Customer Reviews

The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

When I first got this book, I was anticipating a narrative that would draw parallels between the McCarthy era and post 9/11 America. On the cover, a quote from the Denver Post suggested that the manipulative tactics used by McCarthy were similar to those used by the current Bush administration. The four pictures on the cover showed a portrait of Senator McCarthy, the infamous picture of smoke bellowing from the Twin Towers, President George W. Bush, and a soldier (possibly Middle Eastern) aiming a shoulder-mounted launcher. I was anticipating an analytical discourse.

The first dozen pages (in sections titled "Preface to the Paperback Edition," "To the Reader" and "Prologue") touched on fears of terrorism, leaks of classified information, U.S. invasion of Iraq, and our civil rights. These sections however did not draw strong parallels between McCarthyism and contemporary America. The analysis I was craving was probably in the main chapters--why start the comparison in the introductory chapters that most readers skip?

The next twenty-two chapters (almost four hundred and sixty pages) focused entirely on McCarthyism--its rise, its hey-day, and its decline. The next two chapters (chapters twenty-three and twenty-four) focused on post 9/11 America but the narrative did not link contemporary times with the McCarthy era--at least not convincingly. In the "Epilogue" and "Afterword" no serious attempt was made at comparing post 9/11 America with the McCarthy era.

While the book did not meet my expectations, Johnson should be given credit for a readable and through presentation of the McCarthy era. We probably are too close to post 9/11 America to realize its full historical impact. Johnson urges us to examine the possible consequences of our government's actions-- some of which we are already experiencing. He encourages us to question if these actions are compatible with our ideals of civil liberties. He also outlines some of his recommendations on actions the government should take to balance our liberties vis-a-vie terrorism.

Whether we agree with Johnson is immaterial, what is important is that he encourages us to re-examine our ideals specifically those of freedom and individuality.

Armchair Interviews says: A good book on McCarthyism

On the evening of December 2, 1954 I sat in the gallery as the Senate, by sixty-seven to twenty-two, voted to "condemn" (commonly known as the "censure" vote) Senator Joseph McCarthy for conduct "contrary to Senate tradition." I was an intern in the early years of a long career with a federal agency. I felt fortunate to be there. As an idealistic WW II combat veteran studying under the GI Bill of Rights, I had joined a new liberal-left veterans organization, the American Veterans Committee (AVC), with the idealistic slogan, Citizens First, Veterans Second. Due to the antics of McCarthy and others, the "loyalty" of anyone connected with it was suspect and I had been the President of my university chapter. I went through an eerie loyalty interview and a "full-field background investigation" under an executive order promulgated by President Truman at the height of the communist scare which McCarthy had a big role in producing. That I was finally "cleared" for a government job is a tribute to the fairness with which the loyalty program was administered, at least in my case, although others were not so fortunate.

So, this book was nostalgic and I also learned much about the McCarthy era that I never knew or had forgotten. It is primarily a historical tracing of McCarthy's communists in government charges and the Senate hearing which finally brought him down. Particularly compelling is Johnson's account of the political fear of national leaders, including Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, to counter him publicly even though they understood the danger he posed to traditional American values.

The tie-in to the present anxieties are more tenuous. Haynes Johnson lays these out, from his perspective, primarily in the last seventy pages although a few links are sprinkled elsewhere. I found myself wishing for more penetrating analysis. I am as troubled by some aspects of current security policy as the more strident voices who rail against it. And yet, I wonder: Are our anxieties and fears much like the McCarthyism of the past? Or are we confronting new, different, and more subtle threats to American liberty? The brilliant and incisive treatise of McCarthyism that the book provides requires historical perspective and would not have been possible at the time. Nevertheless, the Senate, auspiciously and not without controversy, took action even within the prevailing climate of political fear. Let us hope for a similar response, in whatever form it may take, to the present dangers.

Finally, while I have always disagreed vehemently with everything McCarthy stood for, I confess a certain sympathy for Tail Gunner Joe. He was a man who crucified himself amid human frailties and overwrought passions. Few among us have not, on occasion, been likewise tempted.

A powerful idictment of the politics of fear and those whose would use our fears to increase their own power. The parallels between McCarthy and the current atmosphere are powerful, only this time the liars are in the White House. Well writen and thoughtfully presented, this book is a must read for anybody interested in the anatomy of the politics of fear and how it has played out in our country's history.

Today's rightwing politics is a continuation - not, as Haynes Johnson would have it, a revival - of McCarthyism. And McCarthyism is nothing but American fascism.

But since those two words are mostly used as general abuse, it will be well to make them specific.

Fascism takes many national forms,but as Ernst Nolte wrote in "Three Faces of Fascism," all share one guiding principle: antimarxism.

