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Transcription: [00:24:45]
{SPEAKER name="Questioner-1"}
There were a lot of other people complicit with him; like, he wasn't just one individual.

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
No, what I was--right.

[00:24:51]
{SPEAKER name="Questioner-1"}
Where was the Attorney General? Where was the different arms of the state?

[00:24:54]
{SPEAKER name="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]
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]
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]
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]
to turn himself into a political figure with any continuing popular standard.

[00:25:46]
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]
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]
[[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]
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]
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]
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]
the sense-- his damaging comment about Dean Acheson is not so much that Dean Acheson is a communist,

[00:27:01]
but that Dean Acheson was a striped-pants, cookie-pusher from Harvard.

[00:27:05]
He was an ineffectual fancy-pants. There's an element there of, kind of, of homophobia as well.

[00:27:12]
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]
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]
His temperament brought him to power, brought him to prominence,

[00:27:35]
but he--it let him down. In the same way that he lied about his war record, he lied about communists.

[00:27:42]
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]
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]
they could not have done better than Joe McCarthy.

[00:28:03]
I mean the notion, in fact - if I was more imaginative it would make an excellent excellent thriller - that McCarthy,

[00:28:09]
unwittingly, is the greatest anti-,--pro-Soviet agent, because he discredits anti-communism.

[00:28:16]
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]
after 1954 there were all that many - I think the FBI caught most of them.

[00:28:33]
But nonetheless McCarthy and his excesses does more damage to what was a legitimate national security cause,

[00:28:39]
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]
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]
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]
I think that also the other thing: Whenever anybody says - and this is one of the benefits,

[00:29:10]
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]
--and figure out what exactly the emotional state of the people was.

[00:29:26]
And between 1945 and 1955, coming off a horrendous world war, just as America becomes

[00:29:34]
the dominant power in the world, to see that power threatened by what is clearly

[00:29:40]
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]
And it was on that tension that Joe McCarthy preyed.

[00:29:54]
And fortunately, his temperament let him down.
[00:29:58]

Transcription Notes:
General Georges Ernest Boulanger (France)