by Jon Meacham
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His followers loved his style; his foes feared it. “From a distance, McCarthy may have looked, by some odd reversal of optical principles, larger than life and of greater consequence than he ever really was,” Richard H. Rovere of The New Yorker wrote at the close of the fifties. “But he was large and consequential enough in those years….He was the first American ever to be actively hated and feared by foreigners in large numbers.” In 1953, Eleanor Roosevelt, on a trip to Japan, found herself facing questions about McCarthyism. “Will you please explain these attitudes?” a Japanese businessman asked the former First Lady. “We are unable to understand why these things happen in a great democratic nation like the United States.”
Part of the answer lies in the nature of democracy itself: Millions of Americans approved of McCarthy no matter what the elites might say or do. And McCarthy was not without support and connections in sophisticated quarters. He was friendly with the Kennedys, hiring Robert Kennedy as a staff lawyer for his committee in 1953 and taking two of the Kennedy sisters on dates. As an anti-Communist Roman Catholic, McCarthy was popular in Massachusetts, and a hospitalized Senator John F. Kennedy would miss the McCarthy censure vote in 1954.
Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, was an early opponent of McCarthy’s. Her “Declaration of Conscience” called for decency and fair play amid anti-Communist hysteria.
On CBS’s See It Now on Tuesday, March 9, 1954, the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow took McCarthy on. “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” Murrow said.
JFK, though he privately recoiled at McCarthy’s tactics and manner, chose to remain silent on censure, upsetting the liberal wing of the Democratic Party—including Mrs. Roosevelt—who long saw his failure to stand up to McCarthy as a sign of opportunism and weakness. They weren’t far wrong: JFK wanted to keep the anti-Communist Massachusetts delegation united behind him in his hopes to become Adlai Stevenson’s vice presidential running mate in 1956 and, failing a step to higher office in the meantime, he did not want a McCarthyite challenge in his 1958 bid for reelection to the Senate. Challenged a decade or so later about his work for McCarthy, Robert Kennedy replied, “Well, at the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States…and Joe McCarthy was the only one doing anything about it.” (But, RFK admitted, “I was wrong.”)
Roy M. Cohn, who served as McCarthy’s chief counsel, recalled the senator “saw the dramatic political opportunities connected with a fight on Communism.”
In the early 1950s legions of people were entranced by McCarthy’s Manichaean vision of life. He spoke in the starkest of terms, savoring superlatives. Everything was dramatic, contentious, perilous: So few things, McCarthy implied, stood between American freedom and Communist slavery. But one of those things—perhaps the most important of them—was McCarthy himself, who quoted John Paul Jones: “I have just begun to fight.”
How he loved the story of himself as the brave warrior, a story that dominated the newspapers of the day. McCarthy needed the press, and the press came to need McCarthy. He was fantastic copy, a real-life serial. The twists and turns of the McCarthy saga meant more bylines for the reporters, more exciting headlines for the editors, and, given the subject matter—alleged infiltration of the government of the United States by a fatal foe—more copies sold for the owners. Radio and television amplified McCarthy’s impact.
As Richard Hofstadter, the Columbia University historian, wrote at the time, the “growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected. Mass communications have made it possible to keep the mass man in an almost constant state of political mobilization.”
McCarthy understood the media’s ways and means. “Things have to be done by a certain time,” recalled George Reedy. “And Joe somewhat instinctively picked up the absolutely vital course of the cycle. He knew that every wire service man had to have a lead by eleven o’clock [for the afternoon newspapers]. There just wasn’t any question about it; you had to have a lead.” The senator learned to make sensational charges at just the right moment, forcing reporters to write quick stories that surged across the country by wire, reaching millions of readers before sundown.
The New Yorker’s Richard Rovere reconstructed the rhythms of the age. McCarthy, Rovere wrote, “invented the morning press conference called for the purpose of announcing an afternoon press conference.” Rovere continued:
The reporters would come in—they were beginning, in this period, to respond to his summonses like Pavlov’s dogs at the clang of a bell—and McCarthy would say that he just wanted to give them the word that he expected to be ready with a shattering announcement later in the day, for use in the papers the following morning. This would gain him a headline in the afternoon papers: “NEW MCCARTHY REVELATIONS AWAITED IN CAPITAL.” Afternoon would come, and if McCarthy had something, he would give it out, but often enough he had nothing, and this was a matter of slight concern. He would simply say that he wasn’t quite ready, that he was having difficulty in getting some of the “documents” he needed or that a “witness” was proving elusive. Morning headlines: “DELAY SEEN IN NEW MCCARTHY CASE—MYSTERY WITNESS BEING SOUGHT.” He had no cause for concern if the whole thing turned out to be nothing, as so often happened. He had the headlines; “MCCARTHY” was becoming a more and more familiar arrangement of type and was engraved more and more deeply on the American mind.
