See It Now

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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False accusations. Trumped-up news in the media. Targeted prosecutions. Retribution against political foes. You’re either with him or against him. Roy Cohn. We’ve been here before, and it all began 76 years ago this week when Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of over 200 Communist Party sympathizers in the State Department. The “Red Scare” began.

McCarthy hailed from Appleton, Wisconsin, and became a lawyer. He served for three years as a circuit judge then in 1942, as World War II escalated, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He served as an intelligence briefing officer for a dive bomber squadron in the Solomon Islands for 30 months. During this time, he volunteered to go on 12 combat missions as a gunner-observer. These missions were generally safe, and after one where he was allowed to shoot as much ammunition as he wanted, mainly at coconut trees, he acquired the nickname “Tail-Gunner Joe.”

He later falsely claimed participation in 32 aerial missions so as to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross and multiple awards of the Air Medal, which the Marine Corps decided to approve in 1952 under his political influence. McCarthy also publicly claimed a letter of commendation from his commanding officer and Admiral Chester Nimitz, Chief of Naval Operations. However, his commander revealed that McCarthy had written this letter himself.

Back home in Wisconsin after the war, in 1946, McCarthy won the Republican nomination for the Senate and was elected that autumn. Six years later, he was re-elected.

McCarthy was at first a quiet and undistinguished senator. His rise to prominence began on February 9, 1950, when his public charge—in a speech given in Wheeling, West Virginia—that 205 communists had infiltrated the State Department, created a furor and catapulted him into headlines across the country.

Upon subsequently testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he proved unable to produce the name of a single “card-carrying communist” in any government department. Nevertheless, he gained increasing popular support for his campaign of accusations by capitalizing on the fears and frustrations of a country appalled by communist advances in Korea, eastern Europe, and China.

Employing an attack, deny, then double-down strategy promoted by his protégé, the attorney Roy Cohn, McCarthy instigated a nationwide militant anticommunist crusade. He appeared to his supporters as a dedicated patriot and guardian of genuine Americanism. To his detractors, he was an irresponsible self-seeking witch-hunter who was undermining the country’s traditions of civil liberties.

After McCarthy’s re-election in 1952, he obtained the chairmanship of the Committee on Government Operations of the Senate and of its permanent subcommittee on investigations. For the next two years he was constantly in the spotlight, investigating various government departments and questioning innumerable witnesses about their suspected communist affiliations.

Although he failed to make a plausible case against anyone, his colorful and cleverly presented accusations drove some people out of their jobs and brought public condemnation to others. The persecution of innocent people, including some in the military, on the charge of being communists and the forced conformity that the practice engendered in American public life came to be known as “McCarthyism.” Meanwhile, other government agencies, with less fanfare, identified and prosecuted cases of supposed communist infiltration.

McCarthy’s increasingly irresponsible attacks came to include President Dwight Eisenhower and other Republican and Democratic leaders. However, his influence plummeted in 1954 as a result of a television show and a Senate confrontation.

The TV show was “See It Now,” hosted by the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. After showing clips of McCarthy in action, Murrow addressed the audience: “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

“The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it.”

Then there was a sensational, nationally televised, 36-day Senate committee hearing on his charges of subversion by U.S. Army officers and civilian officials. The detailed television exposure of his brutal interrogative tactics—which famously prompted Joseph Welch, special counsel for the U.S. Army, to ask McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”—discredited him and helped to turn the tide of public opinion against him.

When the Republicans lost control of the Senate in the midterm elections that November, McCarthy was replaced as chairman of the investigating committee. On December 2, 1954, the Senate felt secure enough to formally condemn him on a vote of 67 to 22 for conduct “contrary to Senate traditions.” McCarthy was largely shunned by his colleagues thereafter.

The press that had once recorded his every public statement now ignored him, and outside speaking engagements dwindled almost to nothing. Eisenhower, finally freed of McCarthy’s political intimidation, quipped to his Cabinet that McCarthyism was now “McCarthywasm.”

He died before he had completed his second term in office, on May 2, 1957, at the age of 48. His death certificate listed the cause of death as “Hepatitis, acute, cause unknown.” That McCarthy died of a combination of addictions to alcohol and morphine is now accepted by modern biographers.

His former protégé, Roy Cohn, became a successful attorney in New York and served as a mentor to political and business leaders. Soon after he died of AIDS in 1986, the IRS raided his residence and collected whatever was of value to resolve unpaid taxes. One of the items that the IRS did not seize was a pair of counterfeit Bulgari diamond cuff links given to him by his client and protege Donald Trump.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books, including the newest one, Running Deep. To purchase copies, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.