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The Proof at last: McCarthy was Right.
SourceWednesday, June 28, 2006
The Proof at last: McCarthy was Right
"Nearly 40 years after the death of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, twice-elected United States Senator from Wisconsin, the term "McCarthyism" is still widely used as a convenient epithet for all that is evil and despicable in the world of politics. Hardly a month passes without some reference to "McCarthyism" in the print or electronic media. Despite the frequency with which the term is invoked, however, it is quite clear that not one critic of McCarthy in a hundred has the slightest idea of what he said and did during that controversial period from 1950 to 1954. Whether Joe McCarthy was right or wrong, it is important that we know the truth about him. If he was wrong, then we can learn some important lessons for the future. If he was right, then we need to be vitally concerned about the issues he raised because virtually nothing has been done to deal effectively with those issues since the mid-1950s" - James J. Drummey (1998)
Joseph McCarthy was the all American boy. Descended from poor immigrants, he grew up in rural Wisconsin on the family farm. As a youngster, he suspended his own studies at school to assist his parents on the farm, and once this had been done, he returned to school to complete his diploma. He then became the youngest judge in the history of Wisconsin, and by all accounts had an impeccable record at the bench. He took over when there was a backlog of over 200 cases, yet worked long and hard to reduce this, sometimes working after midnight to make sure it was done. He served as a judge until World War II crashed into America's shores on December 7th 1941 amidst the wreckage of Pearl Harbour. As a judge, he was exempt from military service, and had he chosen to, could have spent the war in sleepy Wisconsin, far from the bullets and danger. Yet he resigned as a judge and enlisted in the US Marine Corps and was sent to the Pacific, at a time when Japan was very much the dominant power, and on the verge of conquering Australia.
McCarthy volunteered to fly as a tail gunner (hence his nick name in later years "Tail gunner Joe") on a US plane, the tail gunner position having the highest casualty rate of any gun position on an aircraft, and he was wounded in action, yet refused to be hospitalised, instead carrying on with his missions. He held his nerve in a variety of deadly encounters to take several vital photographs of the coast line of Guadalcanal in the Soloman island. This intelligence no doubt helped the US to win this famous and critical battle, a battle that historians agree turned the tide of war in the Pacific. He was deservedly awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and his bravery even gained him praise from Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet.
McCarthy returned as a war hero, and was elected easilly to the US Senate, defeating the Democrat candidate Howard McMurray, whom the Wisconsin Communist Party had urged its members to support. This would not be the last time Communists attempted to interfere in US politics. McCarthy had long suspected the Communists and other far left extremists were intent on subverting the US, as they had done in Russia and China. He was determined not to let that happen to America, and was to put personal glory to one side, as he bravely challenged the Communists. In a passionate address to the Senate in 1950, McCarthy raised the issue of some eighty individuals who had worked in the State Department, the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW).
Suspects were summoned to questioning in televised sessions. The suspects were well trained ny their KGB handlers; they realised the power of the mass media, and ruthlessly used it against McCarthy. Each time McCarthy asked a question, they would avoid giving the answer, instead launching into self righteous speeches. They often asked McCarthy in feigned sorrow "Have you no sense of decency?", which suggested to the public watching the lunchtime hearings that this was not about investigating treason, but was some kind of personal vendetta on McCarthy's part. Sympathisers like Herbert Block in the Washington Post also cast McCarthy as a fool and a liar. Writer Arthur Miller accused McCarthy of pursuing a "witch hunt", and wrote his play "The Crucible" as a thinly veiled sneer at him. None of McCarthy's colleagues came to his aid, and eventually the hearings collaped. McCarthy would go on to die a ruined and broken man, dying before he had even seen his 50th birthday.
Leftists have been dancing on his grave ever since, and have in a final swipe used his name as a way to insult anyone who investigates them. This is no way to treat a patriot like McCarthy.
In recent years, with the fall of the USSR and the de-classification of several US documents, we can see that McCarthy was absolutely right. His claim that leftists were subverting the US power structure was borne out by documents showing as early as the 1930's, the Soviets had been recruiting spies in Washington, such as Alger Hiss, who was to serve as an advisor to Roosevelt, encouraging him to hand Eastern Europe to the butcher Stalin at Yalta. They had also recruited the Rosenberg's, who passed on nuclear weapons secrets to Stalin, thus equipping the C20th greatest killer with its deadliest weapons. The VENONA project declassified in 1995, revealed that nearly 300 people on Capitol Hill had become intimately tied to the Sovet Union, and the report chillingly conceded that this probably only represented a tiny fraction of the total number. Even today, less than half this number's identity is known with any certainty. It has since emerged that in 1947, Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee sent a confidential report to Secretary of State George Marshall, stating "It is evident that there is a deliberate calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places, but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity. . . . On file in the Department is a copy of a preliminary report of the FBI on Soviet espionage activities in the United States, which involves large numbers of State Department employees. . . this report has been challenged and ignored by those charged with the responsibility of administering the department..." Clearly McCarthy was not witch hunting. Far from jumping at shadows, McCarthy was fighting a very real, and very dangerous enemy.
McCarthy was so close to destroying the far left subversion of the West, and may have been able to choke it in its infancy had circumstances been different. He may not have been the first person to notice it, but at least he was the first to act decisively to stop it. Who knows; had McCarthy received the support he wanted, needed and deserved, the communists could have been un masked. The leftists could have been purged, and America and the West may well have been spared the moral darkness of the cultural revolution of the 1960's, which would not have been able to happen had it not been for the presence of the leftists in high places that McCarthy had been prevented from purging. We would have been spared "flower power" and its attendants, recreational drugs, promiscuous sex, gay militancy and "anti-war" extremism, with its flag burning and anti-patriotism.
We may never know. McCarthy was stopped by the far left, and his name dragged through the mud. But as time goes by, the truth he tried so bravely to bring to light keeps coming out. We must follow his example, and make sure next time a politician confronts the far left, he gets the support he deserves. If I could meet Senator McCarthy, I would say three words to him; "You were right".
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