Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye.
(Forewarning: This summary is really long. The book is really long. There was a lot to Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism.)
Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy is about US Senator Joseph McCarthy who dominated the headlines between 1950 and 1954 by leading the charge to ferret out communists in the US government, academia, and the media. The McCarthy hearings were a news staple of the early 1950s as the senator investigated and intimidated dozens of accused pinkos and the country watched.
The first sentence of the book sets it up nicely, “This is a book about America’s love affair with bullies.” Larry Tye reminds us that being a bully often works in public life: Huey Long was a populist who would do anything to win; Father Charles Coughlin was a Jew-baiting radio preacher; George Wallace and Louis Farrakhan used race to shove their way into prominence.
Joe McCarthy grew up poor in Wisconsin. Because he had to work, he didn’t finish high school until he was 22. He then went to Marquette University and got a law degree, again while working to put himself through. Early on, he loved to gamble and drink, two vices that would hurt him throughout his career. He was in the Marines in World War II but embellished his record to move ahead. At one point he bragged about how he had broken his foot in a crash landing of a plane in combat. It turned out that he actually fell down a ladder while walking off a ship.
McCarthy was elected a local judge and in 1944 ran for US Senate while still serving in the Marines, which was against the rules. He lost. However, in 1946, Joe out-muscled two potential primary election candidates and ran against the incumbent, Senator Robert LaFollette, Jr., in the Republican primary. Joe pulled off an upset victory, due to a split in the Wisconsin Republican Party and to a lousy campaign by the incumbent who had serious health problems.
After Joe won the primary, the press started wondering how he had financed his campaign. He said his family came up with the money he needed, but his family was dirt poor. He had some serious backers who kicked in what we would call dark money today. Anyway, Joe went on to easily beat the Democratic nominee in very Republican Wisconsin. He was a United States Senator at age 44.
He was a big deal once he got to DC - a young Marine veteran who was a United States Senator. Many WWII vets were elected to the House of Representatives, but starting out in the upper chamber was unusual. Joe made friends with the press and suggested that the best way to settle a mine workers strike was to draft the union president into the Army. He quickly learned that you didn’t have to follow up with any action to get good press. You just had to give reporters a story.
Joe’s first committee assignment was housing. He heard from over a thousand witnesses as he developed legislation to increase housing stock across the country. He wanted a very limited role for the federal government and accused public housing advocates as wanting to set up “breeding grounds for communism.” He learned how to use the power of the chairman to decide who testified and when, and he developed a nasty, prosecutorial style when interviewing/badgering witnesses he didn’t like.
Senator McCarthy burned a lot of bridges early in his career and in 1948, when the Democrats took over the Senate, he lost his subcommittee chairmanship. Playing the victim, Joe responded by lashing out at his enemies and the press.
Joe had been reduced to a backbencher and was looking for a way to get noticed. In 1950, communism was becoming a problem. Russia had just developed the atom bomb and Nationalist China had become Red China. Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury and newspapers were writing a lot about the communist menace. A few years later, school kids would practice ducking under their desks in case of nuclear attack.
Joe McCarthy had no foreign policy experience but he knew a hot issue when it was right in front of him. On February 9, 1950, McCarthy was the featured speaker at the West Virginia Lincoln Day Dinner. In his pockets, he had prepared speeches, one on housing policy and the other a Red-baiting barnburner. He went with the hot speech and announced that he had a letter with a list of 205 communists in high places in the United States State Department.
The audience loved it. The few reporters who were there - primarily low-level stringers for the national news wire services - dutifully reported on the Red Menace. Joe followed up with more speeches on communists in our midst and soon owned the issue. He sent a telegram to President Truman urging him to take dramatic action, to which Truman took offense since he had seen no evidence to justify McCarthy’s charges. In fact, there was no list and Joe was just winging it. Since the reporters were inexperienced they didn’t even think of following up to check on the veracity of the story, No one asked to see the letter, and they just ran with the story. The local reporters, unlike the DC press corps, had no idea that Joe often made up his own facts when trying to make a case. At one point, the state department identified 200 or so employees that might have sketchy issues in their backgrounds, but being a card-carrying communist wasn’t a major problem. McCarthy kept changing the number of traitors in the department and settled on 57.
