In Defense of a Zealot

...Even surviving Red hunters, like Vice President Richard M. Nixon, kept clear of him...

...That same year Klaus Fuchs was arrested for stealing atomic secrets from Los Alamos, and shortly before McCarthy's Wheeling speech, Assistant Secretary of State Alger Hiss was found guilty of perjury in connection with espionage charges...

...Lost the girl of my dreams" attitude...

...To get us behind the scenes, Buckley invents one Harry Bontecou (pronounced Bonte-kew), who at Columbia University had been editor of the student newspaper, the Spectator...

...Considered deserters by the Soviets, they were sent eitherto the Gulag or to their deaths...

...He called that soul love of country, but the audience knew it was love of cruelty...

...Chairman," are the keening sounds of a man at bay...

...Buckley, unfortunately, is a plodding novelist...

...There were spies and security risks, along with many Americans who were sympathetic to our wartime ally, the Soviet Union...

...Buckley gives him a contorted family history and has him almost marry his secret half-sister, until the truth comes out...

...But diplomatic blundering at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 led to Soviet control of Eastern Europe...

...you're in goop to your teeth but you pretend that it's a gold mine...

...As a soldier at the end of the War, guarding Russians who had been captured by the Germans, he participates in Operation Keelhaul, the forced repatriation of 3 million POWs...

...I vote for reign of terror...

...McCarthy also assailed President Truman for defending "the vested interests of Communists by keeping their agents in the State Department...

...Although elected a Republican Senator from Wisconsin in 1947, McCarthy's sensational run on the political marquee didn't begin until February 1950, when he gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia and claimed to have a list of 205 (or 57 or 207) Communists in the State Department...

...You don't have to be a psychologist to realize the junior Wisconsin Senator was engaged in something beyond Red hunting that came closer to the Greek hamartia, or flawed judgment rooted in a character defect...

...In 1950, he is hired by the Senator as a staff assistant...

...What we ask of the novelist is to show us "why," since fiction is not bound by codes of journalistic prudence but lives precisely by laws of risk and speculation...

...It is bland fare beside, say, Roy Conn's producing a photograph of Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens posing with Schine, only to have it quickly shown that the photo was cropped to suggest a special camaraderie between them...

...Of course, depending on the criteria by which these were judged, it was either a reign of terror or a much overdue personnel reform," Bontecou twitters at one point...

...Somewhere in every novel there must be a beating heart...

...Have you no sense of decency...

...All resigned or were fired...

...Was it McCarthy's passion for dramatized malice that drove him to that great televised coup de théâtre, the 1954 showdown with the Army...

...The rich and tangled history of the McCarthy years is similarly Bontecou'd down...

...He lets us know, too, that as McCarthy got deeper into difficulty, he got deeper into alcohol...

...Over a period of four years, Americans were privileged to tune in on the rise and particularly the fall of a man who ascended like Daedalus on wings of nerve and ambition then fell like Icarus, trailing illusions that were so many scorched feathers...

...No doubt Cohn, a brilliant young lawyer with an eye for the main chance, had his foot on the accelerator at the end, but it was McCarthy's train on McCarthy's track...

...Indeed, it was not always a completely sober McCarthy who attended the hearings...

...Those hearings grew out of his claims of espionage at Fort Monmouth and were turned against him because his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had been seeking favors for his assistant, a 26-year-old Army private named G. David Schine...

...Even the slightest hint of this is glaringly missing from The Redhunter...

...Bontecou cites a 1954 report by Eisenhower announcing, after seven months of investigation, "Two thousand four hundred and twenty-nine 'security' risks found in 39 Federal agencies...

...We might be touched by the pathos of this story, if not for the trail of victims McCarthy left behind...

...None of this could have happened, it was reasoned, unless the United States was honeycombed with Soviet agents...

...William F. Buckley Jr.'s novel, The Redhunter, is an attempt to recapture those years in fiction, and while his effort finally falls flat, it is not because the story no longer evokes the pity and terror that Aristotle defined as the essence of tragedy...

...There are many ways to bring this tale to life, but he does a cagey softshoe around them all...

...Such things don't interest Buckley, who refuses to give McCarthy either his birthright as a person or dimension as a fictional character...

...The clear purpose of these experiences is to persuade the skeptical among us that the U.S...

