The Truth About Joe McCarthy
Bishop, William Rusher, with a reply by Joseph W. Jr.
aestheticism. Mrs. Wharton insisted that civilized people could only live by the light of wax tapers; electric light "makes the salon look like a railway station, the dining room like...
...The Hubbard firm specializes in reproductions of eighteenth-century instruments...
...Rusher is quite right in saying that the Wheeling speech was delivered in 1950...
...Because, for one thing, that was precisely the investigation that was derailed by the socalled "Army-McCarthy hearings...
...One died there...
...The other eight had to wait five years before the courts rescued them...
...Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...That is surely not evidence that the researchers, or any of them, were Communist spies...
...I made it-as plain as possible that the rumor was unsupported by evidence and also that I gave it no credence myself...
...4. The allegations of anti-Semitism were based on an attack against Anna M. Rosenberg, made when the Senate was considering her confirmation as Assistant Secretary of Defense, an attack which Adams says "had been orchestrated by McCarthy and his friends...
...Remember, 22 senators--a majority of the Republican members, including minority leader William Knowland-voted against "condemning" him...
...IT]here was never any evidence of that...
...I devoted less than one-sixth of the piece to it...
...Fisher on his own staff...
...to Joseph W~ Bishop, Jr.'s account of various aspects of that controversy, for it is easily the most inaccurate and misleading article I have ever read on a subject notoriously conducive to misstatements...
...He is a disgrace to his university, and to his profession...
...Wrong, by two full years-the date was February 9, 1950...
...But what provoked McCarthy to raise the matter...
...In the next paragraph, speculating on why McCarthy stuck by Cohn and Schine, Bishop swings his slimebuck again: "Their presence help~ spel an anti-Semitic taint in MctSartt~ 3 record...
...A careful reader of Bishop's article will notice various obscure references to "Fort Monmouth," an Army Signal Corps Installation in New Jersey...
...Apparently any mention of Welch is enough to set him off...
...any guest so weak in character as to slouch in front of me may literally feel the pain of my displeasure...
...Welch, a noted Boston attorney with a face and manner that reminded many people of Uriah Heep, was indeed adept at "subtle mockery," and that day his mockery had taken a most curious form: Did Roy Cohn (whom Welch was questioning) truly know of any security risks at Fort Monmouth...
...This instrument is, however, only a substitute for that grandest of all plutocratic excesses, the pipe organ...
...He merely states that "Welch's subtle mockery aroused McCarthy's wrath" and led to this "entirely gratuitous" smear...
...Fisher's membership in the National Lawyers' Guild has never, so far as I know, been adequately explained, but it certainly doesn't date from those good old days when, according to Bishop, the Guild was "founded by Jerome Frank and other honest liberals as a counterweight to the American Bar Association...
...How fortunate that we have, to tell us the truth about this monster, a man with the distaste for smearing, namecalling, and ~guilt-by-association, the habits of factual precision, and the sheer intellectual honesty of Joseph W. Bishop, Jr., Sam Harris Professor of Law at the Yale Law School...
...At one point we get a glimpse of a 15-page letter b y FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, purportedly containing (only...
...was counsel to a Senate committee myself in 1956-57, and met McCarthy repeatedly (though I never worked for him...
...But enough of what Professor Bishop does...
...Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last...
...The facts, as you probably suspect by now, are rather different...
...Calling attention to Fisher's connection with it, therefore, was hardly a "smear...
...I erred in trusting my memory...
...is the Sam Harris Professor o fLaw at the Yale Law School little more than an extended rehash of a famous episode during those hearings when Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer retained by the Army, whipped out a handkerchief and purported to cry into it...
...Some people, of course, suggested a homosexual affair, but there was never any evidence of that, and Schine, at least, was clearly heterosexual...
...Before the Senate voted to "condemn" McCarthy later that year (not for his investigation of Fort Monmouth, by the way), the Democrats had recaptured the Senate, and McCarthy's days as a senatorial investigator were effectively over...
