Coulter, Rabinowitz, and McCarthy

I don't doubt that Ann Coulter went too far defending Sen. Joe McCarthy in Treason and fails to make the case for his enshrinement as a hero. That would be par for the course for her-- she ultimately stretches her evidence farther than is reasonable and engages in rhetorical overkill. That track record is why i have no intention of buying Treason: her desire to be bold and provocative always overwhelms her good sense and intellect.

Nonetheless, I agree with Kevin Holtsberry that Dorothy Rabinowitz's review in Opinion Journal does not address the substance of Coulter's book or the merits of a revisionist assessment of the Senator:

In fact, her slam on Coulter is really just righteous anger at the concept that someone might attempt to defend McCarthy. She does not so much prove that McCarthy really was a monster as assert the fact and act shocked that Coulter would not realize this.


Holtsberry is also correct when he suggests that " McCarthy is more of a cultural indicator than a political one." Which also might explain the phenomenon which puzzles Rabinowitz

It is worth remembering that during that bleak political time the universities, faculties and students understood the threat McCarthyism posed to intellectual freedom--and, dismal to note today, that the universities which were once hotbeds of opposition to McCarthy are now little worlds of their own, where political censorship, speech codes and other ideologically driven assaults on freedom are the accepted order of things.

Perhaps the intellectuals who led the charge against McCarthy were interested less in intellectual freedom and more in defending themselves and the privileged position of intellectuals in general. The question, for some, was self-preservation: they had a pro-Stalin past that they wished to bury. For others, the problem was defending intellectuals against the democratic mob. The elite might engage in character assassination inside the ivy walls of academe and on the pages of their journals; that was okay. It was critical, however, that the mob not strike at their betters.

Note as well that the techniques of McCarthy never went out of style. Congressmen still hold public hearings to gin up publicity, unpopular public figures still get pilloried to advance political careers, the press is more than willing to print leaked information and calculated rumors. McCarthy did not invent this sort of thing and the anti-McCarthy crowd did not stop using them (just ask Ken Lay or Ken Starr).

I think the most interesting question about McCarthy is this: how did he mess up so badly in a target-rich environment? We now know that Stalin had agents and friends all though the government. They ranged from high ranking officials to small fry. Yet, McCarthy failed spectacularly in his investigations. Maybe he was not serious. Maybe he was misled. But neither he nor Roy Cohn were stupid men. Their failure is one of those intriguing mysteries hidden in the morality play of conventional history.