McCarthy=Bad

...But, Evans continues, “all these McCarthy cases were right there in the Soviet cables...

...He alone on the Right, at this moment, visibly imperils” the Left’s “seizure of power...

...But there was no other Annie Lee Moss, Evans makes clear...

...government...

...An underlying reason was McCarthy’s attack on Eisenhower’s mentor, George C. Marshall, but their animosity was mutual...

...We thought listing General Reichelderfer’s ASA command was a security breach, and that demeaning a distinguished offi cer truly constituted McCarthyism...

...To accept “a wide-ranging plot consisting of multiple Alger Hisses, as alleged by McCarthy,” was “unthinkable...

...And so in fact they would be...

...McCarthy publicly criticized Maj...

...Truman promoted a Treasury offi cial named Harry Dexter White to the top U.S...

...foreign policy—in particular, abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China...

...Readers of Blacklisted by History may be surprised by how fastidious and detailed McCarthy was (with the exception of the Marshall speech) in assembling information about security risks in government...

...The clearest evidence of McCarthy’s accusing political rivals of treason is his June 14, 1951, speech in which he said that Gen...

...All those comparisons adhere to Webster’s dictionary defi nition, but the aura of McCarthyism is more profound...

...Evans has obtained 1,200 pages of Services’s dispatches, including one asserting that “the Communist political program is simple democracy . . . much more American than Russian...

...So the book begins by listing 10 senior government offi cials (the most prominent of whom was the Soviet agent Lauchlin Currie, an executive assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt) who, because they were “targets” of McCarthy, “must have been mere innocent victims of his mid-century reign of terror...

...Perry Reichelderfer for failing, when he was commander of the Fort Monmouth laboratories, to fi re an employee who once had attended Communist meetings, and in whose residence were found secret documents...

...This classic example of McCarthyism, however, is not what it seems: Evans has unearthed a New York Times story in which Welch, months earlier, had revealed the lawyer’s membership in the Guild as reason for not employing his services in the hearings...

...The jacket blurb says it took over six years to write Blacklisted by History, but in fact, the 73-year-old Evans, born and bred in the conservative movement, has spent his whole career thinking about Joe...

...But when he became secretary of state in 1949, Evans writes, Acheson “was known as an advocate of conciliating Moscow, in sharp contrast to hardliners in the diplomatic corps who wanted to take a tough anti-Red stance in the postwar era...

...He writes that “the real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to fi nd him...

...Evans depicts Service living in the provisional Chinese capital of Chungking during World War II with two Soviet agents...

...In 1953, a 22-year-old second lieutenant at Fort Devens, Mass., awaiting a possible call to combat in Korea that never came, I was sympathetic to McCarthy, as were most of my fellow offi cers—until an incident in his feud with the Army...

...McCarthyism” is ingrained in the contemporary political lexicon, used so frequently—by conservatives as well as liberals—that it is no longer necessary to defi ne its meaning...

...We were assigned to the ASA Training Center at Fort Devens in a building protected by barbed wire and security guards...

...position at the International Monetary Fund, despite repeated FBI warnings (reported by Evans) that White was a Soviet agent...

...Those and similar quotes from the letter have been showcased by liberals for a half-century and, indeed, have helped discredit McCarthy among conservatives...

...It came when McCarthy imprudently picked a fi ght with the Army over lax security practices, “provoking a constitutional showdown of epic nature between McCarthy and executive branch offi cials...

...M. Stanton Evans is a conservative who has been highly esteemed for nearly half-a-century as a journalist, author, and teacher...

...But isn’t this decade renowned for complacency and good feeling, preceding the roaring ’60s...

...Dean Acheson, McCarthy’s implacable enemy within the Truman administration, reinvented himself after the fact as a fi erce anti-Communist...

...Yet even on this issue, Evans says McCarthy had a point...

...Almost immediately after the Wheeling speech, the assault on McCarthy began from fellow senators who hardly knew him, and from Truman administration offi cials who did not know him at all...

...Joseph R. McCarthy is something like an attempt to unveil the sterling qualities of Caligula, Attila, or Torquemada...

...Tydings admitted, in a subsequent court proceeding, that the unplayed record was from a McCarthy interview in Denver, not his speech in Wheeling...

...At another point, Halberstam refers to “the ugliness of the McCarthy period...

...Halberstam dates the start of the “McCarthy period” immediately after Democratic setbacks in the 1950 midterm elections by an electorate angry over the Korean war, with the reign of fear continuing through the ’50s...

...But none of these famous villains spawned an “ism” worthy of a dictionary defi nition...