...Nevertheless, as history has recorded, McCarthy's hearings were the public staging of aprivate grievance—perhaps the class resentment of a poor farm boy among the country club set—made plausible by the international climate of fear that it attached itself to...

...What other reason is there to read, let alone write, such a book...

...Most Americans had assumed that our victory on two fronts in World War II would assure a Pax Americana for the remainder of the century...

...The moment was right for a Red hunter, and McCarthy was, in effect, hired on the spot by the Senate, the press, and a Republican Party that had been out of office since Franklin D. Roosevelt's first election in 1932...

...He labeled Johns Hopkins professor Owen Lattimore, a specialist in Far Eastern affairs, "the top Russian spy in the United States," yet never nailed down the charge...

...was in need of a larger-than-life Cold Warrior like McCarthy...

...William Buckley and his spokesman opt for the heartless bureaucratese of "personnel reform...

...At the conclusion of the ArmyMcCarthy hearings in June 1954, he was left dangling slowly, slowly in the wind, after Army Chief Counsel Joseph N. Welch dressed him down: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last...

...He pushed events like the Korean War off the front page and, in the process, lit up the murky dawn of the infotainment industry...

...Like Melville's Ahab, McCarthy aimed his harpoon on high, to strike through the mask and make God show his face...

...Joe McCarthy was a pure distillation of his time...

...But for those four years he was the rumpled, scowling star of American politics, the Wisconsin chicken farmer become grand inquisitor, upstaging two American Presidents, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Then, as a student in 1948, Bontecou watches the Presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace on the ticket of the Progressive Party, whose foreign policy platform, he tells us, was identical to that of the Communists...

...At that moment McCarthy must have known he was going down for the count...

...Bontecou is a smug, bland and innocuous sort of fellow, in fact an utter twit...

...But McCarthy, who left a trail of damaged reputations and ruined careers in his wake, did not uncover any actual espionage...

...McCarthy would be the OOP's battering ram against Truman and the Democrats...

...The now famous film clips of him crying out in a voice that seemed to emerge from high up in his sinuses, "Point of order, Mr...

...When the North Koreans invaded South Korea in June 1950, he accused Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall of being "part of a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man...

...But then that is the very essence of hamartia, you know and you don't know...

...In this case, Buckley didn't think to put one in...

...Buckley does set up his protagonist as a witness to two historical events that take place offstage...

...In any event, if the traumas of the Cold War held American politics in their thrall, it was the personal element that drew in the audiences and boosted the ratings...

...McCarthy, like Oedipus, like Macbeth, like Faust, baited his own trap and then walked obstinately into it...

...That, I think—besides enough technical shortcomings to serve as a textbook—pointsto why The Redhunter falls flat...

...He takes this setback with his usual boyish nonchalance, a kind of "Darn...

...And after the 1952 election he charged Eisenhower with appeasing "the Communist hoodlums who, as of this very moment, are torturing and brainwashing American uniformed men in Communist dungeons...

...The nine weeks of battle between McCarthy and the Army contained much high drama, and in revisiting them one wants more than Buckley's impatient summaries of the 7,424-page transcript and Harry Bontecou's ever-so-tedious editorializing with whoever comes into earshot...

...Alas, Harry Bontecou, Buckley's standin here, hasn't a clue, though he is prone to blame Roy Cohn...

...McCarthy was a headliner, troubled and inspired, who transfixed the public time and again with the one thing he really had to show them: his own bruised andlividsoul...

...Surely McCarthy must have known that he had no case, that he was no match for the forces mobilizing against him...

...Three years after the Army hearings, Joe McCarthy was a discarded man...

...He fingered General Ralph Zwicker, a hero of the Battle of the Bulge, for harboring Communists at Fort Monmouth (notably a Leftwing dentist named Irving Peress...

...Everything before was prelude, everything after postscript, including his censure by the United States Senate and his 1957 death from alcohol-related liver failure...

...Reviewed by Mark Shechner Chair, Department of English, State University of New York, Buffalo: author, "After the Revolution: Studies in Contemporary American Jewish Imagination" Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's career as a Red hunter was a Greek tragedy performed on national television, with all the pomp and tawdriness that are built into both...

...One of the many questions Buckley neglects to address is whether Eisenhower's election in 1952 made McCarthy dispensable to the Republicans, thus rendering his fall inevitable...

...In 1949, the fall of China to the Communists and Russia's detonation of an atomic bomb ushered in a new world order we were not psychologically prepared for...