His office produced weekly phonograph albums to send to Wisconsin stations that dutifully aired them. As described by the journalist Edwin R. Bayley, who obtained some of these recordings, interviewers posing as journalists would ask McCarthy congenial questions that led to senatorial disquisitions on the iniquities of the mainstream press, the Democrats, the Communists—anybody, really, who had had anything negative to say about McCarthy and his methods that week.
Television offered him ever expanding reach. The number of TV sets in America quintupled during McCarthy’s heyday, rising from 5 million in 1950 to 26 million in 1954. To McCarthy, the new medium created nearly unlimited possibilities to dominate the public consciousness, and he valued performance over substance. “People aren’t going to remember the things we say on the issues here, our logic, our common sense, our facts,” he remarked to Roy Cohn before the televised army hearings. “They’re only going to remember the impressions.”
The senator inhabited his own curious world, moving around Washington and around the nation with a coterie of aides, investigators, and reporters. He was good company. A showman at heart, McCarthy attacked the press in public but drank and schmoozed with journalists in private. Amid hearings in the capital, he would adjourn for lunch at a corner table in the Carroll Arms Hotel where he would take off his suit coat, have a Manhattan, eat a slab of lamb, order coffee, and muse about the action.
McCarthy’s headline hunting also benefitted from the culture of journalism at midcentury: that the job of a journalist was to report the content of a statement, not to assess its validity. “My own impression was that Joe was a demagogue,” one journalist of the era observed. “But what could I do? I had to report—quote—McCarthy. How do you say in the middle of your story, ‘This is a lie’? The press is supposedly neutral. You write what the man says.” Walter Lippmann defended the press in similar terms. “McCarthy’s charges…are news which cannot be suppressed or ignored,” Lippmann wrote. “They come from a United States senator and a politician…in good standing at the headquarters of the Republican Party. When he makes such attacks against the State Department…it is news which has to be published.”
Palmer Hoyt, the editor and publisher of The Denver
Post, thought McCarthyism required a new way of reporting. In a memorandum to his staff, Hoyt suggested that neutrality was not the highest virtue—truth was. Reporters should “apply any reasonable doubt they [might] have to the treatment of the story.” In other words, if a McCarthy statement was demonstrably false, the journalists should feel free to say so—in print. “It seems obvious that many charges made by reckless or impulsive public officials cannot and should not be ignored,” Hoyt wrote, “but it seems to me that news stories and headlines can be presented in such a manner that the reading public will be able to measure the real worth or value and the true meaning of the stories.”
Hoyt believed steady and informed reporting on McCarthy was the best antidote to the fever of the time. “Believe me, there is nothing wrong with this country that repeated strong dosages of the facts will not correct,” Hoyt told other editors at a Tucson, Arizona, meeting in November 1954. “Even McCarthyism will melt away before this treatment.”
When he read coverage he disliked, McCarthy did not keep quiet—he went on the offensive, singling out specific publications and particular journalists, sometimes at rallies. He particularly hated The Milwaukee Journal. “Keep in mind that when you send checks over to the Journal,” McCarthy told business audiences, “you are contributing to bringing the Communist Party line into the homes of Wisconsin.” To a Journal reporter, McCarthy confided: “Off the record, I don’t know that I can cut [the Journal’s] profits at all….But if you show a newspaper as unfriendly and having a reason for being antagonistic, you can take the sting out of what it says about you. I think I can convince a lot of people that they can’t believe what they read in the Journal.”
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The Washington Post had assigned the reporter Murrey Marder to cover McCarthy after Wheeling. On Election Night 1952, the paper’s publisher, Philip Graham, told Marder that Eisenhower’s victory over Adlai Stevenson would cost Marder his beat. According to David Halberstam, who interviewed Marder about the moment, “Graham was sure that Ike’s presidency would eventually mean McCarthy’s isolation; now that the Republicans had the White House, they would not need McCarthy any longer. But Marder understood McCarthy’s recklessness and his hatred of authority. Party loyalty was not even an issue with the senator—it would not matter who was in the White House. No, Marder speculated, his beat was not finished; instead they would now need two people to cover the senator.” Halberstam’s verdict: “They were both right.”
