Restaging the Red Scare
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Restaging the Red Scare Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator By Arthur Herman Free Press. 382 pp. $26.00. Reviewed bv William L....
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that Arthur Herman names me as one of the historians who have failed to appreciate JosephR...
...Herman tries to get around this inconvenient fact by saying McCarthy was nevertheless right because, in addition to their agents, the Soviets could count on the devotion of 50,000 Communist Party members and, according to J. Edgar Hoover, another 500,000 sympathizers, all of whom were potential operatives...
...Herman cannot have it both ways...
...And he was the one who told MacArthur late in 1950 that there were only 40,000 Chinese troops in North Korea when there were more like 400,000...
...Herman quotes Whittaker Chambers to this effect, but still manages to miss the point, just as he cannot admit that McCarthy was going after fellow travelers like Owen Lattimore, as a rule, not actual spies...
...To spare their own administration further embarrassment Senate Republicans had to shut McCarthy up, and did so as soon as they could...
...In 1943 a U.S...
...McCarthy's mistake was that he came to believe his own speeches, and therefore kept trying to find Communists in government after Dwight D. Eisenhower settled into the Oval Office...
...The project uncovered a real loyalty problem, but in 1948 the FBI was given access to Venona and the spies were neutralized...
...military intelligence operation code-named Venona began intercepting and decoding, or decrypting, them...
...There was a huge security hole in the United States that the Truman Administration was virtually ignoring, making it necessary for Senator Joe to sound the alarm...
...As might be expected, Herman is also a great fan of General Douglas MacArthur, a McCarthy hero, who was always right and whose defeat at the hands of China after invading North Korea was, of course, not his fault...
...What they revealed was that the KGB and the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) had recruited somewhere between 200 and 400 agents in this country...
...For the same reason, most Soviet agents exposed by the decrypts were never prosecuted...
...But these add nothing to what has long been known about McCarthy...
...Actually, Venona proved the exact opposite...
...McCarthy's valuable contributions to America's security...
...That was the reason for using the guilty small fry—Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White—to raise questions about the loyalty of men like Truman, Dean Acheson and Marshall, who were beyond reproach but had to be tarnished if the GOP was to achieve its aim...
...The question of whether China was ours to lose is never raised...
...His treatment of President Truman's containment policy—adopted by all subsequent Presidents throughout the Cold War—is a case in point...
...What can this mean except that Truman's critics were wrong, that his loyalty program was working, and that Soviet intelligence operations in the United States were being defeated...
...The author admits McCarthy attacked Marshall for his lack of ability, negligence, faultyjudgment, and "servile adherence to the interests of the Soviet Union...
...No argument could be more disingenuous...
...After pages and pages of indicting the Truman Administration for tolerating subversives and failing to protect national security, he notes almost in passing toward the end of his book that in 1950, the year McCarthy began his attacks, "KGB field officers complained to their superiors about the difficulty of recruiting new agents in the 'current fascist atmosphere' of a security conscious America...
...He was beaten by the Chinese fair and square, thanks to his vaingloriousness and his habit of substituting wishful thinking for common sense...
...According to Herman, "if any single person can be said to have 'lost China' (and perhaps none can), it was George Catlett Marshall...
...the Soviets would need Western markets, and even Western aid, in order to survive, and from that economic leverage would come political leverage, and peace...
...He was misled by unnamed persons in military intelligence, we are told, and undermined by a nest of spies...
...It is simply a rehashing of discredited accusations that have largely been exposed as such by history, and by the release of previously secret Soviet and American documents...
...This is as good a summary of containment as one could expect, and Herman even admits that the assumptions of Kennan et al...
...Why, then, did the Neanderthals of the Right, and even fairly sane figures like Senator Robert A. Taft, relentlessly attack containment as some sort of sellout...
...In McCarthy's day this was known as "guilt by association" and rightly condemned by all fair-minded people...
...Herman's argument is that the Venona project and the partially opened Soviet archives have proved McCarthy was right in general, even if wrong in specific cases...
...The one big change since Oshinsky's book appeared is that with the end of the Cold War a large number of previously unobtainable documents have come to light...