...In every instance in which I have personal knowledge about his statements, he is correct...
...I have no reason to question Adams's veracity, and certainly few people had a better opportunity to observe the Senator...
...He ought to know...
...Welch's lachrymose sonorities assuredly went over brilliantly with the housewives who had been lured from their soap operas to watch him: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness . . . . Little did I dream that you would be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad . . . . Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator...
...he died of a severe attack of hepatitis...
...Adams says likewise that the Senator "was also given $10,000 by Lustron Corporation, makers of pre-fabricated houses, when the company was looking for funds from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation," 3. I merely reported a fact when I said that "some p e o p l e . . , suggested a homosexual affair...
...He was also called "the tormented mushroom...
...I earnestly counsel him not to read any more material critical of Senator McCarthy~ Such tantrums cannot be good for his health...
...electric light "makes the salon look like a railway station, the dining room like a restaurant...
...F o r the rest, the Bishop article is a long string of unsupported accusations that would make a vulture retch: "[McCarthy] stayed in the Senate until he drank himself to death in 1957 . . . . He was a pariah...
...Then, on Joe McCarthy and the controversies that x~hirled around him (up to 1953), read Buckley and Bozell's painstaking analysis, McCarthy and 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 His Enemies (Regnery, 1954...
...J. Parnell Thomas, another congressman, who was ultimately convicted of accepting kickbacks from his staff...
...Did he, in fact, know of any security risks anywhere...
...Nevertheless, though it may lack a chapel and a priest's hole, the Conservative House is a place where cross and icon are reverenced, and is a sanctuary of another sort...
...On reflection, it occurs to me that the Bishop article may inadvertently perform, for its readers, one important service after all...
...To hear Bishop tell it, McCarthy (of course) started it all: "On June 9, 1954, Welch's subtle mockery aroused McCarthy's wrath, and he started off on one of his characteristic (and entirely gratuitous) smears" (emphasis added...
...In any case, he was not a "security risk," for he had never been employed by the government or had any access to classified information...
...I had felt a little guilty about attacking a politician who, I wrongly supposed, had no supporters left...
...Rusher's agitated letter: I. My article was rather more than an "extended rehash" of the episode in which Joseph Welch made his wellknown speech about McCarthy...
...His hands shook so that "he was having trouble drinking, and gin trickled from the corners of his mouth when he took a sip...
...Bishop carefully doesn't tell you...
...It is absolutely studded with falsehoods, half-truths, slanders, innuendoes, and simple errors...
...Rusher, like everyone, is entitled to his own...
...He had at one time been a heavy drinker, but in his last years was cautiously moderate...
...No wonder misstatements come easily to Bishop...
...He eventually married a former Miss Universe...
...Name I City I State Zip t Offer good only in the continental U.S.A...
...it is the monastery...
...8. Mr...
...unevaluated raw data on "more than thirty suspected subversives" at that base...
...A stairway treatment with exposed pipes, as at the Frick house, might be recommended in an age of low ceilings...
...If you are getting tired of out-andout baseless smears, how about a little guilt by association...
...I advanced a quite different explanation...
...She called the Victorian upholsterer "the house dress-maker," who "pads and puffs his seats as though they were to form the furniture of a lunatic's cell...
...Hardly...
...Why, though, one may ask, weren't any authentic security risks among them turned up by McCarthy's investigation...
...A harpsichord is perfect for painting pastoral or apotheosis scenes on...
...I myself once saw him knock down three stiff cocktails before lunch...
...Let's watch this accomplished mudgunner at work...
...stands with fluted or cabriolet legs are available...
...not even a flat accusation--just a statement that unnamed persons "strongly suspected" McCarthy of wrongdoing...
...Smith...
...Father Coughlin, a demagogic priest silenced by his bishop...
...Smith, America's leading anti-Semite...
...But he had left the Guild long before 1954...
