Back in Washington, McCarthy was readmitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital on April 28. At first, Jean told reporters his knee had been acting up again. A day later, she said he'd gotten a virus while in Wisconsin, and it had turned into a bad cold. In fact, his liver had begun to fail, but Jean was still trying to cover for him.
On the afternoon of May 2, 1957, McCarthy received the last rites of the Catholic Church from a priest, and that evening at 5:02, with Jean at his side, he died. He was forty-eight years old.
The death certificate gave the cause of death as "hepatitis, acute, cause unknown." Time magazine, however, reported that Joe had died of cirrhosis of the liver, a disease known to be brought on by excessive drinking. Jean, intent as always on defending him, insisted that her husband had died of hepatitis, not alcoholism, and ardent McCarthyites followed her lead.
In their obituaries, liberal newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post described Joe as a demagogue—a person who tries to stir up people by appealing to their emotions and prejudices in order to become a leader and achieve his or her own selfish ends. The two papers said that McCarthy had undermined the nation's civil liberties, done irreparable harm to many innocent government employees, and tarnished America's image abroad. Conservative newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune assumed a very different stance. In an editorial, the Tribune wrote, "The senator was no Communist; hence he was no hero to the 'liberals.'" An ultraconservative newspaper in New Hampshire, the Manchester Union Leader, charged that "McCarthy was murdered by the Communists because he was exposing them.... The Communist Party realized that if it was to survive and succeed in its conspiracy to seize control of the United States, it had to destroy McCarthy before he destroyed the Party."
In January 1957, McCarthy feeds his adopted daughter, Tierney Elizabeth, while his wife, Jean, looks on. Marquette University Archives
After Sen. McCarthy's funeral on May 6, 1957, United States Marines carry his body from St. Matthew's Roman Catholic Cathedral in Washington, D.C., to a waiting hearse. Watching the departure from the bottom of the cathedral steps is McCarthy's widow, Jean, who holds on to the arm of her late husband's brother William. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
Reactions of Joe's fellow senators divided along political lines. His longtime friend Karl Mundt said, "His passing takes out of the American political arena a courageous fighter against Communism and a stalwart advocate of our traditional American concepts." His frequent opponent Stuart Symington said only, "I am deeply distressed," and would never discuss McCarthy again.
President and Mrs. Eisenhower offered their "profound sympathy" to Jean. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had been the subject of many of Joe's fiercest attacks, told the press, "I have no comment at all." Then he used a Latin phrase, De mortuis nil nisi bonum, which means "Say nothing about the dead unless it is good."
On May 6, a formal funeral service was held at St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, where Joe and Jean had been married four years earlier. In attendance were Vice-President and Mrs. Nixon, Roy Cohn, Senator William Knowland, a White House assistant representing President Eisenhower, and 2,000 other mourners. Another service followed, at Jean's request, in the Senate chamber where McCarthy had delivered so many of his anti-Communist speeches. Jean wept quietly in her seat as one after another of Joe's Senate allies extolled him.
Barry Goldwater inserted his comments into the Congressional Record. "Do not mourn Joe McCarthy," Goldwater began. "Be thankful that he lived, at the right time, and according to the talents vested in him by his Maker. Be grateful, too, that when it came his time to die, he passed on with the full assurance that, because he lived, America is a brighter, safer, more vigilant land today."
After the Senate service, McCarthy's remains were flown to Wisconsin, accompanied by Jean. The next day, more than 30,000 people paraded respectfully through St. Mary's Church in Appleton to view the open casket. In late afternoon, the coffin was taken to St. Mary's Cemetery, where Joe was buried beside his parents in a grassy plot overlooking the Fox River. His grave was only seven miles from the farm where he grew up.
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EPILOGUE: Another McCarthy?
TODAY, MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS after his death, Joe McCarthy remains as controversial a figure as he was in life. Ardent believers still think of him as a true American hero who alerted the country to the threat of Communist subversion until he was silenced by evil forces on the left. A greater number recall him as a demagogue who played cynically on the nation's fears of the Soviet Union and nuclear war to keep his name on the front pages of the nation's newspapers.
His most enduring legacy, though, may be the word "McCarthyism," which has found a permanent place in our language. It refers to tactics McCarthy himself used so successfully: guilt by association and unfounded accusations.
The tactics themselves are standard procedure for many politicians, even today. Just as accusations of Communism or association with Communism did in the McCarthy era, accusations of terrorism or terrorist leanings stirred up fear and resentment in the aftermath of 9/11. Claims that a candidate speaks for "real Americans," suggesting that rival candidates do not, or that an opposition candidate has "socialist"—read "Communist"—ideas, have typically been part of recent political campaigns. Anyone familiar with McCarthy's methods can recognize this kind of reckless speechmaking for what it is.
Can another McCarthy appear on the political stage and wreak havoc? It's entirely possible. In any kind of major crisis, people tend to look for someone or something to blame—a simple answer to a complex problem. A would-be leader who claimed to have the answer would probably attract followers, perhaps millions of followers, as McCarthy did.