The Post expected much from Eisenhower. “It is this newspaper’s hope and belief,” the Post editorialized in March 1952, “that McCarthyism would disappear overnight if Eisenhower were elected.” That was not to be. One sign of trouble: Eisenhower had flinched in taking McCarthy on during the presidential campaign. The senator had accused George Marshall of treason the year before, telling the Senate that Marshall was part of “a conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”
In the text of a speech he was to deliver in Milwaukee on Friday, October 3, 1952, Eisenhower was slated to defend Marshall in no uncertain terms. “I know that charges of disloyalty have, in the past, been leveled against General George C. Marshall,” Eisenhower was to have said. “I have been privileged for thirty-five years to know General Marshall personally. I know him, as a man and as a soldier, to be dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America. And this episode is a sobering lesson in the way freedom must not defend itself.”
Ike never uttered the words. Talked out of it by political advisers who thought it unwise to antagonize McCarthy and his supporters (the voices included Wisconsin governor Walter J. Kohler, Jr., and New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams, the future White House chief of staff), Eisenhower always regretted his failure to say what he thought, and he hated that the world knew what had happened, for word of the dropped paragraph leaked to The New York Times. (“It turned my stomach,” General Omar Bradley wrote of the Eisenhower-Marshall-McCarthy episode.)
Unlike Truman, who openly denounced McCarthy, Eisenhower was patient and reticent. “Nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of trouble-making as to ignore him,” the new president wrote in 1953. “This he cannot stand.”
The strategy was less dramatic—and less heroic—than one could have hoped for from Eisenhower. But it was his strategy, and he stuck to it. “I had made up my mind how I was going to handle McCarthy,” Eisenhower recalled. “This was to ignore him….I would give him no satisfaction. I’d never defend anything. I don’t care what he called me, or mentioned, or put in the papers. I’d just ignore him.”
“Getting in the gutter” with McCarthy, a phrase Eisenhower often used, would be counterproductive. “I would not have you believe that I have acquiesced in, or by any means approve, the methods he uses,” Eisenhower wrote. “I despise them….But I am quite sure that the people who want me to stand up and publicly label McCarthy with derogatory titles are mistaken.”
Still, he did speak out occasionally. In 1953, McCarthy deplored the contents of libraries at American installations overseas. Cohn and David Schine, a hotel heir, took a highly publicized European trip, a kind of grand tour of censorship. Among other titles, the senator’s staff targeted The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, on the grounds that the writer Dashiell Hammett, who supported left-wing causes, had posted bail for a group with Communist ties in 1951, and refused to name names in Red-hunting hearings. They also complained that the libraries failed to subscribe to American Legion Monthly. The European newspapers, Benjamin C. Bradlee, then the press attaché at the American embassy in Paris, recalled, were aghast. “What is America becoming to allow these people to go around and represent it?” was a typical comment.
At Dartmouth College in 1953, Eisenhower alluded to the controversy. “Don’t join the book burners,” he said. “Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go into your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship. How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?”
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At ten-thirty on the evening of Tuesday, March 9, 1954, CBS broadcast an episode of Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now. Its subject: Senator McCarthy. Its means of storytelling: images and recordings of McCarthy’s own words. At the conclusion of the report, Murrow spoke more in sorrow than in anger. “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” he said. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”
Then came Murrow’s final words. “The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies,” Murrow said. “And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ Good night, and good luck.”
A few weeks later, on the evening of Monday, April 5, 1954, President Eisenhower walked down to the Broadcast Room in the White House basement. Featuring a handsome desk, special lights, and large prompters, the studio offered the president a convenient venue from which to address the nation. He had decided to try something new: a more casual speech, without a full text. There would be cue cards with a few notes—that was all. He would be seated on
the edge of the desk and look directly into the camera—a Fireside Chat for the television age. His theme was fear—and how America should fight it.
Eisenhower is usually remembered for two rhetorical moments. The first dates from June 1944, when he drafted a letter accepting full responsibility in the event of the failure of the D-Day landings against Hitler’s Fortress Europe. The second came in his January 1961 Farewell Address warning about the “military-industrial complex.” His April 1954 speech about fear, which falls about midway between these landmarks, appears, at first glance, to be a forgettable presidential address—or at least a routine one. The remarks repay consideration, however, for in them Eisenhower described the disposition necessary to survive life in an age of strain and uncertainty. “We are worried about Communist penetration of our own country,” he said, “and we are worried about the possibility of depression and the loss of jobs among us here at home.” He continued:
Now, the greater any of these apprehensions, the greater is the need that we look at them clearly, face to face, without fear, like honest, straightforward Americans, so we do not develop the jitters or any other kind of panic, that we do not fall prey to hysterical thinking.
Sometimes you feel, almost, that we can be excused for getting a little bit hysterical, because these dangers come from so many angles, and they are of such different kinds, and no matter what we do they still seem to exist….
It is the American belief in decency and justice and progress, and the value of individual liberty, because of the rights conferred upon each of us by our Creator, that will carry us through….There must be something in the heart as well as in the head.
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