Our S.O.B. - Review - book reviews

National Review, Dec 20, 1999 by David Frum

Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, by Arthur Herman (Free Press, 416 pp., $26)

NO name in American history has been as thoroughly blackened as that of Senator Joe McCarthy. Julius Rosenberg's defenders can still be tallied in the thousands. George Wallace received sympathetic treatment in a made- for-TV movie. Aaron Burr has Gore Vidal. Even Benedict Arnold has been the subject of a revisionist biography. But Tailgunner Joe's reputation has sunk lower today than at the time of his death, and it had sunk pretty low by then. The verdict has been rendered, seemingly beyond all hope of appeal.

Until now.

Arthur Herman, a program coordinator at the Smithsonian Institution and an adjunct professor at George Mason University, has filed a brief for the defense that is simultaneously audacious in its argument and painstaking in its scholarship. It is a work of vindication all the more powerful for standing so nearly alone, its only company a new novel by William F. Buckley Jr. And it challenges us to rethink our understanding not only of McCarthy's moment, but of our own.

Herman, it should be said straight off, can do only so much with McCarthy the man. Herman freely admits that McCarthy was careless with his facts and reckless in his rhetoric, and that these flaws-bad to start with-were exacerbated by boozing. Herman's McCarthy is crude, ignorant, bullying, and possibly even mentally ill: McCarthy's manic mood swings, his gambling, the chaos in which he worked, his ability to go for days without sleep-these all look to Herman like the symptoms of a hypomanic disorder. But if McCarthy never rose to the marble-statue level of statesmanship, he was, Herman contends, something more than the vicious demagogue he has been made out to be.

To appreciate Herman's view of McCarthy, it is essential to understand McCarthy's times. In February 1950, when McCarthy delivered the speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched his career, the United States had been locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union for almost three and a half years. The Soviet atomic bomb, the Berlin airlift, NATO, the Henry Wallace campaign for president, the Czech coup, the Marshall plan, and the Truman Doctrine all predated McCarthy's debut. So did most of the great spy revelations: those of Igor Gouzenko, Elizabeth Bentley, and Whittaker Chambers. So did the purge of Communists from organized labor. The country did not require McCarthy, in other words, to convince it that the Soviet Union and its domestic sympathizers were a threat that had to be repulsed. But repulsed how? It was this uncertainty that roiled American politics between McCarthy's emergence in 1950 and his censure and disgrace in 1954.

The Truman Democrats who waged the Cold War in its earliest days tended to see the confrontation with the Soviet Union in terms of power politics: as a struggle not entirely dissimilar to that between the Allies and Imperial Germany or Great Britain and Napoleon. The Soviet threat was in the eyes of these men essentially a military and strategic one, and the proper tools of self-defense were military and strategic as well: bigger armies and navies, economic aid to impoverished allies, pacts, and treaties. Ideology mattered too, of course-even George Kennan acknowledged that. But as the Truman Democrats saw it, Soviet ideology was a snare, a con, that offered the promise of a better world to the naive and hungry, only to conceal the reality of a ruthless dictatorship.

This scornful interpretation of Marxism-Leninism carried the important implication that succumbing to Marxism-Leninism was at worst an intellectual error produced by an excess of tender-heartedness, at best a reasonable response to deprivation. The refusal to take Communism seriously as a system of ideas was the origin of the strangely indulgent attitude that the Truman Democrats seemed to take toward officials who might otherwise have seemed to present glaring security risks. At least 57 people whom congressional investigators deemed "poor risks" were still employed by the State Department in 1948. (This is the origin of McCarthy's famous wandering statistic of the number of Communist sympathizers at State.) As of 1951, Herman reports, "the State Department [loyalty] board had never separated anyone as a loyalty risk, even though 54 people had been allowed to resign in disloyalty cases and another three had been found disloyal but were still in the department pending appeal . . . [T]he State Department had bent over backward to avoid dismissing anyone for Communist associations or pro-Communist views, and was willing to allow people of doubtful loyalty, as it was then defined, to remain rather than have to get rid of them."

McCarthy is held in odium for his accusations that men like George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson accepted security risks into their department because of some lack of loyalty to the United States. Herman has no more time for those accusations than the severest of McCarthy's detractors. But something hindered those two wise men from acting as vigorously as they ought to have done to protect their department and their country against those risks, and Herman's defense of McCarthy is based on exposing what that something was. He quotes Raymond Moley, one of FDR's early advisers, confessing in 1953 that McCarthy "was the product of the fright and anger of a 'deceived and injured public,' who had been lied to regarding the Soviet threat both at home and abroad."