...Fort Monmouth, therefore, was a perfectly proper--in fact, a highpriority--target for investigation by the Senate Committee on Government Operations (of which McCarthy was chairman in 1953-54), if indeed more than 30 people stationed there, all or most of them "scientists," were the _9 subject of negative security data in the files of the FBI...
...I hope that Mr...
...he can't even get an ordinary fact straight when he is presumably trying...
...I was fascinated to learn from Bishop's article that "Adams thinks, as I have always thought, that Welch, anticipating the Senator's attack on Fisher, had prepared and memorized [his rebuttal] well in advance...
...Leaping to a new accusation, Bishop dredges up one of the oldest and lowest of them all...
...Savor this masterpiece of the genre: "A succession of politicians and assorted rabble-rousers had done well [denouncing Communism] in the thirties: Martin Dies, Karl Mundt (who later, as a senator, played a shabby role in the ArmyMcCarthy hearings), Father Coughlin, J. Parnell Thomas, Gerald L.K...
...Welch had undoubtedly pondered how to turn a McCarthy attack on Fisher's membership in the Guild to advantage...
...McCarthy's sin, it seems, consisted of parading on the TV screens of a watching nation the damaging fact that one of Welch's young legal associates named Fred Fisher, whom he brought with him to the Army job, had been a member of the National Lawyers' Guild, an organization that Bishop insists had begun honorably but which he concedes "had been infiltrated and finally dominated by Communists...
...j...
...Do they teach you such tactics at Yale Law these days...
...According to a footnote, Professor Bishop's diatribe is "based on" a recent book by John Adams, who served as general counsel to the Army during McCarthy's investigation of certain security problems in that branch of the armed forces...
...Rusher's little list of approved reading does not include Thomas C. Reeves's The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography, published in 1982, which is the most recent and exhaustive account of the Senator...
...As for the sloppiness of Bishop's way with facts, his repeated descent into the very tactics that "McCarthyism" is supposed to epitomize, and the general intellectual slovenliness of his performance, however, these unhappily tell us some important truths about him...
...McCarthy, Bishop goes on to tell us, ou~-red-baited them all...
...5. As for Karl Mundt's "shabby role," Adams says, "Mundt quickly earned his nickname as the Leaning Tower of Putty...
...That fact, in turn, makes hash out of Bishop's charge that McCarthy was "looking for a good issue on which to seek reelection in 1952...
...For that, Professor Bishop relies on his own rancid and faulty recollection, plus a stew of unsubstantiated allegations so vicious that by themselves they would serve as a splendid example of the very "McCarthyism" he is supposedly c6mplaining about...
...No proof, please note...
...and many of them strongly suspected him of taking bribes from large corporations, such as Pepsi-Cola, to push bills they favored...
...My opinion that McCarthy's "dominant quality was fraudulence" is simply my opinion...
...Its sheer essential meanness--the raucous hatred that blazes out of Bishop's prose after the passage of thirty years--may lead uninvolved readers to suspect things about the equities of that distant controversy that they would never have learned at the knee of some typical liberal historian of those times...
...Early on, he says of McCarthy in 1950, "Those who knew anything about him, mostly newspapermen, thought very little of him...
...The basis of the infatuation was never clear...
...I apologize to Uriah Heep for comparing him to this cynical, gold-plated old phony...
...THE TRUTH ABOUT JOE McCARTHY An exchange...
...Actually, the article is William Rusher is the Publisher of National Review and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...Get from your library a copy of James Burnham's The Web of Subversion (John Day, 1954), and decide for yourself whether the issue was a legitimate one...
...Entirely gratuitous...
...But note the implication: If Welch in fact deliberately baited McCarthy into dragging Fred Fisher's record onto national television in order to weep over the cruelty of his doingso, his subsequent performance takes the Hypocrisy Prize of all time...
...It is notwrong to love these objects...
...How's that for smearing somebody without going in for any heavy lifting, such as producing a little evidence...
