Face-to-Face: Joseph McCarthy portrait

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David C. Ward: Joe McCarthy was the manager of the New York Yankees in the 19--no, I'm kidding. [[laughter]]

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Um, there was a Joe McCarthy who managed the Yankees in the 1920s and was one of the most successful but we won't be dealing with him tonight. The other Joe McCarthy, Tail Gunner Joe, the devout, uh, anti-communist, um, senator from Wisconsin.

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I wanted to begin though, um, since we are in the newly rehung gallery -- and this question comes up a fair amount --

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and recently we've had a spate of criticism from, either politically or culturally-oriented, about who exactly gets into the Portrait Gallery.

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And originally when the Romans and the Greeks came up with the idea of a pantheon, the idea really was to have the heroes of the society enshrined as a mem--essentially both to memorialize them and to inspire other people, particularly the children of the other citizenry in those republics.

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Um, and that template continued into the 19th century with the founding of the British National Portrait Gallery, the first -- and still the greatest really -- um, portrait gallery in the world, where, it really was a gallery of heroes.

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And gradually as history became more scientific and we became more inclusive and more, um, in a sense self-critical about what it is that we did, um, we broadened the definition of who should get into a portrait gallery.

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In some senses we broadened it in a good way. Many of the people who get in now, uh, would not have gotten into a 19th century portrait gallery, which tended to be dominated by people who were involved in making the state: generals, presidents, prime ministers and so on.

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Um, we have a much more democratic and inclusive list of people who get in now.

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And the other thing that we do, um, and I'm gonna try and keep politics out of this as much as I can and treat Mr. McCarth--Senator McCarthy as an historian. We also have people whose reputations are at best conflicting or controversial.

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Um, and we even have bad guys. We have villains. Um, John Wilkes Booth is in our collection. Lee Harvey Oswald is in our collection.

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Um, we have people who are, um, traitors. We have people who have difficult reputations.

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And the criteria now is to have people who made a major sizeable impact on the history and culture of the United States.

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And it's hard to say that Joseph McCarthy was not somebody who did not -- down to this very day -- have an incredible, powerful impact on American politics and culture.

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Joe McCarthy, Appleton, Wisconsin, um, I've forgotten when he was born. Um, 1908.

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Um, had a lower middle class upbringing. He dropped out of high school very early, um, to raise chickens. And that didn't work for him and he went back to high school, finished it remarkably quickly when he was age 20, got through Marquette University in Wisconsin and Marquette Law School, um, in record time.

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It's a mistake for anybody who's an anti-McCarthyite to think that he wasn't an incredibly smart man. He was.

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Uh, as his law career proved. He was elected as a judge early on,

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um, developed a reputation for handing down really meticulous rulings which were rarely overturned. And in 1942, he makes the shrewd -- and also I'd have to give him credit for this -- he joins the Marine Corps, in part looking out for his subsequent political career, both as a judge and what he hopes to be an elected career.

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It's an interesting question with portraits about whether they reveal character and what the relationship is between character and success. Can bad people do good things? Can good people do bad things?

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Um, and it's a very tricky proposition as an historian to even try and address that question let alone answer it -- it's probably impossible.

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But McCarthy very early on in his career, in his life, starts to show character traits which are, at best, unpleasant and anti-social and then in the public sphere become actually damaging both to himself and others.

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He doesn't seem really capable of telling the truth. If he's involved in a political quarrel with someone, he develops very early on a tendency to smear them with a variety of factual errors. In his first race for judge he mischaracterizes his opponent.

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And that-- warning bells are not really caught on with people. It's seen as politics as usual. And he gets away with it.

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He is a charming man in many ways. He's a bit of a kind of overbearing alpha male of the certain type. He loved to play poker. He loved more than one drink at a time. Which, of course, would be his downfall.

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Um, but he begins to manifest this tendency of a certain lack of control, self-control, whether it's with the truth or with his own personal behavior.

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In the Marine Corps he serves honorably but he, inevitably, again having evidence as these tendencies towards exaggeration, when he comes out of the war he immediately starts to exaggerate his career.

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He comes back to Wisconsin in '46, uh, runs for the Senate against Bob La Follette of the famous La Follette progressive Wisconsin family.