This is important, because there is a well-financed campaign by American rightists to rewrite history and make all fascisms left, rather than right, movements and to claim they are socialist.

Nolte identifies the original fascism as the Action Francaise, which was royalist and Catholic but lacked the leader principle and never created a private army. McCarthyism was more like French fascism than Italian, German, Chinese, Spanish or Hungarian fascisms: It was not royalist, but it was strongly, though not exclusively Catholic. It never attempted to acquire a private army, and McCarthy's personal life was so disorganized that he could never have aspired to become a Duce, although Johnson thinks he seriously thought he could become president in '56. Johnson also strongly underplays the role of the American Catholic church in creating McCarthy.

Johnson would have it that McCarthy sort of stumbled into a winning formula and, using his vast supply of unscrupulous energy, made it grow like a snowball rolling down hill. In fact, there's evidence that Jesuits scouted, recruited and nurtured McCarthy.

Johnson does not claim to add much to the history. David Oshinsky has written an excellent critical biography, "A Conspiracy So Immense." and David Caute has explained how American fascism was on a roll before McCarthy's Wheeling speech and was abetted by national security Democrats.

It remains a matter of opinion whether the Democrats were as natural fascists as the Republicans were in the late '40s or were just stupidly trying to "dish the Whigs" on the issue of subversion. Johnson is rather dismissive of Caute, labeling him a revisionist writing in the context of Vietnam War criticism, but I remember the great fear very well. I was a young boy and did not understand the fear, but I could see and feel it.

While I have some differences of opinion with Johnson, his retelling of the McCarthy years - which takes up 450 pages - is revealing, exciting and, within the bounds of the evidence, reliable. It would be well for politically active Americans to know this story, because although McCarthy self-destructed, McCarthyism never went away.

Johnson says, "Whatever McCarthy's personal qualities, McCarthyism in one form or another outlived the man. Its impact on our policies, and on the way Americans view their leaders and their government, has been profound."

Johnson wrote in 2005, when he wondered whether the Democrats were becoming a permanent minority party. He did not foresee that Reaganomics policies would wreck the financial system, ushering in a hapa-haole president, but he did identify the moral absolutism and Christian bigotry that was part of the original McCarthyism.

"Of Joe McCarthy, it can be said that fear made him possible," Johnson writes, which is true enough but not the whole story. The McCarthyite attack to destroy Bill Clinton - ignored by Johnson - can hardly be laid to a national fear; those were the years when we were the sole superpower.

Terror from the Islamic world offered new scope to the fascist tendencies of the American right, and Johnson spends a hundred pages lamenting this, but I am unpersuaded that the simpler explanation is not also the better: The Bush administration was the most ignorant and incompetent we ever had.

Incurious George was so clueless that shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, he broke bread with Muslim clerics to make the point, obviously incorrect, that Islam is not the enemy of the west (and of the east and the south). This is not his grandfather's McCarthyism (and, in fact, Prescott Bush was mildly antiMcCarthy). No one can imagine Joe McCarthy breaking bread with, say, Tito to make the point that some communists are less communists than other communists.

And even if the more openly fascist Bushites, like Dick Cheney, worked hard to create a great fear, they failed. Johnson seems to have missed the point, writing that "dissent, however mild, is not allowed."

That was largely true in the early '50s, not even a little bit true in the '00s. Cindy Sheehan acquired a cult status and even camped out on the president's doorstep, not something easy to imagine about Joe McCarthy.

A good deal of the last hundred pages of "The Age of Anxiety" consists of kneejerk liberal readings of public opinion that match poorly with events.

These can be minor, such as accepting that the liberal Ivy League was a natural target of middle American rightists. The reality was that perhaps the most widely vilified thinker on the American scene was the Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who was detested almost as much by the Bush antiterrorists as by leftwing apologists for Islam.

And they can be major. Like all good liberals, Johnson believes in the Geneva Conventions and is horrified that Bush wove his way around them. It has not occurred to him that if America abandoned the Geneva Conventions, which have never protected U.S. prisoners in Asia, then many of the policies that Biush adopted would have been unnecessary.

Liberals who objected to a war on terrorism, preferring to make it a police matter, neglected to notice that under the conventions, captives cannot be tried in any criminal court. This was briefly known, but soon forgotten, when in the Falklands War the British captured an Argentinean officer notorious for throwing girls out of helicopters. They had to let him go.

It was the requirements of the conventions that forced the government to adopt legalisms like "enemy combatants" and offshore prisons. More honesty might have allowed for better policy.

Johnson is right about the undemocratic actions of the Bush years, but wrong about how they came about.

