Pamela Troy

“Read the latest on McCarthy — He was basically vindicated.”
Don McLeroy, Member of the Texas State School Board of Education, on Senator Joseph McCarthy

So McCarthy apologists have at last managed to worm their way into some semblance of respectability.

Git yer history, right here!

The Texas State School Board of Education recently rammed through some changes to the state history standards that, along with the omission of Thomas Jefferson in discussions about the impact of enlightenment ideas, include the strong implication that Joseph McCarthy was “vindicated.”

This “vindication” story is a lie. There is nothing revealed in the decades since his death that vindicates either McCarthy or McCarthyism.

On February 20, 1950, on the floor of the Senate, Joe McCarthy, the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, read from the “Lee List,” a numbered series of numbered Department of State security cases from 1947. In his fascinating biography of McCarthy, writer Thomas Reeves compares the Tydings Committee’s cross listing of the Lee List with McCarthy’s. It’s a pretty revealing read.

From the Lee list:

The subject was described in reports by various witnesses as interested in communism as an experiment but his political philosophy is in keeping with liberal New Deal social reform under democratic processes of government; ‘he is a very ardent New Dealer; he is a live liberal;’ but an informant who also lived in the International House at one time said “He was one of those accused of being a Red here but the people who do get up and talk communism are refuted.”

McCarthy:

He was described in reports by various witnesses as interested in communism and by his roommate at the International House as a communist.

From the Lee list:

This employee is with the office of Information and Educational Exchange in New York City. His application is very sketchy. There has been no investigation. (C-8) is a reference. Though he is 43 years of age, his file reflects no history prior to June 1941. Case is awaiting a report from the New York Office.

McCarthy:

This individual is 43 years of age. He is with the Office of Information and Education. According to the file, he is a known Communist. I am not evaluating the information myself, I am merely giving you what is in the file. This individual also found his way into the Voice of America broadcast. Apparently the easiest way to get in is to be a known Communist.
(From The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, hardcover edition, Chapter 12 “The Top Russian Spy,” pgs 239-40)

A liberal New Dealer who is described in the file as actually refuting Communism when it’s brought up is said by McCarthy to have been described in the file as “a Communist.” A man about whom the file says nothing is known is said by McCarthy to be “a known communist.”

This is “McCarthyism.” This is why McCarthy’s critics during his heyday included not just liberals and leftists, but conservative and liberal anti-Communists. It’s why the New York Post under the auspices of editor James Weschler, an ex-Communist turned anti-Communist, ran a 17-part series on McCarthy in 1951 entitled “Smear, Inc.–The One-Man Mob of Joe McCarthy.” It’s why Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a couple of weeks after McCarthy’s May 20 speech, wrote her impassioned “Declaration of Conscience” in which she denounced McCarthyism as “a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty” and added, “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear…. “

Typically the argument offered by those who subscribe to the myth of McCarthy’s “vindication” is that the declassification of the Venona Papers and other documents prove the existence of Soviet espionage and therefore prove critics like Weschler and Smith to have been “wrong.”

The problem with this claim is that the debate about McCarthy in the ‘50s was not about whether Soviet espionage was a fact. Hardly anybody denied its existence. Weschler and Smith both believed it was a problem, and said so. “It would be nice if the world were prettier, but it isn’t,” wrote Weschler in 1947. “Espionage and sabotage are facts of modern life.” In her “Declaration of Conscience,” Smith observes, “The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of communism here at home and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democtaric administration. There are enough proved cases to make this point without diluting our criticism with unproved charges.”

So it’s unclear how McCarthy apologists imagine Joseph McCarthy can be “vindicated.” He was reviled, not because he tried to ferret out spies, but because his notion of ferreting out spies included conflating liberalism with communism, purging VOA libraries of “unacceptable” books (like the works of Theodore White and Dashiell Hammett), questioning witnesses about things like their church attendance and books they’d written twenty years before, and harrying VOA employees and speakers out of their jobs and, in one case, to suicide.

There is nothing that can “vindicate” these things unless someone manages to so drastically shift America’s notion of right and wrong that lying, censorship, and petty malice are perceived as virtues.

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