IN ONE respect at least, the conventional treatment of Joe McCarthy is correct. He was ultimately more important as a symbol or product of the age than for what he did as an individual, however well or ill his personal doings might be rated.
From the standpoint of America’s national interests, the most significant thing about the Red-hunting battles of the 1950s wasn’t the personal odyssey of somebody named McCarthy but the security situation that existed in the State Department and elsewhere in the government, and the degree of threat that this presented to the nation. These were the things that really mattered then, and that matter still today in sorting out the story. Viewed from this angle, McCarthy was an almost incidental figure who showed up at a particular time when conditions were ripe to push such issues to the forefront. The same might at least in theory have been done by any number of people in Congress, some of whom had been on the job before he got there and knew more about the subject than did he, at least at the beginning. It just happened that the person who actually did it, albeit with copious help from others, was McCarthy.
However, it’s also obviously true that there were facets of McCarthy’s character, views, and conduct that caused him to play the role he did, in the way he played it, and that influenced the way events unfolded. Whether it was his flamboyant style, rhetorical tactics, or willingness to mix it up with all the reigning powers of his era, there was something about him and his much-lamented methods that got the attention of the public as his predecessors hadn’t. Some brief discussion of McCarthy as a personality may thus be helpful by way of background before getting down to cases.
For many people, the standard image of McCarthy as a dreadful human being is defined by the drawings of Herbert Block, better known as Herblock, for decades the editorial-page cartoonist of the Washington Post. In the usual Herblock treatment, McCarthy was a swarthy, bearded caveman wielding a gigantic club with which to knock his victims senseless, or an ogreish creature emerging from a sewer manhole bearing a bucket of filth to slosh on his opponents. These oft-reprinted Herblock drawings are doubtless a main source of the impression that McCarthy was some kind of loathsome monster.
There were, however, many verbal renderings of McCarthy that weren’t too different from the Herblock version. Among the more notable of these was the word portrait of McCarthy painted by New Yorker correspondent Richard Rovere in his book Senator Joe McCarthy (1959), depicting its subject as a crazed, barely human, creature. This volume helped establish early on the notion that McCarthy was a brutal villain, guilty of innumerable personal failings as well as official misdeeds. Here are some samples:
No bolder seditionist ever moved among us—nor any politician with a swifter, surer access to the dark places of the public mind…Like Hitler, McCarthy was a screamer, a political thug, a master of the mob, an exploiter of popular fears…He was a master of the scabrous and scatological; his talk was laced with obscenity. He was a vulgarian by method as well as probably by instinct…He made little pretense to religiosity or to any species of moral rectitude. He sought to manipulate only the most barbaric symbols of America—the slippery elm club, the knee in the groin, and the brass knuckles…He was…a prince of hate…He was morally indecent…McCarthy had become liberated from the morality that prevailed in his environment….1
And so forth and so on at some length, including charges that McCarthy was a sociopath and nihilist, didn’t really believe in the cause he was espousing, and much else of similar nature. Anyone who read this book and believed it to be even a remotely accurate picture of McCarthy could hardly help concluding that he was an amoral, brutal lout with no redeeming features. Nor were Rovere’s comments to this effect unusual in the journalism and political comment of the time. Multiply such statements manyfold and there isn’t much doubt as to how McCarthy’s negative image was established. However, as the record amply shows, there were facets of his life and conduct quite different from this hideous portrait.
Certain data about McCarthy’s personal and family background have been many times recited and may be capsuled rather briefly. He was born in Grand Chute township, outside the city of Appleton in upstate Wisconsin, on November 14, 1908, the son of Timothy and Bridget McCarthy, a second-generation Irish-American couple. Baptized Joseph Raymond, he was the fifth child (out of seven) and third oldest son. The McCarthys were part of the so-called Irish settlement in northeast Wisconsin, flanked by Dutch and German immigrant families who had also moved to the frontier, as it then still was, because of the cheap land and the chance to become property-owning farmers.
