What I Am Reading: "Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy" by Larry Tye
This book, another Trump-era history that I delayed starting in the election's aftermath, confounded me. On one hand, it is a useful update to the McCarthy story, one that draws on previously inaccessible papers archived at Marquette University, McCarthy's alma mater, including McCarthy's wife's unpublished memoir. On the other hand, the book seems to assume that its readers will know the McCarthy story, and doesn't spend enough time orienting itself and laying the groundwork before darting off into supplementary detail. On one hand, it gives necessary corrections to some of the anti-McCarthy information out there, including on his military service and some of his political activities; on the other, it is still casually condemnatory while referring to him. It also has a frankly distracting number of footnotes that made reading the electronic version very frustrating. Overall, I’d say that it was a good supplementary work, but at least superficial knowledge of McCarthy is recommended going in.
In the spirit of my perception of this as the second McCarthy biography that one should be read (consider Richard Rovere for your first), the truncated version of McCarthy's biography: McCarthy was Wisconsin's junior Senator from 1947 to 1957, and was a disliked waste of space until 1950, when he claimed in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia to have proof of Communist subversion in the Truman Administration’s State Department. From there, he rode the issue of Communist subversion for several years, a professional red-baiter attacking the Truman administration and persecuting alleged Communist employees until 1954, when he finally went too far in attacking the Army and suffered a large drop in popularity and political capital. He went on to drink himself to death in his forties. Despite this comparatively brief reign, he gave name to McCarthyism, an ideal of paranoid prosecution of ideological deviance, often on spurious grounds.
These are the highlights, but there are many in-between details as well. Please enjoy them, true to McCarthy form, in the laziest format possible:
McCarthy's farm upbringing and teenage poultry entrepreneurship, and his hustle through all of high school in one year in a hurry to get to college;
his caddish college ways where he developed his vices and personality flaws of gambling and drinking;
his unsuccessful campaign as a New Dealer for District Attorney in 1936, and his successful campaign for circuit judge in 1939, in both of which he learned the art of pandering and of opportunistic, sleazy attacks with just enough truth to prevent debunking;
his service in the South Pacific in World War 2, where he worked as an intelligence officer but moonlighted, notoriously, as a gunner;
his against-regulations campaign for the GOP Senate nomination in 1944 while he was still stationed in the Pacific, intended to raise his name recognition as a Republican and a service-member;
his work as a circuit judge, intended to produce crowd-pleasing decisions and to butter up useful Republican operatives through quickie divorces and other favors;
his perpetual and continuing shady investment deals and ruinous personal and campaign finances;
his election against Progressive Senator Robert La Follette in 1946, as the ailing and quiet incumbent stayed in Washington and barely campaigned while being hammered by McCarthy's charges of corruption and anti-farm votes and by the Democratic nominee Howard McMurray's attacks on his isolationism (and by the use of friendly organized labor votes in his own Democratic primary);
his immediately-demagogic arrival in Washington and his quick torpedoing of his own reputation as he made claims that couldn't be backed up and screwed with the priorities of his fellow Senators;
his first crusade, to discredit Allied war crimes prosecutors on behalf of German war criminals of the Mamledy Massacre, fueled equally by his ideological hatred of top military brass (from his own time in the war) and his pandering to the isolationist German and Irish ethnic voters in his state;
his leaning on FBI and journalist sources after he struck it big with the Wheeling speech, as he had claimed a list of Communists in the State Department without the names to back them up;
his first, botched charges against Owen Lattimore, Dorothy Kenyon, and against Anna Rosenberg's nomination for Assistant Secretary of Defense;
his condemnation of Secretaries Marshall and Acheson of the Truman administration for their alleged incompetence;
his condemnation by the Tydings Commission for those reckless charges, which were dismissed by Republicans as a whitewash more focused on McCarthy than actual leaks;
his efforts to sink Tydings, Benton, and other Democrats in the 1952 elections, though later political scientists have dismissed these efforts as of minimal electoral value;
his reign as Chair of the Committee on Government Operations and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after the Republicans took over the Senate, from which he launched most of his attacks on government workers and contractors for their alleged, overblown Communist connections or their Fifth Amendment refusal to testify;
his marriage to his more organized and driven staffer, Jean Kerr, which came late in life after a long courtship and was eventually superseded by his co-dependent relationship with Roy Cohn, who had upscale connections that he didn't and was meaner than he was;
his purposefully slovenly personal life and demeanor to prove that he was different from fancy Washington senators;
his manipulation of the written press, as he got them press releases right before their deadlines when there was no time to fact check, and made some of his claims while out on speaking tours where only inexperienced and underpaid wire reporters were there to cover them;
his attacks on the Voice of America and the Government Publications Office to root our perceived Communists;
his accommodations by Eisenhower and other leading Republicans, as the President sought to deny him airtime;
how these factors combined in his downfall when he did attack the Army, with Eisenhower moving against him and the television press showing his bullying tactics to the entire country;
the development of the Army-McCarthy hearings, where McCarthy was being investigated because his staffer Roy Cohn tried to get special favors for his coworker / possible lover who was drafted, and the Army was being investigated for both knuckling under to that influence and for possibly retaliating; and
McCarthy's illness and drinking, starting all the way back before his military service, which ultimately killed him from what could reasonably described as complications of alcoholism in 1957, after he had been humiliated and deprived of any clout by the hearings.
