125 of 133 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Review of Joseph McCarthy, December 17, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Hardcover)
This is an extremely interesting and well-written book. The premise is that, despite his faults-and there were many, Senator Joseph McCarthy was correct in his underlying premise: that the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations were riddled with active Communist spies, knowing Communist sympathizers and Russian dupes. Making perhaps the single greatest marshaling of facts to date on this subject, Herman demonstrates that these spies and fellow travelers damaged the foreign policy interests of the United States in a variety of ways. Worse still, he demonstrates conclusively that high ranking members of the two administrations knew or should have known about the Soviet infiltration and did nothing about it. Herman, whose fact-dense writing clearly shows his background as a professional historian assembles proof from many sources, but relies heavily on the more recently declassified information and the materials released after the fall of the Soviet Union. Not a fact is stated that is not supported by an original source, all of which are documented in the book's extensive end notes. If you've ever been in an argument with anyone over whether or not Alger Hiss was a Communist spy, you need this book to settle it once and for all.
Rather than trying to rehabilitate McCarthy, Herman is at pains to demonstrate McCarthy's mendacity, sloppiness in making allegations and his many other flaws on nearly every page. Nonetheless, Herman points out that since the liberal establishment could not disprove McCarthy's allegations and , in fact, was mortally embarrassed by them, it diverted attention from the charges by attacking McCarthy himself. The effect of this was to obscure the underlying truth of what McCarthy was saying and of what had really occurred. This "crust" around the issue has lasted for nearly fifty years so that as soon as anyone starts to discuss Communists in the government during the 40's and 50's, liberals deride them using McCarthy's name.
I highly recommend this excellent book to anyone with an interest in the era or in the liberal-conservative dialogue in the U.S. since World War II.
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45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Feared and Smeared, November 16, 2004
This review is from: Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Hardcover)
Feared and Smeared
"Joseph McCarthy: Re-Examining The Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator" is a truly outstanding biography of one of the most controversial men in American political history. Previous biographies on the controversial senator from Wisconsin have focused on the politics of the Cold War and Red Scare during the 1950's. Author Arthur Herman takes a look at the actual facts and circumstances surrounding the life and times of Joe McCarthy to explore his historical situation.
Herman properly synthesizes all of the earlier works from William F. Buckley's 1950's "McCarthy and His Enemies" through the tomes of Ellen Schrecker and Thomas Reeve. The result is an objective, unbiased look at what McCarthy accused others of doing and also what he himself did during those times. Herman looks at McCarthy's actions and statements and asks some basic questions: was there a basis for the claim? Where others saying the same thing? Could a reasonable person objectively come to the same conclusion, anti-communist predispositions aside?
Today, we know that many of the claims accusing people of communism, espionage, or of being a security risk have been borne out by the revelations following the collapse of global communism. We know much more today about CPUSA subversion of American democracy from the 1930's through the 1950's (see, "In Denial" and "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage In America" by Haynes/Klehr and "The Haunted Wood" by Weinstein/Vassiliev for the extent of communist penetration in America). Herman relies heavily on many post-1990's analyses which have buttressed the claims of anti-communists like McCarthy.
There are three key elements that Herman continually revisits throughout the book. First, Joe McCarthy was a Midwesterner and most of his opponents were East Coast elites. Second, he was a conservative Republican while most of them were liberal Democrats. Third, he was a Roman Catholic -- most of the people who despised him were aristocratic WASPs or liberal Jews. True, the substance of McCarthy's actions and words is what most animated his opponents and supporters (his early aides included a Catholic, Bobby Kennedy, and Jew, Roy Cohen). Herman's book is the first to note that McCarthy aroused tension along party, ideology, religion, class, and social status. Among most Americans -- even after the Army hearings -- McCarthy was still looked upon very favorably. Working class Americans generally supported McCarthy; elites in media, academic, and political circles despised him.