The McCarthys were devout Catholics, hardworking, frugal, and self-reliant. Though they weren’t destitute, and as working farmers didn’t go hungry, there was never much money to go around. The children were expected to do their share of chores, and did. Thus Joe McCarthy from an early age was accustomed to hard work and plenty of it. By most accounts, indeed, he was the hardest working of the lot. But he wanted to be something other than a farm-hand, and as a teenager started a business of his own, raising chickens and selling eggs to local grocers. This project did well, but in the winter of 1928 severe weather that injured McCarthy’s health and destroyed his flock brought the venture to an end. He then got jobs managing a couple of grocery stores, where his outgoing manner and strong work ethic made him a locally prominent and successful figure.
What most people recalled about McCarthy from this era and his early life in general was his cheerful personality, quite different from the Herblockian image or the fulminations of Rovere. The young McCarthy was gregarious and good natured, well liked by just about everyone who knew him—customers, fellow workers, complete strangers with whom he would strike up a conversation. Combined with his ambition and willingness to work long hours without letup, these qualities seemed to promise greater achievement in the future.
However, the full-time jobs McCarthy held as a teenager kept him from attending high school, and he realized that if he were going to be more than a storekeeper or a farmer he had to get an education. There followed an unusual decision at the age of twenty to enroll at a nearby high school. His experience at the school was something of a community legend. Under an accelerated program then being offered, he completed four years’ worth of schooling in nine months, garnering top grades along the way to do so. Again, the keys to his success were willpower and unremitting effort, rising at 5 A.M. and working late at night to do the necessary reading.
From high school McCarthy went on to become a student at Marquette, the Jesuit university in Milwaukee, where he at first pursued a degree in engineering. Halfway through his undergraduate years he switched to prelaw, attended Marquette Law School, and in 1935 received his law degree there. While at Marquette, he held down a number of outside jobs—everything from running a gas station to washing dishes to starting a makeshift moving company. Again he showed a capacity for hard work and impossible hours that amazed his classmates. He exhibited another trait as well that would be significant for his future—an apparently near-photographic memory that allowed him to absorb large masses of material in a hurry and breeze through exams with last-minute cramming.*6
Emerging from Marquette Law, McCarthy hung out his shingle in the small town of Waupaca, about thirty miles from Appleton, but in the depression it was hard to make a living at anything and being a small-town lawyer in upstate Wisconsin definitely wasn’t the road to riches. Given his friendly nature and willingness to outwork the competition, he hit on the idea of running for public office. His first successful bid was a campaign for circuit judge, though he was still only an inexperienced lawyer and barely thirty. Opposing an incumbent against whom he was thought to have no chance, he succeeded by dint of hard campaigning in pulling off the upset, thus becoming in 1939 the youngest state jurist in Wisconsin.
Nobody including McCarthy himself ever said he was a great legal scholar, but by most accounts he was a pretty good judge. As in everything else he did, he was hardworking and energetic, and soon clear
ed up an enormous backlog of about 250 pending cases and thereafter kept the docket current. He was also said to have a good intuitive sense of justice. In handling divorce cases, he showed a strong proclivity for defending the rights of women and children. He likewise revealed an inclination to defend consumers and the little guy in general from what he considered overbearing interests, this once more differing from the later image.2
With the coming of World War II, McCarthy at the age of thirty-three enlisted in the Marine Corps, getting lots of favorable press notice when he did so. As a state judge, he was exempt from the draft and didn’t have to go, but did. He spent most of his service in the South Pacific as an intelligence officer debriefing pilots in combat with the Japanese. It was in this assignment that he got or gave himself the nickname “Tailgunner Joe,” acquired from flying a dozen missions or so in which he doubled as photographer/tailgunner. There would be wrangles later about the citations he received for his wartime service and the number of missions he flew, but that he went when he didn’t have to and honorably carried out his duties is not disputed.
