Your mental image of Joe McCarthy is fascinating ...
and no doubt shared by many highly intelligent people somewhat too young to have witnessed his rapid rise and fall as a "live event." My own impressions are something of an amalgam of the early Joe and the later Joe, as glimpsed on TV. That composite is quite different from what you see in your mind.
McCarthy was a Marine officer during the war, and while not quite the hero he later claimed to be, he did serve in the Pacific war theatre. He unseated LaFollette, a highly respected "favorite son" and long term liberal Democrat, to win senatorial election in Wisconsin in 1946. He was an undistinguished and largely unknown senator in his first term. There was fierce opposition to his reelection in 1952, especially from powerful liberal newspapers in his home state. He needed to find a cause, and the Communist-infiltration issue that had been brought to his attention became it. You might ponder on why the people of Wisconsin would have elected such a "wild-eyed, screaming" manic personality not once but twice. Suffice to say that his reputation in the early years was that of a dedicated crusader for clean government and a great charmer.
MCCarthy chose to wage war on the Communist issue against the most powerful people in the country, beginning with the Truman administration, and ultimately the Eisenhower administration. As an outspoken and abrasive conservative Republican, he had natural enemies all over the place, including the media, academia, and the entertainment industry. This was a potent array aligned against him, with a lot of weaponry to bring to bear. He was in many ways his own worst enemy, an increasingly heavy drinker, crude in many ways, prone to great exaggeration. He did not handle criticism or attacks well, and was natural born gutter-fighter. In the beginning he had a lot of important allies who believed in his cause, but by the end he had alienated virtually all of them.
There is some speculation now that he suffered from bi-polar disorder, which might account for his inexplicable vacillation between periods of highs where he would work furiously for days without sleep, and lows when he would fall into bouts of lassitude and depression. Those who knew him felt that he had a storybook love relationship with his wife, Jean, who remained his staunchest supporter to the bitter end. To say the least, he was a complicated man.
By now, he has been reduced to a cardboard caricature, a manic and mean-spirited bigot, bereft of any depth or redeeming qualities. I do think this a great disservice to the actual man.
I don't think it would be hard for you to imagine that he was an easy target for bright and clever people who hated him to do a hatchet job on. The Murrow "See It Now" episode was memorable at the time, but I doubt that anyone around then would have imagined it would endure as it has, and become actually, the prime reality of who Joe McCarthy was for future generations. The program, without argument, is Joe McCarthy in his own words and pictures. Not a pretty sight to behold. But imagine how easy it would be to do such a program on Bill Clinton or GWB, splicing together carefully selected clips and sound-bites to portray them at their very worst. McCarthy gave them the ammunition, and they used it to craft the desired image, with no inclination to worry about balance.
I don't have time to go any further on this at the moment, but in any case it is all a separate matter from the substance of McCarthy's claims about Communist infiltration of government. There were other prominent supporters of his charges among the senators on his Sub-committee, Karl Mundt and Everett Dirksen coming to mind. It was far from a one-man show. In the end though, McCarthy's rapid descent to the status of a snarling, cornered rat, lost him all support and harmed the very cause he was espousing.
Maybe more later. Thanks for the good wishes about my daughter, who has kept me on the go the point of exhaustion. I have to get up at 4:30 AM to put her on a bus to get to work on time. She loves our dogs especially, and has been great fun to have around. |