Joe continued tease the story, saying that he needed more evidence before he went public. The country was concerned about foreigners. Washington was awash with spies from many countries. President Truman thought that McCarthy was a fraud, but the president did agree to release some of the information that the FBI and other agencies had developed on possible communists. McCarthy got funding to set up a committee and he was off to the races. Back then, public finance laws were very weak, so Senator McCarthy solicited additional funding from unidentified private sector sources, a practice he continued throughout his career.
Joe also made a lot of money giving speeches all around the country about the pinko threat. He was a very in-demand speaker. In retrospect, it may be hard to understand how he got away with what he did, but communism was considered to be a real threat by most Americans. The news regularly reported on spies, usually Russian, being caught and tried. The Soviet Union had hardened its hold on its subject countries and was posing a serious threat to world order.
The Senate subcommittee on investigations had an interest in rooting out communists. It was chaired by Senator McCarthy, who most senators expected would crash and burn due to his out-of-control obsession with Reds. They were wrong.
Larry Tye devotes hundreds of pages to detailing McCarthy’s approach to the investigations: accuse someone of being a communist or supporting communists; bring him or her before the committee; and relentlessly interrogate/intimidate the witness, usually behind closed doors, usually with no counsel.
Dorothy Kenyon, a former judge and a New York City liberal, was typical of his targets. She was accused of belonging to 28 pro-communist organizations. (This begs the question of how anyone could belong to 28 organizations with any meaningful involvement in any.) Kenyon stood up to him and called him “an unmitigated liar.” She was right on a couple of counts. She was not involved with most of the organizations, and of the groups with which she had some connection, she was joined by many US Representatives and Senators who were also members.
This pattern held. He would attack someone with trumped-up charges, inflame the rhetoric, stretch the truth, and leak juicy tidbits - usually unsubstantiated - to his press buddies who would give him great coverage.
Owen Lattimore was a Johns Hopkins professor who did work in Afghanistan and other exotic places. He was called “a true communist” and a “dangerous traitor” by Joe. President Truman was cowed into releasing FBI documents on Lattimore who belonged to some mainstream liberal groups but that was it. The charges fell flat. This case illustrated McCarthy’s penchant for just plain lying. Lattimore coined the phrase “McCarthyism” which went beyond being anti-communist to persecuting people that you didn’t agree with ideologically.
McCarthy’s defenders kept giving him a pass despite his consistent failures to find any pinkos anywhere. He was chasing down Marxists, and that was so important that it outweighed any small issues about who he pursued and how he did it. His base loved him with no regard for his personal behavior, lack of ethics, and consistent inability to find any fellow travelers in the government.
One of Joe’s most memorable attacks was against former WW II General and then Secretary of State George Marshall, whom McCarthy accused of being soft on communists and letting Stalin ride roughshod over Europe. The Senator’s 60,000-word case made the argument that the old soldier had committed treason. Of course, there was no evidence of that, just recycled Republican attacks against Truman and FDR for not stopping Russian expansionism. McCarthy was pilloried by members of both political parties for his totally irresponsible attacks. Marshall rode out the storm but was worn out and retired three months later.
Drew Pearson was a celebrated newspaper columnist whose writing appeared in 600 newspapers and who hosted a radio show listened to by 20 million people. He hated McCarthy and wrote 58 columns over a few months whacking the Senator from Wisconsin. Pearson wrote that McCarthy was “another Huey Long. Like the Louisiana Kingfish, Joe McCarthy has an engaging manner, great personal charm, tremendous energy and an insatiable desire for putting headlines ahead of public welfare.”
Pearson played hardball. He had a paid informant on the Senator’s staff. At one point at a party Pearson and McCarthy got into a fistfight. Joe kept attacking Pearson in his speeches and eventually convinced one of Drew’s radio sponsors to not renew the ad contract.
Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith represented Maine. She was very troubled by McCarthy’s antics and on June 1, 1950, gave a speech where she said, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny - Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
Joe’s colleagues were getting sick of him. They came up with a report that documented that McCarthy’s investigations had come up with nothing - no spies and no communists in high places. The report did not get rid of Joe. Rather it split the Senate and energized Republicans.