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Uh, essentially maligns La Follette. McCarthy is a Republican, um, for actually no real reason -- originally he was a Democrat and he moves over to become a Republican, I think just because he thought it might be easier to get in office.

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He beats La Follette in a very hard-fought, closely-run campaign for the Senate seat, um,

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and then swamps his over-matched Democratic opponent and takes office in the Senate.

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He runs in large measure on being "Tail Gunner Joe". He was not a tail gunner. He was in the military wing of the Marine Corps and he was an intelligence officer who got himself some flights over occup-over enemy territory in Pacific.

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And he exaggerates this war record to the point where he seems to have won the war in the Pacific single-handedly.

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Um, exaggerates again the number and danger of the missions that he flew. Gets himself awarded, through persistent lobbying once he becomes a senator, the Distinguished Flying Cross from having flown 25 combat missions which he did not.

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He had trouble with numeracy early on: originally he flew 14 missions, then he flew 17, then he flew some 30 missions. And that lack of arithmetical ability would later mark his career as an anti-communist, as we'll see.

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He gets himself into the Senate where he becomes popular. He's very much a clubbable man in the Senate's clubhouse.

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He liked late-night poker games, he's affable, he'd get-along, go-along kind of guy.

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But very early on, he -- out of ambition, maybe perhaps for wealth, it's a little uncertain -- he makes himself very, much too openly, the instrument of the sugar lobby.

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He becomes known as the Senator for Pepsi-Cola because of his attempts to do away with sugar tariffs and sugar-restrictions on sugar in order to aid the soft drink industry, particularly Pepsi.

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And his really controversial move which gets him exiled from the powerful committees on which he is on, to the DC Public Works Committee,

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is that he defends the Germans who are brought to justice for killing American soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge at Malmedy.

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There was a--the, the Germans captured in the encirclement of Malmedy during the battle, they captured a great many American prisoners, in part due to subterfuge: they weren't dressed as German soldiers, which itself is an act of-- a violation of the Geneva Convention.

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They executed the Americans out of hand. And McCarthy, in a weird attempt, I think to gain votes among the German-Americans of Wisconsin, defends them. Well, this doesn't stand.

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After World War I, you could do that because Germany was considered really just another power. But after the revelations of Nazism, it's something that makes McCarthy ve--it's a miscalculation.

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But I think it also speaks more widely to McCarthy's right-wing sympathies, which we do have to address: the coming out of Wisconsin as a kind of isolationist, anti-elitist, um,

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and this strain of admiration that's buried in there for the German Wehrmacht or even the Nazis is something that I think needs to be at least considered in his subsequent role as a devout anti-Stalinist, anti-communist.

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McCarthy, though, gets shipped out to the D.C. Public Works Commission Committee, which I believe is probably the lowest-ranking, least-desirable committee. I'm sorry to tell you District residents that, but Congress doesn't really care about you. And that committee has very little power.

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McCarthy looks for a way -- this is towards the end of his term -- he's looking for a way to revive his flagging career.

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And in 1950, he hits upon the notion of an anti-communist crusade.

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1945 to 1950, as you'll remember or at least will recollect, is a period of incredible chaos ideologically as our former ally, the Soviet Union, becomes in effect our enemy with the end of the Second World--the defeat of fascist Germany.

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Again, this kind of, this kind of changing sides element -- we'll remember that the war began with the Nazis and Stalin making a pact which subsequently gets broken -- the ideological shifts really become bewildering.

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Um, the Soviet Union under Stalin is not quite as interested in world-wide revolution as it once had been, but what they are interested in is furthering the

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military-industrial complex and the great power status of the Soviet Union.

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They had an extensive, very good spy network -- both in England, on the continent, and in the United States.

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They were very efficient, they were very effective. And they had the advantage of what came to be known, somewhat pejoratively as 'fellow travelers', which could range from people who were well-meaning socialists who bought the idea that,

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well, who legitimately bought the idea that through socialism you could have an alternative to the brutalities of capitalism,

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all the way to people who were out-and-out members of the Communist Party of the United States,

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and thereby, because of the Soviet domination of the Comintern, effectively ideological, if not actual agents of the Soviet state government.

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And the Soviets, both in Britain, in particular with the atomic--the 'Cambridge spies' -- and then in the United States with committed leftists,

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like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, the panoply of other 'atomic spies', um, is able to very effectively infiltrate a variety of forms of the American government.