...McCarthy committed what Evans calls “a grievous error” in angrily reacting to the evasiveness, as a witness, of Brig...

...2. unfairness in investigative technique.—Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1989...

...Acheson’s promise not to turn his back on Alger Hiss was not an aberration...

...The principal surviving image of McCarthy comes from the subsequent televised Army-McCarthy hearings (but mainly from Point of Order, a fi lm documentary that put him in the worst light...

...Evans makes a convincing case that McCarthy is innocent on all three counts, and he does so with a painstaking case-by-case approach...

...The woman testifying was a Communist, the Army belatedly admitted, with “party membership book number 37269...

...A recent book critical of McCarthy by David M. Oshinsky is sarcastically titled A Conspiracy So Immense...

...More than John Stewart Service and the China hands, or Annie Lee Moss and her “mistaken identity,” that single speech on Marshall is the core of the case for McCarthyism...

...My fellow offi cers and I were so shocked that we instantly changed our outlook on McCarthy...

...but in life, he was a nasty partisan who dismissed reports of Soviet espionage out of fear it might damage his beloved party...

...Ralph Zwicker, a decorated combat general, by calling him “a tremendous disgrace to the Army...

...Joe McCarthy . . . managed to focus the blazing spotlight of public notice on these issues in a way nobody had ever done before him...

...Ruthless in hand-to-hand political combat, Tydings is shown by Evans refusing to let McCarthy testify, and omitting Republican material from the printed transcript...

...The Boston Globe said the 2006 campaign by the Republican candidate for Massachusetts governor “has a fl avor of McCarthyism...

...First, he labeled as security risks and drove from public life offi cials (especially skilled Foreign Service professionals) whose only sin was liberalism...

...John Stewart Service, a State Department “China hand,” is widely viewed as a top-level martyr driven out of the department by McCarthy’s accusations...

...More than half-a-century later, it seems to me to be a mistake by McCarthy, but not evidence of any “ism...

...George Allen in Virginia to McCarthyism...

...We had been instructed never to tell anybody of our ASA connection...

...Tydings brought onto the Senate fl oor a purported phonograph record of the Wheeling speech, noting that McCarthy allegedly claimed 205 Communists were in the State Department (a number perpetuated in history despite McCarthy’s denials and lack of substantiation...

...Purportedly an adviser to Chiang, Service was sending reports back to Washington degrading Chiang and extolling Mao Zedong’s Communists...

...The most familiar case of supposed mistaken identity by McCarthy—really the only such case—involves an elderly black woman from Washington named Annie Lee Moss, employed by the Army as a code clerk...

...In March of this year, conservative radio talker Glenn Beck said an attack on him by MSNBC’s left-wing Keith Olbermann “smacks of the same McCarthyism [Edward R.] Murrow fought so valiantly against...

...That hostility replicated the automatic reaction of the nation’s majority political party that Alger Hiss could not have been a spy, that State Department offi cial (and Soviet agent) Lawrence Duggan could not have been a traitor, and that former Communist courier Elizabeth Bentley could not be believed...

...Government offi cials, from both parties, were not eager to have the unvarnished facts about the level of Communist penetration on their watch, and their failure to do much about it, set clearly before the nation...

...That’s because Evans has assumed a Sisyphean task...

...A rehabilitation of Sen...

...This book is my attempt to do so...

...The combination of forces against Joe McCarthy from the Left, from the news media, from both parties and his own president, had succeeded in aligning people like me against him...

...But Chambers was ambivalent about McCarthy...

...When McCarthy brought her before his investigative committee, then in its last days, she was identifi ed by the FBI as a Communist party member dealing with classifi ed material to demonstrate faulty security procedures...

...McCarthy correctly saw a State Department infested with Soviet agents and sympathizers, infl uencing U.S...

...McCarthy’s oft-stated goal, says Evans, “was to get his suspects out of the federal government and its policy-making system...

...Stan Evans has described why we were wrong— because, indeed, McCarthy was fi ghting “a conspiracy so immense...

...In death, Harry Truman has been installed in the American pantheon as an intrepid Cold Warrior...

...In his posthumous account of the Korean war (The Coldest Winter) David Halberstam writes that “what was to be known as McCarthyism, a powerful new political virus,” was spawned by Dean Acheson’s maladroit defense of Alger Hiss...

...Even among those who at last accepted the guilt of Hiss,” Evans writes, “he was usually viewed as an aberration, not the precursor of a species...

...And third, he degraded the political process by accusing major rivals of treason...