...He was, in fact, only halfway through his first term, and thus nearly three years from his next encounter with the voters...
...Later Bishop, in the course of his summation, tells us that "the scientists employed at Fort Monm o u t h . . , all were ultimately vindicated...
...as the late Virgil Fox once said, "Home is where the organ is...
...I think these descriptions seemed just to most of those who watched the hearings...
...Later in the very same paragraph, Professor Bishop sneers that "it was Joe's way, when asked for substantiation of his charges, simply to leap to new accusations...
...It will be noted that many of the statements which incensed Mr...
...The electronic clock is not necessary...
...they are to be enjoyed until the moment when duty demands their sacrifice...
...as I said, the vote was based on his abuse of other senators...
...one must marry either a musician or an artist...
...Senate on December 2, 1954, and died in Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 2, 1957, so nobody under 45 in America today can have any very dependable personal recollection of the "McCarthy controversy" that caused such a fulor in the first years of the decade of the fifties...
...Let me regale you for a while with what he doesn "t do--his errors of omission, that is to say...
...McCarthy's early THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 23 "obscurity," he tells us, "ended abruptly in February 1952 when he delivered a stump speech to the Ohio Valley Women's Republican Club at a Lincoln Day dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia...
...A taint put there by Pr ssor Bishop: I lived through the whole McCarthy controversy and never heard of it till now...
...Rusher's blood pressure is down again...
...Those who feel they have to sit in the dark and look at something may turn on the picture lights and peer at Rinaldo and Armida without subjecting themselves to commercials...
...The conservative following of the harpsichord predates the present vogue of "ancient music...
...It seems to me reasonably objective...
...and Gerald L.K...
...Just about what you would expect--if you buy Professor Bishop's version of the McCarthy story, lock, stock, and barrel...
...Account# Exp, Signature ~ 1983, Barnes & Noble Bookstores, inc...
...He would tell any lie, assassinate any character, to get a headline . . . . If there had been a significant Communist vote in Wisconsin, he would have said flattering things about Marx, Lenin, and Stalin . . . . His basic motives were to be re-elected and to grab as many dishonest dollars as came within his reach...
...But look at that collection of names: Martin Dies and Karl Mundt, both perfectly honorable members of Congress over periods of many years (typically, Bishop never gets around to saying what was "shabby" about Mundt's role in the Army-McCarthy hearings...
...The sight unquestionably moved many people watching on television, and Professor Bishop is clearly one of them...
...William Rusher, with a reply by Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...In a way, I was glad to see Mr...
...the shape of the easy chair she regarded as "dropsical...
...There is, of course, no television in the Conservative House, but there is Tiepolo...
...If so, I implore you, sir--I implore you--to reveal their names "before the sun goes down...
...It is cruel in our day, however, for a host to ridicule a guest, as the Baron de Charlus did, for sitting by mistake in a Directory chauffeuse after directing him to sit in the Louis XIV chaire...
...Have you left no sense of decency...
...2. My statement about McCarthy and Pepsi-Cola is based on what Adams says in his book...
...Neither Adams nor I suggested that the Senate voted to condemn McCarthy for his Fort Monmouth investigation...
...Rusher's letter, as well as half a dozen others of similar tone and tenor, worthy of the Senator himself...
...He wiped a few crocodile tears from his rheumy eyes...
...But Professor Bishop is guilty of an even more deceptive omission, in connection with the incident that serves as the centerpiece of his article: Joseph Welch's teary speech...
...Now why do you suppose McCarthy brought the subject up...
...but the incident can hardly substitute for an explanation of what the "McCarthy controversy" was all about...
...That is the doctrine of the Higher Materialism, to be distinguished from the conspicuous and acquisitive materialism of the bourgeois (who finds it incomprehensible) and the envious and Manichaean materialism of the socialist (who finds it criminal...
...So far as I can see, nothing in it contradicts my statements...
...H]is dominant quality was fraudulence...