The same day the report was released, FBI Director Hoover announced the arrest of Julius Rosenberg as a communist spy. McCarthy called the Senate Democrats stooges of Stalin’s Fifth Column in the country. It worked. The Republican Senators continued to support his work as the American public continued to fear communists and look to Joe to find them.
Senator McCarthy had an interesting diet anchored by hamburgers and Scotch, which he chased with bicarbonate of soda which helped calm his stomach. He sometimes ate a quarter pound of butter which he claimed helped him hold his liquor. He drank a lot – at the hearings, in his office, early in the morning, late at night. Unlike another noted tippler, Winston Churchill, drinking did degrade Joe’s work performance. Unsurprisingly, the Senator was in general poor health. He had bleeding gums, chronic intestinal problems, sinusitis and headaches. He was in and out of the hospital throughout his career.
McCarthy mastered the press. He knew the deadlines of all of the papers that covered him and timed his outlandish accusations to get maximum coverage. He courted the wire service reporters (United Press International, Associated Press, and International News Service) because they were under constant pressure to get scoops and therefore didn't do much fact checking before running with a story. The press loved Joe because his allegations were always over the top and made for great headlines. The fact that most people believed that communists were out to undermine the country gave them cover to boost him in their papers. Joe also drank regularly with reporters and they liked him. Finally, a lot of the heads of major media outlets were conservative businessmen who believed in the Red Menace and gave cover to their papers to give McCarthy massive coverage. On the other hand, the international press made fun of Senator McCarthy and our country for taking his hysterical rantings so seriously.
The Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections investigated McCarthy’s fundraising and found serious irregularities. They delayed releasing their findings until Joe was reelected in 1952 and even then, took no action except referring their report to other agencies and to the full Senate. There was no follow-up. Joe was still wildly popular with the people.
Bobby Kennedy spent a few months as a counsel on Joe’s investigation committee. The two were friends. Bobby’s dad, Joseph Kennedy, was very anti-communist and gave McCarthy a lot of unreported contributions. Bobby and Ray Cohn, Joe’s chief counsel, didn’t get along, which didn’t help keep RFK on the job too long.
Right after the new Congress took office in January of 1953, Joe became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He held most of his hearings behind closed doors and regularly leaked out damaging reports to the press. Often Joe was the only person asking questions. People were often given less than one day’s notice to appear, and there were no formal votes on who would be investigated. Joe did all of that by himself.
Typically, the committee would call academics and present and former government employees to be questioned. Generally, these people were liberals, and sometimes community activists, but they weren’t communists or spies. He would badger them and leak damaging information, which was never put in the proper context, and the witness would be dismissed with no action being taken. No one the subcommittee investigated was ever indicted or convicted of any relevant crime.
Joe went after the Voice of America and accused its managers of not being anti-communist enough in their broadcasts. That wasn’t VOA’s job. The communications agency was charged with giving the world a view of what life in the United States was like. It was soft propaganda designed to make the world like America. Joe also charged that pinko sympathizers had sabotaged the broadcast towers. It turns out that engineers were just routinely repairing the antennas.
Army McCarthy Hearings
The Army accused McCarthy’s Chief Committee Counsel Roy Cohn of pressuring the Army to give preferential treatment to David Schine. a former McCarthy aide and friend of Cohn's. McCarthy counter-charged that this accusation was made in bad faith and in retaliation for his recent aggressive investigations of suspected Communists and security risks in the Army.
The hearings convened on March 16, 1954, and received considerable press attention, including gavel-to-gavel coverage on TV and radio. The media coverage, particularly television, greatly contributed to McCarthy's decline in popularity and his eventual censure by the Senate the following December. Thirty million people watched the first days of the hearings on TV, with fifty million more listening on the radio or reading newspapers. That was about half the population of the United States back then.
The Army-McCarthy Hearings transformed news coverage by putting live television coverage of a major political event in front of tens of millions of people. One of my earliest memories was of my mother watching the hearing while she worked around the house.
In 1953, McCarthy's committee began inquiries into the US Army starting by investigating supposed communist infiltration of the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, NJ. The Army accused McCarthy and his staff of seeking special treatment for recently drafted Private David Schine, a chief consultant to the investigation committee, and a close friend of Cohn's. McCarthy claimed that the accusation was made in bad faith and in retaliation for his justified examination of communists in uniform.
