McCarthyism: The competence canard (2)

The initial case against Sen. Joseph McCarthy declared that he was engaged in a veritable witch-hunt-- a demagogic campaign against an imaginary problem. He confused liberals with Communists and progressive idealists with Stalinist agents. He conjured up fanciful networks of conspirators out of thin air to frighten ignorant and parochial voters.

When the VENONA files and Soviet archives came to light, this leftwing dogma was shattered. It turned out that the New Deal was penetrated from top to bottom by conspiratorial networks working for the benefit and at the direction of Stalin's spy organs.

It was (and is) an article of faith among the Left that McCarthy was, is, and must ever be “unredeemable”. So the revelations created a big problem.

What to do? What to do?

The “solution” united far Left academics, New Republic liberals, and neocons like Ron Radosh. The new narrative seemed to address the most troubling facts while still condemning McCarthy: There had been spies in the 1930s and during WWII, BUT Harry Truman and J. Edgar Hoover had cleared them all out by 1950. So McCarthy was still whipping up public hysteria over a nonexistent problem.

While it is true that Truman instituted procedures to remove security risks he was hardly a determined redhunter. He took action only after his party suffered a landslide defeat in the 1946 elections and lost both the House and Senate.

To critics, the Truman security program looked like a political fig leaf rather than a dedicated effort to identify and root out the “Red webs” which stretched throughout the whole of the federal government.

That is what the “never caught a spy” canard attempts to hide. McCarthy and other critics were not hunting spies: they were warning that our spy hunting bureaucracy was failing to carry out its mission.

On this question McCarthy and his allies were right. His critics were wrong then and are wrong today.

Truman himself never owned up to the unprecedented scope of the Soviet apparatus that had penetrated FDR's alphabet agencies. At every turn he was prone to minimize the evidence when it was presented to him, to dismiss credible charges as red herrings, and to attack whistle blowers. For fifty years after the Katyn massacre only one government organization published the truth about the Soviets' guilt: The Madden committe in the House of Representatives. Truman opposed this inquiry and his State Department lobbied against its formation.

Truman wanted to abolish the House Committee on Unamerican Activities-- a committee which actually did “catch a real spy”. It also identified Russian assets who went on to service the atomic spies and the Britain's Cambridge Ring. Neither Truman nor Hoover cared to follow up.

The Truman administration also had an odd penchant for defending Soviet agents when they came under public scrutiny. Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Laurence Duggan were all defended by Truman or members of his cabinet.

This is hard to reconcile with the modern image of Truman as a more effective spy hunter than McCarthy.

The Truman security program was more political theater than anything else. HST's closest political aide admitted as much to Carl Bernstein decades later.

"There was no substantive problem. It was a political problem. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured. There was a certain element of hysteria."

Clark Clifford

As was the case with the Tydings Committee, Truman and his allies were vexed by the political embarrassment the communists presented to his party; the risk they presented to the country was of lesser concern.

As a consequence the Truman security program was half-hearted and insincere. Its primary purposes was to show that the executive branch was doing something about the problem of Stalinist infiltration of the executive branch without embarrassing the Democrats or the administrative state.

McCarthy was slipshod in his methods and sometimes exaggerated the danger. The Truman administration was consciously dishonest in addressing the problem. Yet, the anti-McCarthy narrative is so locked in place that even some conservatives and most neocons praise Truman in order to condemn McCarthy.

McCarthy must remain unredeemable no matter what new revelations come from the archives.