by Jon Meacham
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The end for McCarthy came in the months following the Murrow broadcast and the Eisenhower speech on fear, when hearings into McCarthy and the U.S. Army opened in the Senate. Behind the scenes, the president had maneuvered to detail the pressure that McCarthy and Roy Cohn had exerted to secure favors for David Schine, an intimate of Cohn’s who had been drafted. The report of this influence—with its implication of an illicit relationship between Cohn and Schine, always denied by Cohn—drove the hearings. Day by day and week by week, McCarthy performed poorly before large television audiences, coming across as more gadfly than crusader.
In an iconic moment, the counsel for the army, Joseph N. Welch, attacked the senator, who had clumsily attempted to impugn the loyalty of a young lawyer on Welch’s team. “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” Welch told McCarthy. “Little did I dream you would be so reckless and cruel as to do an injury to that lad….I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think than I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.”
McCarthy blundered forward and took up the theme again. Welch was ready and struck with force. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” Welch said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Yet a good bit of McCarthy’s base of support remained loyal. After the Welch drama, Gallup found that while McCarthy’s favorability ratings were falling, 34 percent of the country still backed the senator, a formidable-enough number. “Unless we can get rid of [McCarthy],” an Eisenhower Republican senator remarked to Cohn, “he’s going to be a mighty big thorn in our side.” That 34 percent figure was the problem. The Republicans, Cohn believed, were worried that McCarthy could bolt the GOP, form a “right-wing third party ticket,” and attract enough support to throw the 1956 presidential election to the Democrats.
By the end of the year the threat evaporated when the Senate censured McCarthy. The move to condemn him by resolution was the result of much of the Senate’s revulsion against his reckless methods. Senator Ralph Flanders, Republican of Vermont, led the charge. “This matter is indeed a serious one,” Flanders said. “The senator [McCarthy] has an habitual contempt for people….Unrebuked, his behavior casts a blot upon the reputation of the Senate itself.”
The senior senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush, spoke out in favor of censure. It was not the first time that Bush, a patrician with a strong New England moral code and sense of fair play, had taken on McCarthyism. Two years earlier, while sharing a stage with McCarthy in Bridgeport, Connecticut, during the 1952 campaign, Bush had criticized his Wisconsin colleague’s methods in front of a raucously pro-McCarthy crowd. Now, with the censure resolution pending, Bush told the Senate that McCarthy “has caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude, and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers, that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy blindly, not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions, or in his eyes you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line.” The resolution passed by a vote of 67 to 22. (Twenty-two of the Senate’s 44 Republicans voted to condemn.)
Once feared as indomitable, McCarthy was finished politically. He continued to drink heavily, and his health deteriorated. He died of acute hepatitis—his liver was inflamed, almost certainly because of his drinking—in 1957, at the age of forty-eight.
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The conventional view of McCarthy’s fall turns on his erratic performance during the army hearings. But Roy Cohn believed something deeper was also at work. “Undoubtedly the hearings were a setback,” Cohn recalled. “But there were other perhaps more fundamental reasons for his decline. By the time the hearings ended, McCarthy had been the center of the national and world spotlight for three and a half years. He had an urgent universal message, and people, whether they idolized or hated him, listened. Almost everything he said or did was chronicled.”
That surfeit of attention, Cohn argued, itself contributed to McCarthy’s decline. “Human nature being what it is, any outstanding actor on the stage of public affairs—and especially a holder of high office—cannot remain indefinitely at the center of controversy,” Cohn recalled. “The public must eventually lose interest in him and his cause. And Joe McCarthy had nothing to offer but more of the same. The public sought new thrills….The surprise, the drama, were gone.”
To everything, in other words, there is a season, and McCarthy’s hubris hastened the end of his hour upon the stage. “I was fully aware of McCarthy’s faults, which were neither few nor minor,” Cohn recalled. “He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had—in order to draw attention to the rock-bottom seriousness of the situation. He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements.”
The urge to overstate, to overdramatize, to dominate the news, could be costly, and so it proved to be for McCarthy. The Wisconsin senator, Cohn said, was essentially a salesman. “He was selling the story of America’s peril,” Cohn recalled. “He knew that he could never hope to convince anybody by delivering a dry, general-accounting-office type of presentation. In consequence, he stepped up circumstances a notch or two”—and in so doing he opened himself to attacks that proved fatal. He oversold, and the customers—the public—tired of the pitch, and the pitchman.
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By the end of 1954, McCarthy may have been spent, but the forces he represented—popular anxiety about the fate of the nation—would never completely subside. Like McCarthy, right-wing figures such as the John Birch Society’s Robert Welch cast Eisenhower in the role of villain. The old general’s moderate domestic views and pragmatic foreign policy made him anathema to conservatives who, longing for a crusader, instead found themselves living with a conciliator.
