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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (10172)	10/19/1998 9:59:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

<OT: McCarthy & McCarthyism> Just a brief comment from someone who lived through the McCarthy era, and who paid as little attention to it as possible. But I was a student in Washington D.C. at the time, so it was impossible to ignore everything. For one thing, it was impossible to ignore the general atmosphere of unease and fearfulness (for jobs, usually). But it is not fair to hold McCarthy responsible for it all. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, for example, pre-dated McCarthy. And the Administration had in place an elaborate system of security checks, the construction of which began under President Truman. And it stayed in place after McCarthy's departure. To this day, it is not fully dismantled. Maybe there were a lot of genuine Russian spies out there. The problem is that a lot of people who could not possibly have been spies lost their jobs, and their reputations. To be fired from certain government positions, for example, all you needed was one anonymous denunciation against you. Just like in the Soviet Union. Or you might be a member of one of those zillions of "suspect" organizations on the Attorney General's List, some of which were about as threatening as the Audabon Society. The end result is that a lot of people were intimidated (only temporarily, fortunately) into a weak-kneed conformism. Speaking of the not entirely dismantled system...Note that the supposedly "liberal" Clinton Administration has been pushing "security " measures (e.g., roving wire-taps, expanded FBI surveillance capabilities) that the ACLU and some conservative Congressmen alike (!) fear could be used to track people with "unacceptable" views. jbe