...Herman even goes so far as to defend McCarthy's slandering of General George C. Marshall, the noblest public servant of his generation...
...Eventually it would have to come to terms with the industrialized West...
...In no respect can it be understood as a rational alternative to containment...
...Contrary to what his subtitle suggests, Herman's book is not a revisionist history...
...Because it took so long to work...
...Yet despite this compliment, I have to say that Herman's is the most peculiar volume on McCarthy and McCarthyism ever to cross my desk...
...There are many existing studies, including my colleague David M. Oshinsky's A Conspiracy So Immense (1983), widely regarded as the definitive McCarthy biography...
...MacArthur himself wrongly believed that if the Chinese attempted to cross the Yalu into Korea, air power would detect and destroy them...
...The sentence is vintage Flerman...
...Nor does it occur to Herman that the Nationalists were so hopelessly inept, no amount of aid could have saved them...
...The list contains so many distinguished scholars that modesty prevents me from identifying them...
...Besides trying to vindicate McCarthy with his leap of faith, Herman attempts to refight the major battles of the Red Scare era to show that the extreme Rightwingers—including Senators McCarthy, Albert E. Jenner Jr., William F. Knowland, and Pat McCarran, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the usual suspects, in short—were correct both on the loyalty issue and on the Truman Administration's other failings...
...If liberation merely meant tweaking Stalin's nose, there was no point to it, since not a single person would be liberated...
...it suggests there might have been no individual guilt, then smears Marshall just in case there was...
...The jump to over half a million possible spies or subversives is huge, and there is virtually no evidence for it...
...Elsewhere Herman maintains it was McCarthy's fall that led to liberalism's resurgence in the 1950s and '60s, when it was McCarthy's rise, and that of other scaremongers, that prompted liberals to regroup and take the offensive...
...Either liberation was a politically-inspired fraud, because nothing would change, or it was madness...
...Only a handful of those known or strongly suspected to be in the USSR's service were ever indicted, much less convicted...
...Naturally, Herman never admits that the Red Scare itself was at bottom a Republican tactic to regain control of the government...
...Finally, Herman cannot bring himself to face the central truth about Joe McCarthy, which is that he gave anti-Communism a bad name with his recklessness and character assassinations...
...That, he patiently explains, did not mean going to war with the Soviet Union, but simply annoying it in various ways, such as recognizing Eastern European governments in exile and supporting the Nationalist Chinese on Formosa...
...That is the real history of the Red Scare and explains the fate of Joe McCarthy...
...For Herman's purpose the new documents fall into two groups: material from Soviet archives, and secret messages from Soviet intelligence officers to their agents in the United States that were sent as diplomatic cables...
...A better strategy, Herman says, was the Right's policy of "liberation...
...In the end, they believed, economic reality would overcome ideology...
...Thanks to Venona, the FBI and a sweeping new government loyalty program that outraged civil libertarians, Soviet espionage was no longer a problem by 1950 when McCarthy began his rampage...
...But if liberation meant what it plainly said, rolling back the frontiers of one or more Communist states, then it did run the risk of a Third World War fought with nuclear weapons...
...produced the desired outcome...
...Although widely disliked and barely, if at all, competent, Willoughby was a trusted MacArthur aide for many years...
...To protect the invaluable information gathered by the Venona project, none of its findings were made public during the Cold War...
...Herman sums it up as follows: "The strategy of containment, which [George F.] Kennan proposed and the Truman Administration embraced, assumed that the Soviet Union could not last long in isolation...
...It was, however, his own chief of intelligence, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, who did the misleading...
...Thus, to the question of why another book on McCarthy, Herman provides no answer...
...If consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, Herman has nothing to fear...
...Reviewed bv William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...What is odd here is that Herman has a much more sophisticated understanding of events at the time than McCarthy and his ilk had, plus the advantage of hindsight, yet ends up endorsing their stupidest positions...
...The first question that springs to mind is, why another book on the junior Senator from Wisconsin...
...But the Senator was entirely justified, for when Marshall led his ill-fated mission to China after World War II its security was deplorable and his advice to Truman—not to give further aid to the Nationalists—was practically an act of treason...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
