The Redhunter
Buckley, William F. Jr.
William F. Buckley, Jr. Redeems Joe McCarthy The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy William F. Buckley, Jr. Little, Brown /421 pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Joseph...
...My guess is that they're all over the place," Joe tells Harry, and the irony is that he is absolutely right: Soviet spies really are all over the place, and a handful of top U.S...
...He is our Darth Vader —the quintessence of evil...
...But the ex-Marine is determined to save America from Communism, or perish in the attempt...
...It's not that he develops second thoughts about the morality of the McCarthyite crusade, or begins to question McCarthy's essential decency...
...Rather, Harry comes to believe that for all his good intentions, McCarthy lacks the necessary sophistication to fight the Communists effectively...
...They have a sense of what has happened to the eastern Europeans, what goes on every day in the Soviet Union...
...McCarthy flirted with the notion that George Marshall was a Communist—because he had been ambassador to China and secretary of state when the Nationalists lost China to the Communists, and principal military adviser to Roosevelt and Truman when the Communists got eastern Europe...
...As for Joe McCarthy himself, Harry remembers him as "a life lover who animated all situations in which he found himself...
...As he tells his father, McCarthy subscribed to the seductive fallacy "that subjective intentions can be deduced from objective effects...
...As an unidentified woman put it in Richard Rovere's widely acclaimed biography of the senator, "[McCarthy] was a stinker...
...So Joe McCarthy is left to do battle on his own...
...Other Republican political figures are making similar charges, and there is no reason to suppose that McCarthy regards his speech as in any way exceptional...
...intelligence officials know it, but because their information comes from super-secret "Venona" intercepts, they can't say so without tipping the Soviets off to the factthat we'd broken their code...
...He never thought of believing in what he was doing...
...True, there is a broad streak of recklessness in his character, and he is not above cutting a few corners andtelling a few fibs...
...government agency...
...JOSEPH SHATTAN's new book, Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War, was published this month by the Heritage Foundation...
...Exactly how McCarthy phrases his charge is unknown, since the radio station broadcasting his remarks erases the tape...
...Whether, in addition to being plausible, Buckley's portrait of McCarthy is accurate is something for the historians to thrash out...
...nobody seemed to mind...
...Joe wouldn't have formulated it that way, but his reflexes were what a few years later people were calling `Birchite.'" After Harry leaves McCarthy, the senator's lack of intellectual sophistication leads him to place undue stock in the views of his brilliant but unscrupulous aide, Roy Cohn, and this, in turn, brings about his downfall...
...Eventually, these men reluctantly conclude that McCarthy—as Sherrill bluntly informs Harry—is "f- - king up" and damaging the anti-Communist cause, but initially they are all convinced that despite his excesses, he is doing the Lord's work...
...But it does convey a picture of NIcCarthv and his supporters that is both sympathetic and plausible...
...The priesthood didn't get all that mad at Harry Truman about what he said in 1948 when campaigning...
...For all his virtues, though, Buckley's McCarthy has a serious problem—he's not very bright—and this, along with his growing fondness for booze, eventually undoes him...
...In the meantime, even readers who, like me, prefer their history straight will find much to admire in Buckley's enlightening and intriguing entertainment...
...Little, Brown /421 pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan enator Joe McCarthy occupies an , S unenviable niche in American history...
...But our leaders don't have that intuitive sense...
...You have the message...
...He is quickly contacted by the formidable FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover, who informs the Republican senator that the destiny of the Free World is in his hands: [Hoover] looked McCarthy directly in the eyes...
...On December z, 1954, after three days of bitter debate, the Senate votes 67 to 22 to "condemn" him...
...But McCarthy's (alleged) statement that "I have here in my hand a list of 205 [Cornmunists] —a list of names which were made known to the Secretary of State...and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department" is picked up by the press, and the next thing you know, McCarthy's a celebrity...
...His zeal alarms his staff, who wish that "Joe would slow down a bit...
