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A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy

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Historian David Oshinsky, Professor of History at Rutgers University, does a masterful job in chronicling the life and times of one the most controversial political figures in our history. Oshinsky, an excellent story teller, allows the narrative to unfold in an unforced way, combining breazy prose with an excellent command of facts, thus allowing the drama of the McCarthy era to unwind naturally. Unlike most chroniclers of the early cold war -- and in particular, McCarthy biographers -- Oshinsky takes the time to examine McCarthy's childhood and rise to prominense with an unbiased eye. He notes that McCarthy was an excellent student, finishing four years in high school in one year; an industrious and indefatigable worker, helping his parents tend to the family farm while also starting his own poultry business; and a caring and warm person, liked by the town folk and respected by community leaders. McCarthy, however, also had competitive streak -- a win at anything cost mentality -- according to the author. In a given environment, such as campus politics, he was often daring, brutal and unforgiving -- completely focused on the task at hand. Oshinsky recites the story where McCarthy, in his final year of college, ran for class president. Prior to election day, McCarthy and his opponent agreed to vote for the other fellow, thus keeping the election friendly. McCarthy, however, after learning the election was a dead heat, changed his vote, telling his opponent that "the best man should win." Oshinsky notes that McCarthy could be both ruthless and caring; one moment, stealing an election, and the next, caring for a needy friend. This trait, writes Oshinsky, would run like an ubroken line throughout McCarthy's career.

Oshinsky does an excellent job in chronicling McCarthy's rise to power -- his defeat of Judge Ed Warner for Circuit Court Judge, and then the defeat of "Fighting" Bob Lafolliate, United States Senator, in 1946. At the Age of 39, McCarthy was the youngest member of the United States Sen

Oshinsky gives the most complete review of McCarthy's life of any historian. He tries to appraise McCarthy's controveries and does not take part in the vicious name calling of a Ricahrd Rovere. However he comes from a liberal perspective and to get a fair appraisal from a conservative historian - read Hermann's McCarthy.

Since Venona has been released Oshinshy should have rewritten this book and not reissued the book he wrote in 1982.The events of 9/11 can give us an analogy.

Imagine if a professor advised the state department that the Taliban was the best hope for Afghanistan and that bin Ladin was just an agrarian reformer. Imagine if military secrets as the H bomb was given to Iran and that key government officials belonged to Islamist groups. Imagine if a senator would look at the aspects of that ? Would he be called intolerate of other religions ?

Owen lattimore urged that Mao was an Agrarian reformer. Mao killed millions. Larrimore made millions of bucks on his 'brilliant" observations. Oshinsky shouldn't defend this man. Klaus Fuchs, Rosenbergs, Hall etc gave the bomb to Russia. Hiss helped shape our foreign policy and even gave Russia three votes in the General Assembly.

So balance is really needed. McCarthy was a patriotic man who used bad means to an end. But his enemies sometimes used worse methods as Oshinsky demonstrates in the Joseph Rauh case and Eisenhower's minions forging letters.

McCarthy was brought down by Roy Cohn wanting favorable treatment for a possible lover- David Schine but curiously Oshinsky does not update the book with Cohn's sexuality and this would be an important insight.

In short this was a brilliant book for 1982 but the newer revelations as Venona , Cohn etc demands an update for this book

I found this book hard to put down. It was well-written and brought across a real sense of McCarthy and his times. The author was as neutral as could be expected when dealing with the facts of McCarthy's actions. McCarthy's actions spoke for themselves, he was an arrogant man who thought he couldn't be stopped. He kept claiming that his responsibility was not to prove innocent or guilt, but to accuse. He had an end justifies the means attitude. The End was publicity for Joe McCarthy, and the means was accusing anyone and everyone of being a communist, even if he had to make up lies. What amazes me about this era was the idea that the Russians were so stupid they couldn't build the A-bomb without stealing our secrets, yet they were smart enough to infiltrate our government and take it over if we weren't diligent in rooting them out even at the expense of crushing innocent reputations.

There were a couple of problems with the book, mostly the author's intrusion. A few times, maybe three or four, he bragged how the information he had just cited had not been cited in any other biography of McCarthy. I felt this was unnecessary and bogged down the narrative. All biographers have to pick and choose. There never is room for everything. Also, several of the footnotes didn't make sense to me. I couldn't quite understand what he was getting at. Also, a couple of times he had minor facts that didn't seem right.

But, overall, I would definitely recommend the book.