The Senate decided that these dueling charges should be investigated. The appropriate committee to do this was the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, usually chaired by McCarthy, who was replaced by Senator Karl Mundt.
The most dramatic exchange of the hearings came on June 9, 1954, day 30 of the hearings. Army counsel Joseph Welch challenged Committee Counsel Cohn to produce McCarthy's list of 130 subversives in defense plants to the office of the FBI and the Department of Defense "before the sun goes down".
Ignoring Welch's challenge, McCarthy suggested that Welch should check on Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch's own Boston law firm whom Welch had planned to have on his staff for the hearings. McCarthy mentioned that Fisher had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, a group which US Attorney General Brownell had called "the legal bulwark” of the Communist Party.
Welch revealed he had confirmed Fisher's former membership in the Guild approximately six weeks before the hearings started and saw no problem. Welch then reprimanded McCarthy for his needless attack on Fisher, saying "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." McCarthy, accusing Welch of filibustering the hearing and baiting Cohn, dismissed Welch's comments and casually resumed his attack on Fisher, at which point Welch angrily cut him short:
“Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
Near the end of the sessions, McCarthy and Missouri Senator Stuart Symington sparred over the handling of secret files by McCarthy's staff. Everyone on McCarthy’s payroll, regardless of security clearance, had access to classified material. Symington hinted that some members of McCarthy's own staff might themselves be subversive. McCarthy took offense and they went back and forth, all of this televised and on radio and on the front page of newspapers. Symington ended his comments with a prophetic remark of his own: "Senator, the American people have had a look at you now for six weeks; you're not fooling anyone."
The results of the hearings were a muddle, sort of a tie between the Army and McCarthy for bad behavior. They both had messed up. Before the official reports were released, Cohn had resigned as McCarthy's chief counsel, and the Senate had introduced a resolution of censure against McCarthy.
The Army–McCarthy hearings ultimately became the main catalyst in McCarthy's downfall from political power. Daily newspaper summaries were increasingly unfavorable toward McCarthy, while television audiences witnessed firsthand the unethical tactics of the junior Senator from Wisconsin.
In Gallup polls from January 1954, McCarthy's approval rating was at 50%, with only 29% disapproving. By June, both percentages had shifted by 16%, with more people now rejecting McCarthy and his methods (34% approving, 45% disapproving).
On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67–22 to censure McCarthy, effectively eradicating his influence, though not expelling him from office.<sup> </sup> After his censuring, Senator McCarthy continued his anti-Communist oratory, often speaking to an empty or near-empty Senate chamber. Turning increasingly to alcohol, McCarthy was admitted to the hospital in April and died on May 2, 1957, at the age of 48. The official cause of death was hepatitis but the real cause of death was alcoholism and liver disease.
The Enablers
Tye identifies the people who let McCarthy continue his ramshackle investigations for four years without serious challenge.
— President Dwight Eisenhower had refused to criticize McCarthy despite his belief that the Senator was a fraud. But until 1954, McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade was very popular, and Ike didn’t want to use his political capital on someone who was self-destructing. Ike finally did go after him, but not until Joe had dug himself a pretty deep hole.
— Another set of enablers were the businessmen who gave unlimited money to McCarthy, which let him buy influence and pay off his extensive gambling debts.
— J Edgar Hoover supplied Joe with FBI files on investigation targets for many years, but he did turn on McCarthy at an opportune time.
— For years the press fawned over McCarthy and his investigations. They rarely did any fact checking, and even when things didn’t add up, they didn’t report on it.
— Joe McCarthy’s most important enablers were the American people who supported him until the Army hearings and censure showed him for who and what he really was - a demagogue.
Bob’s Take
Joe McCarthy certainly put on a good show. He dominated politics for four years, but there was a lot more smoke than fire at the end of his run.