Thoughtful Americans, however, would probably question and challenge the new leader's simplistic solutions, especially if they conflicted with the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Eventually, the challengers would expose the new leader's failings and take steps to correct any damage that had been done. It took more than four years to bring Joe to heel—but his opponents ultimately succeeded. And if the new leader's opponents were lucky, the leader's weaknesses, like McCarthy's tendency to act alone rather than build a strong supporting organization, would help their cause.
There's no way to be sure that a dangerous leader will or will not rise up in the future. One thing is certain: Our democratic form of government, with its checks and balances, has survived serious assaults in the past. With luck, and the attentiveness and dedication of its citizens, the nation and the principles on which it relies will continue to prevail.
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After McCarthy's Death...
JEAN KERR MCCARTHY obtained permission from the Catholic Church to complete the adoption process for her daughter, Tierney Elizabeth, and raise the little girl on her own. In 1961, Jean remarried. Her second husband was G. Joseph Minetti, a conservative Democrat from Brooklyn, New York, who served on the Civil Aeronautics Board in Washington. He, in turn, adopted little Tierney. Also in 1961, Jean donated all of Joe McCarthy's personal papers to the archives of Marquette University, his alma mater. But she placed a severe restriction on them: The papers will "remain closed to all use until 2050." This was probably a last attempt by Jean to protect her first husband's image. Jean McCarthy Minetti died of cancer in 1979.
ROY M. COHN returned to New York City after resigning as counsel to McCarthy's committee, and he built a successful career as an attorney for the rich and powerful. Among his clients were Donald Trump, several Mafia chieftains, and the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. He never worked again with David Schine.
Cohn lived with his widowed mother, Dora, until her death in 1969, when Roy was forty-two. Although he dated several women, including the television journalist Barbara Walters, those close to him knew he was really attracted to men. Cohn never admitted to being homosexual, though, not even after he was diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1984. Instead, he insisted that he was being treated for liver cancer. Roy Cohn died in 1986 of co
mplications from AIDS; he was fifty-nine.
In 1993, Cohn reappeared as a major character in Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America. Kushner portrays Joe McCarthy's former associate as an amoral hypocrite who vigorously denies his sexuality to the end of his life. Angels in America was made into a television miniseries in 2003. It starred Al Pacino as Roy Cohn and won both a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy.
G. DAVID SCHINE went back to his father's hotel and movie businesses after completing his military service. Then and later, he refused to comment on the Army-McCarthy hearings or his friendship with Roy Cohn.
In 1957, Schine married a former Miss Sweden, Hillevi Rombin, and they eventually had six children. Meanwhile, Schine achieved considerable success in the music and film industries. He was the executive producer of The French Connection, the 1971 crime thriller that was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won them all.
Schine's life came to a tragic end in 1996 when he, his wife, and their eldest son, Berndt, were killed in the crash of their private plane moments after takeoff from the Burbank, California, airport. David Schine was sixty-eight years old.
JOSEPH N. WELCH, the legal counsel who took on Sen. McCarthy in the Army-McCarthy hearings, became an actor after retiring as a lawyer. In 1959, he was cast as a judge in the film version of the best-selling mystery novel Anatomy of a Murder. Welch said he took the part "because it looked like that was the only way I'd get to be a judge." The movie was a huge hit and Welch received a 1959 Golden Globe nomination as best supporting actor for his performance. He died a year later, in 1960, at the age of sixty-nine.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON, who shepherded the censure of McCarthy through the Senate, was John F. Kennedy's choice for vice-president in his winning campaign for the presidency in 1960. Johnson succeeded Kennedy as president following the latter's assassination in November 1963. He ran for reelection in 1964 and won in a landslide over his Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater.
During his presidency, Johnson used his knowledge of the legislative process to push a number of important bills through Congress. Among them were Medicare, Medicaid, and, in the area of civil rights, the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. He lost public support, however, because of his failure to bring the unpopular war in Vietnam to an end.
After deciding not to run for a second full term in 1968, Lyndon Johnson retired to his Texas ranch, where he died in 1973 at the age of sixty-four.
RICHARD M. NIXON, one of Joe McCarthy's earliest supporters, succeeded Lyndon Johnson as president in January 1969. This was a remarkable comeback for Nixon, who had been defeated in his earlier bid for the presidency against the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960.
Ironically, it was Richard Nixon, the arch anti-Communist, who opened the way for renewed diplomatic relations with Communist China when he made a state visit there in the spring of 1972. The success of his China trip played a key role in Nixon's landslide reelection to a second term that fall. He negotiated a cease-fire agreement with Vietnam early in 1973, thereby pointing the way toward the conclusion of the longest war in American history.
