Europe and McCarthy
BENTON, WILLIAM
Haw an American liberal viewed the late Senator Europe and McCarthy By William Benton In 1954, prior to the Army-McCarthy hearings, William Benton, former Assistant Secretary of State and Senator...
...they laugh him off...
...But, because they had no conclusive evidence, they never used names, even on the Senate floor...
...because he is fomenting a dangerously simple interpretation of the forces at work in our 20th-century world...
...These momentous decisions were spurred and punctuated by the Communist seizure of Czechoslovakia, the Berlin airlift, the development of atomic weapons in the Soviet Union, the fall of China, and finally the Communist aggression in Korea, which sent casualty telegrams into more than 140,000 American homes...
...Purely as a problem in practical politics, and apart from the moral considerations involved, it is my belief that an attack on Senator McCarthy may win for a man campaigning for office at least as many votes as it will lose...
...Senator McCarthy has provided a steady stream of such accusations...
...He is not known for anv positive proposals, either responsible or irresponsible...
...But above all he is a United States Senator...
...These 25,000 can perhaps be called the "hard core...
...they gasped in astonishment and dismay...
...I have tried to make three points: (1) that the tremendous publicity Senator McCarthy receives in the American press, and by reflection in the European press, is traceable to a combination of his personal talent for making headlines and the national mood of anxiety...
...First and most important, even if Senator McCarthy had all the evil talent of Mussolini or Hitler he would still not constitute the same menace...
...They had "the names...
...They did not choose to use such information publicly, even though it might have proved to their personal political advantage...
...The theme he chose—spies and secret agents—is a proven favorite of fiction...
...Haw an American liberal viewed the late Senator Europe and McCarthy By William Benton In 1954, prior to the Army-McCarthy hearings, William Benton, former Assistant Secretary of State and Senator from Connecticut (1949-1953), who, perhaps more than any other man, can claim to have laid the groundwork for checking the late Joseph McCarthy's political power, wrote an article on the Wisconsin Senator at the request of the British magazine Fortnightly...
...Do you think," he said, "that Senator McCarthy will be able to take over the United States...
...Could it apply to America...
...Thus, the setting, and the national mood of anxiety, have been propitious for Senator McCarthy's drive for the headlines...
...I have personally tried to reassure my European friends...
...He is energetic and resourceful, moving from one accusation to another swiftly and with an adroit sense of timing...
...The net effect of Senator McCarthy on the voting in November 1952 in my own state of Connecticut was negligible, no more than a few thousand either way out of more than a million cast...
...Joseph McCarthy is not bound by these rules of fairness...
...Klaus Fuchs were convicted in England...
...Even in the British Commonwealth, some conspirators have been yanked into the spotlight...
...I fought him because, for personal and partisan ends, he sought to exploit this danger, and America's mood of anxiety, with reckless and irresponsible charges...
...It would be strange if the dramatic events of the past eight years had had no emotional impact on America...
...But by mid-1946, before a year had passed after V-J Day, the full invective of Communist propaganda throughout the world had turned against the United States...
...They even aspired to be political philosophers...
...Indeed, they have never existed in the United States...
...The deep-rooted traditions of fair play and free speech in the American democracy, tested and strengthened now over the past 1 11> years, will not he easily dissipated...
...Senator Taft had the support of millions of ordinary Americans who respected him for his integrity and for what they regarded as his remarkable grasp of public issues...
...His appeal is to fear and hate, not to hope and faith...
...Senator McCarthy's version of it is false—for example, his "205 card-carrying Communists in the State Department...
...A question that arises is this: "Why hasn't this history of failure—this record of crying "wolf'—destroyed Senator McCarthy...
...Then came the United States decision on Greece and Turkey, the Truman Doctrine—a most unfamiliar and unsought role for Americans...
...America's wars in the past have been hot and absolute...
...Some employes named by him were later separated from the Department for "security" reasons, some because the Department was tightening its criteria for dismissal, some even perhaps because the Department was shell-shocked by his charges...
...In America, amid headlines sustained for many months, Alger Hiss had finally been convicted—all this before Joseph McCarthy, in February 1950, began his tirades about 205 (later 57 or 81) card-carrying Communists in the State Department...
...he is conducting what he calls "exposures" rather than criminal trials...
...The answer is that accusations are vivid and memorable while denials and explanations arc tedious and dull by comparison...
...Others resigned before reviews of their cases were completed, but almost all those were old and disputed cases...
...Measured against the prestige of the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Senator McCarthy is a pygmy...
...Senator is considered newsworthy in America...
