In 1954 William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies. The bulk of the book is a deep dive into McCarthy's "public cases". The authors also have an incisive analysis of the trade-offs between individual rights and the need to protect government security and operations. Anti-McCarthy arguements usually, explicitly or implicitly, presume that government bureaucrats have a right to their job unless they can be proven guilty as in a court of law. For a variety of reasons, this standard is neither realistic nor desirable.
McCarthy and His Enemies also addresses the central point about the narrative which is now the most interesting question about the historiography of McCarthyism: What makes Sen. Joseph McCarthy uniquely evil? Why is his name a universal "malediction" among respectable pundits and historians? They provide plenty of examples of harsh rhetoric from esteemed liberals that rival McCarthy's "irredeemable" methods. <>
Seven decades later we still do not have an answer to those questions.
The introduction to the 1961 editions provides some clues as to how that narrative was formed and defended.
McCarthy and His Enemies was not ignored. It could not be-- it was a best-seller. Instead it was bushed off and mocked.
The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) brought out the big guns to knock down the idea that there any rational case to be made for McCarthy and his investigations. Elmer Davies, Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Dwight Macdonald, and Hugh Trevor-Roper were among the marquee names chosen to delivers the message.
At the time that line up of critics seemed impressive. Knowing what we know now, they illustrate the intellectual dishonesty which marked the opposition to McCarthy and right-wing anti-communism.
Elmer Davies was an early and vehement critic of McCarthy. He also ran the Office of War Information during World War II. Under his watch Stalin's agents had free run to spread lies such as their cover-up of the Soviet's massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. When he returned to journalism after the war, he became an advocate for the innocence of Alger Hiss.
In short, Davies was stubbornly blind to the dangers of Soviet infiltration. To concede that McCarthy and his allies had a point was also to admit that he himself had failed as both a bureaucrat and journalist.
Richard Rovere worked for Stalinist publications before being reborn as a "respectable" journalist at the New Yorker. Like Cambridge spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess he brushed aside his professional association with communism as a youthful foiable. No one questioned his suitability as a Washington reporter or biographer of McCarthy because he was backed by the towering prestige of the New Yorker.
Macdonald, like Rovere, was a man of the far-left. His anti-Stalinist credentials, unlike Rovere's, were beyond question. He backed Trotsky and denounced the Moscow Trials when the Popular Fronters were defending Soviet "justice".
His distaste for Stalinism did not translate into support for the US. He was a pacifist and deeply suspicious of all governments. If his worldview had a lodestar it was a commitment to high culture and a loathing for mass culture-- both communist and bourgeois.
Any movement with popular appeal, including McCarthy's was bound to draw his ire.
Macdonald did not address the evidence amassed by Buckley and Bozell nor did he counter their arguments. Instead, he mocked the book with a quip: McCarthy and His Enemies, he wrote, had "the general effect of a brief by Codwalder Wickersham and Taft on behalf of a picklpocket".
The jest is ironic coming from Macdonald. In a few years he would pen a ponderous 2-part "rebuttal" to a Tom Wolfe article mocking William Shawn and the New Yorker. The honor of his boss engaged Dwight Macdonald's interest; a factual record of the Tydings Committee he treated as a joke.
No wonder he is considered the perfect "New York Intellectual".
His review prefigured a common line of attack on anti-communism as new information emerged about the Stalinist penetration of the West-- VENONA, the Soviet documents, Mitrokhin's archives -- leftwing journalists and professors treated them as unimportant. They were only of "antiquarian interest". Only obsessives and spy hobbyists cared about them.
Mockery and disdain are powerful tools to keep unwelcome ideas out of the Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN). Just ask Elizabeth Bentley.
As Buckley wrote in 1961, "documentation that tends to prove uncongenial points is not documentation, it is effrontery".
The New York intellectuals -- communist, former communist, and anti-communist -- were consciously gatekeeping the narrative around the issue of Soviet spies and and Stalinist subversion. Commonweal magazine asked Hannah Arendt to review Whittaker Chambers's Witness. Her friend Mary McCarthy wrote to her to make sure she understood what was at stake:
Arendt's review gave Mary McCarthy no reason to complain. She denounced Chambers as an "informer" who "properly belonged in a police state."
[Witness] can't be treated simply as a book. The great effort of this new Right is to get itself accepted as normal, and its publications as a normal part of publishing... and this, it seems to me, must be scotched if it's not already too late. What do you think? I know you agree with me about the fact, the question is how it's to be done.
John Dos Passos, who knew something about such things, described the reaction to Witness as a "moral lynching of Whittaker Chambers by the right-minded people of this country."
The lines were drawn. Anti-Stainism was OK as long as one remained on the left and was largely limited to words and manifestoes. Hard anti-communism was off-limits, especially if the anti-communist was on the right.
We can see how these lines still largely define the debate around the McCarthy era. In their book on the Amerasia case Klehr and radosh detailed how the Truman administration torpedoed on of the first post-WWII spy cases. Yet there were the obligatory denunciation of McCarthy in the book's conclusion. Similarly, Radosh (an ex-communist) was highly critical of M. Stanton Evans's biography and dismissive of any attempt to rehabilitate the senator's reputation.
What was odd was that review ran in National Review -- a journal founded by William F. Buckley -- a supporter of McCarthy (obviously) and a friend of Whitaker Chambers.
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