But we ought not to paint the rise of post–World War II movement conservatism—a movement that reached its apotheosis with the election of one of its early enthusiasts, Ronald Reagan, to the presidency in 1980—with too broad a brush. It is true that, as William A. Rusher, the publisher of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review, the conservative magazine founded in 1955, recalled, “modern American conservatism largely organized itself during, and in explicit opposition to, the Eisenhower Administration.” For most of those conservatives, however, Eisenhower was too moderate, not too Red. Writing in the inaugural issue of the magazine, Buckley, then twenty-nine years old, argued that the conservative mission was to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop”—history in this instance being understood as the flow of power to the state, which Buckley called “the dominant social feature of this century.” Buckley’s respectable conservatism was based not on paranoia but on a reasonable critique of the assumptions of midcentury liberalism.
Buckley, in fact, was a critical figure in moving the Birchers out of the mainstream conservative movement. In January 1961, during a meeting at the Breakers in Palm Beach with a handful of conservatives that included Barry Goldwater, Buckley agreed to take on the far right by attacking what he called the “Birch fallacy.”
“How would you define the Birch fallacy?” Buckley was asked.
“The fallacy,” Buckley replied, “is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.”
“I like that,” Goldwater said.
In National Review, Buckley wrote: “How can the John Birch Society be an
effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points…so far removed from common sense? That dilemma weighs on conservatives across America….The underlying problem is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world which is false, and, besides that, crucially different in practical emphasis from their own.”
The Birchers represented a persistent type of political belief. In the spring of 1954, shortly before McCarthy’s fall, Richard Hofstadter delivered a lecture as part of the American Civilization Program at Barnard College. Later published in The American Scholar as “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” this piece of Hofstadter’s, while less celebrated than the essay on the “paranoid style in American politics,” is equally incisive. In it, Hofstadter argued that the right was now animated not by a classical understanding of conservatism (a recognition of the limits of human reform and a skepticism about far-reaching public initiatives) but by a mindset that was, in its way, as expansive as the liberal hope of progress. He called this strain “pseudo-conservatism,” writing:
Who is the pseudo-conservative, and what does he want? It is impossible to identify him by social class, for the pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically all classes in society, although its power probably rests largely upon its appeal to the less educated members of the middle classes. The ideology of pseudo-conservatism can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent about politics. The lady who, when General Eisenhower’s victory over Senator [Robert A.] Taft [for the Republican presidential nomination] had finally become official in 1952, stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming, “This means eight more years of socialism” was probably a fairly good representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality….
The restlessness, suspicion and fear shown in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded.
A key Hofstadter insight had to do with motivation. Politics was not a high-minded philosophical contest between competing visions of reality; it was, rather, a messy struggle that often defied easy categorization. As Hofstadter wrote:
Political life is not simply an arena in which the conflicting interests of various social groups in concrete material gains are fought out; it is also an arena into which status aspirations and frustrations are, as the psychologists would say, projected. It is at this point that the issues of politics, or the pretended issues of politics, become interwoven with and dependent upon the personal problems of individuals. We have, at all times, two kinds of processes going on in inextricable connection with each other: interest politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs; and status politics, the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives.
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When Joe McCarthy died at Bethesda Naval Hospital on Thursday, May 2, 1957, he was once more the center of attention. “Years will pass before the results of his work can be objectively evaluated,” Vice President Nixon said, “but his friends and many of his critics will not question his devotion to what he considered to be the best interests of his country.”
Many others did not believe a distance of years was required to offer their verdict. His home-state Milwaukee Journal wrote, “The harmful influence of McCarthy and McCarthyism was felt far beyond the world of politics. It injured American prestige in the eyes of the world….Future generations are likely to find this period as fantastic, and harmful to the American spirit, as that of the Salem witch hunts, the post–Civil War Reconstruction or the Ku Klux Klan.”
The Louisville Courier-Journal took the longest of views:
There is an element almost of classical tragedy in the life and death of Joseph McCarthy. His rise to fame had the sudden, spectacular violence of a rocket splitting the night sky with unhealthy brilliance. With equal speed the glare faded and the spent stick came racing downward. Now it has struck earth. McCarthy, the meteoric, the defiant, the proud is now dead. In the classic form, true tragedy derives only from a man of great qualities who is destroyed by one fatal flaw of character. It would be hard to make a case for greatness in the Senator from Wisconsin.