A wonderful book, I couldn't put it down. And for you fussy academics the scholarship is impeccable too. The precipitate of left v. right comments appearing with mine on this amazon site proves that McCarthy lives. "I want to bring him back," said the owner's son and heir apparent at a company I consult for. McCarthy's refusal to avert his senate censure assured that he would live on into our time as a fallen hero of the political right.

Robert Doti has a mild criticism that the author should have refreshed the text by treating Cohn's "sexuality" in the 2005 edition. Not so. The author reveals Cohn's homosexuality brilliantly by letting it come out in the letters to Senator Flanders and in Flanders' own belief that Cohn and Schine were lovers. So readers in the nineteen-eighties did not go wanting.

What moves me the most is Oshinsky's illumination of the same left-right dichotomy which exists today: the patrician, ivy-league left versus the gritty, academically undistinguished right, Stephen Breyer versus Harriet Myers, John Kerry versus Rick Perry. The reason why the Republicans will likely win in 2012 is that the reckless and cruel actors of the Bush years, their political and economic havoc notwithstanding, were replaced by a president with immense promise who proved to be academic and effete and worse yet by a return of Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe or of Berg's Lulu as a normal way to live.

One thing needs to be cleared up right away: Joe McCarthy "never uncovered a Communist."

Because McCarthyism was so devastating to rightwing anticommunism, giving a sour taste among decent people for half a century, there has been a deliberate (and often successful) attempt to rewrite history. In this version, McCarthy may have been crude and abrasive but he accomplished good work for the cause of freedom.

As David Oshinsky lays out in endless detail in "A Conspiracy So Immense," there was nothing good about McCarthyism and little good about McCarthy except perhaps his charm. This was lost on many but reported powerfully by some who were strong political enemies.

Oshinsky asserts, I think correctly, that his is not an ax-grinding history, and he certainly finds fault often enough with McCarthy's enemies, both political, journalistic and academic. He gives McCarthy credit where he can, which is not often.

He portrays McCarthy as a man outside society, a natural: "He was so primitive, so cynical, so devoid of commitment to any goal but personal success, that few opponents had the will or stomach to fight him on his own terms." Or perhaps few Americans were as indecent as Joe McCarthy.

That quotation comes from the introduction. Later, much later Oshinsky decides that McCarthy's anticommunism was genuine and not just, as so many charged, a cynical manipulation of an issue to get power, attention and money.

This judgment must be heavily qualified. It's doubtful McCarthy knew anything about communism, and he definitely knew nothing about Americanism. That he was convinced that communism was evil means little; plenty, maybe almost all, of his opponents got that, too.

Catholicism is key to McCarthy. Oshinsky says he was a ritual, not a moralistic Catholic. As long as he attended Mass and made his Easter duty, he had fulfilled the requirements of faith. Even priests who supported him are quoted as saying that McCarthy paid no attention to doctrine.

This is an extremely important point and one where Oshinsky, in my opinion, errs. It has long been asserted that McCarthy was led to anticommunism by the Catholic clergy, and a dinner meeting is even said to have been the occasion that he was informed how he could use the issue to shore up his sagging political base after almost four years of undistinguished residence in the Senate.

Oshinsky is skeptical about this meeting, for which there is no reliable testimony. However, a host of circumstantial evidence supports the idea that the American Catholic church recruited McCarthy.

First, as anybody who attended Mass in the early `50s (as I did) knows, the church was desperate to launch a counterattack in eastern Europe and for that it needed some standard bearer in the U.S. government. McCarthy was it.

Second, McCarthy's preferred companions of an evening were floozies and grifters. He did not regularly, or even irregularly, socialize with priests. To imagine that a singular long meeting with two priests and a fanatical Catholic layman was devoted to chatting about Notre Dame football is beyond belief.

Third, Catholics stuck to McCarthy long past the time that he was becoming a political liability in most other sectors of American life. (That his loudest and longest cheerleaders -- still cheering in 2008, in fact -- were the bigoted Catholic William F. Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell tells us much.)

Oshinsky does a good job of recreating how crazy the McCarthy era was, even though he hardly mentions the concurrent Red scares that went along with it -- Robert Oppenheimer's security investigations get a single footnote, for example. I well remember how fearful people became when McCarthy's name came up.

Oshinsky gives Dwight Eisenhower a lot of credit for bringing McCarthy down, second only to McCarthy's own flaws. But the fact that a president as popular as Ike had to do so sneakily, and that it took almost the first half of his first term to get it done, shows just how powerful the fear was.

Oshinsky's admiration for Ike's skill in maneuvering McCarthy out of power is tempered by his disdain for Ike's refusal to confront him early and in the open.