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Now, this is where this all gets very controversial and complicated because on--in February of 1950, McCarthy, his career's flagging, makes a speech before the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and claims that he has a list in his hand of 205 active communist agents who are working for the State Department.

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A statement--going back to his problems with numeracy--which is certainly not true, which was derived from the fact that some 300 people had been investigated,

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um, 75 had been dismissed for a variety of disciplinary reasons not including the fact that they were members of the Communist Party.

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So McCarthy comes up with the 205 figure based on the 75 who'd been dismissed.

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The problem with all of this is the next time he gave the speech, it was 57 people, then it was 72, then it was 140, and then of course it was a conspiracy so immense that you could barely begin to fathom it, which required the inform--the intervention of Congress.

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The ironic thing about this, in terms of McCarthy's career and his relationship with the other great anti-communist of the period, Richard Nixon, is that McCarthy in his Wheeling, West Virginia speech,

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plagiarized Richard Nixon's speech from the previous year in 1949 when Nixon ran for Congress about the influence of communists in the government.

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Um, which again shows a nice sense of judgement on Joe McCarthy's part.

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Um, the thing about all of this, and it's become controversial throughout the ages, is there actually were communist spies in the American government.

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There's--and, and we're dealing with a period of ideological and, and, and, and cultural conflict which was, in effect, a substitution of war by other means,

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because there was very much the fear that the United States was going to go to war.

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The Soviet Union detonated its atomic bomb in 1949, which shook the United States, which had no spy presence really in the Soviet Union at all, uh, it took us totally by surprise.

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In 1953, they detonated a hydrogen bomb, which caused even further panic.

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Um, there are great power oppositions throughout the continent, most notably over Berlin and in Germany.

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And there was really an issue of not just ideological, but the sense that in some ways World War II would continue, uh, with a beaten Germany in the middle and the United States effectively, um, duking it out with the Soviet Union in an increasingly desolated middle Europe.

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Um, the problem was, the methods by which one went about rooting out or discovering, um, these spies, and also distinguishing people who had, under the Constitution, protection to believe what they want.

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It was illegal to be a member of the Communist Party USA, um, and, but up to that point, exactly how did you determine what was and what wasn't a subversive.

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And this is where McCarthy really begins to, um, A) become popular, and B) become controversial, as he exists down to the present day.

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He holds a series of hearings, um, he, he, because he's--one of the committees he's sitting on is dealing with government operations, he very craftily uses that to investigate who is working for the government.

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He makes charges against the Army that there's a, that in the Monmouth, New Jersey military base, there are 45 active communists.

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That panics the Army and, instead of actually doing a fair and legitimate investigation of what might well have been subversive activity, instead they peremptorily fire 45, um, uh, soldiers in Monmouth, New Jersey.

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Um, McCarthy, because of the per--because essentially there's a period, I won't say it's hysteric because I don't think you should ever characterize public opinion as hysterical or panic,

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but because of this period of heightened concern and sensitivity in which the American people seem to be, um,

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willing to sacrifice civil liberties on the altar of national defense, McCarthy becomes very popular.

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Um, it-it-it's a, it, he is the most extreme of the congressman or senators or public figures who are arguing for the communist threat.

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Um, many, in fact many, including people that we would call liberals, like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., um, later an ally of the Kennedy family, uh,

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are making roughly the same point. It's a legitimate question, of what the role the Soviet Union is in influencing American politics.

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McCarthy, though, goes much further than this and whips up an hysteria in which, if you subscribe to certain newspapers, if you bought certain books,

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Um, in one famous case, he has the Army intimidated into investigating somebody who still retains an allegiance to a man who turned out to be his brother who once attended a socialist rally in Madison Square Garden.

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Well, that's really stretching the point from Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who we now know were actually spying, who were transferring secret or classified information to the Soviet Union,

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and people who were just exercising their right to free speech, their right to free inquiry, and all the rest.

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McCarthy, though, rampages through the federal government, making charges which he can't support.

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The judge--McCarthy has had a bit of a comeback in recent years as the right wing has tried to rehabilitate him and the effectiveness by essentially what I'm saying, which is that there were communists and there were spies, ergo McCarthy was validated in what he did and how he did it.

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My argument to that would be that the FBI and the other police, uh, agencies of the United States was doing a perfectly effective job finding the spies who had worked at Tennessee, the Rosenbergs, and all the rest of it, David Greenglass.

