McCarthyism: myth and reality

Washington Monthly, May, 2006 by Charles Peters

I recently reviewed Shooting Star, Tom Wicker's excellent new book about Joe McCarthy, for the New York Observer. In the review, I made a point that I would like to share with Monthly readers.

There is no question that McCarthy and the larger movement that came to be called McCarthyism did immense harm. Innocent people lost their jobs, talented actors found themselves blacklisted for more than a decade, with few people bothering to ask what difference does it make whether an actor is a communist or not?

There was a time when communism seemed attractive. I am sure some young people in Hollywood and in Greenwich Village became communists because it was hip enough in the '30s and early '40s that they thought it might help them get laid. Certainly similar thoughts passed through my mind as I bought my first copy of the Daily Worker at a Sheridan Square newsstand in 1945. And many other liberals were sympathetic to Communism for more elevated reasons: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was a siren song for idealists.

The result was that liberals have always had a soft spot for McCarthy's victims and have not only understood the harm he did but have also written books and made movies about it.

What they have not understood as well is the harm done by the myth of McCarthyism--the myth that all the charges made by McCarthy and his allies were false.

There were real spies--not only Alger Hiss at State but Harry Dexter White at Treasury, Lauchlin Currie at the White House, and David Greenglass at Los Alamos, who had been recruited by another Soviet agent, Julius Rosenberg.

We know these spies were real because of what are called the Venona intercepts. These are secret Soviet intelligence messages that were decoded by our government in the 1940s but not made public until 1995. Tom Wicker is a good enough reporter to acknowledge the intercepts, but the fact that he does so only in footnotes tends to minimize their importance. Wicker also cites a Soviet report that 40 of their top American agents had been neutralized by 1950 to argue that whatever real danger of Soviet spying that might have existed earlier "was all but over" by the time McCarthy made his first sensational charge in Wheeling, W.Va.

There were, however, other important Soviet agents who were still on the loose. Of the 344 Americans whose code names were identified by Venona, less than half could be identified by their real names. Of the 200 who could not be nailed, we know that at least two were important atomic spies, one had been a top officer in the CIA's predecessor, the OSS, one had been a captain in the Navy, and one had been inside enough to have met privately with Roosevelt and Churchill. Did these people continue to spy?

We may never know the answer, but we do know that Russia continued to spy. It did seem, however, to switch from ideologically committed agents to those who spied for money: the U.S. Navy's Walker family, the FBI's Robert Hanssen and the CIA's Eddy Howard, and Aldrich Ames come to mind.

One reason Soviet spies and other hostile foreign agents continued to enjoy success was ineptitude at the FBI and the CIA. A major reason for this ineptitude was the failure of critics to focus on the competence of these agencies. Liberals only criticized them when they threatened civil liberties; conservatives only when they failed to serve rightwing agendas. The result is that both organizations continued to stumble too often, all the way to 9/11 and Iraq. Maybe conservatives will never wake up to the problem, but that is no reason why liberals can't work for a smarter, more effective FBI and CIA as zealously as they seek to protect our civil liberties from abuse by them.