Haynes Johnson's "The Age of Anxiety" is a swift, entertaining and highly personal history of the McCarthy Era. Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, had a bird's-eye view as a teenager of the whole messy period: his father, Malcolm Johnson, himself an award-winning reporter whose stories on corruption in the dock workers' union inspired Budd Schulberg's screenplay for "On the Waterfront," was one of the first reporters to note Joe McCarthy's dire effect on America, and found himself threatened because of it. Haynes Johnson doesn't bring us any new revelations as to McCarthy's activities or character, but he does provide a thorough, intelligent and mostly fascinating summary of McCarthy's rise, dominance, and fall. He also is careful to place McCarthy in his historical context, describing the mood of Congress and the American people in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and also contributing brief discussions of earlier treason scares, starting all the way back with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In the book's last hundred pages, Johnson turns away from McCarthy to the current terrorism scare sparked by 9/11, with unsparing depictions of the Patriot Act, the illegal detention and deportation of Muslims, and of both President Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft (whom, Johnson believes and I agree, may still go down in history as the worst Attorney General ever). Frankly, this final section feels a little premature; among other things, Johnson wrote it before the mid-term elections of 2006, in which the American people showed their disgust with the Iraq war and other Bush administration policies by voting out Republican incumbents wholesale. But I find it hard to argue with the conclusions Johnson reached from the vantage point of 2005. Johnson writes, "Of Joe McCarthy it can be said that fear made him possible, partisanship was responsible for his rise, and politicians, press, and public shared the blame for failing to check his abuses, which damaged countless individuals and brought shame to the United States." Johnson leaves little doubt that, in his opinion, you could replace the name of Joe McCarthy in that last sentence with that of George W. Bush or John Ashcroft, and still have it be essentially correct. That's my opinion, too.

Haynes Johnson's The Age Of Anxiety: McCarthyism To Terrorism receives Kristoffer Tabori's dramatic rendition as it provides journalist Johnson's history of the demagogue Joseph McCarthy and his reign of terror during the 1950s with his anti-Communist crusade. Johnson re-creates the key figures of the times and their interactions - and also offers insights for modern times as civil liberties are being challenged. A timely story comes alive in audio.

I recently ordered The Age of Anxiety and was terribly excited when it arrived. Sadly, that excitement did not last. The book itself is well-researched and beautifully written, but not at all what I had expected. I had thought it would be, well, a history of the United States from McCarthyism to Terrorism. It was instead a lenghty discussion of McCarthyism and then a very brief (60 pages!) discussion of post 9/11 America.

Haynes Johnson, in his book "The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism", has provided the reader with a nice descriptive history of the anxieties caused by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade of the 1950's. It is evident that Johnson tends towards the more liberal view of explaining the excesses of McCarthy's tactics and does not attempt to justify any of McCarthy's work, but this supports his theory that McCarthyism contributed (if not created) the age of anxiety of the 1950's in America.

On a much more serious note, Johnson has engaged in a diatribe against the current political environment and administration in the closing chapters of the book. The author explicitly states that he does not mean to link McCarthyism to Terrorism, and there is scant evidence that the two are related in any way. Instead, I believe that the author chose to expand his book to explain a personal philosophy rather than create a journalistic or historical argument that the two events were linked. For that reason, I give this book just three stars. If Johnson had focused entirely on the years of McCarthy, I would have given it four (or perhaps five) stars.

"The Age of Anxiety" is unapologetic from the outset in displaying the partisan bias of its author. The flood of vitriolic adjectives flowing from its pages reveals that Haynes Johnson is not a historian, but rather an ideologue who engages in tactics remarkably similar to those he attributes to Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Through the fog of his hyperbole, Johnson looks at the 1950s without having to dwell on inconvenient figures like Alger Hiss, who really was guilty after all. In a 500-page book, Mr. Johnson only fleetingly mentions the Venona Project, which documented plenty of Soviet espionage and communist treason during the McCarthy Era.

The Venona Project was a top-secret program that began in 1943 in which Soviet cables between KGB offices in Moscow and the United States were decoded. The decryptions from the Venona Project were first released on July 11, 1995, close to half a century after Senator McCarthy delivered his speech concerning subversives in the State Department. They have provided insight into the depth of Communist espionage in America, including in senior government positions. The full extent of this treason will never be known. Less than half of those found in Venona were identified, amounting to over 150 unknown spies. Communist subversion within the government was a reality, not a McCarthy myth.

For anyone interested in the McCarhty Era and its implications for today, this book is an amusing diversion. However, for purposes of obtaining a rounded picture of the historical reality, it should only be read in conjunction with "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies" by M. Stanton Evans and "Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator" by Arthur Herman. Both are available at Amazon.com.

Yes this book was very interesting on the McCarthy period, but was much too lenient on the current Bush Administration. A much better book to read to learn about the habits of the Bush Administration is The Rise (and hopefully) Fall of The Third Reich.