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They were doing a much better job than the British were, for instance, who managed to leave everybody in place well into the 1960s, and in the case of Winfred Blunt into his rise to become the Queen's art curator.

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Uh, so what I would argue is that, in fact, Joseph McCarthy should not really be considered in any way, shape, and form as an effective agent against communism or against the Soviet Union because none of his charges ever stuck.

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He was never able to bring anybody to brook as a communist, he was never able to uncover a spy ring.

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He made charges in large measure because he liked the applause, and one of his big mistakes was: In 1953 he goes after the U.S. Army.

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The Army at this point had begun to recover, slightly, from its panic state early on.

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He makes a series of wild charges as he investigates army bases, USIA libraries, and a variety of things.

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And, here again, you're dealing with an ego that's out of control.

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I go back to the sense of--in which a character becomes destiny in a way that he's unable to control

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his lust for power and the extent to which when he talked, when he started off with something that might be plausible, he quickly got out of control.

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He browbeat generals who had distinguished combat records. And it wasn't just that he criticized them, but he broke them down.

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Um, he-he-he, he insulted them in vicious, vile, and personal terms, and it becomes more than just an element of public policy in which you're trying to to make the government run smoothly.

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And-and in this, there's a variety--it's easy enough now, 50 years, 60 years later to look at this in somewhat comic terms. There's a-there's a fantastic exchange where he investigated the libraries of the United States Information Agency overseas,

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and he would inquire of either the librarians themselves, these poor bureaucrats who were working in Berlin buying books,

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or the head of the USIA: why are you buying these books?. And then he would have the authors in,

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and he asked, in one famous exchange, he asked a mystery writer, you know, "Why is it that the USIA has bought 385 copies of your book worldwide?"

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And Hammett goes, "Well, first of all, I didn't buy it, and second of all, they must be good books!"

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But that doesn't spare Dashiell Hammett, who was a member of the Communist Party and refused to answer grand jury testimony, as was his constitutional right, from going, um,

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going to jail. And that, of course, is the problem, is that in McCarthy's, um,

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David C. Ward: pursuit of the communists that he thought were existing, he manages to violate the - what I would take to be - the civil liberties of many of the people that he pursued using the IRS and the tax investigative

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power of the United States and just the simple crushing burden of being a private citizen and having to hire a lawyer and ultimately in the case of him and in many others, having to go to jail.

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And it really becomes a question with Americans about how far you will go in allowing, um,

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personal liberties to be sacrificed for national security interests. And I would argue that, um,

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in maintaining that balance, um, that McCarthy went too far, and that in a way, that you know, he becomes the tyrant in a way that we are supposed to be fighting against.

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Um, this great picture is done in 1954 at the Army-McCarthy hearings, and I'll return;

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portraits - you know, the standard way that we do portraits is, the oil portraits that you see here of Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe, they're the most highly established, iconic pictures that we do when we celebrate an individual.

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But we've got - in the same way that we've democratized the collection - we are also more interested in other ways of portraying individuals. And this of c-this is a news photo, in fact,

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by George Tames whose photographs McCarthy, in his familiar role of questioning a witness at the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 in which the Army-which,

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which Congress sets up, in effect, to investigate McCarthy, turns the tables on him, reveals him. It's one of the first great moments, by the way, in television,

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where television becomes the cultural force as we now know it to be. In fact it was more of a cultural force then because it was rarer. It wasn't as ubiquitous. These days, everything's on television so it kinda loses its impact.

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But back then it was on television and it was a sensation. And when the people saw it - you know, in the brief career of McCarthy from '50 to '54, they decided they really didn't like what they saw. And as McCarthy browbeat witnesses, and, and

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and, and hectored them, kept them from answering, badgered them, badgered indiscriminately, it really became something that-when I was a student I didn't quite understand the McCarthy hearings because they didn't

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have anything at all to do with Communism or Stalinism, they just seemed to be people dealing with somebody who was out of control. And the climactic moment of that is the defense counsel, Mr. Welch, saying to-and you can see it in the, in the,

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in the newsreel footage of, you know, "Senator, have you no shame?" You know, he-- browbeating a poor young witness, you know, an associate in the law firm, a man who was just doing his constitutional job as a lawyer.