Another unique focus of Herman's biography is his focus on the interplay between McCarthy and segregationist Democrats. One might expect Southern Democrats who were conservative on matters of national security to side with McCarthy. However, McCarthy was opposed to segregation and favored civil rights for blacks. This helped turn Maryland Senator Millard Tydings strongly against McCarthy to the point where McCarthy helped bring about his defeat in 1950 with a handpicked candidate (McCarthy's wife worked on Tydings' opponent's campaign). Blacks and Catholics voted heavily for the Republican candidate that year. Tydings would continue to be a thorn in McCarthy's side until his death and Tydings' Southern Democrat allies, including Stennis and Eastland of Mississippi, would help censure McCarthy in late 1954. Herman focuses extensively on Tydings throughout the book and racial issues aside, the two Senators probably had more in common than they disagreed on. Their personality and party differences, however, turned what would be a normal political dispute into a vicious deathmatch.
Herman's book also focuses on the vote to censure McCarthy. All 44 Democrats voted for censure, corralled by newly anointed Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. But one senator was incapacitated: John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts. He was reportedly going to vote for censure. It would have taken guts for a Northeastern Democrat to vote against it. Or would he have? His brother Bobby had worked for McCarthy on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and Papa Joe was a big anti-communist supporter (McCarthy had even once dated the Kennedy girls). The final vote to censure was 67-22 but many of those supporting censure later regretted their votes (Southern Democrats among them) and the use of the Senate for McCarthy's memorial ceremony after his death indicates that many censure supporters probably did not believe in the substance of the charges against McCarthy.
Herman drills into the reader that much of what Joe McCarthy is alleged to have been involved in -- the Rosenberg trial, HUAC, blacklistings -- had nothing to do with McCarthy or his Senate committee. Many first-time students of McCarthy are surprised at these misstatements of fact. Herman also points out that while McCarthy made mistakes and was wrong at certain junctures, so were his opponents. Much of what he was accused of doing and ultimately censured for were in fact offenses which were also employed against him. To assert that McCarthy was guilty of something unique to his own personal madness while excusing his critics is not a fair and balanced account of the historical record.
Herman notes that McCarthy's excesses, his drinking, and his dependence on flawed subordinates (such as Roy Cohen) all contributed to McCarthy's biggest mistake: he alienated what should have been his strongest supporters with his flair for the dramatic and verbal hyperbole. Senate colleagues, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, President Eisenhower -- these are some of the people who distanced themselves from McCarthy when he began to choose his opponents poorly. Going after the State Department for communist subversion was one thing -- but the United States Army? Hoover could have helped McCarthy, but his recklessness threatened to compromise Hoover's espionage sources (notably, the Venona intercepts).
Arthur Herman's book sheds new light and proper perspective on a subject that is often debated with emotion and cliches, rather than facts and reason. M. Stanton Evans' forthcoming biography on Joe McCarthy will probably be the final word on that chapter, but Herman's book is a worthy predecessor.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
McCarthy's cause vindicated with good scholarship, September 24, 2006
This review is from: Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (Hardcover)
An excellent book and invaluable for understanding this pivotal cold war episode - the rise and fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy, on the heels of the Hiss Case in late 1949, started asking, loudly and publicly, what the administration knew about Communists in the State Department and other sensitive places, and what it was doing about it. For the next four years, and particularly after gaining the chair of a Senate investigation subcommittee, McCarthy bore down on this issue, attracting millions of followers who believed in his mission, but also making enemies among the intelligentsia, among elites threatened by McCarthy's populist style, among liberals who saw Communists as ideological allies. McCarthy's own missteps, and those of aide Roy Cohn, helped bring down his career and blacken his name. But only in recent decades has newly declassified intelligence information shown he was more or less on the right track.
It is important to remember the context of the times. The Soviets had ended any illusions about democracy in Eastern Europe. China had fallen to Mao. Manhattan Project spies had given the Russians the atomic bomb and in 1949 they detonated their first. The Korean War began in 1950. Communism was seeking to establish its influence in the developing world. The Cold War was heating up, the U.S. seemed to be losing, but meanwhile the Truman administration didn't seem to want to know about potential traitors in their midst.
