We usually get
no details on what was unsubstantiated nor do we even get a good look at what
was said to be demagoguery some 66 years ago. Is it surprising in today's
media?
Communist espionage
deniers should know better. The biggest problem is that people simply don’t read or care to read
the latest revelations. The debatable behavior of McCarthy does not negate the
damage done to our country by thousands of Soviet agents of influence at work
since the Tsarist overthrow. Keeping alive the McCarthy bogeyman conveniently
diverts attention from that.
When the Left
in Foggy Bottom during Roosevelt -Truman was purging anti-Soviet diplomats and
security specialists, dissolving our military intelligence libraries,
sanitizing personnel records, lying to the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, supporting the
Communist takeovers, was there any concern from the Left about careers ruined
and the millions overseas killed or enslaved?
McCarthy never
said in his Wheeling WV speech there were 207 Communists in the State Department. This has been
debunked many times. No person present at the actual speech ever confirmed it
and McCarthy put the number at 57.
Over and over,
we get this battle cry: Army attorney Joseph Welch's question to McCarthy,
"have you no sense of decency?" Perhaps it wasn't a good move by
McCarthy to have brought up at Army-McCarthy hearings the subject of
Welch's associate Fred Fisher having been a past member of the communist-front
National Lawyers Guild. Yet it was Welch himself
earlier in the April 15, 1954 New York Times who first outed Fisher. That fact wouldn't interest today's Trump-McCarthy attackers.
According to
the late M. Stanton Evans in his "Blacklisted by
History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his Fight Against
America's Enemies," McCarthy was
correct in his accusations of Communist subversion all the way up to the White House.
This was documented by way of the Army's ultra-secret
project Venona decrypts of Russian cable traffic, J. Edgar Hoover and other federal investigators, everyday
whistleblowers, a brief opening of the KGB archives, Russian defectors.
People came to McCarthy and his committee, not the other way around. Government secrecy had
kept a lid on the true story, warping our national history.
McCarthy, a
former judge with a near-photographic memory, a keen poker player, was liked by
commoners as well as the Kennedys. He smeared no one. When liberal
Democrats attacked him, he fought back. He was feared all right in Washington,
D.C.; many a Democrat scalp dangled from his campaign belt.
It was no
exaggeration that we gave Eastern Europe to Stalin and China to Mao. The devil
is in the details.
President Eisenhower especially hated McCarthy for blasting
his friend George Marshall for Marshall's subversive role in the Pearl Harbor sneak attack, Yalta, Operation Keelhaul, and of course the Marshall Mission to China which sandbagged nationalist Chiang Kai Shek while building up Chou En Lai and Mao Tse Tung -- leading to the horrors of Korea resulting in 37,000 American dead.
And like Truman before him, Eisenhower during the time of the
Army investigations would invoke executive privilege to stymie McCarthy's
inquiry.
Finally Eisenhower did in
McCarthy, sending Vice President Richard Nixon to the Senate rounding up censor votes for the kangaroo court. Renowned defense
attorney Edward Bennett Williams knocked down every charge except "conduct
unbecoming a senator" – in other words, abusing Democrats. Williams
pointed out that some senators had done far worse in general, and in particular
to McCarthy. To no avail.