At a requiem mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Monsignor John Cartwright said that McCarthy would “take his place among those colleagues of the hall of fame, each one of whom is great in memory because at one time or another he had the fortitude to stand alone.” McCarthy’s casket was borne from the church to the Capitol for a brief state funeral—customary for sitting senators—attended by Vice President Nixon, 32 of 49 Senate Democrats, and 38 of 46 Senate Republicans. House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Roy Cohn were there, too.
A notable fixer, Cohn thrived at the nexus of law, politics, media, and society. “I don’t want to know what the law is,” he’d say of a case. “I want to know who the judge is.” One of his more celebrated clients in afteryears was a young real-estate developer who was looking to move into Manhattan from his family’s base in Queens. And Roy Cohn was always there for Donald Trump.
King and Johnson, pictured here in the Oval Office in December 1963, found themselves sharing history’s stage as the country confronted the unfinished business of the Civil War.
Nigguhs hate whites, and whites hate nigguhs. Everybody knows that deep down.
—Governor GEORGE C. WALLACE of Alabama
At the moment when I was hit on the bridge and began to fall, I really thought it was my last protest, my last march. I thought I saw death, and I thought, “It’s okay, it’s all right—I am doing what I am supposed to do.”
—JOHN LEWIS, who was beaten at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, March 7, 1965
Lyndon Johnson couldn’t sleep. As Friday, November 22, 1963, turned into Saturday the twenty-third, the new president of the United States—he had taken the oath of office some eight hours before, in Dallas, in the wake of the assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy—wanted to move. “Very frankly, Mr. Speaker,” Johnson told House Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts in these difficult days, “I can’t sit still. I’ve got to keep the government going.” “Lyndon acts as if there is never going to be a tomorrow,” his wife, Lady Bird, once observed, and on this long Friday evening, her husband, wearing his pajamas in the Johnsons’ house in Spring Valley in northwest Washington, gave orders about everything he could think of. There was so much to do—a president to bury; a sudden, tragic transition to manage; a Cold War world to master.
To his aides who sat by his bedside, taking notes, Johnson seemed calm in the madness of the hour. “Lyndon,” Lady Bird remarked that night, “is a good man to have in a crisis.” No president had been assassinated since William McKinley, and the horror in Dallas marked the first unexpected transfer of American power in the Nuclear Age. Johnson was already thinking beyond the moment. “Well, I’m going to tell you,” he said, “I’m going to pass the civil rights bill and not change one word of it. I’m not going to cavil, and I’m not going to compromise. I’m going to fix it so everyone can vote, so everyone can get all the education they can get.” Fate had given him ultimate power, and he intended to use it.
President Kennedy had left a proposed civil rights act in the Congress. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s eight-year-old daughter Yolanda was distraught on the afternoon of the assassination. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “now we will never get our freedom!” King was reassuring. “Now don’t you worry, baby,” he said. “It’s going to be al
l right.”
It was a crowded moment. In June, Governor George Wallace had tried to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The next day, Medgar Evers, the field director of the NAACP in Mississippi, had been assassinated in his driveway. In August the country had watched King address the March on Washington. In September had come the brutal deaths of four little girls on a Sunday morning when Klansmen bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. And yet, as King well knew, the American attention span was notoriously brief. “We’re still a ten-day nation, Walter,” King said to his colleague the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, who recalled the remark to the writer Nick Kotz. King, according to Kotz, had a “sense that the country seemed unable to focus on a single issue such as civil rights for more than ten days.”
A Southerner in a Democratic Party divided between liberals based in the Northeast and segregationists in the Old Confederacy, Johnson faced the worst of all political worlds on civil rights. Yet he knew, too, that it was a task for the ages—a task for great and good men who, if they overcame the tyranny of the present, would bask in the warm light of history. As Johnson gathered himself to press ahead with the Kennedy administration’s civil rights legislation—in his first address to Congress as president LBJ would frame the fight as the most fitting possible tribute to JFK—he was advised to go slow and to play it safe, at least until after the 1964 presidential election. As political a man as ever drew breath, Johnson, however, dismissed such counsel with a penetrating rhetorical question: “Well, what the hell is the presidency for?” he asked, if not to do the big things lesser men might not?
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Johnson had hardly been a progressive in his pre–White House years. A Texan with an astute sense of politics and a consuming ambition, he had erred on the side of appeasing his segregationist constituents. While he had declined (along with Tennessee senators Albert Gore, Sr., and Estes Kefauver) to sign the 1956 Southern Manifesto, a declaration pledging resistance to the Warren Court’s groundbreaking school-integration decisions, Johnson had also weakened civil rights bills in the Senate. (Though he would point out that at least they passed, in some form.)