...Nor is there evidence that Senator McCarthy has the talent required to exploit an explosive or revolutionary situation if such existed...
...any U.S...
...This was followed by the great decisions on European economic aid...
...Alan Nunn May and Dr...
...But such groups do not make a party, a program, a platform, or any considerable portion of America...
...Further, there is nothing in the American psyche comparable with the wounds the Germans felt after their defeat in the 1914-18 war...
...At every press conference in Germany and Italy, I was asked similar questions...
...It reached its peak strength when its Presidential candidate polled 102,991 votes in 1932...
...The answer requires insight into the state of the American mind in the early '50s...
...To achieve top success, a demagogue must appeal both ways...
...Yet, he has continued to fail to produce the evidence...
...Americans have approved the steps taken by our two great labor organizations, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, to expose and expel the Communist leadership of constituent unions...
...It is true the extremist fringes have rallied around him...
...However, the Communist party had its most rapid growth in the United States in the 1920s...
...It has been declining steadily since then to about 25,000 party members today—one adult in every 4,000...
...We must ask, then, why Joseph McCarthy gets so many headlines...
...he is after the headlines...
...The basic preconditions of Fascism and Nazism do not exist in the United States in the early '50s as they existed in Italy in the early '20s and in Germany in the early '30s...
...In each country of crisis—Greece, Korea and the rest —were potent internal enemies: the Communism fifth columns...
...By 1953, he was the most talked-about American in Europe...
...It also requires some understanding of American politics and of the American press...
...His failures are obscured by the complexity and relative dullness of the rebuttal and by his skill in substituting new charges...
...Yet, he failed three times to secure the Republican nomination for President...
...The attitude of many Europeans was summarized by the head of the World Council of Churches, Dr...
...His high irresponsibility is perhaps best attested by the fact that many other Senators, Republican and Democratic, had heard all the rumor and gossip and had read the "confidential reports" on Communists in our Government much earlier than he...
...It is true that some oil interests are supporting Senator McCarthy...
...The tradition is too strong and the man who has set himself against it too weak...
...America is in no way tinder at the tyrant's hand...
...Many are schooled in conspiracy...
...I well remember, during my service as Assistant Secretary of State in 1945-47, the concern of highly placed and responsible Senators over alleged Communist infiltration into the State Department...
...Here I must re-emphasize a most important fact: There has been a Communist conspiracy in America...
...Senator McCarthy has no program...
...There is no doubt among Americans that there have been solid grounds for our country's deep concern about the Communist conspiracy...
...In my opinion, the principal reason is that most American politicians—like many Europeans— grossly overrate Senator McCarthy's political prowess...
...To this theme he has brought a personal talent for mixing fact and fiction which borders on genius...
...Certainly the theory of history-by-conspiracy-of-traitors-and-spies was easy to understand...
...W. A. Visser't Hooft, a Dutchman, who told 90 American Protestant leaders that "irresponsibility in the United States, as indicated by McCarthyism, looms as large in the Western European mind as the threat of aggression from the East...
...Later, as a United States Senator, I fought McCarthy not because I denied the existence of a Communist danger within the Government and within America...
...They would never wish to see him become chief of the American state—as the successor to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln...
...In turn came the United States determination to station troops in Europe and to spend huge sums for rearmament and for the North Atlantic Treaty program...
...When I visited Europe in the fall of 1951, a German journalist startled me at a press conference in Bonn...
...The emotional reaction of many Americans to this new condition is one of bafflement and exasperation...
...I remember when as Assistant Secretary of State, in my speeches of 1946 and 1947, I read Soviet broadcast bulletins aloud to my audiences...
...When it is an accusation against Government officials, high or low, suggesting treason, espionage or sedition, or conspiracy to commit any of these, it can become sensationally newsworthy...
...for a six-year term, he has unlimited access to one of the world's most resonant rostrums...
...It is a fact that Senator McCarthy has not proved anybody in the State Department to be a member of the Communist party...
...I can conceive of only one crisis sufficiently catastrophic to give him a remote chance to seize top leadership—the chaos of a military disaster...
...by the favorite method of false accusation, he brings them into court and murders them...
...Italy and Germany were attuned to the shout of the political adventurer...
...It is true that some of the high-tariff interests are McCarthyites...
...This Russian propaganda, in bitter, brutal and terrifying terms, charged Americans with great crimes including that of being "warmongers...
...This elementary psychological fact underlies the special protections with which Western law surrounds an accused man...
...The Department's criteria evolved from "reasonable evidence" of disloyalty or indiscretion to "reasonable doubt" of loyalty or discretion...
