Worst American Birthdays, vol. 30
By 
Next November 14 will be the 100th anniversary of “Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy’s birth. On that day, we can surely look forward to a stream of nonsense regarding McCarthy’s record, as contemporary apologists like Ann Coulter, M. Stanton Evans and Elliot Abrams crawl forth to insist that the Wisconsin senator was actually correct when he claimed in February 1950 that 57 “card-carrying communists” had been identified within the State Department. Disabled by appeasers and fellow-travelers in the media and federal government, McCarthy’s Senate investigations — or so the fable has it — had actually exposed severe national security weaknesses until McCarthy himself was rechristened as an solitary, irresponsible, drunken egomaniac by his enemies.
A wingnut avant la lettre, McCarthy is of course an appropriate subject for rehabilitation. His methodology — based on the alchemical conversion of rumor to fact — allowed him to build a narrative worthy of disgruntled German nationalists during the era of the Weimar Republic. As McCarthy understood it, two decades of conscious Democratic treason (a word he used as freely as whiskey) had enabled the Soviet Union to outflank the United States, thus delivering the free world to the brink of extinction. Like the contemporary hard right, McCarthy was empurpled by the State Department and its limp-limbed “intellectuals,” who were incapable of confronting the global menace of communism with the monotoned toughness required to defeat it. As McCarthy framed it, pantywaists like Dean Acheson, John Service, Philip Jessup and Owen Lattimore had surrendered America’s freedom to multilateral institutions like the United Nations, promoted the dangerous fiction that Soviet leaders were capable of reason, and surrendered China to the communists. Their crimes, in other words, flowed effortlessly from their mistaken assumption that America’s power was — and should be — limited by circumstance.
We might locate the essence of McCarthyism in any number of places, but perhaps the best example can be found in his excruciating 1951 attack on General George C. Marshall, who was serving at the time as Defense Secretary for Harry Truman. McCarthy accused Marshall of at least a decade of treachery, acts that included recommending against an allied invasion of Eastern Europe through Italy; making “common cause” with Stalin at the Tehran Conference; enabling through inaction the Soviet occupation of Berlin and Prague; accepting Soviet domination of North Korea; crafting the destruction of Chinese nationalism; and refusing to “impose [our] will” on the nation’s enemies overseas. Having listed Marshall’s crimes, McCarthy thundered forth a stream of paragraphs that, published today with nominal revisions, would be earning yawps of approval and howls of “indeed” across the blogosphere.
What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence. If Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interest. If Marshall is innocent of guilty intention, how could he be trusted to guide the defense of this country further? We have declined so precipitously in relation to the Soviet Union in the last 6 years. How much swifter may be our fall into disaster with Marshall at the helm? Where will all this stop? That is not a rhetorical question: Ours is not a rhetorical danger. Where next will Marshall carry us . . . ?
What is the objective of the great conspiracy? I think it is clear from what has occurred and is now occurring: to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East and to impair our will to resist evil. To what end? To the end that we shall be contained, frustrated and finally: fall victim to Soviet intrigue from within and Russian military might from without. Is that farfetched? There have been many examples in history of rich and powerful states which have been corrupted from within, enfeebled and deceived until they were unable to resist aggression. . . .
The time has come to halt this tepid, milk-and-water acquiescence which a discredited administration, ruled by disloyalty, sends down to us. The American may belong to an old culture, he may be beset by enemies here and abroad, he may be distracted by the many words of counsel that assail him by day and night, but he is nobody’s fool. The time has come for us to realize that the people who sent us here expect more than time-serving from us. The American who has never known defeat in war, does not expect to be again sold down the river in Asia. He does not want that kind of betrayal. He has had betrayal enough. He has never failed to fight for his liberties since George Washington rode to Boston in 1775 to put himself at the head of a band of rebels unversed in war. He is fighting tonight, fighting gloriously in a war on a distant American frontier made inglorious by the men he can no longer trust at the head of our affairs.
The America that I know, and that other Senators know, this vast and teeming and beautiful land, this hopeful society where the poor share the table of the rich as never before in history, where men of all colors, of all faiths, are brothers as never before in history, where great deeds have been done and great deeds are yet to do, that America deserves to be led not to humiliation or defeat, but to victory.
Read, as they say, the whole thing.