House of Representatives, investigated allegations of communist activity in the U. Established in , the committee wielded its subpoena power as a However, the relationship between the two nations was a tense one.
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See More. Communists could be lurking anywhere, using their positions as school teachers, college professors, labor organizers, artists, or journalists to aid the program of world Communist domination. This paranoia about the internal Communist threat—what we call the Red Scare—reached a fever pitch between and , when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army.
No one dared tangle with McCarthy for fear of being labeled disloyal. Any man who has been named by a either a senator or a committee or a congressman as dangerous to the welfare of this nation, his name should be submitted to the various intelligence units, and they should conduct a complete check upon him.
Despite his popularity and his enormous political capital, they believed, Ike refused to engage directly with McCarthy. By avoiding the Red-hunting senator, some have argued, Eisenhower allowed McCarthyism to continue unchecked. In this interpretation, Ike rode above the fray of politics while secretly pulling levers and using White House influence to obstruct McCarthy and his allies. Looking at all the evidence, the clearest conclusion is that Eisenhower did not want to confront Joe McCarthy at all.
And during , he tried to avoid the whole issue, hoping the Senate would silence the explosive senator. McCarthy was a Republican, after all, and many fellow senators supported him. Ike needed to keep his party unified to pass bills in other areas; battling McCarthy would only stir up a civil war inside the GOP. There had, after all, been real spies who penetrated into the State Department, notably Alger Hiss.
And Communist agents had stolen classified secrets from the wartime Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were condemned to die in the electric chair as punishment for their theft of atomic secrets, Eisenhower did not for a moment consider granting them clemency. On June 19, , they were both put to death. Eisenhower in improvised in dealing with McCarthy, at first trying to ignore him, then trying to outdo him in the Red-hunting business.
Then he tried to seduce him with promises of new legislation to destroy Communism in America. None of these tactics worked. But at the start of , the picture changed. Joe McCarthy turned his investigatory resources on the US Army and on members of the administration itself. Eisenhower had no choice but to fight back. He did not have even a single name. In Reno, the list had fifty-seven names.
He had grabbed the headlines, and that was all he cared about. He would dominate them for the next four and a half years. He tossed a match and started a bonfire. Tye also quotes from transcripts of the executive sessions that is, hearings closed to the public of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee, which McCarthy essentially hijacked in and put to the business of exposing Communists in the government.
But they are important. He could subpoena anyone Tye says he called five hundred and forty-six witnesses in the year and a half he ran the show , and was answerable to no one.
These transcripts give us McCarthy unbound. He more than makes the case. The likeness is uncanny. McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.
McCarthy had the support of a media conglomerate, the Hearst papers, which amplified everything he said, and he had cheerleaders in the commentariat, such as the columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, both of whom reached millions of readers in a time when relatively few households in , about a third had a television set.
He tried to block a hostile newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal , from his press conferences, and he egged on the crowds at his rallies to harass the reporters. Right from the start, McCarthy had prominent critics. But almost the entire political establishment was afraid of him.
You could fight him, in which case he just made your life harder, or you could ignore him, in which case he rolled right over you. He verbally abused people who disagreed with him. He also had easy access to money, much of it from Texas oilmen, which he used to help unseat politicians who crossed him. To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong. McCarthy forced government agencies, by the constant threat of investigations, to second-guess appointments, and to fire people he had smeared just because he had smeared them.
He was a destroyer of careers. To call McCarthy a conspiracy theorist is giving him too much credit. He was more like a conspiracy-monger. He had one pitch, which he trotted out on all occasions. It was that American governmental and educational institutions had been infiltrated by a secret network of Communists and Communist sympathizers, and that these people were letting Stalin and Mao have their way in Europe and Asia, and were working to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship.
That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men. Even Republicans were aghast. Marshall was almost universally regarded as a selfless public servant and a model of personal probity.
But that was about as far as most Republicans had the nerve to go. For McCarthy, though, the important thing was that he had said something that was manifestly preposterous and had got away with it.
He must have realized that he could get away with anything. McCarthy lied all the time. He found that, if he just kept on repeating himself, people would figure that he must be onto something. He was incapable of sticking to a script. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to.
But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.
At the end, when he was about to be condemned by the Senate for his behavior toward his colleagues, he was invited to sign letters of apology that would probably have got him off the hook.
He refused, and is supposed to have thrown the pen across the room. Like many bamboozlers who succeed by preying on the earnest and the credulous, McCarthy was easily bamboozled. He often tied witnesses who had little to hide in knots, but the actual spies who testified and there were one or two completely fooled him. He hired rashly, and he valued loyalty over ability. He was also loyal to those he believed were loyal to him—and that, ironically, turned out to be his undoing. His excesses and his political vulgarity have made him a convenient symbol of Cold War anti-Communism—its ideological intolerance, its disregard for civil liberties, its exaggerated warnings about Communist infiltration and expansion.
But McCarthy was responsible for none of those things. This is the main reason along with his general disorderliness that no one McCarthy investigated was ever convicted of anything. There were almost no Communists left to fire or spies left to convict. McCarthy can be blamed for continuing the official practice of witch-hunting long past the point it made any sense, but he cannot be blamed for creating it.
The blame for that rests with a man who hated McCarthy, Harry Truman.
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