Preface

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT America's love affair with bullies.
     Front and center is 'Low Blow' Joe McCarthy, one of the most reviled figures in US history. It's not often that a man's name becomes an ism, in this case a synonym for reckless accusation, guilt by association, fear-mongering, and political double-dealing. In the early 1950s, the senator from Wisconsin promised America a holy war against a Communist 'conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.' While the conspiracy and infamy claims were a stretch, the body count was measurable: a TV broadcaster, a government engineer, current and former US senators, and incalculable others who committed suicide to escape McCarthy and his warriors; hundreds more whose careers and reputations he crushed; and the hundreds of thousands he browbeat into a tongue-tied silence. His targets all learned the futility of taking on a tyrant who recognized no restraints and would do anything' anything' to win.
     'to those of you who say that you do not like the rough tactics'any farm boy can tell you that there is no dainty way of clubbing the fangs off a rattler or killing a skunk . . . It has been a bare-knuckle job. It will continue as such," the farm-bred soldier turned senator delighted in telling audiences about his hunt for pinkos and Reds. "I am afraid I will have to blame some of the roughness in fighting the enemy to my training in the Marine Corps. We weren't taught to wear lace panties and fight with lace hankies."
     But this is more than the biography of a single bully. A uniquely American strain of demagoguery has pulsed through the nation's veins from its founding days. Although Senator McCarthy's drastic tactics and ethical indifference make him an extraordinary case, he was hardly an original. He owed much to a lineup of zealots and dodgers who preceded him'from Huey 'the Kingfish' Long to Boston's 'Rascal King' mayor James Michael Curley and Michigan's Jew-baiting radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin'and he in turn became the exemplar for nearly all the bullies who followed. Alabama governor George Wallace, Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, and Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke tapped the McCarthy model, appealing to their countrymen's simmering fears of imagined subversions even as they tried to escape the label of McCarthyism. All had big plans and glorified visions in which they played the crowning roles.
     Now that we at last have access to the full sweep of the records on Joe McCarthy's transgressions, we can see that his rise and reign also go a long way toward explaining the astonishing ascension of former President Donald J. Trump. While some seek comfort in the belief that Trump's election was an aberration, the truth is that he was the latest in a bipartisan queue of fanatics and hate peddlers who have tapped into America's deepest insecurities. In lieu of solutions, demagogues point fingers. Attacked, they aim a wrecking ball at their assailants. When one charge against a manufactured enemy is exposed as hollow, they lob a fresh bombshell. If the news is bad, they blame the newsmen. McCarthy was neither the first nor the last, but he was the archetype, and Trump owed much to his playbook.
     The playbook invariably is the key. It transformed Joe McCarthy from a crank to one of the most menacing men in modern civilization. Armed with a similar blueprint, Donald Trump rose from sideshow to contender to commander in chief. Neither was sure of the formula in advance'bullies seldom are, but they can sense in their bones how to keep the pot simmering and know when they achieve a critical mass. Suddenly and shockingly their scattershot bile is gaining traction and lacerating countless noncombatants. Americans, or enough of them to matter, actually believed that McCarthy had the list he claimed of 205 Communists lurking at the State Department. And that Trump's Mexican wall would make the United States safe. Was it simply through endless, mind-numbing repetition that these fictions became facts?
     Candidate Trump boasted to supporters in 2016, 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.' Sixty-two years before, polling pioneer George Gallup penned a chillingly similar prediction about Joe's minions: 'Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him."
     At the time when McCarthy drafted his poisonous script, few people knew the Wisconsin native's full story. America got its best look at the single-minded senator in his public and prodigiously publicized hearings, when he targeted alleged Soviet infiltration of the Foreign Service, the Voice of America, and, in a step too far, the mighty US military. "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?' the Army's special counsel famously asked him on live television in the spring of 1954, echoing what much of the nation was thinking by then. Americans would have been asking a lot sooner, and reached a quicker tipping point, if they had witnessed the secret hearings McCarthy was holding. It turns out that only a third of his conspiracy hunting happened in public sessions; evidence of the rest, filling almost nine thousand pages of transcripts, was kept under lock and key for half a century.
     Those records, in 2003 unveiled by McCarthy's successors and never before closely examined, reveal in disturbing detail that when the subcommittee doors slammed shut, Chairman McCarthy came unhinged in a way unimaginable to most Americans. He ceased even pretending to care about the rights of the accused, whom he summarily declared guilty. He held one-man hearings, in violation of long-standing Senate tradition. When he was absent, his poorly trained, sophomoric staffers leapt in to badger witnesses on his behalf. It is true that he ferreted out a handful of leftists, but most were indictable more for youthful idealism and political naïveté than for the sedition and treason of which they were accused. He searched in vain for a big fish'his own Alger Hiss or Julius Rosenberg'and targeted fellow lawmakers who dared challenge his shakedowns. And he grew nastier still after lunch, where he routinely washed down his hamburger and raw onion with whiskey. Here, in executive session, when he thought nobody was looking, this snarling senator showed his unvarnished essence.
