McCarthy

In his introduction to an edition of Lord Acton’s lectures on the French Revolution, Stephen Tonsor quotes a professor of history as saying “tell me what you think about the French Revolution, and I will tell you what you think about everything else.” That is an exaggeration of course, and  it would be a bigger one to say the same thing about Senator Joseph McCarthy. However people’s opinions of and reactions to McCarthy can be revealing.  Doctrinaire  leftists tend to present him as a veritable Robespierre, running a reign of terror against innocent people and trumping up a red scare when there were no reds, only nice guy progressives like themselves. More moderate establishment and academic leftists frequently depict him as a dangerous and déclassé populist from the sticks - similar to  Huey Long - who threatened the tranquility of the realm  but was put in his proper place by the valor and superior virtue of moderate establishment and academic leftists.  (Media types in this group usually hand McCarthy a black top hat and moustache, conflate his activities with the HUAC, boogerman stories of blacklists in Hollywood, and maybe Nixon and Hiss, stir in a general contempt for the post-war years, and serve up  a melodrama with Edward R. Murrow untying Nell from the railroad tracks just in time.) Conservatives, particularly Catholic and authoritarian conservatives, often defend McCarthy with claims he was  mainly correct and well intentioned, even heroic,  if perhaps a little careless from time to  time. Some such as Ann Coulter even dispute most of  the carelessness.  Libertarians and others  with liberal sentiments usually accept the evidence that there was a threat from Soviet espionage and subversion while seeing McCarthy’s activities as a wrong and counterproductive way to deal with the threat and seeing McCarthy as a dishonest and unsavory demagogue. 

As well as I can tell, the last assessment seems about right.  The steps taken by the government after World War II to counter Soviet espionage and subversion were made  independently of McCarthy  and largely before he became interested in the issue. No one he accused was convicted of espionage, perjury, or treason as a result of his investigations.  His overall effect was  to give anti-communism a black eye and hand leftists a straw man they have been attacking and exploiting for cover ever since. 

While his targets varied from obscure government employees  (at least one of whom really was a communist) to Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, probably his most significant case was that of Owen Lattimore.   Lattimore was an author and China hand who had significant influence on American policy in the Far East in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Many conservatives believe he was a  traitor in the service of Soviet Union. Many leftists believe he was a wronged innocent and dismiss his faithful and consistent support of Mao, Stalin, and of Soviet interests in the Far East as indicative of nothing in particular.  In recent times Lattimore  has become something of a fallback guy for leftists who have found it harder to defend Hiss and other traitors as innocents since the opening of Soviet archives and the release of some of the Venona data. (His Wikipedia article is a fairly typical, though of course amateurish, example  the technique.  He comes across in it as an evenhanded, disinterested scholar and all around good guy who got caught up in politics and suffered for it.)  In fact Lattimore was clearly an active and influential supporter of the  Soviet Union who worked with communists to advance the interests of the Soviets and the Chinese communists. As such he was morally guilty of harming this country and aiding and abetting  two of the most brutal and murderous tyrannies in human history. If McCarthy had simply noted and demonstrated those facts and stopped and shifted his attention to preventing such things in the future, he would have been both correct and useful. However, he went far beyond the evidence and recklessly declared Lattimore was not only a Soviet secret agent but the top Soviet spy in the country. He presented no convincing evidence to support his claim, and none has been made public since. The result was a fiasco serving to  prevent legitimate inquiry into the harmful activities of Lattimore and his associates, give the left a useful martyrdom myth, let Lattimore off the hook, and facilitate a lot establishment dirt being swept under a lot of establishment rugs.

A senator should have known better. The distinction between supporters of  foreign government and secret agents of foreign governments is crucial. A secret agent works for and owes his primary allegiance to a foreign government, acts clandestinely in the interests and under the control of  that government, and attempts to hide the fact of his employment by it. Secret agents usually fall into one or both of two categories - spies who attempt to steal secrets from a country and saboteurs (in the broad sense) who try to do the country harm, sometimes by influencing decisions on policy.  A supporter of a foreign government  simply favors the interests of that government and works to promote them.  In the context of national security, there is nothing wrong with an American’s doing this as long as he does nothing to harm this country, and the foreign power is not hostile to the United States. (If I had been alive and influential in the period between the two world wars, I would have tried to support the interests of the British Empire, believing it to be, in comparison to the possible alternatives, a force for liberal and civilized values. Many patriotic Americans in those years did.)

Lattimore may have been a secret agent of influence for the Soviet Union. He may have been only a very harmful pro-Soviet activist  who might have thought he was not damaging America. (During Roosevelt’s administration, while the Soviet Union was hostile to the United States even during the years both were fighting Germany, the U.S. government did not consider it to be so.)  We don’t know, and neither did McCarthy. His style, manner, and crudely blundering ahead with this and other claims  in other cases he could not back up either hurt the cause of freedom, helped the communists, and provided convenient cover for subversives, Soviet sympathizers and apologists, anti-anti-communists,  and traitors for the rest of the Cold War.  Good causes can suffer when inept,  unreasonable, dishonest, or unappealing people become their best known advocates. That is something to be thinking about these days too.