Nixon's popularity was at an all-time high in May 1973 when it was threatened by revelations of his involvement in a criminal break-in at Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Hotel during the previous year's election campaign. An investigation of what became known as the Watergate scandal exposed other instances in which Nixon and his staff had engaged in illegal activities, and this led to the president's resignation under pressure in August 1974.
Unlike Joe McCarthy, who sank into depression after his censure, Nixon fought hard to restore his reputation after he left the White House. He largely achieved his goal through the publication of his memoirs and a number of other books, mainly about foreign policy issues. In April 1994, Richard Nixon suffered a stroke, and he died four days later at the age of eighty-one.
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Bibliography and Source Notes
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I HAVE LONG WANTED TO WRITE about Joe McCarthy and the witch-hunts he conducted in the early 1950s, because they coincided with an important period in my own life. I was a junior in high school when McCarthy launched what became his first major anti-Communist campaign with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950. And I was a senior in college when the Army-McCarthy hearings that effectively ended his career were telecast in their entirety in the spring of 1954.
McCarthy's activities never affected my family or me directly, but they had a significant effect on my college education. I describe that effect in Chapter 18, where I am the college junior whose philosophy professor declines to discuss Marxism, the philosophical basis of Communism, in class for fear of losing his job.
In preparing to write the book, I was confronted by a mountain of research material. Among the books I found most useful was The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography by Thomas C. Reeves (New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1982). Published twenty-five years after McCarthy's death, it presents a more balanced view of the man than some of the biographies that were published immediately after his passing. In an attempt to offer a comprehensive portrait of McCarthy, it devotes more space to his formative years in Wisconsin and includes extracts from interviews Reeves conducted with members of McCarthy's family, Wisconsin friends and colleagues, and some of his early political opponents, all of whom were still very much alive when Reeves did his research. I drew extensively on extracts from these interviews for the early chapters of my book. At the other end of the time spectrum, Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy, by veteran New York Times reporter and columnist Tom Wicker (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2006), has the advantage of a long perspective. Wicker, as a young reporter in early 1957, had a brief encounter with McCarthy shortly before the latter's death, but his book is written from the viewpoint of an astute observer familiar with the ways of Washington, whose purpose is to evaluate McCarthy and his actions from a distance of almost fifty years. I found his cool, judicial tone a welcome relief from some of the more heated tomes published in the late 1950s. These include Senator Joe McCarthy by Richard H. Rovere, a longtime political commentator for The New Yorker (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959). Writing in a fast-paced, journalistic style, Rovere strives to make a strong case against McCarthy, and he does so, but at the expense of a full-scale biographical study. For example, he devotes almost no space to McCarthy's youthful years, his military service during World War II, or his early political career in small-town Wisconsin.
Other books helped me to see McCarthy in a broader context. Ted Morgan in Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2003) begins his narrative with the Russian Revolution of 1917 as seen through the sometimes panicked eyes of American observers, and ends the chronicle with the buildup to the Iraq War in 2002–3. In the middle of the book, Morgan presents a condensed but accurate account of the key role Joe McCarthy played in America's response to what was sometimes called the "Red Menace."
For an intriguing left-wing view of McCarthy and his times, the British journalist Cedric Belfrage's The American Inquisition, 1945–1960: A Profile of the McCarthy Era (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973) is worth examining. You may not agree with Belfrage's conclusions, but chances are you'll be stimulated by his lively writing style.
Another book worth reading for its different take on one of Joe McCarthy's most famous, or infamous, hearings is Ordeal by Slander by the subject of that hearing, Owen Lattimore (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004). This is a paperback reprint of the hardcover edition, published in 1950, written in the immediate aftermath of the hearing and rushed into print two months later. Lattimore's book not only presents a spirited self-defense but also offers advice to other Americans who might find themselves facing similar charges of being disloyal to their country.
Yet another illuminating book about the period is The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents by Ellen Schrecker (2nd ed., New York: Pal
grave, 2002). Especially valuable is the compilation of key documents that composes more than half of the book. Among them is a large section of Joe McCarthy's 1950 Wheeling, West Virginia, talk that launched what would become his anti-Communist crusade.
Along with books about McCarthy and his investigations, I read a number of books about the other Senate and House investigative committees that competed for attention with Joe's. Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt, by Michael J. Ybarra (Hanover, N.H.: Steerforth Press, 2004), portrays the workings of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee chaired by Senator Pat McCarran, archconservative Democrat from Nevada. The subcommittee's 1952 investigation of alleged Communist influence in the United Nations led to the dismissal of many capable and experienced staff members.
I also read several books and articles about the House Un-American Activities Committee and its numerous hearings into the supposed Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry. One book, Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left, by Ronald and Allis Radosh (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005), admits that many innocent actors, directors, and writers had their careers destroyed by the HUAC-fostered blacklists that deprived them of their livelihoods. But the Radoshes insist that HUAC still provided a useful service by exposing the hard-core Communists who attempted to inject Communist propaganda into the movies they acted in, wrote, and directed in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s.
The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy Page 27