     If that is the darker-than-we-knew side of Joseph Raymond McCarthy, there is also an untold tale of the beguiling charm with which he seduced the Badger State and much of America. Snippets of the private Joe'the relentless yet riveting sycophant, incongruously generous to those he had just publicly upbraided'have filtered out over the decades, but these generally came from unreliable sources bent on either shielding or savaging the senator. Now we have his unscripted writings and correspondence, military records and wartime medical charts, love letters, financial files, academic transcripts, and box after box of other personal and professional documents. Joe's widow donated them sixty years ago to his alma mater, Marquette University, and they were made available, for the first time, to this author.
     These papers and others reveal a figure far more layered and counterintuitive than the two-dimensional demagogue enshrined in history. Just three years before he launched his all-out crusade against Russian-style communism, McCarthy was taking courses in the Russian language and assuring his instructors they were playing a role 'in the furtherance of peace and understanding among the people of the world.' Later, when his Red-baiting was going full steam and his favorite target was Harvard University'mcCarthyites called it the 'Kremlin on the Charles''Joe and his wife, Jean, were troubled by the beating that Harvard physicist Norman Ramsey was taking on the Sunday morning TV show Meet the Press, as reporters goaded the professor into defending the university against Joe's brickbats. As soon as the show was over, the McCarthys invited Ramsey to a dinner party; he came and stayed for three and a half hours while McCarthy feted him, charmed him, and offered him a job, which he declined. "I'm not sure that we convinced him," Jean recalled of their evening with the scientist, who, three decades later, would win the Nobel Prize. "But I'm sure he left agreeing that Joe doesn't have horns.' Ramsey volunteered a different takeaway: 'At that time there was some speculation that McCarthy might become president or even a dictator. After our evening together I concluded this was no threat from McCarthy alone but might be with him and his wife together."
     Jean, who shared Joe's zeal, was twice as disciplined, and outlived him by twenty-two years, assembled her own illuminating take on her husband's outer and inner lives in the form of an unpublished manuscript titled 'the Joe McCarthy I Knew.' James Juliana, a former FBI special agent and Joe's lead Senate investigator, likewise spent the years after McCarthy's death organizing his files into a memoir he never got around to publishing before his own death in 2013. Jean's and Jim's families made their recollections available for this book. Daughters and sons of McCarthy victims did the same with their loved ones' painful reminiscences, told in private oral histories or personal letters. Bethesda Naval Hospital, meanwhile, opened for the first time, to this author, its records on Joe's treatments from early in his Senate career to the day he died there, all of which confirm some long-held theories about his health and demise while upending others. And the US Marines, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, Marquette University, the Russian Foreign Ministry, and other institutions and individuals central to Joe's life recently unveiled files that weren't accessible to earlier McCarthy biographers.
     Even as I was poring through those collections'along with everything ever written on Joe in books, newspapers, magazines, and yellowing government files'I was racing to reach aging McCarthy friends and colleagues, as well as his enablers and casualties. They, together with their survivors, helped me unwind his tangle of contradictions. Months before Leon Kamin died, the eighty-nine-year-old psychology professor said that being targeted by McCarthy left him 'unemployable in the United States.' Reed Harris, a Voice of America executive whom McCarthy denounced for his campus activism and leftist politics two decades before, wrote in a journal he left to his children that his days testifying before the Wisconsin senator were 'the toughest and saddest week of my life, but in a way it also was the finest. For I was able to stand up to McCarthy.' And Bronson La Follette told me that his father, former senator Robert 'Young Bob' La Follette, 'committed suicide instead of being called before McCarthy's committee . . . [H]e was very, very agitated."
     Yet Ethel Kennedy, who got to know the Wisconsinite after he gave her husband, Robert, his first real job, saw a very different side of the senator. The public may have thought McCarthy a 'monster," but he actually 'was just plain fun," she says. "He didn't rant and roar, he was a normal guy.' Sometimes she and Bobby would visit Joe at his Capitol Hill apartment, bringing along their toddler Kathleen. Joe 'just wanted to hold her. We'd be talking and then he'd say something to her," remembers Ethel. "I have had that kind of bond with somebody else's baby and so I understand that it can happen. It's like falling in love."
     Examining all the fresh evidence of McCarthy's official excesses and his behind-the-scenes humanity makes him more authentic, if also more confounding. Today, every schoolchild in America is introduced to Joe McCarthy, but generally as a caricature, and parents and grandparents recall the senator mainly with catchphrases like witch-hunter or with a single word: evil. The newly disclosed records let us shave away the myths and understand how the junior senator from Grand Chute rose to become powerful enough not just to intimidate Dwight Eisenhower, our most popular postwar president, but to drive legislators and others to take their own lives. Pulling open the curtain, we find Senator McCarthy revealed as neither the Genghis Khan his enemies depicted nor the Joan of Arc rendered by friends. Somewhere between that saint and that sinner lies the real man. He was in fact more insecure than we imagined, more undone by his boozing, more embracing of friends and vengeful toward foes, and more sinister.