The book has a lot of interesting and entertaining detail and analysis on all of these aspects of the McCarthy story. Much of this comes from the new documentation in McCarthy's Marquette files. Tye uses some of this documentation to debunk historical misconceptions about McCarthy, usually circulated by his critics, including those surrounding his military service (he likely did fly on the undocumented runs that he claimed and that he received medals for). It also covers how some of the institutions he attacked likely did have lax security procedures at the time. The problem with McCarthy, of course, was that he was not just bringing up lax security, he was making disproportionally vicious attacks and claiming Communist subversion. He turned people with vague left-wing backgrounds into confirmed Communists into active Soviet spies, and a cowed government then drummed them out of their jobs.
His record catching actual spies was dismal, as only about ten or a dozen of the 159 people he named as spies between 1950 and 1952 were identified as such by the Venona Cables when they were declassified after the Cold War ended. Even then, some argued at the time and subsequently that McCarthy was an overblown boogeyman, that at worst his attacks only prevented people (many actually suspect) from holding federal positions, which were after all a privilege and not a right. However, beyond the fairly wide reach of his investigations (including down to defense contractors and educators), there was the broader atmosphere of paranoia and repression that they created and that came to characterize the early Cold War era. This political culture especially hindered left-wing groups and efforts, as people were afraid to organize or to campaign lest they be tarred with the brush of Communism. Ellen Schrecker is quoted as saying, "For a few short years in the late 1940s, the American people had more political options than they would ever have again. McCarthyism destroyed those options, narrowing the range of acceptable activity and debate." The book doesn’t focus on the broader picture as much as The New Republic would like, but I think it was honest about being a straightforward biography of McCarthy and not an all-encompassing work on McCarthyism, and I was happy with its work on the broader picture.
The book spends some time on McCarthy's victims and antagonists, often one and the same. I am a big Owen Lattimore fan, having read a couple of his books and the book about his Red Scare ordeal, Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" Of China by Robert P. Newman. His case was an early demonstration of McCarthy's overreach, but it didn't stop him for long. More important were telegenic cases such as Black communications clerk Annie Lee Moss, who was viewed as being unfairly questioned, or bureaucratic pushback from, of all people, Allen Dulles at the CIA (part of a turf war with the FBI, admittedly). There were many others in the bureaucracy and in the media. Edward R. Murrow's televised exposé played a role, of course; but McCarthy had to blow himself out before such things could do any good, and he was eventually buried under the collective weight of his own errors more than he was defeated by some decisive blow. His strategy was reckless and impulsive, and eventually he picked the wrong fight. Despite this, some of his supporters rode the plane right into the ground; he always had high Catholic support (and Kennedy alliances, as noted in the Kennedy Versus Lodge book), and fair Protestant support for a while. The Jews were the only demographic who got him right all the way through; though Tye thinks that McCarthy was less explicitly anti-Semitic than he was just an unfiltered small-town American.
The also book tries to place McCarthy within a chain of American demagogues going back at least as far as Huey Long and proceeding to Trump, but it revisits this topic only occasionally, and provides mostly superficial observations on similarities. Then, on the other hand, it proves more useful in its Wisconsin analysis, noting how McCarthy and the La Follette dynasty both rallied their supporters against a similar eastern establishment that was anathema to small midwestern farmers, but that this took different forms in different eras. McCarthy of course does have a combativeness and impulsiveness in common with Trump, as well as a showman’s sense for publicity and a lack of any ability for introspection, long-term planning, or other deeper thought processes.
I guess a McCarthy biography from the Trump era was inevitable, and I think that this one does a perfectly serviceable job. It is a long story with familiar beats, but a reasonably thorough recitation and new documentation are welcome. I’ve been reading a bit about the era anyway, through my (yes, still ongoing) work on Hiram Bingham III, who was the chairman of Truman’s Loyalty Review Board. He doesn’t appear in this book, but the loyalty boards did some heavy-lifting, for better and (mostly) worse, on the Red Scare front. Once a reader has finished rubbernecking on McCarthy himself, there are a lot of other good books on the larger era, with many nooks, crannies, and other personalities.