While serving in the Pacific, McCarthy made no secret of his political ambitions and launched a mostly absentee and unsuccessful primary election bid for the U.S. Senate in 1944 against the Republican incumbent, Alexander Wiley (later McCarthy’s Wisconsin colleague in the upper chamber). Though limited in his ability to campaign, McCarthy as a two-fisted Marine serving in a combat zone came in with a respectable 80,000 votes, prompting him to try again in 1946 when he was back home from the service. This time his opponent in the primary was the supposedly unbeatable Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr., a name to conjure with in Wisconsin.
The La Follettes were to their state what the Kennedys would later be to Massachusetts, and few people gave McCarthy a chance against this scion of Wisconsin’s first political family. La Follette, however, proved to be a reluctant, Washington-based campaigner and otherwise weaker than expected, and McCarthy would emerge from the primary with another stunning upset. He then cruised home to easy victory in the fall, becoming at the age of thirty-eight the youngest U.S. senator in the country.
Such in barest outline was the career of Joe McCarthy before his arrival in the U.S. Senate in January of 1947. Taken at face value, with nothing more to go on, it could be construed as an inspiring Horatio Alger saga, in which a man from humble beginnings ascended to one of the highest offices in the land through toil, pluck, and perseverance. Needless to remark, that isn’t how the story is played in most discussions of McCarthy. Instead, as set forth in several standard treatments, the McCarthy vita was marked at every step along the way with evil doings, all said to presage the sinister role he was to play in the Red hunts of the 1950s.
In fact, there is virtually no aspect of McCarthy’s personal life, dating from his earliest childhood, that hasn’t been the subject of ad hominem attack. These tales are so many and varied it’s hard to keep them all in focus. They include assertions that, as a youngster, he was either a mama’s boy or a bully (take your pick); that as a young attorney he was an ambulance-chasing hustler; that he used unethical methods in running for circuit judge and later in his campaign against La Follette; that on the bench he specialized in “quickie divorces” in return for favors; that he was involved in financial shenanigans in the Senate, then cheated on his taxes; that he lied about his war record in the Pacific; that he was a hopeless drunkard; and a good deal else of similar lacerating import.
Given the number and anecdotal nature of these charges, sifting through them is a difficult business. Anecdotal data are hard to verify and depend for their evidential value on whose anecdotes are given credence. A good (or bad) example is the almost universally accepted tale of McCarthy’s heavy drinking, attested by countless stories in the standard bios. Yet there were those who observed McCarthy closely—including such harsh McCarthy critics as Jack Anderson and George Reedy—who had a different version: The McCarthy they knew early on was a drink-nurser, concerned to keep his wits about him and thus gain a competitive edge over others who were imbibing. People change, of course, and it may be that if McCarthy succumbed to the bottle, as many witnesses aver, it was in the aftermath of his censure when he was downcast, reviled, and no longer in the limelight. Yet there are those who knew him well at this period also who deny the image of chronic drunkard.3
In still other cases, there are negative McCarthy anecdotes that some of his toughest critics tried to nail down but couldn’t. The bogus tale of his allegedly welcoming Communist Party support in his campaign against La Follette has been mentioned. Likewise, the “quickie divorce” allegation has recently been debunked in some detail by a particularly stringent McCarthy critic. Yet another item in this vein is the oft-heard charge of cheating on his taxes, a subject that exercised his foes for years and involved a minute ransacking of his finances. Yet when all was said and done, the IRS in 1955 wound up giving McCarthy a $1,056 refund on the grounds that he had overpaid his taxes.4
Add to all the above the fact that the biographer-critics are by no means agreed as to the scarlet sins committed by McCarthy. While all standard treatments are as one in describing the supposed falseness of his Senate charges, they often vary widely in depictions of his personal evil. In this respect, it’s noteworthy that later, more in-depth studies by David Oshinsky and Thomas Reeves dispute many of the lurid tales told by Rovere, Jack Anderson and Ronald May, and other early McCarthy critics, with no evident effort to check the sources. In several instances, Reeves and Oshinsky did such checking and found the previous charges were in error.*7
On the other hand, there are McCarthy vignettes that are undoubtedly true in whole or major part: That he was a thrusting young attorney/politician seeking the main chance would be a surprise to no one who knows much about ambitious young attorneys, or politicians; that he used a bit of sharp practice in his race for circuit judge (though mild by the standards of today) seems well documented; that he puffed up his service record and used this for political advantage seems well attested also—though he was hardly the first, or last, to engage in conduct of that nature. To establish the exact degree of truth or falsity of all such charges and arrive at a composite judgment, pro, con, or in between, would be a tremendous labor and result in another book as long as this one.