...Harry informs Alex that he signed up with the Wisconsin senator because he believed "that the highest calling of our time is to contribute to the anti-Soviet cause," and he makes it clear that despite growing disagreements, he stuck with McCarthy for three and a half years because he was convinced that the arch anti-Communist, though flawed, was a far more admirable figure than his detractors...
...But where does it say that all good men have to be teetotaling intellectuals...
...As Harry tells it, it was just one of those things...
...A host of secondary, equally appealing characters share Harry's favorable assessment of McCarthy...
...Of course, The Redhunter is an artful blend of fact and fiction, not a work of scholarship...
...Buckley maintains that far from being a cynic, McCarthy was a True Believer...
...Instead of focusing on the Reds, the Democrats fire away at the Red-hunter, who replies in kind...
...In 195o, at a Lincoln Day rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator McCarthy denounces the Truman administration for harboring well-known Communists in the State Department...
...But when a conservative engages in a bit of demagogy, everyone professes to be deeply shocked...
...You're going to have the ear of the American public...
...To McCarthy-haters, this marks a fitting climax to an infamous career, but Harry Bontecou— and, one assumes, William Buckley— regards McCarthy's life as a tragedy of almost classical proportions, a heart-breaking tale of a gifted politician who means well, takes up the Redhunting burden that other, more fastidious souls shun, but is simply not up to the great task he has stumbled onto...
...Senator, you may be the critical man of this decade...
...They include Columbia University political theorist Wilmoore Sherrill (modeled on Yale's Wilmoore Kendall), his brilliant graduate student, Charles Lichenstein (who in real life went on to become Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick's deputy at the United Nations), and the great poet/prophet of anti-Communism, Whittaker Chambers...
...Did Buckley lift his plot from an old episode of the Jerry Springer show...
...Eventually, though, Harry stops defending McCarthy and leaves his staff...
...far from being unprincipled, he was a patriot...
...To make the case for McCarthy, Buckley invents an engaging character named Harry Bontecou — a distinguished historian and the soul of decency—who served as McCarthy's speechwriter from 195o to 1953, and who in 1991, on the eve of his retirement from academia, recounts his experiences to another distinguished historian, the sprightly octogenarian Lord Alex Herrendon, who happens to be Harry's natural father as well as a repentant ex-Communist and former Soviet agent...
...Senate, there is every reason to suppose that Joe McCarthy's prospects are glittering...
...The The American Spectator October 1999 69 people out there know what's at stake...
...and far from being a liar, he was on to a very important, though widely ignored, truth —that the Soviet Union had successfully recruited agents in every important U.S...
...Pickups on your speech were placed on my desk throughout the afternoon...
...In The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy, conservative polymath William F. Buckley sets out to refute the conventional wisdom...
...U nfortunately, McCarthy's efforts to unmask hidden Communists are bitterly resented by the Democrats, whose "operative premise," as Harry puts it, "is that, really, nobody is a Communist...
...70 October 1999 • The American Spectator...
...Other American villains have at least some redeeming qualities—Benedict Arnold was a courageous soldier, John Wilkes Booth was a Southern patriot, Bill Clinton is the unfortunate victim of child abuse—but Joe McCarthy, it's generally agreed, was rotten through and through...
...How, then, does this charming life-lover become the fearsome Senator McCarthy...
...I felt it when I got the report this morning...
...But when, at age 38, he becomes the youngest member of the U.S...
...He said that 'powerful forces' were working to 'undermine' American democracy, 'like those that created European fascism.' The whole business, the GOP was run by the real estate lobbies and the National Association of Manufacturers...
...In the process, he sometimes makes serious mistakes and maligns innocent people, but Harry believes that his boss is the victim of a double-standard...
...Hoover's words transform McCarthy...
...He was never `sincere'—Christ, what a laugh...
...He becomes obsessed with the threat of Communist espionage, devoting virtually all his waking hours to ferreting out Soviet spies (or at least trying to, since he never actually uncovers a single agent...
Vol. 32 • October 1999 • No. 10