     These documents and testimony tell us one more thing that is unsettling, at least for McCarthy's most zealous detractors: they borrowed too many of his techniques, too eagerly accepting as truth things they couldn't have known or that they simply got wrong. The gay-bashing senator was not, as rumor had it, himself gay, nor did he skim from his patrons to make himself rich. And despite repeated claims that he never exposed a single Communist in the government, he did, although nearly all were small-time union organizers or low-level bureaucrats, and there weren't nearly as many as he boasted. Most twenty-four-karat spies had slipped away long before Joe joined the hunt. The more we learn, the fewer heroes this story has. Dwight Eisenhower surely wasn't one, as his brother Milton made clear in his early and futile pleas that the president take on the bullying senator; neither was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, although his CIA director brother Allen came closer when he refused to bend to Joe's threats. Even Edward R. Murrow, who has been cast in movies and mythology as McCarthy's public executioner, came to the battle late and said himself, 'my God, I didn't do anything.' Some call it just punishment that McCarthy the mudslinger fell victim to his own methods of smear. I find it ironic, and sad, that this senator's inquisitions first muzzled America's political left, then, once he and his ism had themselves been blackballed, undercut legitimate questions about security and loyalty. That McCarthy crippled anticommunism at least as much as he did communism was the singular thing that both Communists and anti-Communists accepted as fact.
     I seek not to redeem the Wisconsin senator but rather to unmask fanatics and fabricators on all sides in a way that presents a truer, more fully dimensional portrait of a figure so central to the narrative of America. Shameless opportunism may have inspired McCarthy's anti-Communist jihad, yet by the end he had willed himself into becoming a true believer in the cause and even cast himself as its messiah. He didn't invent the dread of an enemy within that permeated the United States during its drawn-out face-off with the Soviet empire, but he did channel those suspicions and phobias more skillfully than any of his fellow crusaders. In the process, he shattered many Americans' faith in their government, trust in their neighbors, and willingness to speak up. While his reign of repression lasted barely five years, that was longer than any other demagogue held our attention, and at the height of his power fully half of America was cheering him on.
     I have always been drawn to Joe McCarthy's story as an object lesson in what this country was like in the 1950s, the decade of my birth, and I became more intrigued while researching my last book, a biography of Bobby Kennedy. McCarthy offers a barometer of the '50s much the way Kennedy does for the '60s, although of a darker kind. Both were cultural icons as well as political ones, with Bobby's unruly locks and riotous crowd appeal pushing the press to brand him the Fifth Beatle, while McCarthy's table-thumping bravado was what Americans seemed to want in the midst of a frightening stare-down between superpowers. Both, too, unapologetically embraced their Catholic and Irish roots, and were eager to take on and if need be shame the political establishment. The stories of Kennedy and McCarthy share one more thing: each had an ideological idiosyncrasy that was easy to miss but was central to his character. In Bobby's case, it was the way this liberal icon was nurtured on the rightist orthodoxies of his dynasty-building father and started his public life as counsel to the left-baiting McCarthy. McCarthy's transformation was in the opposite direction, from flaming New Dealer to the frostiest of Cold Warriors. That Bobby embraced Joe as an early mentor speaks volumes about McCarthy's magnetism.
     I have tried to judge McCarthy by the standard of his tense times, rather than by more recent insights about just how wobbly the Soviet empire was, and to give the senator the benefit of the doubt he seldom gave his victims. While I focus on the decade of McCarthy's life in Washington, I return repeatedly to his bedrock origins in Wisconsin for deeper understanding. Only by examining the nuances of his pilgrimage'it was neither a straight line from liberal to conservative nor so simple as a prince turning into a frog'can we pare away the historical fictions and see this unorthodox political figure as human and plausible.
     Before the era of Trump, even a groundbreaking biography of Senator McCarthy might have seemed like a chapter of American history too painful to revisit, one with little relevance to a republic that had outgrown his appeals to xenophobia and anti-establishmentarianism. An autocratically inclined Russia might unite behind the ironfisted Vladimir Putin, and an Italy that had lined up behind flag-waving Benito Mussolini could be lured in again by the anti-globalist Five Star Movement, but surely this would never happen in the judicious, eternally fair-minded United States of America. After the 2016 election, nobody needed reminding that this had become a story of our time. To make sense of Donald Trump's rise, reporters swarmed into America's heartland to interview his angry white believers. Another vital way to understand what happened is to look back at the bully who set the guideposts. Cross out the name Joe McCarthy in the vitriolic transcripts of his hidden hearings, and it's easy to imagine we are listening to our forty-fifth president.
     There is one more through-line that connects McCarthy's story to Trump's. It is Roy Marcus Cohn, an attorney who, while only in his twenties, already was a seasoned Red-hunter. Cohn served as McCarthy's ingenious and imperious protégé. Thirty years later, this petulant front man became Trump's bare-knuckled preceptor, channeling the senator's playbook to the eventual president.
     As gut-wrenching as their tales are, McCarthy and his fellow firebrands offer a heartening message at a moment when we remain desperate for one: every one of those autocrats'James Michael Curley and George Wallace, and truculent Donald Trump'fell even faster than they rose, once America saw through them and reclaimed its better self. Given the rope, most demagogues eventually hang themselves.