The proceedings of the subcommittee were embargoed until a few years ago. After analysis, the consensus was that the information that Joe released from the hearings was radically at variance with what actually happened behind closed doors. The most definitive analysis used 5,000 pages of decoded Soviet intelligence reports to match the names of real Russian spies against the 159 people accused of spying. It turns out that 9 were probably spies, but 4 of them had been unmasked before McCarthy began his investigations. Some of his targets resigned from their positions after being embarrassed by the revelation that they had briefly belonged to a socialist/communist club in their youth (usually in college), but they weren’t spies. While Joe did come up with a few real spies, you could argue that there were much better ways to find them than through his circus-like and interminable committee investigations. Knowledgeable people estimated that 10,000 people lost their jobs because of the Red scare and that five to ten times more people quit in anticipation of being investigated.
This is a very long, excruciatingly detailed book. Some reviewers said that it seemed that Larry Tye had basically recorded all of his note cards in the text without synthesizing the elements to tighten the story. That’s a bit unfair, but I think that the book could have been a lot shorter. It’s a very long 600 pages or so, with small print. For me, an American history nut, it was certainly worth reading. I didn’t know much about how McCarthyism was created and how it worked. Now I do.
Donald Trump and Joe McCarthy
You can’t read about Joe McCarthy without thinking about comparisons to Donald Trump, a point Larry Tye makes but doesn't hammer. They do share certain characteristics and behaviors.
Using the media to advance their agenda.
– Joe McCarthy effectively utilized the press to get noticed and draw continuing attention and adulation. He schmoozed reporters, drank with them, and gave them inside scoops. They gave him great news coverage. It was a win-win.
– During his 2016 campaign, candidate Trump had his way with the news media. Trump could call up any TV station and be interviewed on the spot, which was totally against standing policy. His controversial statements were good for ratings, and being on TV frequently was good for his campaign.
– President Trump continues to dominate social and traditional media. He may be way out there with his tweets and press conference utterings, but reporters and commentators continue to cover him and give him lots of publicity.
Creating and growing your brand.
Senator Joe McCarthy was Everyman who was fighting the communist threat. He put his address and phone number in the phone book. He was tireless in his pursuits of communists in high places. He would tell it like it is, which often was inaccurate.
Trump was the non-politician and successful businessman who would drain the swamp and unleash the economy. He railed against the fake liberal media and would routinely demean his opponents and make fun of them. He was a reality TV brand.
Creating your own facts to make your case.
Joe McCarthy
— Made allegations of communist connections, even treasonous activities, that were unfounded. Had his staff write and backdate memos and minutes to support current claims.
— Accused targets of investigations of conspiring with communists they had never met.
— Exaggerated his wartime service. He claimed to have been on PT 109 with JFK and that he broke his ankle in a plane crash when he actually tripped and broke it. This was interesting because he did have a stellar war record.
Donald Trump
— Claimed that the largest crowd ever turned out for his 2017 inaugural. That was wrong.
— Said that there were millions of fraudulent ballots cast in 2016. There weren’t.
— Maintains that mail-in voting is subject to widespread fraud. There is no evidence of that.
— The pandemic is no big deal and will be over soon.
— The vaccine will be ready (Fill in date of choice here).
Final Thoughts
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” - Donald J. Trump“
Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would still go along with him.” - Pollster George Gallup speaking about Joe McCarthy’s supporters
It turns out that Mr. Gallup wasn’t right about Joe McCarthy’s support. The Army-McCarthy Hearings did him in. People saw what Joe was like, and they didn’t like what they saw, so he lost about one-third of his public support.
Donald Trump was right. His hard-core base has hovered around 40% no matter what he does. Any negative behavior or outrageous accusations he makes just don’t register.
Bob in the Basement has a theory. In the 1950’s, news came to us through a limited number of media outlets – a few TV networks, radio stations, and newspapers. You couldn’t search out and find your own brand of news; it was just the news. Sure, there was some bias, but not much.
Today you can choose your own news. If you love President Trump, you watch Fox News and visit Internet sites and follow social media that support the fact that he is the best president ever. If you can’t stand President Trump, you watch MSNBC and rely on Internet sites and follow social media that reinforce your belief that he is the worst president ever.
“And that’s the way it is,” said Walter Cronkite as he signed off CBS News each night. That’s too bad for us today. The country would be better off if citizens couldn’t cherry-pick their information sources to support their biases and beliefs, but we can.