However, there are obvious grounds on which such an effort would be not only arduous but fruitless. Chief among these is that, in strict logic, ad hominem attacks have nothing to do with the subject that concerns us—whether McCarthy was right or wrong about his charges of Red infiltration. In theory, he could have been guilty of every personal sin alleged against him and many more, and that still wouldn’t tell us what we need to know about the cases. Conversely, he could have been a saint in his personal life but completely wrong about his charges. The proof of the matter, either way, must be found in the documentary record on the cases, to the extent that this can be recovered.
Still, there are aspects of McCarthy’s life and career, beyond the mere outline of his schooling and employment, that cast some light on his political conduct and anti-Red crusading. These relate to matters on which there was widespread agreement among his friends and critics, rather than a series of dueling anecdotes, and thus concern facets of his nature obvious to all who knew him.
Starting with McCarthy’s family background and upbringing, one of the most notable aspects of his persona was his Roman Catholic faith—this directly contrary to the Rovere portrayal of an irreligious and amoral cynic. As attested by friend and foe alike, McCarthy was in fact religious. There are numerous uncontradicted tales on record of his faithfulness in attending Mass, whatever his worldly preoccupations, and while he was no choirboy his Christian faith was an obvious feature of his personal credo and public message. (As a U.S. senator, he was known for his hospitality to Catholic priests and other representatives of the Church who weren’t always so recognized by other Catholic members of Congress.)
A second McCarthy trait on which all obser
vers were agreed is that, from college on if not before then, he was a tough customer who wasn’t afraid to mix it up with all comers as might be needed. At Marquette, he had been a collegiate boxer, known for his straight-on methods of attack and willingness to take a punch in order to land one. He was powerfully built, strong, and fearless, but in terms of boxing technique, we’re told, neither graceful nor proficient. As his critics never fail to note, his headlong boxing methods bore a marked resemblance to his political tactics later, and there is doubtless something to this. (It could likewise be said that his physical courage was in keeping with his wartime decision to join the Marines and go into a combat zone, when he could have stayed out of the service altogether or settled for chairborne duty on the home front.)
A further McCarthy avocation noted in all the studies was his fondness for playing poker. This is frequently cited as an example of his reckless nature, proclivity for bluffing, raising on a losing hand, and so on. Read with any care, however, accounts of McCarthy’s poker playing suggest a somewhat different verdict. By the testimony of many who knew him or played against him, he was an extremely good poker player and during his college days and later made considerable money at the table, often covering his living expenses in this fashion. Somebody good enough to make money on a consistent basis playing poker may seem reckless to the kibitzer, and no doubt has a streak of daring in his makeup, but obviously knows what he is doing.
Some other McCarthy traits that couldn’t be guessed from the caveman-in-the-sewer image were his keen intelligence and range of knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. His foray into engineering studies would come in handy, for example, in Senate hearings that involved technical/scientific matters, of which there were a fair number. Likewise, his mastery of the public housing issue in his early Senate tenure made him perhaps the foremost expert on that subject in Congress. He also made some study of Russian and astounded listeners at a hearing when he spoke in Russian to a witness who had defected from the Soviet Union.5
Blacklisted By History Page 4