McCarthy lived at a burnout pace, and "A Conspiracy So Immense" overwhelms with detail. There were so many scandals. Nevertheless, the last 200 pages rush past as all the threads are spun together into a rope that finally hangs the evildoer.

Only an opera librettist would have countenanced the coincidences that really happened around McCarthy. He had so many attacks going on simultaneously, and they all blew up on a single day, March 9, 1954. The Washington Post required no fewer than 12 stories, plus editorials and cartoons to keep up with Joe that day.

He was elemental, a force of nature. But, Oshinsky says, he was never a threat to subvert the government. Unlike a Hitler (whom he resembled), he had no larger goal. He did not even have an antisubversive plan to throttle the commies with. He seemed to care only to expose them, presumably thus causing righteousness to prevail.

This silly idea he probably came to instinctively, but it is also another hint that Catholic puppeteers were pulling his strings. It was firmly believed by the church that Russian communism was barely sustaining itself and even a slight push would knock it down. That is why the prospect of war in eastern Europe did not appall the Sheens and Spellmans (or, at a humbler level, my parish priest, Father Shea).

Three incidents, out of hundreds, stand out in this life.

One is McCarthy's bewilderment after the famous dressing down he got from Joe Welch on national television, when Welch stared him down and asked whether he had "at last no decency." After it was over, McCarthy is pictured asking in bewilderment, "What did I do? What did I do?"

Even worse, but less famous because there is no film of it, was his treatment of a poor (and by the time McCarthy was through with her, jobless) black woman named Annie Lee Moss. Oshinsky reports that the steely Sen. John McClellan "seemed almost in tears" as he watched McCarthy's humiliation of this innocent woman. It made me cry.

The last image is of McCarthy, out of power, weeping on the sidewalk after being thrown out of a Republican dinner. McCarthy, Oshinsky believes, wanted to be liked, but would rather have been hated than ignored. During the last three years of his short life, he was ignored and, with any other subject, the picture of him sobbing in loneliness might raise a sympathetic tremor.

Not this man. His was no Greek tragedy. McCarthy's story was black and then blacker.

In the end, Oshinsky says, McCarthy's strength and weakness was his "outrageous independence." If so many people had not been injured so badly, it would almost be funny: A man claiming to be fighting for all he was worth (nothing, as it turned out) to save society who was never part of that society himself.

A book of politics, and the craving for power that drives some people to do almost anything to get that power. The broad outlines of the story are well known. Joe McCarthy grandstanding in front of the microphones accusing all kinds of people of being communists. Never presenting any evidence he was able to ruin the lives of many Americans just to gain his own satisfaction.

Now reviled, these times really need to be viewed in the light of the times, and again now that we have learned more about those times. His accusations appear to have been unfounded. But this was the time of the Rosenberg executions. This was the time of the House UnAmerican Activities Commission (HUAC).

As we have learned since with the release of the Venona documents, the Rosenbergs were guilty (well there's some question about Ethel). The activities of HUAC harmed a lot of people, especially in Hollywood, but did it really make us safer? It also appears that there were a lot of communists in our Government. But there is no indication that McCarthy really knew that.

This is an accurate story of McCarthy's rapid rise, and his rapid fall.

Oshinsky lays out the McCarthy record in straight-forward, unbiased terms.

Joe McCarthy was a deeply disturbed individual, who, having stumbled into a Senate Seat, went asking his friends for a good campaign "hook" to get reelected. They suggested communism.

Over the next five years, McCarthy accused, literally, thousands of Americans of being Soviet agents. Not once did he produce evidence that any of those accused were, in fact, working on behalf of communism. He accused the leadership of the U.S. Army of communism because it insisted on drafting G. David Schine, "friend" of McCarthy's associate Roy Cohn. Anyone who publicly criticized what McCarthy was doing was accused as well. Anyone who so much as supported progressive causes was labled as unpatriotic. In 2005, does that sound familiar?

It was inevitable that the Republican noise machine would eventually try to rehabilitate the record of one of the most disgraceful persons in American history. For the real facts on this living nightmare of a man, read this book.

Shocking...bizarre...funny...sad! American politics at it's worst! Could hardly stop reading it until I was finished!

I think the evidence is pretty clear at this point that McCarthy was right on target with his accusations. Its amazing to me that liberals still cling to this "McCarthyism" myth. It just didn't exist. There was no repression of ordinary Americans in the 50s. Didn't happen. Sure, some people in government lost their jobs. But they were communists who then got other jobs selling insureance or whatever. Its not like they were sent to the gulag or anything.