...That was the point at which McCarthy, his patience snapping, intervened to suggest that if Welch was really so all-fired eager to locate security risks, he might start by looking into the aforesaid Mr...
...the other apparently still survives...
...The price of looking it up just went way down...
...What Bishop never tells us, however, is that Fort Monmouth was a highly sensitive installation, deeply involved in research on radar and other subjects of great interest to the Soviet Union...
...I think it reasonable to infer that drinking played a large role in his fatal liver disease...
...7. Fort Monmouth was undoubtedly a "sensitive installation," where much classified research was performed...
...As a matter of fact, two friends of Julius Rosenberg (who even Bishop admits was a Communist spy, and "far more dangerous" than Alger Hiss) had worked at Fort Monmouth in the early 1940s, and fled to the Soviet Union in 1950 to avoid questioning about their subsequent activities...
...his funeral service, an event conducted (quite exceptionally) in the Senate chamber itself, was the most moving scene I witnessed there in my 17 months on the staff...
...Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...the Senate chamber emptied when he rose to speak...
...Fisher was a member when the Guild was a well-known Communist front--was, in fact, on the Attorney General's official list of subversive organizations...
...He kept right on with a senator's ugual chores up almost until the end...
...Fisher may have had Communist or leftist sympathies when he joined the National Lawyers' Guild as a student, or he may have been merely naive: I don't know, and I doubt very much that McCarthy knew...
...Writing of Roy Cohn, McCarthy's counsel, and G. David Schine, a friend Of Cohn's who was also on the committee's staff, the "Sam Harris Professor of Law at the Yale Law School" gets off this beauty: "Schine was a handsome rich kid, a recent graduate of Harvard although rather lightly furnished in the upper story, with whom Cohn had become infatuated...
...As a final turn of the screw, it is interesting to note that McCarthy was not in fact even dragging Fisher and his Communist-front affiliation into the limelight: The New York Times had written extensively on the subject weeks earlier...
...9. Adams says that "McCarthy was a prodigious drinker" and that the last time Adams saw him "he poured about six ounces of Fleishman's gin into a glass [and] added a little tonic and a lump of ice...
...Nor is the allegation (assuming it to be true) that two friends of Julius Rosenberg had worked there during World War II...
...6. Mr...
...Rusher does the cause of conservatism no service by his vehement defense of the indefensible...
...Since a good many of The American Spectator's readers are under that age, it is a pity that its December issue gave space...
...Rusher's lengthy and intemperate attack on Welch seems quite pointless...
...Contrary to appearances, large, sturdy Louis XV fauteuils are perfectly comfortable, as long as one sits up in them...
...Given the way in which Welch led with his chin (or rather Fisher's chin), as described above, I think this is entirely probable...
...Rusher are based on what John Adams has to say...
...As Bishop piously observes in another context, "It is always easier to get the media to broadcast sensational accusations than lackluster facts disproving them...
...Rusher's attack on Fred Fisher is as "gratuitous" as was McCarthy's...
...But the mistake hardly affects the validity of my criticisms of the Senator...
...replies: I have only a few comments on Mr...
...The only alternative is personal, not political...
...Finally, if you are interested in my own assessment of the man as I knew him, in relation to his tumultuous times, there is a chapter about him in my book, Special Counsel (Arlington House, 1968...
...The anthropomorphic bronze mantel clock, which shows signs of having been made by human hands, demands only the service of winding...
...As for the 30-odd employees accused by McCarthy, Adams says, "before long, 25 of them were restored to full duty...
...For anyone who wants to know the truth about, the Communist penetration of American society in the 1930s and 40s and about the "McCarthy controversy" that resulted from it, the facts are, happily, available--in sober, unemotional volumes that tell the story accurately and well...
...Other electronic innovations, insofar as they are necessary, must be concealed...
...J o e McCarthy was "condemned" by the U.S...
...Both statements are utterly false...
Vol. 17 • March 1984 • No. 3