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And McCar-that is the moment in which the tide breaks for McCarthy. This brief period in which he's able to ride the wave of this publicity and genuine national opinion against

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against state-Soviet state intrusion into American politics, the Cold War beginning, and all the rest of it. That they realized that this was not how to go.

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And he s-within short order - he had always raised a certain amount of distrust, for one thing - he was seen as a kind of a primitive, an outsider; he was seen as a willing instrument. He never really recognized that. It's kind of pathetic.

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Eisenhower and the-and Bob Taft and the Republican hierarchy tolerated him as an election go-you know, an election issue, you know, as someone who could get out the vote, who could throw red meat to the mass, or the base, as we would now call it.

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But they never really liked him and McCarthy didn't do much to make himself liked.

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And they were very quick to turn on him. And he's censured in 1954 and he dies soon thereafter, essentially, he drank himself to death in a very close order.

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He disappeared as suddenly as he arrived, politically, but he lives on in the concept of 'McCarthyism' - there are very few people who have an 'ism' named after them (even Hitler didn't get to be an 'ism', it was Nazism.)

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But there is 'McCarthyism', a term coined by Herb Block, the Washington Post cartoonist, whose exhibition is on the second floor and there's some nice cartoons of the McCarthy era down there.

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And he lives-'McCarthyism' lives on - and I was reading in the papers today or just talking to people about - in the current political comment about- which-climate, about which I will not comment,

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about unsubstantiated slurs - that the-the censorship, on the basis of who or what you are assumed to be, rather than what it is you actually said.

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And I actually would ask for a return to the original meaning of 'McCarthyism', because I think in some senses the word has become denatured. It's too ubiquitous. It's too easy. If you're in a political meeting, as I s-unfortunately sometimes am,

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it's too easy to assume anybody who criticizes you or keeps you from talking is that "that's McCarthyism", as opposed to just smearing me. I mean it's like, you can smear me, but don't call me a 'McCarthyite'.

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Because what I think 'McCarthyism' demonstrated is the abuse of the power of the government. And I think that needs to be kept distinct from somebody just shooting off their mouth or somebody being nasty or somebody being mean.

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And I really think that the crucial issue of 'McCarthyism', which I don't think we've totally assimilated, is the fact that the--

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is the state has the obligation to behave better than its citizens do.

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And the state has the value and the right of upholding the values that-that, that we most cherish.

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And it's the state that should always be most careful in the charges that it renders against its people.

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And to that extent, I would like to return to the actual meaning of 'McCarthyism', which was the use of government power,

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ostensibly to maintain the values of the state, but in fact to subvert it, and in effect to bring it into threat. Thank you. [[applause]]

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Questioner-1: There were a lot of other people complicit with him; like, he wasn't just one individual.
David C. Ward: No, what I was--right.

00:24:51.000 --> 00:24:54.000
Questioner-1: Where was the Attorney General? Where was the different arms of the state?

00:24:54.000 --> 00:25:06.000
David C. Ward: No, I th-that's the interesting point, is, McCarthy was tremendously powerful, both-popular, both, publicly - I mean, he wins re-election in a landslide. He has public opinion with him.

00:25:06.000 --> 00:25:16.000
And it's-it's very interesting sea change, um, where he goes from being very influential with a lot of backers, but he just simply goes too far.

00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:25.000
To that extent, the much greater politician, Richard Nixon, is able to carefully calibrate exactly what and where, what you should do, how far you can go.

00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:41.000
McCarthy - and I'll go back to my unsubstantiated view of him just being simply an erratic character, uh, and you know, the sense of personality or character will be revealed by the way that you behave - is that he just lacks the discipline to keep-

00:25:41.000 --> 00:25:46.000
to turn himself into a political figure with any continuing popular standard.

00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:58.000
I mean, there are threats at the time - the left do see him, not maybe as a little Hitler, but they do see him as, perhaps, you know, kind of a Mussolini-like character with the potential for a mass following.

00:25:58.000 --> 00:26:04.000
But he simply temperamentally can't do it. He's tremendously disorganized. He dr-he drinks all-he is, he's very--

00:26:04.000 --> 00:26:14.000
[[addressing one of the audience]] Sir, could you just-- you're making me a little nervous. Could you s-- Could you step a little-- Thanks! Yeah, you were kind of moving that way! Um, thanks.

