McCarthy on the Record

...Even to those who have followed McCarthy's mercurial career in the headlines, this 1-2-3-4, A-B-C-D analysis is impressive...

...The first, McCarthy: The Man, the Senator, the "Ism," by Jack Anderson and Ronald May, is still the best report on the man and a capable account of the Senator and the "ism" in pre-Eisenhower days...

...perhaps no one can just now...

...Such revelation begins with the understanding that democracy is always precious and precarious because it rests on the easily-mutable interior state of each individual...

...Last winter's McCarthy: A Documented Record, compiled by the editors of the Progressive magazine, is chock full of interesting material but slap-dash in organization and is marred by its tone, which is that of an agitator's handbook...

...For them, the McCarthy issue is an affair of the blood, not of the brain...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub THIS IS the fourth book on the junior Senator from Wisconsin in two years...

...The torrent of abuse heaped on the anti-McCarthy series of Frederick Woltman, for years daily journalism's most effective anti-Communist, should settle that point conclusively...

...The biggest seller thus far has been McCarthy and His Enemies, by William F. Buckley Jr...

...To put it another way: Back in 1951, the reigning cliche about McCarthy's charges was: "Where there's smoke, there's fire...

...The fact, which Buckley and Bozell knew and which Rorty and Decter make explicit in this book, is that there has been less and less fire each month, while the ever-billowing smoke has become more and more plainly identifiable as poison gas...

...To deal with the second would require, at the very least, the unfettered talent of a Bertrand Russell...

...To say that Rorty and Decter have not performed this service is not to disparage them or the distinguished members of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom who sponsored their work...

...To deal with the first question, one would have to do for McCarthy what Victor Serge, in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, did for the Leninists...

...They have not provided the book on McCarthy...

...Its greatest bit of hokum is its "evaluation" of McCarthy's record on the sole basis of the charges he made in the spring of 1950...

...2. What is the nature of the disease in our society which has enabled so many respectable people to tolerate him and his ways for so long...

...The pattern that emerges from the detailed Rorty-Decter study should make the Buckley-Bozell shell game obvious to all...

...then created personal capital by inflicting new wounds (General Marshall, "Alger—I mean Adlai" and so on), and finally, when his supposed goad, the "Truman-Acheson regime," had passed into history, slashed away at all society just for the egotistic hell of it...

...As for the literate McCarthyites and "anti-anti-McCarthyites," they are what they are for reasons no rational book could ever undo...

...But only those close to the Communists-in-Government issue could readily understand why Buckley and Bozell thus chose to hush up McCarthy's last three years, especially the critical period under Eisenhower...

...And it is for this reason that the most illuminating statement in the Rorty-Decter book is this quotation from a Catholic missionary who had just returned from a jail in Red China: "I would rather return to my Chinese Communist prison cell," wrote Father Leon Sullivan in November 1952, "than avail myself of Senator McCarthy's 'protection.' His is as great, if not a greater, threat to American freedom than the military might of the Kremlin, and, believe me, I do not underestimate either the Kremlin's might or its cleverness...

...Buckley and Bozell grasped the essence of this new nihilism and succeeded in articulating it into an ideology—an ideology which, quite properly, had less to do with Communism than it did with the basic corpus of common belief in our still-free world: rationalism, scientism, individual dignity, popular sovereignty, social welfare...

...Having said this, I must nevertheless confess a certain disappointment, not so much with what the book does as with what it fails to do...

...The deeper meanings of McCarthyism are, I suspect, less susceptible to social science than to revelation...

...it is pathetically disingenuous when it deals with the flesh-and-blood McCarthy...

...What they have given us—which is plenty—is a precise and comprehensive record of his public acts, a fair estimate of their causes and results, and several acceptable seminal ideas on "security" generally...

...Anyone who hopes to discuss McCarthy intelligently will have to read the Rorty-Decter book, if only for the material in its two key chapters, the one analyzing his methods and the other his substantive charges and "investigations...

...An honest, if misguided, work when it is scourging liberals for their various sins since 1789...

...Many, if not most, of those charges had been previously made, with more or less justification, by others in and out of Congress...

...It was for this reason that Orwell set his 1984 not in Communist Poland, but in the West...

...Anti-McCarthyites need no new ammunition, while those who support Indian Charlie's buddy out of sheer ignorance will probably never see this book...

...And the authors' cool, factual tone gives it all the greater wallop...

...In setting forth chapter and verse on McCarthy's methods and charges, Rorty and Decter delineate a cagey opportunist who first found political capital in the rubbing of old wounds (Service, Vincent et al...

...Thus, while Rorty and Decter live in the ideational world of William James and write in the anti-Communist lingua franca of Sidney Hook, Buckley and Bozell attempt to conjure the world of Savonarola back to life by enveloping it in the pseudo-scientific tones of Walter Lippmann...

...The five words, "Senator McCarthy is a scoundrel," spoken by Dwight D. Eisenhower, could probably do more for the unsophisticated McCarthyites than a hundred books...

...What is McCarthy when he faces himself alone in the darkness...

...and L. Brent Bozell, published last April...

...Those who have drunk their heady potion will not be impressed by facts even if they are presented by GE's mechanical brain, let alone by "left-wingers" and "eggheads...

...For the most part, therefore, arguments over McCarthy, while still diverting, serve little useful purpose today...

...It seems to me that the lines on McCarthy have already been pretty sharply drawn...

...To perform a really new service on McCarthy, one would have to deal with these two questions: 1. What within this man makes him what he is...