McCarthy & His Friends - Review

National Review, June 14, 1999 by Terry Teachout

Mr. Teachout, the music critic of Commentary and a contributor to Time magazine, is the editor of Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959.

The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Little, Brown, 421 pp., $25)

It is cold comfort to have lived long enough to witness the publication of such books as Venona, The Haunted Wood, and Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, and to watch aging leftists scuttling to revise their memories of the Red Scare so as to take into account the awkward fact that many celebrated "victims" of the anti-Communist "witch hunts" are now known to have been Soviet intelligence agents or sources. To be sure, some have honorably acknowledged the terrible implications of what their right-wing contemporaries knew all along. But too many continue to play the great game of obfuscation, while not a few diehards cling frantically to their tired lies like a senile millionaire to his greedy mistress.

Still, much has been revealed in recent years about one of the darkest episodes in modern American history, and it is growing harder simply to pretend that the bad guys were good and the good guys, bad. With the guilt of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs finally established beyond even the most unreasonable of doubts, the Old Left has only one sanctifying symbol left to hide behind-but one that has not yet lost its power to intimidate. Forty-two years after his drunken death, liberals continue to play the Joe McCarthy card, and conservatives continue to fold their hands the moment it is played. By now, the late junior senator from Wisconsin is not merely a symbol but a cliche, which is why our ability to understand who he really was and what he really did has not advanced an inch. He is the black hole of anti-Communism: No matter how much scholarly light is shined on his life and work, none is reflected back.

Perhaps it is for this reason that William F. Buckley Jr., who knew McCarthy personally and in 1954 co-authored McCarthy and His Enemies, to this day the only intellectually serious apologia for his notorious activities, has now chosen to recall his old friend not in a memoir, but a novel-and a deliberately popular novel at that. Though The Redhunter is not short, I polished it off in a day, partly because I was intensely curious to see how Buckley would handle this historical event or that, but mainly because it is so wonderfully readable. Instead of an All the King's Men-like political epic, he has given us a witty, fast-moving yarn in the manner of his Blackford Oakes thrillers, complete with ventriloquial walk-ons by assorted great men (Dean Acheson and Dwight Eisenhower, here as in the Oakes books, are quite eerily plausible) and a decorous bedroom scene (in which, I am relieved to report, neither McCarthy nor Roy Cohn is a participant).

Even so, the feel of The Redhunter is substantially memoiristic, not least because it is told from the point of view of Harry Bontecou, a bright young fellow who served in World War II, returned to an Ivy League college, studied under a brilliant but crotchety associate professor of political science named "Willmoore Sherrill," worked on the school paper, did battle against Henry Wallace and his Communist- dominated Progressive Party in 1948, took a job as Joe McCarthy's administrative assistant in 1950, then reluctantly broke with him once it became all too clear that a deep-seated streak of irresponsibility was causing McCarthy to sink his own boats: "You're giving ammunition to the enemy that's going to hurt you and our position on the Soviet Union and for sure on the internal-security question. . . . you are, net, hurting the anti-Communist cause."

It goes without saying that Bontecou is based in part on the youthful Buckley (though there are other equally obvious sources, most notably L. Brent Bozell), and his fictional recollections open a window on a poorly understood aspect of American politics in the '50s. Much has been written by and about the ex-leftists who were seduced by Communism and later broke with it. But we have heard surprisingly little of the young intellectuals who did not touch pitch, who joined the anti- Communist cause solely out of the belief that it was a moral imperative. What drove them? More specifically, what led someone like Buckley to become close to someone like McCarthy? Was it simply a strategic alliance? Or was there something about Joe McCarthy that went beyond his being on the right side, a charisma that made him impossible to resist?

Working from firsthand knowledge and from Thomas C. Reeves's excellent 1982 biography, Buckley has sought to answer that question, with results that are both plausible and surprising. For though The Redhunter is frankly sympathetic to McCarthy, it is no kind of hagiography. Buckley's McCarthy is "attractive, earnest, yet never boring or fanatical, courteous, and thoughtful, a life lover who animated all situations in which he involved himself"-but he is also a rogue, a true believer who nonetheless suffers from a fatal willingness to stretch the truth until it snaps back in his face. And while Buckley suggests that Roy Cohn (and alcohol) brought out the worst in McCarthy, he leaves no doubt that had McCarthy's own character not been gravely flawed in the first place, Cohn's blandishments would have had no effect.