In his interview with Leo Cherne, WFB pressed his guest to define what made McCarthy uniquely evil. That is, why are McCarthy's methods or McCarthy's rhetoric out of bounds when they appear indistinguishable from those of other politicians and public figures.
Cherne, to his credit, addresses the question head-on. For him, McCarthy is detestable because he made reckless charges of treason. against men like George Marhsall.
It is a telling point. For six decades McCarthy's reckless attacks on Marshall stood as the worst example of his excesses and a reason to treat him as especially dangerous.
Then a really strange thing happened: Donald Trump was elected. More importantly, Hillary Clinton lost. Suddenly, baseless accusations of treason became the highest form of patriotism. Adam Schiff turbocharged his political career by making them against Trump and many of his aides. Rachel Maddow banked millions of dollars by trafficking in them.
This makes WFB's main point. Everyone is expected to be horrified by "McCarthyism" but no one can define it nor explain why it is singularly evil.
ii
It is still rewarding to read Buckley and Bozell's McCarthy and His Enemies* because that is a main theme the authors address. McCarthy's rhetoric and methods are condemned while other politicians are celebrated for "fiery speeches" and "dogged investigations".
Take public congressional hearings. When McCarthy confronts witnesses, it is the return of the Spanish Inquisition, a replay of the Salem witch trials. Yet the Left loves those sort of hearings in the right context.
Buckley and Bozell are scathing in their handling of the putative anti-communists who professed themselves shocked by McCarthy's methods while professing to support his aims. Since those critics rarely condemned other investigations, the authors doubt their sincerity.
The inquisitorial method is "understandable" or "indispensable" or even "desirable" if it is used to uncover or embarrass Wall Street racketeers (the Nye committee), the anti-union practices of management (the LaFollette committee), or the financial angels of right-wing organizations (the Buchanan committee). But the same method even if more restrained and equitable in its application is outrageous and fascist when used to lay bare the activities of American fellow travelers (the Committee on Un-American Activities), to expose the ideological impact of the Institute of Pacific relations (the McCarran committee), or to look into pro communism in the Voice of America (the McCarthy committee).
There may be a few intellectually honest critics of McCarthy who also denounced the televised hearings into organized crime and labor racketeering. The vast bulk of the punditry class adopted the Leninist approach of "Who/whom" when assessing those investigations. Robert F. Kennedy was good and noble when he was investigating the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa; it was a blot on his character when he worked for McCarthy investigating Stalin's American minions. Senator Sam Ervin supported segregation and opposed the civil rights movement for decades; he became a liberal folk hero when he chaired the Watergate hearing that helped "get Nixon"
For it is McCarthy's aims that demonstrably disconcert and frighten so many of his critics. They disapprove of McCarthy's method when it is used to further McCarthy's aims but like it fine when it is used to further their own.
Twenty years after McCarthy's death WFB returned to this theme. Discussing the now celebrated Hollywood 10, he noted that they went to jail "for committing the same offense for which Judge Sirica sentenced Gordon Liddy to twenty years in jail, getting for himself in return the Man of the Year award from Time magazine: contempt of a duly constituted government board of inquiry."
Today we note that Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to prison for defying the January 6 committee -- a purely partisan ad hoc star chamber created by Nancy Pelosi to get Trump and his allies. By what standard is that a just outcome but the Hollywood 10 were martyrs for defying HUAC-- a long-standing committee with bi-partisan support?
Hyprocrisy like all lies can reveal important truths once you spot it. In the case of the polymorphic "nightmare" which is called "McCarthyism", the key point is this: many of the loudest voices against the senator were anti-McCarthy because they were, at their core, anti-anti-communist. Some were still true believers in the Bolshevik dream or adherents to the Popular Front myths fostered by Willi Munzenberg. Others were liberals too embarrassed or too prideful to face up to the Soviet reality they once supported.
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Another mark of the elastic nature of the term "McCarthyism" is the way it is applied to activities where the senator had zero involvement. McCarthy had nothing to with Hollywood screenwriters or the Hollywood blacklist. The deaths of Laurence Duggan and Harry Dexter White which so vexed Drew Pearson and Edward R. Murrow had no connection to his investigations.
Yet, somehow, hearings which occurred before the Wheeling speech or which took place in the House of Representatives still get the "McCarthyism" label.
Hard to ignore the fact that the only points of commonality we find here is: 1) the investigations targeted communist subversion and espionage and 2) liberals attacked the investigators and covered up for the guilty.
Senator McCarthy rallied anti-communists and patriots, but his memory -- his enduring myth and media image -- has proved even more useful to the anti-anti-communists. They made McCarthy representative of all vigorous anti-communists.
It is obviously not the political methods of McCarthyism that arouse the indignation of those who invoke its specter today, but the political ideas with which McCarthy was associated, specifically his anti-communism. This is admitted with disarming frankness by New Left professor Ellen Schrecker in No Ivory Tower, a tendacious book about effects of McCarthyism on the university: "after all, what made McCarthy a Mccarthyite was not his bluster but his anti-communism mission".
Collier and Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties
Over time, anti-anti-communism became, not just the dominant attitude in popular culture, but the only acceptable attitude for right thinking people. (Willi Munzenberg's methods kept working even after he broke with Stalin and was murdered for his effrontery). "McCarthyism" became the all-purpose argument for rehabilitating obviously guilty spies and traitors such as Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg.
McCarthy ceased to be a legitimate subject for historical investigation. Instead he became a symbol of evil, the man who could not -- must not-- be defended. Further, one must not even give the appearance of seeming to defend him. Any discussion of American communism was expected to begin with a ritualistic denunciation of McCarthy, the Man, and the Ism. (This fealty rite continues to this day-- even at National Review founded by "McCarthyites" Wm. F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell).
The Bicentenial year of 1976, ironically, represents Munzenberg's posthumous triumphus. Lillian Hellman published Scoundrel Time -- her third volume of dishonest memoirs-- to wide acclaim. Critics lauded it; celebrities hastened to pay obeisance. She appeared in glossy ads for Blackglama Mink. When Hellman appeared as a presenter at the Oscars in 1977, Hollywood gave her a standing ovation. Jane Fonda was cast to play her in the movie Julia. That movie, based on a wholly fictional autobiography, would garner 11 Oscar nominations and would win 3 awards.
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Few people know that the House Committee on Un-American Activities was created at the instigation of liberal congressman Samuel Dickstein in order to fight the Nazi threat and its fifth column in America. Dickstein promised that he could "name you one hundred spies" and claimed that there were 50,000 fascists in just Connecticut. The congressman was willing, even eager to "name names" and put them in the Congressional Record. (He refused to include their denials.)
Far from condeming Dickstein, progressive groups supported him and the congressional investigations. He even went on to become a justice on the New York Supreme Court.
Decades later Clio finally delivered her punchline.
There in the Soviet archives was the codename CROOK -- assigned to none other that Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D-NY). The UnAmerican Activities committee owed its birth to a paid agent of Soviet intelligence.
*Some daring publisher should bring this book back in print with a new introduction to bring it up to date with what we now know about Soviet penetrations of the New Deal.
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