00:26:14.000 --> 00:26:25.000
But unlike, say, 19th century Europe with, you know, the 'strong man', the man, the general, the Boulangers in France and all the rest of it, he's never able to command a mass following.

00:26:25.000 --> 00:26:37.000
But he does - and this is where it's very important to take him seriously - he does articulate a strong strain of militant anti-communism, anti-Soviet

00:26:37.000 --> 00:26:53.000
feeling, which gets transferred, as well, into a very, almost knee-jerk, pro-Americanism and a distrust for elites, of elites, which we see - and I'll, I will just say it - we see in certain strands in-in the radical right in the Republican party today;

00:26:53.000 --> 00:27:01.000
the sense-- his damaging comment about Dean Acheson is not so much that Dean Acheson is a communist,

00:27:01.000 --> 00:27:05.000
but that Dean Acheson was a striped-pants, cookie-pusher from Harvard.

00:27:05.000 --> 00:27:12.000
He was an ineffectual fancy-pants. There's an element there of, kind of, of homophobia as well.

00:27:12.000 --> 00:27:22.000
But the point really was that these are the smart guys who have sold honest Americans out, you know, for their own ideological enjoyment.

00:27:22.000 --> 00:27:32.000
And what kept McCarthy - to repeat myself - what kept him from having a mass following, as opposed to a brief period of incredible influence, was his temperament.

00:27:32.000 --> 00:27:35.000
His temperament brought him to power, brought him to prominence,

00:27:35.000 --> 00:27:42.000
but he--it let him down. In the same way that he lied about his war record, he lied about communists.

00:27:42.000 --> 00:27:52.000
And the curious counter-factual is - in the attempt by the radical right and the Republican party today to bring him--to rehabilitate him -

00:27:52.000 --> 00:28:00.000
if the Soviet Union could have planted a double agent who would do more damage to the anti-communist cause in America,

00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:03.000
they could not have done better than Joe McCarthy.

00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:09.000
I mean the notion, in fact - if I was more imaginative it would make an excellent excellent thriller - that McCarthy,

00:28:09.000 --> 00:28:16.000
unwittingly, is the greatest anti-,--pro-Soviet agent, because he discredits anti-communism.

00:28:16.000 --> 00:28:29.000
It becomes very difficult to pursue as-- the actual spies - however many they were, and I'm not sure they were-they w--

00:28:29.000 --> 00:28:33.000
after 1954 there were all that many - I think the FBI caught most of them.

00:28:33.000 --> 00:28:39.000
But nonetheless McCarthy and his excesses does more damage to what was a legitimate national security cause,

00:28:39.000 --> 00:28:48.000
than the people who were the members of the Socialist Party or the Hollywood Ten, or the people who, you know, attended or even were members of the Communist Party.

00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:59.000
And so, if in some future unveiling of the Soviet archive we see that the Soviet Union had an agent in place in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1932,

00:28:59.000 --> 00:29:05.000
I would be very interested to hear about that. I'm being far-fetched, but nonetheless I think it's an interesting point.

00:29:05.000 --> 00:29:10.000
I think that also the other thing: Whenever anybody says - and this is one of the benefits,

00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:23.000
one of the supposed benefits of history, that you compare your time with other times - I think it's very difficult emotionally, as opposed to factually, to look back at a particular period of time and--and--

00:29:23.000 --> 00:29:26.000
--and figure out what exactly the emotional state of the people was.

00:29:26.000 --> 00:29:34.000
And between 1945 and 1955, coming off a horrendous world war, just as America becomes

00:29:34.000 --> 00:29:40.000
the dominant power in the world, to see that power threatened by what is clearly

00:29:40.000 --> 00:29:51.000
and overtly a major power which is ideologically, as well as politically, opposed to you, causes a degree of tension in the people that we need to understand and not dismiss.

00:29:51.000 --> 00:29:54.000
And it was on that tension that Joe McCarthy preyed.

00:29:54.000 --> 00:29:58.270
And fortunately, his temperament let him down.

00:30:01.000 --> 00:30:04.000
David C. Ward: Yeah. [[inaudible cross talk]] Yeah. No, I mean the--

00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:13.000
David C. Ward: No the whole--and particularly after the atomic bomb with the notion of the atom-the dropping of the bombs in--in Japan and then the explosion of the Soviet bombs,

00:30:13.000 --> 00:30:15.000
David C. Ward: there really is the sense of total annihilation here.

