Larry Tye - Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy

Copyright 2020 by Larry Tye

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tye, Larry, author.

Title: Demagogue : the life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy / Larry Tye. Other titles: Life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy

Description: Boston : New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019024932 (print) | LCCN 2019024933 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328959720 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328960023 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358316619 | ISBN 9780358315087

Subjects: LCSH: McCarthy, Joseph, 19081957. | McCarthy, Joseph, 19081957Influence. | Anti-communist movementsUnited StatesHistory. | LegislatorsUnited StatesBiography. | Subversive ActivitiesUnited StatesHistory20th century. | United States. Congress. SenateBiography.

Classification: LCC E748.M143 T94 2020 (print) | LCC E748.M143 (ebook) | DDC 328.73/092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024932

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024933

eISBN 978-1-328-96002-3
v1.0520

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photograph: ullstein bild dtl. / Getty Images

Author Photograph Lisa Frusztajer

Joseph McCarthy Papers accessed through the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries. Access granted by permission of the donors. Excerpts from the diaries of Reed Harris used by kind permission of Donald Harris. Selections from Jim Juliana's unpublished memoir used by permission of the Juliana family.

To Dorothy Rubinoff Tye, my mother, earliest editor, and enduring inspiration. She turned a joyful 101 while I was completing this book, but did not live to see its publication.

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT Americas love affair with bullies.

Front and center is Low Blow Joe McCarthy, one of the most reviled figures in US history. Its not often that a mans name becomes an ism, in this case a synonym for reckless accusation, guilt by association, fear-mongering, and political double-dealing. In the early 1950s, the senator from Wisconsin promised America a holy war against a Communist conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. While the conspiracy and infamy claims were a stretch, the body count was measurable: a TV broadcaster, a government engineer, current and former US senators, and incalculable others who committed suicide to escape McCarthy and his warriors; hundreds more whose careers and reputations he crushed; and the hundreds of thousands he browbeat into a tongue-tied silence. His targets all learned the futility of taking on a tyrant who recognized no restraints and would do anything anything to win.

To those of you who say that you do not like the rough tacticsany farm boy can tell you that there is no dainty way of clubbing the fangs off a rattler or killing a skunk... It has been a bare-knuckle job. It will continue as such, the farm-bred soldier turned senator delighted in telling audiences about his hunt for pinkos and Reds. I am afraid I will have to blame some of the roughness in fighting the enemy to my training in the Marine Corps. We werent taught to wear lace panties and fight with lace hankies.

But this is more than the biography of a single bully. A uniquely American strain of demagoguery has pulsed through the nations veins from its founding days. Although Senator McCarthys drastic tactics and ethical indifference make him an extraordinary case, he was hardly an original. He owed much to a lineup of zealots and dodgers who preceded himfrom Huey The Kingfish Long to Bostons Rascal King mayor James Michael Curley and Michigans Jew-baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coughlinand he in turn became the exemplar for nearly all the bullies who followed. Alabama governor George Wallace, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke tapped the McCarthy model, appealing to their countrymens simmering fears of imagined subversions even as they tried to escape the label of McCarthyism. All had big plans and glorified visions in which they played the crowning roles.

Now that we at last have access to the full sweep of the records on Joe McCarthys transgressions, we can see that his rise and reign also go a long way toward explaining the astonishing ascension of President Donald J. Trump. While some seek comfort in the belief that Trumps election was an aberration, the truth is that he is the latest in a bipartisan queue of fanatics and hate peddlers who have tapped into Americas deepest insecurities. In lieu of solutions, demagogues point fingers. Attacked, they aim a wrecking ball at their assailants. When one charge against a manufactured enemy is exposed as hollow, they lob a fresh bombshell. If the news is bad, they blame the newsmen. McCarthy was neither the first nor the last, but he was the archetype, and Trump owes much to his playbook.

The playbook invariably is the key. It transformed Joe McCarthy from a crank to one of the most menacing men in modern civilization. Armed with a similar blueprint, Donald Trump rose from sideshow to contender to commander in chief. Neither was sure of the formula in advancebullies seldom are, but they can sense in their bones how to keep the pot simmering and know when they achieve a critical mass. Suddenly and shockingly their scattershot bile is gaining traction and lacerating countless noncombatants. Americans, or enough of them to matter, actually believed that McCarthy had the list he claimed of 205 Communists lurking at the State Department. And that Trumps Mexican wall would make the United States safe. Was it simply through endless, mind-numbing repetition that these fictions became facts?

Candidate Trump boasted to supporters in 2016, I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldnt lose any voters. Sixty-two years before, polling pioneer George Gallup penned a chillingly similar prediction about Joes minions: Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him.

At the time when McCarthy drafted his poisonous script, few people knew the Wisconsin natives full story. America got its best look at the single-minded senator in his public and prodigiously publicized hearings, when he targeted alleged Soviet infiltration of the Foreign Service, the Voice of America, and, in a step too far, the mighty US military. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? the Armys special counsel famously asked him on live television in the spring of 1954, echoing what much of the nation was thinking by then. Americans would have been asking a lot sooner, and reached a quicker tipping point, if they had witnessed the secret hearings McCarthy was holding. It turns out that only a third of his conspiracy hunting happened in public sessions; evidence of the rest, filling almost nine thousand pages of transcripts, was kept under lock and key for half a century.

Those records, recently unveiled by McCarthys successors and never before closely examined, reveal in disturbing detail that when the subcommittee doors slammed shut, Chairman McCarthy came unhinged in a way unimaginable to most Americans. He ceased even pretending to care about the rights of the accused, whom he summarily declared guilty. He held one-man hearings, in violation of long-standing Senate tradition. When he was absent, his poorly trained, sophomoric staffers leapt in to badger witnesses on his behalf. It is true that he ferreted out a handful of leftists, but most were indictable more for youthful idealism and political navet than for the sedition and treason of which they were accused. He searched in vain for a big fishhis own Alger Hiss or Julius Rosenbergand targeted fellow lawmakers who dared challenge his shakedowns. And he grew nastier still after lunch, where he routinely washed down his hamburger and raw onion with whiskey. Here, in executive session, when he thought nobody was looking, this snarling senator showed his unvarnished essence.