...Evans lists a few instances of McCarthy at his worst, headed by the Marshall speech—which was actually a journalist’s book manuscript handed to McCarthy and impulsively read into the record...

...Readers are likely to be even more startled by the ferocity of the assault on him by the Truman administration and the unifi ed Democratic majority in the Senate once he emerged from obscurity—in Wheeling, West Virginia, on the night of February 9, 1950— by declaring the existence of Communist security risks in the State Department...

...of pro-Communist activity, in many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence...

...McCarthy’s brief chairmanship was conducted with a care that belies his historical reputation, but the new Republican president in the White House, and the new Democratic leader in the Senate (Lyndon B. Johnson), were ready to pounce in reaction as they awaited the inevitable false move by their prey...

...In August, Rabbi Michael Feinberg called a campaign against an Arabic-themed public school in New York City “the lowest of McCarthyite tactics...

...It has also been reported that Truman sloughed off a confi dential alert which declared that decoded Soviet cable traffi c showed the Russians had penetrated the U.S...

...In the same letter to Buckley, he wrote that “the Senator represents the one force that all shades of the Left really fear...

...Still later, he cites “the ugly fratricidal charges that became known as the McCarthy period...

...As those hearings, which effectively would end McCarthy’s career, were about to begin, Whittaker Chambers wrote a personal letter to his friend and McCarthy’s defender, William F. Buckley Jr...

...He and his charges were viewed in certain quarters as a serious menace to be dealt with quickly, and in most decisive fashion...

...But, says Evans, President Dwight D. Eisenhower “disliked him, intensely, and the feeling would grow more so as the events of 1953 unfolded...

...In the 2006 campaign, Newt Gingrich compared attacks on Sen...

...But his seventh book is not likely to be greeted by undiluted approbation, even from fellow conservatives...

...George C. Marshall was supporting “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man”—that is, a Communist conspiracy...

...The demonization of McCarthy was essentially a three-part indictment...

...The early stage of the Democratic attempt to destroy McCarthy was led by Sen...

...As late as 1956, Truman was denying that Alger Hiss was a Communist spy...

...That explains the inexorable assault painstakingly described here by Evans, which succeeded not only in destroying McCarthy but in separating him from anti-Communist followers— like me...

...He never accused General Marshall of pro-Communist sentiments, only that he was infl uenced by Soviet agents and Soviet sympathizers: “Marshall everywhere and always made wrong decisions or urged mistaken courses...

...when McCarthy declared that a Welch law partner had belonged to the Communist-front National Lawyers Guild...

...Millard E. Tydings of Maryland, a haughty grandee of the then-dominant southern Democratic bloc...

...But he tracked down much of the missing data, helped immeasurably by the Venona fi les of decrypted secret Soviet communications and by the new accessibility of both FBI reports and Soviet archives...

...Hounded by united Democrats, McCarthy ultimately was done in by the fi rst Republican president in 20 years...

...Democrats claimed McCarthy had the wrong Annie Lee Moss...

...A relentless researcher, Evans was frustrated by the mysterious disappearance of government fi les and even newspaper clippings...

...Venona, plus supporting data from Kremlin archives, shows that “rather than being blameless martyrs, all were indeed Communists, Soviet agents or assets of the KGB, just as McCarthy had suggested...

...Second, he accused innocents of being Communists, sometimes in cases of mistaken identity...

...Chambers called McCarthy “a political godsend” to the Communists who “divides the ranks of the Right” and “scarcely knows what he is doing...

...But that did not demolish what Evans calls “The Legend of Annie Moss...

...The most memorable incident is the melodramatic performance of Joseph Welch, the Army’s counsel for the hearings (“Have you left no sense of decency, sir...

...To McCarthy, Eisenhower “represented, not systematic change from Roosevelt and Truman, but something closer to continuity...

...McCarthy identifi ed Reichelderfer as chief of the Army Security Agency (ASA...

...Her “mistaken identity” has been central in assaults against McCarthy dating from Edward R. Murrow’s famous See It Now program in 1954 to George Clooney’s 2005 panegyric of Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck...

...It takes M. Stanton Evans’s meticulous investigative journalism to show what Joe McCarthy’s short stay on the national stage (a little under fi ve years, from February 1950 to December 1954) really was about...

...McCarthy was a thorn in the side of the Democratic Party, as the issues of infi ltration and security laxness all had their genesis under Roosevelt and Truman...

...It “appeared to be the best of times” for McCarthy after the Republican election victory in 1952 gave him the chairmanship of the principal Senate investigating committee...