00:30:15.000 --> 00:30:23.000
David C. Ward: And the fact that the Soviets had concentrated most of their spying energy on the atomic program, um,

00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:32.000
David C. Ward: is a cause of greatest concern. And as we've learned recently, despite the denials, the Rosenbergs and Sobell, and the others were, in fact, Soviet agents.

00:30:32.000 --> 00:30:41.000
David C. Ward: I mean it was denied for years and years but Alger Hiss was, you know, at least a second tier Soviet spy.

00:30:41.000 --> 00:30:47.000
David C. Ward: And he's you know, high up in the state department. There was a real problem.

00:30:47.000 --> 00:30:56.000
David C. Ward: How you solve that problem--it's like the 19th century radicals who were accused of burning down the barn in order to kill the rats.

00:30:56.000 --> 00:30:59.000
David C. Ward: and it's, it's a matter of how far you go with this.

00:30:59.000 --> 00:31:01.000
David C. Ward: Again?

00:31:01.000 --> 00:31:10.000
Questioner-2: ...these accusations and criticizing military [[?]] with Spanish backgrounds, what was their reaction to senior fellow senators to--?

00:31:10.000 --> 00:31:13.000
David C. Ward: They gradually began to realize quickly that they'd gone too far.

00:31:13.000 --> 00:31:19.000
David C. Ward: I think there was the fond hope by people, like Eisenhower and Taft, that they could control him.

00:31:19.000 --> 00:31:24.000
David C. Ward: And, again, we're dealing with a very short period of time, four and a half years, so,

00:31:24.000 --> 00:31:27.000
David C. Ward: so, to say that they didn't react quickly, I think is true enough,

00:31:27.000 --> 00:31:34.000
David C. Ward: but I think that people like Taft, who was an isolationist from Ohio, a fervent philosophical anti-communist, uh,

00:31:34.000 --> 00:31:40.000
David C. Ward: there was a notion that they could use him, he would get, as I say, get out the vote,

00:31:40.000 --> 00:31:45.000
David C. Ward: and that he would animate their cause, that he would make it apparent to the American people that we were under danger.

00:31:45.000 --> 00:31:58.000
David C. Ward: ICBMs, rockets are being tested, there's the beginning of the kind of Cold-War paranoia, that we could all g---it wasn't really paranoia, but the element of uncertainty and,

00:31:58.000 --> 00:32:04.000
David C. Ward: they thought they could control him. I don't think anybody really liked him. They recognized him as a force of nature.

00:32:04.000 --> 00:32:09.000
David C. Ward: Eisenhower, when he was urged, once he became President, to take on McCarthy personally,

00:32:09.000 --> 00:32:18.000
David C. Ward: he, first of all, Eisenhower was not gonna have a President go after a Senator; there's an element inequality there in terms of, just, almost political propriety.

00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:22.000
David C. Ward: But he literally said: "I am not gonna get into the gutter with him."

00:32:22.000 --> 00:32:33.000
David C. Ward: I mean, for a man, a senator, who'd attacked, as he just said, George C. Marshall, probably the greatest--the greatest, gen--one of the two greatest generals of the late--of the--in American history.

00:32:33.000 --> 00:32:41.000
David C. Ward: If he would attack Marshall for being pro-communist; I mean, Eisenhower, would have been, you know, he would have turned his guns on him.

00:32:41.000 --> 00:32:47.000
David C. Ward: The wildness of these attacks first attracted and then also repelled the people who benefited from him.

00:32:47.000 --> 00:33:02.000
David C. Ward: And gradually they distanced him and he loses his censure vote decisively, it's like 75/25 (those aren't the numbers) but he loses; he has a very small rump of support among very conservative Republicans

00:33:02.000 --> 00:33:07.000
David C. Ward: and as I said to the previous--the answer to the previous--the gentleman's previous question,

00:33:07.000 --> 00:33:14.000
David C. Ward: he just never--the--he never transferred it into an organization. I mean, he's a rogue.

00:33:14.000 --> 00:33:27.000
David C. Ward: He's useful for the Republican party and conservative Democrats for a little while, but he leaves nothing behind him and it's--it's a really amazing episode in American history.