The Journalism That Failed

...Reviewed by James A. Wechsler Columnist, associate editor, New York "Post" Above all, Joe McCarthy wanted to be somebody memorable...

...Given the enormous value of Bayley's well-researched work, it is with reticence that 1 append certain caveats...

...What credentials does Hiss bring to this latter-day role of journalistic scholar...

...It appears in the course of a "summing up" of his impressive critique of the media's prolonged abdication in dealing with McCarthy: "Alger Hiss, speaking at the San Francisco Press Club on 25 July, 1975, answered in the affirmative when he was asked whether the press in the 1950s was 'supine.' 'The press was not very good at wood-chopping in those days,' he said, adding that it had gained in ' vigor' and' courage' since that time...

...Congenial as he was over a vanishing Bourbon bottle, he was a source of continuing confusion at home and national discredit abroad...

...Anyone who speaks on a college campus must detect the effect of the revisionist crusade, packaged in abysmal distortions of the truth...

...the term has too long been treated as an epithet by those who would have us believe that there were never any Communists in influential places-or that it could not remotely matter if there were...

...Why could he pose so large a political challenge that Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a total failure of nerve when even General George Marshall's patriotism was being impugned...

...McCarthyism is a part of our vocabulary...

...Why did large and influential sectors of the press and TV-radio shrink from exposing him until very late in his day...

...I have never had any sympathy for a notion still articulated by venerable McCarthyites: "You have to admit McCarthy at least focused the country's attention on Communism...

...Now, 24 years after his death, his triumph is secure...

...These autobiographical notes will indicate my special interest in this richly documented, highly readable book by a former Wisconsin journalist who knew McCarthy well in his heyday and is now Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California...

...It is challenged here because it seems to provide adornment for contemporary editing of the Hiss drama that grows increasingly fashionable with the fading of recollection and the arrival of new generations...

...To read this bulging record of widespread journalistic suppression, negligence and retreat is a macabre experience, relieved only by reminders that there were some who fought back at risks those of us working in established liberal citadels never experienced...

...It was there that Hiss, after gravely demanding to see Chambers' teeth, grudgingly admitted he was not a stranger...

...I never believed he believed a word of it, yet he clearly reveled in the audacity of the thrust...

...I had essentially the same view of McCarthy when, as the then editor of the New York Post, I was hauled before his committee for interrogation on our premature anti-McCarthyism...

...William Theis, long chief of the Washington Bureau of International News Service, recalled in a talk with the author: "All three wire services were so goddamn objective that...

...Moreover, that the Communists had been largely isolated by liberal and labor counterattacks by the time McCarthy began to run amuck is proof that the show he conducted was abetted by remembrances of past Stalinist intrigues and deceits...

...Anyway, you can't disagree with his objectives...

...Throughout the proceedings, adversary as the transcript reads, there was the sense that McCarthy (unlike the committee's counsel, dour Roy Cohn) was a frivolous-at times almost likable-inquisitor...

...Surely to lament their execution does not require the acceptance of fables...

...Hiss' perjury conviction was a powerful weapon in the hands of the emerging McCarthyites...

...For what has emerged from numerous previous studies of the man, and is devastatingly reinforced by Edwin R. Bayley's book, is his essential lack of seriousness and commitment...

...his special theme is the role of journalism...

...Such is his immortality, and it must be his last, eternal laugh on the country he hoaxed...

...He first flourished, as Bayley acknowledges, in a period when the American landscape was shadowed by the Korean War...

...From that moment on this became a classic re-enactment of "Oh what a tangled web we weave...

...they] let Joe get away with murder, reporting it as he said it, not doing the kind of critical analysis we'd do today...

...Nonetheless, this valuable book is marred by his casual presentation of Hiss' commentary...

...As the story unfolded, however, Hiss' self-portrait was steadily riddled...

...Yet such incongruity is no justification for a revival of innocence about the years when Stalinists held key posts in the CIO, conducted their own blacklisting in Hollywood (and elsewhere) and enlisted the cooperation of such well-groomed government servants as Alger Hiss...

...what better way to promote the Kremlin cause, he said, than to be a target of Communist attack...

...The Army (with Eisenhower as commander-in-chief) would also have moved less reluctantly and timorously into combat with the Senator had his early rampages been subjected to any semblance of systematic examination...

...Does the author believe Hiss' tenacious dissembling gives him any authority for weighing the media's performances in his embattled time and thereafter...

...That failure explains to a large extent why McCarthy was able to sustain his posturing and stampede the country until his fatal exercise in overkill??his confrontation with the Army...

...Nor have I ever been persuaded by a view that was popular in some intellectual circles during the Senator's rise: "Maybe Joe's methods are rough, but too many people protest too much...

...In fact, of course, he held no list in hand (unless it was a laundry list) and, in subsequent forays, his "revelations" repeatedly proved as transparent as the initial fraud...

...The melancholy story of the Rosenbergs is similarly being retold in glamorized terms that bear no resemblance to reality...

...Actually, he was eventually convicted in May 1950, just three months after McCarthy virtually stumbled onto the "Communist issue" at Wheeling...

