"I don't think the Mc Carthy hearings tested people's loyalties to this country"
No. I did not intend such an analogy. Perhaps I was too careless...
Some interesting quotes about Mc Carthy, and a short biography which illuminates his self serving character...
spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk
(1) Edward Hart was a lawyer who worked with Joseph McCarthy during his campaign against Edgar Werner. He was interviewed by David Oshinsky in 1983.
I always felt that Joe lived in a different moral universe. He asked himself only two questions. What do I want and how do I get it. Once he got rolling, you had to step aside. It was every man for himself, sort of what anarchy must be like.
Edgar Werner was an honest man. Joe went after him in a way that was unconscionable. Maybe that's what he had to do to win. I don't know. But it's a hell of a price to pay. You've got to live with yourself.
(2) Dr. A. J. Werner, letter to Robert Fleming about the defeat and death of his father, Edgar Werner (4th October, 1951)
McCarthy not only drove my father to his grave but turned long-standing friends against our whole family. It was amazing how one man could wreck the reputation of another man so loved and honored in his community.
(3) Urban Van Susteren, a close friend of Joseph McCarthy, was interviewed about him on 22nd October, 1977
As far as I know, Joe looked at only one book in his life. That was Mein Kampf. Joe, I think, was more taken by the tactics, by the means and not the end. He had no use for Hitler or for anything the Nazis did. But when he looked at Mein Kampf, it was like one politician comparing notes with another. Joe was fascinated by the strategy, that's all.
(4) Joseph McCarthy, speech at Wheeling (9th February, 1950)
The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer - the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in Government we can give.
While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.
(5) Archibald MacLeish, letter to Paul H. Buck (1st January 1953)
My radio reports that various Congressional Committees plan to investigate colleges and universities to determine whether they are riddled with Communists. Senator McCarthy is reported as including "Communist thinkers". Since he has already told us that he regards Benny de Vote and young Arthur Schlesinger as - Communist thinkers we have some notion of what that means.
You will recall that I am to be away the second half year. You will recall also that Senator McCarthy has already attacked me as belonging to more Communist front organizations than any man he has ever mentioned. He - or one of the other committees - can be expected to attack me again when he or they get around to Harvard - should be early in the campaign. It I am away in the British West Indies at the time I should like you to have the facts.
But before I set them down I should like to ask a question which must be in your mind and in the minds of many others. Has not the time come for the believers in the American tradition intellectual liberty - above all the believers in positions of responsibility on the faculties of the free universities - to take a firm stand on the fundamental issue? There is no disagreement, I take it, on the issue of Communists in teaching. No man who accepts a prior loyalty to any authority other than his own conscience, his own judgment of the truth, should be permitted to teach in a free society. That view I take it, is held by those responsible for the selection of teachers in all colleges and universities in this country. It is also applied in the case of Communists at least - though it is notoriously not applied in certain cases at the other extreme.
I have not been told what Communist-front organizations the Senator has in mind but I assume they include the League of American Writers and various other organizations of an antifascist character to which I belonged at the time of the Spanish War and during the rise of the Nazi danger and from which I removed myself when I entered the Government as Librarian of Congress in 1939.
My own personal position on the issue of Communism has been clear throughout, and the record is a matter of public knowledge. I was, I think I can say without immodesty, one of the first American writers to attack the Marxists. This was, of course, on the literary front since it was on the literary front I met them. In the early Thirties the Marxist position was, as you know, a fashionable position among the critics. Attacks on Communism were not the pleasant and profitable exercises they are now when all politicians and most publicists fall all over themselves and each other to demonstrate their detestation of everything Communism is or stands for. In the early Thirties, to attack the Communists was to bring the hornets out and the stings could hurt.
(6) General Dwight D. Eisenhower, diary entry (1st April, 1953)
Senator McCarthy is, of course, so anxious for the headlines that he is prepared to go to any extremes in order to secure some mention of his name in the public press. His actions create trouble on the Hill with members of the party; they irritate, frustrate, and infuriate members of the Executive Department. I really believe that nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of troublemaking as to ignore him. This he cannot stand.
(7) Whittaker Chambers, was one of those who helped provide evidence to support the idea of a communist conspiracy. However, in a letter to Henry Regnery on 14th January, 1954, he explained why he was having doubts about Joseph McCarthy.
All of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.
(8) Max Eastman, The Necessity of Red Baiting, The Freeman (1st June, 1953)
Red Baiting - in the sense of reasoned, documented exposure of Communist and pro-Communist infiltration of government departments and private agencies of information and communication - is absolutely necessary. We are not dealing with honest fanatics of a new idea, willing to give testimony for their faith straightforwardly, regardless of the cost. We are dealing with conspirators who try to sneak in the Moscow-inspired propaganda by stealth and double talk, who run for shelter to the Fifth Amendment when they are not only permitted but invited and urged by Congressional committee to state what they believe. I myself, after struggling for years to get this fact recognized, give McCarthy the major credit for implanting it in the mind of the whole nation.
(9) After a tour of Europe in the summer of 1953, Philip Reed, head of General Electric, wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower (8th June, 1953)
I urge you to take issue with McCarthy and make it stick. People in high and low places see in him a potential Hitler, seeking the presidency of the United States. That he could get away with what he already has in America has made some of them wonder whether our concept of democratic governments and the rights of individuals is really different from those of the Communists and Fascists.
(10) Edward Murrow, See It Now (9th March, 1954)
The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly.
We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our own history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.
This is no time for men who opose Senator McCarthty's methods to keep silent. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.
(11) Roy Cohn, who worked closely with Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s wrote about his enemies in his book McCarthy (1968)
The fact that Joe McCarthy lived well within his means did not prevent his enemies from accusing him of trying to line his pockets out of hours. The chief harassment along these lines was led by William Benton who launched an investigation into his income-tax payments and occasional sources of outside income. This grew into a campaign that plagued McCarthy for years, even after the charges were dropped.
(12) Lyndon B. Johnson, on the death of Joe McCarthy (3rd May, 1957)
Joe McCarthy had strength, he had great courage, he had daring. There was a quality about the man which compelled respect and even liking from his strongest adversaries.
(13) Barry Goldwater, With No Apologies (1979)
Joe McCarthy was unquestionably the most controversial man I ever served with in the Senate. The anti-anticommunists were outraged at his claims that some of the principals in the Truman and Roosevelt administrations actively served the communist causes.
McCarthy was supported by a strong, nationwide constituency, which included among others, Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of John, Bob, and Edward. A variety of respected, creditable federal employees disturbed by security risks in the national government provided McCarthy with a steady stream of inside information.
The liberals mounted a skillfully orchestrated campaign of criticism against Joe McCarthy. Under the pressure of criticism, he reacted angrily. It is probably true that McCarthy drank too much, overstated his case, and refused to compromise, but he wasn't alone in his beliefs. |