Some of the best chapters here focus on historical context rather than McCarthy himself. Herman recreates the Popular Front days of the 1930s, when Communists successfully infiltrated many liberal organizations or duped liberals into joining Communist front groups. In the "Who Lost China?" debate, Communist-influenced diplomats tweaked U.S. policy to finish Chaing on Mao's behalf. And Herman renders a fine consideration of McCarthy's effect on politics between then and now, including the death and rebirth of conservatism, the death of the liberal establishment with the Vietnam War, and the Popular Front's rebirth as the New Left.
History reads quite differently from the liberal conventional wisdom when the then-secret Venona Decrypts or only-recently-availaible KGB files are factored in. Virtually no one McCarthy exposed was innocent. Today's conventional wisdom mistakenly regards Communist ties then as no more than an expression of dissent, a sympathy for the underdog. The CW fails to recognize that it was a lifelong commitment - more like being in the Mafia or a religious cult - where one swore fealty to a foreign and hostile power, created discord to destabilize one's own society, and sometimes aided spies and traitors.
Herman does not spare McCarthy's faults - his drinking, his judgment-impairing mania, his too-trusting reliance upon Cohn. He shows how McCarthy destroyed himself, such as his fit of pique during the televised Army vs. McCarthy hearings, where he reneged on a deal not to expose the Communist-front involvement of one of opposition counsel Joseph Welch's aides.
Those close to him knew the youngest senator was not the best person for this job. He was too raw, too impulsive and too unschooled in Washington's ways. But the way he saw it, no one else was doing it and the job needed to be done.
McCarthy became undeservedly vilified. No one went to jail because of him. He didn't kill anyone. Unlike dissidents in Communist states, those questioned by him were protected by due process of law and had legal counsel. McCarthy was performing quintessential Congressional oversight - shining the bright light of publicity on dark spots within the administration, to influence change through the bringing of social pressure. McCarthy often held closed hearings, when the publicity of open hearings would have helped him more, to protect witnesses or those they testified about from being smeared. His questioning style was tough but typical of a courtroom. And the government really did have Communists buried in its bowels, often with access to sensitive information, with an administration too often unwilling to act.
Herman highlights some amazing ironies of McCarthyism:
--The truest single victim of "McCarthyist attacks", someone railroaded and hounded to death in sham hearings, was McCarthy himself. Liberal journalists with little regard for the truth smeared him, and frequently.
--The executive privilege so loathed by liberals when Nixon claimed it during Watergate, was pioneered by Eisenhower expressly to stonewall McCarthy. That marked the beginning of "the imperial presidency" and decline of Congessional oversight which liberals particularly often decry - sentiments with which McCarthy himself actually agreed.
--Bobby Kennedy's well-received Congressional investigations of the Mafia and labor racketeering in the late 1950s used the identical tactics he had learned working for McCarthy, and for which McCarthy was condemned.
--The Kennedys were not only McCarthy allies, but refused to go along with the rest of Congress in abjuring him. John Kennedy scheduled surgery so that he would not be present for the vote to censure McCarthy, while Bobby discreetly attended McCarthy's funeral in Wisconsin.
--The New Left, born in 1962, was explicitly an attempt to revive Communist activity in the United States, minus the Soviet ties. The biggest purveyors of the "paranoid style" in American politics, a term often tied to McCarthy, has actually been the left, with its dark vision of a world dominated by a malign U.S. government and its all-powerful corporate allies.
This book is one of the major sources for Ann Coulter's bestselling "Treason". Coulter's polemics rouse her base but may alienate even the undecided. Herman's evenhanded tone and treatment of the subject matter, though, do credit to his work, which lends a measure of vindication to McCarthy's short but searing political career. He continues to be vilified today, through movies such as "Good Night and Good Luck". Hollywood wants to keep history's spotlight on McCarthyism, but you get the idea that's mostly to keep us from looking where our attention belongs - on what McCarthy sought to expose.
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