...the craving was as transparent as the thirst for alcohol that ultimately killed him...

...For here, in great and stunning detail, is the chronicle of how-from the time of his February 1950 Wheeling, West Virginia speech in which he professed to have in his hand a list of 205 Communists being sheltered by the State Department-McCarthy cynically lied and bluffed and bullied his way from obscurity to his ultimate hours of power...

...The word is usually invoked as a synonym for intolerance, feckless scapegoating, character assassination-but for Archie Bunker, Joe McCarthy remains a revered martyr...

...Again alleged improprieties in the prosecution have been converted into a legend about the monumental "frame-up" of two dedicated "progressives" and Brooklyn Dodger fans...

...Although arguments concerning the procedural aspects of his prosecution survive to this day, the basic myth on which his public-relations case rested-the image of an impeccably respectable, lifelong moderate vindictively or aberra-tionally tormented by a shabby, unbalanced ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers-started to fall apart during the celebrated hotel-room confrontation that preceded the indictment...

...Unfortunate as well is his loose use of "redbaiting...

...Does Bayley require Hiss' testimony to bolster his case...

...That mischievous quality of his was the hardest thing to put in print, especially with the journalistic standards of the day...

...Revisionist memories may tell us that Hiss was a victim of the McCarthy era...

...And McCarthy, whatever his other limitations, early learned to take advantage of the pedestrian wire-service method as well as meekness...

...There was deep national resentment and frustration...

...Much history might have been altered if the large media battalions had diligently pursued McCarthy's "lists" (the numbers were always changing) and nailed him for his big and little lies...

...Obviously Hiss did not alone set the stage for the McCarthy age but he contributed heavily to it...

...Against that background I was astonished to find an improbable passage in the final chapter of Bayley's book...

...Murray Marder of the Washington Post, who spent several years in close coverage of the man, told Bayley that McCarthy was fundamentally "a mischievous child" who "didn't give a damn about Communism or anything else- It was all a game with Joe...

...Prior to the Hiss trials, numerous public figures (including Harry Truman) had invested heavily in his protestations of total innocence...

...Why did it take so long to catch up with him...

...Some members of the newspaper group gravely argued that the case was vulnerable because I had not proved that I had been intimidated...

...Americans had died at the hands of real-life Communists engaged in a naked aggression...

...Fresh in the minds of many, too, was the saga of Alger Hiss...

...But the book should have an audience far beyond the media...

...had there been no death penalty, we might have been spared some of the retroactive simple-mindedness...

...After I had submitted voluminous comments from the Daily Worker about my anti-Stalinist heresies, he promptly cited them as evidence of my continuing allegiance...

...The truth, I suspect, is that I received the Wisconsin Senator's attention chiefly because the Post had extensively investigated the special privileges Cohn had wrested for his friend, G. David Schine, during the latter's period of involuntary Army servitude...

...the prosecution had been initiated long before the Wisconsinite's regrettable rise to prominence...

...McCarthy was a liar and a fraud with an instinct for the jugular...

...None of this detracts from how effectively Bayley documents the shame of much of the media and its apologists in muffing the McCarthy story...

...There would be little satisfaction in pursuing the Hiss story now if he and some of his diehard friends did not seem so determined to perpetuate the fiction of utterly baseless persecution...

...Still, the responsiveness of too many Americans was not wholly the result of any immunity he was granted...

...But it does create the unhappy possibility that his work will be used by neo-Stalinist scholars to reconstruct and falsify the true history of McCarthyism and its origins...

...It is grotesque that his ambitious and mirthless young counsel Roy Cohn, so instrumental in promoting McCarthy's deceptions, escaped the fallout from his ruin and now occupies prestigious or lucrative legal and political positions...

...Bayley does not, of course, purport to be presenting a full history of the McCarthy years...

...Before I came upon Joe McCarthy and the Press, for example, I was unaware of how sturdily the late Robert Kintner, long a high-ranking TV executive, had resisted the pro-McCarthy pressures...

...Further, it implicitly blurs the point of Hiss' responsibility for some of the fear and flabbi-ness exhibited by the media...

...In another time of national madness, his name might even be a rallying-cry for some legions of lunacy...

...Nevertheless, a later inquiry by a committee of the American Society of Newspapers could produce no better than a divided vote on whether McCarthy's assault on the Post was an intimidatory transgression...

...Many journalists had subscribed to the devil theory featuring Whittaker Chambers, skillfully nurtured by Hiss and his partisans...

...He'd browbeat a witness and then he'd go up and grin at him and expect him to be friendly...

...The paragraph is admittedly a brief diversion in a long, generally careful book...

...Since so disarming a figure had plainly lied in his wide-eyed disavowal of any past Communist connections, the country could not readily accept the future denials of those unjustly "exposed" by McCarthy and his brethren...

...Surely things might have been very different if McCarthy had faced a critical investigative press from the start of his wild ride...

...In part, as Bayley emphasizes, the debacle was a product of self-imposed limitations of technique...

...Indebted as we are to him, though, some points must be made-not in mitigation of the journalistic collapse, but in achieving valid perspective about a national nightmare...