The Notorious Baiter

...Even his titles seem to echo the earlier volume...

...The speech, of course, was hogwash...

...The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, by University of Wisconsin-Parkside historian Thomas Reeves, is thus the first full-length scholarly biography of the junior Wisconsin Senator...

...In most of these accounts, McCarthy himself fades into the background, his name occasionally invoked as a symbol of the era's discordant politics, but otherwise ignored...

...Cold War scholars, on the other hand, have been relatively uninterested in McCarthy himself, viewing him more as the product than the cause of America's second great Red Scare and seeking to locate the causes of his sudden fame and notoriety in the dynamics of Cold War politics—the campaign for the new diplomacy of containment by the Truman Administration, the quest for partisan advantage by conservative Republicans, the actions and inactions of America's political, economic, and cultural elites...

...his name soon became synonymous with reckless and unfounded accusations of communism in government...

...On other occasions, Reeves's effort to set the record straight leads him to erect straw men and to exaggerate the originality of his own contribution...

...Reeves's failure also derives, however, from the simplistic and banal character of his goal...

...thus chapters in the Anderson and May book on "Humble Beginnings," "Justice on the Double," and "Tail-Gunner Joe," become, in Reeves's account, "Rural Beginnings," "Speedy Justice," and "Tail Gunner Joe...

...and a highly compartmentalized narrative style which permits Reeves to describe in quite considerable detail how McCarthy repeatedly lied about his military career and flagrantly violated Wisconsin's campaign finance laws, but also to observe straight-faced a few pages later that the young men who rallied around McCarthy in the mid-1940s were attracted by "a belief in his integrity...

...Reeves is unwilling to pursue the issue beyond these assertions, however, even though his own long catalogue of McCarthy's behavior—the reckless gambling, the prevarications, the alcoholism, the vulnerability to injury and illness—seems to cry out for explantion...

...to write what he calls an "objective" biography which portrays McCarthy neither as a "fiendish figure" nor as a "saintly patriot...

...On February 9, 1950, an obscure young Republican Senator delivered a rousing Lincoln Day stump speech before the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, damning the incumbent Administration of Harry S. Truman and charging, at one dramatic moment in the speech, that he held in his hand a list of 205 Communists who were working and shaping policy in the State Department...

...He insists that McCarthy was not insecure (because McCarthy's friends and family say so) and that, at least after 1950, he was a true believer in the cause of anticommunism, not a cynical opportunist...

...Yet McCarthy himself has remained an elusive figure, the creature of legends spun by friends and foes alike, as weli as of his unique talent for self-invention...

...In the next five years he sought, with considerable success, to intimidate two Presidents, the press, the Federal bureaucracy, and the U.S...

...This is no small achievement...

...Robert Griffith (Robert Griffith, a historian at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, wrote "The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate...

...Nor did the Senator hold in his hand a list of 205 Communists (or anyone else, for that matter), though he would try hard to concoct one in the weeks that followed...

...What were the springs of McCarthy's frenetic behavior...

...As a consequence, when all the pages have been turned, all the sources consulted, all the facts assimilated, our understanding of Joe McCarthy (and his times) remains much the same as when we began...

...a remarkable degree of credulity in accepting at face value many of the recollections of McCarthy's family and friends...

...McCarthy was not the "amoral, cynical, thieving, homosexual monster his critics described," Reeves concludes, though he "brought far more pain into the world than any man should...

...Reeves has mined almost all the important archival collections (the only important exception is McCarthy's own papers, which remain closed to researchers), shrewdly culled the extensive secondary literature, and interviewed many of McCarthy's friends and family members...

...The most serious shortcoming, however, is Reeves's own reluctance to explore fully McCarthy's character and personality...

...Most of it was cribbed from other partisan attacks on the Democrats, including a long section from a speech Richard Nixon had delivered in the House of Representatives only two weeks earlier...

...Far too much of the biography is cast in the form of a critique, an exercise which might have been more profitably reserved for footnotes or a bibliographical essay...

...From this inauspicious beginning, Joseph Raymond McCarthy nevertheless became, almost overnight, one of the most notorious figures in American politics...

...There is no answer in the many pages of this incomplete biography...

...Yet Reeves fails in the end to place this enormous body of information in the service of a plausible and coherent interpretation of McCarthy's significance, and as a consequence his book falls short of becoming the definitive account of McCarthy's life, much less his times...

...Recent popular biographers have done little more than repeat the assertions, both accurate and not, of contemporary accounts, especially Jack Anderson and Ronald May's, McCarthy: The Man, the Senator, the "Ism" (1952), and Richard Rovere's Senator Joe McCarthy (1959...

...What this effort seems to mean in practice is a series of tu quoque attacks on McCarthy's critics, charging them in effect with McCarthyism...

...Either or both points, of course, may be true, though Reeves's own evidence is not particularly persuasive...

...Part of this failure is rooted, curiously enough, in one of the book's strengths...

...The result is a long, densely detailed account of McCarthy's rise and fall, one which goes a long way toward cutting through many rumors, exaggerations, and lies that surrounded the Senator's stormy career...

...Reeves is so anxious to correct earlier accounts of McCarthy's life, particularly that of Anderson and May, that the effect seems to dictate much of his intellectual agenda, shaping the questions he poses, if not the answers he discovers...

...Senate...