayer said at the unveiling of McCarthy’s memorial in 1959: ‘[D]eath is only a horizon, and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.’ ”

But what Herman appears not to grasp is the vast difference between responsible anti-communists of the early years of the Cold War--Walter Reuther, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr and Hubert Humphrey come to mind--and an unprincipled, opportunistic bully like McCarthy. Rather than analyzing the Venona cables, Herman wields them like a sledgehammer, suggesting that they prove that liberals such as 1948 Progressive Party presidential nominee Henry A. Wallace and his Democratic colleague in the next two elections, Adlai E. Stevenson, were essentially pro-Stalin. Smearing New Deal liberals as creatures of the Kremlin is an old right-wing trick, and Herman does so with relentless glee. Yet his sloppy research and errors undermine his rhetoric.

Trying to claim that the Agricultural Adjustment Administration harbored KGB spies, Herman states as fact that Harold Ware, a longtime Communist Party member, was also a charter member of the New Deal cabal. This is false. Never a New Dealer, Ware was not employed by the AAA, although he was a hanger-on who used to sit around the agency’s lunchroom and gossip. He also claims that Stevenson worked with communists at the AAA and was “untroubled by Marxist ideals,” charges there is no evidence to support. Even U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter falls victim to Herman’s distortions: He was never offered a deposition in the Hiss case; he simply testified. Beyond such errors of fact, Herman has an annoying tendency to insinuate that FDR and Truman tolerated communists in their inner circles. This does a profound disservice to the two American presidents who roused our nation to win World War II and the Korean War. Neither FDR nor Truman was pro-Stalin; they were internationalist-minded Democrats who made policies that they believed to be in the best interests of the United States.

Herman chronicles McCarthy’s crooked path from his birth on a poor Wisconsin dairy farm to his death at the age of 48 from acute hepatitis caused by alcoholism. But there are virtually no new insights or original research findings worth mentioning in these pages. Herman is at his best when analyzing the ethnic makeup of McCarthy’s post-Wheeling supporters and why 50% of the American people considered the senator’s anti-communist crusade good for the nation. His chapter “The Enemy Within,” which sets the stage for the Wheeling speech, is sound and enhances understanding of the climate in which McCarthy was operating. But Herman’s attempt to exonerate McCarthy for his compulsive lying, character assassination, casual treachery, ingrained disloyalty, shallow ambition and mean-spirited bigotry is breathtakingly ludicrous.

Remarkably absent from these pages is any consideration of the innocent lives McCarthy destroyed: the schoolteachers fired and the entertainers blacklisted, the union leaders arrested and the victims’ children tormented, all of which Ellen Schrecker ably documented in her 1998 book “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America.” Herman offers nothing of the sort. Instead, his apologia ends with a comparison of his subject to modern movie director Oliver Stone. “ ‘JFK’ is the McCarthy story told in a mirror,” he pronounces, “where left is right and right is left.” If that notion weren’t baffling enough, Herman then subjects the reader to an appendix titled “McCarthy and the Doctors,” in which he postulates that his subject’s zealotry stemmed from hypomania, a mental disorder that triggers inflated self-esteem. “Contrary to critics, McCarthy’s notorious ‘cruelty’ and ‘insensitivity’ had little to do with the political cause he espoused--and may have had everything to do with a man’s simply not being in control of himself,” he writes.

Still, much of his book is interesting. But those parts--the good, straightforward biographical data and some telling anecdotes--come directly from Thomas C. Reeves’ first-rate “The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography,” first published in 1982 and available since 1997 in a revised edition. It is Reeves’ biography that William F. Buckley Jr. also relies on, almost exclusively, in his recent novel “The Redhunter.”

Buckley has been interested in Joseph McCarthy ever since the senator came on the scene. In 1953, the then-28-year-old Buckley wrote a book with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, titled “McCarthy and His Enemies,” a stinging polemic that was less a defense of the notorious redbaiter than it was a conservative attack on the New Deal and the Progressive Party. As editor of the National Review, Buckley did not turn his back on McCarthy even after the Senate voted in December 1954 to censure him. Although the Korean War was over, Joseph Stalin was dead, and McCarthy was being vilified for his reckless excesses, Buckley stood by him, going so far as to commission him to review Acheson’s 1955 book “A Democrat Looks at His Party” for the National Review. Not all conservatives were amused. Renowned poet T.S. Eliot, for instance, whom some called the “patron saint of the new conservatism,” told Buckley’s colleague Russell Kirk that it was “ill-advised” to let McCarthy savage Acheson yet again. Eliot canceled his subscription to Buckley’s magazine in protest.

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With this background, Buckley’s new historical novel, written in the same vein as Gore Vidal’s “Burr” and “Lincoln,” was bound to attract attention. What is surprising about the novel, however, is its sad, deeply melancholy tone. While conservatives who enjoy Buckley’s own arch anti-communist tract won’t be disappointed, “The Redhunter” is no pro-McCarthy diatribe. In fact, it’s cleverly and noticeably well-written, full of rich, evocative description and genuine suspense.

From the outset, Buckley uses his alter-ego, Harry Bontecou, to show that the postwar redbaiters were right about the nature of the American Communist Party and its cooperation with the Soviet KGB as well as the security threat from closet communists in the Truman administration. Throughout the novel, Buckley sets up liberal straw men--particularly Hiss, Wallace and Acheson--just to knock them down through well-crafted dialogue. And even in the scene when U.S. Army lawyer Joseph N. Welch unleashes his famous tirade during the televised hearings--”Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”--Buckley’s loyalties clearly lie with the Red-hunter.

Although Buckley does, like Herman, try to elicit sympathy for McCarthy with tales of Joe as dutiful son, war hero and Catholic American patriot, he succeeds far better at evoking what the postwar world was like, including what a brute Stalin was: a Hitler-like thug responsible for the deaths of some 25 million of his own people. As a work of imagination, “The Redhunter” thus recalls Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” and George Orwell’s “1984,” if not for literary merit then for drawing the reader into the high-stakes drama of the Cold War. There are wonderful descriptions of the elite society Buckley knows so well, a world of mahogany-patinated law firms, men’s clubs, Republican campaigns and Senate hearings.

Unfortunately, good fiction can also make for bad history. Most of “The Redhunter’s” characters are based on real-life figures, and the reader can only sigh that beneath his sparkling erudition, Buckley seems drawn to the likes of Roy Cohn and David Shine. Still, instead of defending his longtime support of McCarthy, Buckley goes halfway, intimating that he may still consider Joe a charismatic friend but that in retrospect he too is at a loss to explain the Wisconsin senator’s bizarre paranoia and barroom malice. “The Redhunter” ends where Arthur Herman’s Joseph McCarthy begins--at Tailgunner Joe’s tomb in Wisconsin. Forty years after his friend’s death, Buckley still seems interested in trying to peer over the horizon to a land where McCarthy was a hero. It’s a futile endeavor.