...because he has challenged our hard-won Western doctrine of the presumption of innocence...
...After his own party came to power in 1952, his Senate seniority automatically gave him a chairmanship of a powerful committee and a large stafF to help him dig up evidence to support his charges...
...The Republican millions who admired Senator Taft hold no similar respect for Senator McCarthy...
...America is powerful and prosperous...
...We have approved also those Congressional investigating committees which have tried to be just and careful in their methods, which have helped bring to public attention the Communist cells in Government and in other key areas of national life...
...There is nothing comparable with the resentments the Italians felt, their sense of being limited and contained, overpopulated, economically depressed, and undervalued...
...McCarthy is not Mr...
...I am asked frequently, not only in Europe but in the United States, why so few members of the United States Senate, a body of 96 members which regards itself—with justice—as one of the world's great deliberative bodies, have seen fit publicly to challenge their colleague from Wisconsin...
...Three and more years before Joseph McCarthy first noticed the Communists in 1950, I had helped, as Assistant Secretary of State under Secretaries Byrnes and Marshall, to establish higher security standards in our Government by insisting on full investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the thousands of employes under my direction...
...If it has any deep-rooted national neuroses, they are not dangerous to others...
...It assumes its posture as a leader, not to compensate for inferiority but from reluctant necessity...
...Could such a fifth-column enemy also exist in America...
...An atomic spy ring was exposed in Canada...
...Mussolini and Hitler came forward with blueprints for economic and social action...
...Any accusation against any individual made publicly by a U.S...
...and because he can use the "subversive label to frighten worthy but dissenting citizens into verbal conformity and thus weaken our hard-won right to freedom of expression—the very touchstone of our Western creed...
...A condition of relative war, of half war, limited war, is new and perplexing...
...Nevertheless, a national mood has prevailed since 1946 which helps explain it...
...I have said that our people have no deep-seated national neuroses which explain McCarthy-ism...
...He is known only for his accusations and his calumny...
...I agreed with them that many Americans underestimate Joseph McCarthy...
...Not one American in ten thousand could say how Senator McCarthy has cast his ballot on the major substantive issues before Congress...
...In The Republic, Socrates says: "When a tyrant first appears above ground, he is a protector...
...On subsequent visits, I found Europe's concern about McCarthy even deeper and more widespread...
...This mood is a product of the cold war and has been deepened by the war in Korea...
...because by doing so he injured innocent people—non-Communists—unjustly...
...some he kills and others he banishes, at the same time hinting at the abolition of debts and the partition of lands...
...All, however, were hailed by Senator McCarthy as his vindication, even though nothing remotely approaching a justification of his original accusations had developed...
...The Republican political leaders who are not above trying to make use of him would be revolted at the thought of serving under him...
...2) that his publicity is not an accurate measure of the size of his political following and is not translatable into votes, and (3) that the attempt to draw an analogy between Hitler and Mussolini on the one hand and Senator McCarthy on the other is unwarranted and misleading because America is not now vulnerable to their kind of leadership and because Senator McCarthy is not accepted as a leader by a mass following...
...Republican—or Mr...
...Having a mob entirely at his disposal, the tyrant is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen...
...Senator has vast potential power, whenever he wants to exercise it...
...It shows that even at the flood-tide of McCarthy's influence and the hysteria it engendered in many intellectuals, we had among us practical liberals who soberly forecast the end of his career...
...By contrast, America's politics is stable...
...Anybody...
...They draw too close an analogy between what they knew as Nazism or Fascism in Germany or Italy and what has become known as "McCarthyism" in America...
...It is an error to stretch the analogy across the Atlantic to a new setting, on another continent, and in another half of the century...
...This is about the last thing Americans believed themselves to be...
...They gave "the names" to me and to other Administration officers, and action developed at the administrative level...
...But his headlines developed against the background not only of a massively menacing Communist threat abroad but of a highly dramatized conspiratorial threat at home...
...The decisive factor on the vote in Connecticut was the personal popularity of General Eisenhower...
...In 1945, millions of Americans hoped and believed that the Western world would get along with the Soviet Union...
...They must be regarded as potent and dangerous...
...They captured and retained power partly on the promises of their program...
...Spurred by Diana Trilling's reflections on the McCarthy era in her May 27 "Here and Now" column, we are reprinting his piece— in shortened form...
...But, by contrast, I assure my European friends that they themselves greatly overestimate him...
...America has had a long and continuous history of constitutional government, and of free speech, free debate and free elections...
...they cannot believe that he has any destiny except to hang himself...
Vol. 40 • July 1957 • No. 29
