When Even Angels Wept: The Senator Joseph McCarthy Affair--A Story Without a Hero

by Lately Thomas

In the twenty-three years since the late Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy of Wisconsin made his celebrated speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, and thus set off a train of detonations that reverberated through the next four years, torrents of words have flowed around the subject. Yet, with a few meager exceptions, everything that has been written and said about it has been partisan in spirit and contentious in purpose, or speculative.

In view of the intense bitterness characterizing the schism which Senator McCarthy created and came to symbolize, this is not surprising. The principles involved were profound and the stakes at issue enormous - nothing less than direction of the policies of the world's most powerful government during a period of harsh international jealousies and constantly threatening war.

But now, at least, the grandiose episode can be seen in fascinating authenticity and in proper perspective through this triumphantly objective reappraisal of its interlocking aspects. The author's aim has been to present the drama in a manner sympathetic to both sides and all parties, without necessarily adhering to the conclusions of any; to submit only the recorded facts; and without either accusing or defending, to recount the actions and the verbatim statements of the participants.

The drama - certainly unsurpassed in our time - moves through every mood as it unfolds day by day, weaving a pattern of all-too-human motivations and behavior, a tangled farce-comedy-tragedy. Whether the scene is Owen Lattimore's appearance before the Tydings Committee or the climactic sequence of the Army hearings, which fascinated an audience of millions caught up in their fury and clamor, Senator McCarthy remains the pivot of the action, and in the end even achieves a sort of sleazy grandeur. Yet he is only one in the cluster of vivid personalities. Here also Cohn and Schine, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, Senator Symington and Counsel Joseph P. Welch are on stage, speaking their own words as scrupulously recorded.

654 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been feeling lately, maybe for about a year now, that I should study up on the McCarthy era. There's nothing really specific that's been happening in U.S. politics that gives me this feeling, it's just something kind of vague and amorphous. An ill wind, citrusy in hue, but nothing really specific. This particular 1973 book was mentioned by Roger Morris in his Nixon biography.

Lately Thomas (a pseudonym, but for what, who knows) doesn't give a lot of historical context for the story of this hairy cheesehead. The Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss are mentioned a bit, the House Un-American Activities Committee gets maybe one sentence, and the Cold War is not really touched on. The fact that Roy Cohn, McCarthy's acolyte, had prosecuted the Rosenbergs was passed over so quickly I apparently forgot it, and learned it as if for the first time from Cohn's wikipedia page.

McCarthy's interest in Communism came about by chance, according to Thomas. He had been a Wisconsin chicken farmer, gone to law school, become a judge, and asked for a commission in the Marines in order to enhance his political profile. He campaigned hard, won a Senate seat, and in 1950 sat down with three friends in search of an issue that he could use to win reelection in 1952. After such duds as the St. Lawrence Seaway and pension plans that would pay $100 a month were rejected, a Reverend and dean at Georgetown University suggested Communist subversion. McCarthy liked the idea and it was off to the races.

McCarthy gained immediate national attention with a speech in West Virginia at which he waved a piece of paper that he claimed contained the names of a large number of known Communists working in the State Department. A subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee was given jurisdiction to investigate "persons who are disloyal to the United States or have been employed by the Department of State". McCarthy was one of the minority Republicans on the subcommittee.

McCarthy couldn't get any of the charges he leveled against State Department employees to stick, but his public profile was raised immensely. His opponents, both Democrats and in the press, "thought that the very vulgarity of his language would discredit him with the public; unfortunately for them, Joe's "straight talk," as his supporters construed his stinging phrases, served to build him up."

Never profound and completely unoriginal (from start to finish of his career he would use the same hackneyed phrases lifted from others, and the same dog-eared appeals), he was constantly effective in dramatizing the lurking thoughts and tumultuous emotions of his listeners, pro and con; and this by none of the usual artifices of the rabble-rouser, for he had no oratorical power, but by his gift for infusing the commonplace words with a sense of drama - the drama of hyperbole, boldness, conflict.

McCarthy can be credited with turning "Democrat" into an adjective in order to give it a pejorative meaning, a practice that continues today among the rightwing press, politicians, and (most likely ignorant of its origins) the internet commentariat. Sample from Joe: "The subcommittee will continue to function whether or not it has any Democrat members." The proper adjective is Democratic, just as the proper adjective is Republican rather than Republic, but McCarthy wanted to avoid bestowing any positive connotations associated with small-d "democratic."

This is not a biography, so while we are told that fellow-Catholic and anti-Communist Joseph P. Kennedy was a big financial backer of McCarthy, and JFK a friend, Thomas remains mum on the fact that McCarthy dated two Kennedy daughters. (When the Senate finally censured McCarthy in 1954, JFK was the only Democrat who did not vote, or make his opinion known. Some (writes Thomas) thought it a convenient coincidence that JFK was in a New York hospital at the moment that the censure vote was taken.)

When Eisenhower won in 1952 the Republicans took Congress and McCarthy was given the chair of the Committee on Government Operations. This was considered a minor committee; Republicans thought they could control McCarthy's worst excesses by shunting him off to this remote outpost. (This should sound familiar to you. Think of a certain Austrian.) But a subcommittee thereof, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, turned out to be just the platform McCarthy needed to launch many more....investigations. He proceeded to fix his gimlet eye on the Voice of America (and authors like Howard Fast whose works were read there). Cohn went to Europe to remove leftist books from State Department library shelves. In 1953, McCarthy began to investigate the Army in the famous Army-McCarthy hearings, which were televised and watched avidly by millions of Americans. His mudslinging and bullying style (e.g., rude nicknames publicly used, such as "Sanctimonious Stu" for Democratic senator Stuart Symington), and his constant interruptions for "a point of order," which had originally won him fans, began to wear thin and slowly the tide turned against him. After the hearings ended in a draw, with neither the Army nor its accusers looking particularly good, a fellow Republican senator recommended that McCarthy be censured for a variety of misdeeds, including abuse of Army General Ralph Zwicker over the honorable discharge of an Army dentist (McCarthy had accused Zwicker of hemming and hawing, badgered him, asserted he didn't have the brains of a five year old child, should be removed from his command, and wasn't fit to wear the uniform) and calling the senators investigating him a "lynch bee" and "unwitting handmaidens" and "attorneys-in-fact" of the Communist party.

McCarthy's health had never been good, and once he had been humiliated in the Senate and the TV cameras turned away from him, his drinking got heavier. He died at the ripe young age of 48, of acute hepatitis and liver failure, leaving behind a much younger wife and a newly adopted baby daughter.

Unconvincingly, Thomas frames McCarthy's story as one of a pirate, a buccaneer, a raider, a corsair. Most of us have passed moral judgment on him, but Thomas argues that since "one cannot pass valid moral judgments upon pirates" because their actions are outside conventional morality, neither can we on McCarthy. "...he is impervious to our moral sanctions...because in him we dimly sense certain latent atavisms deeply buried in our own natures."