Christians for McCarthyism?

Some Christian influencers are now trumpeting Joe McCarthy, the 1950s U.S. Senator and red hunter, as a model for today. One prominent influencer recently exclaimed: “My only criticism of Joseph McCarthy is that McCarthy didn’t go far enough.”

Another Christian influencer has declared: “We need a new red scare. And a new McCarthy.”

As a slapdash performer indifferent to truth and facts, preferring to generate outrage and publicity, McCarthy would indeed do well in today’s social media climate. But McCarthy served only McCarthy, not America, and not anticommunism, causes that his antics harmed.

Curiously, McCarthy’s main targets were the leaders who did the most to fortify post-WWII America against the Soviet Union: Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson and, although he would not name him directly, Dwight Eisenhower.

Truman, Marshall, and Acheson orchestrated the Berlin Airlift, aided Greece and Turkey against Soviet threats under the “Truman Doctrine,” organized NATO, created the Marshall Plan to bolster democratic western Europe, created the CIA, increased military spending after the initial post-WWII draw down, and committed U.S. forces to defend South Korea.

Winston Churchill told Truman: “You, more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

Unconvinced, McCarthy denounced Truman’s policies as “traitorous,” although he sheepishly admitted Truman was not himself a “conscious” part of the “great conspiracy” but merely “their captive.”

McCarthy assigned darker motives to George Marshall, whom Churchill had hailed as “the organizer of victory” in WWII:

“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…“

McCarthy also alleged that Dean Acheson was “high on the roster” of a “great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

This was the same Dean Acheson that President John F. Kennedy dispatched to Paris during the Cuban Missile Crisis to obtain French President Charles de Gaulle’s support, which he did. It’s also the same Acheson who during that crisis urged JFK to bomb the Soviet missile sites in Cuba, advice that JFK fortunately declined, and which caused Acheson to quit the conversation with JFK.

Responding to the attacks against his Administration, Truman furiously fired back at McCarthy, which inflated his status. Eisenhower, who abhorred McCarthy no less than Truman, thought the better strategy was not joining McCarthy “in the gutter” but awaiting McCarthy’s inevitable missteps.

Infamously, Eisenhower during the 1952 campaign planned specifically to defend his mentor George Marshall in a speech in McCarthy’s own Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s governor shortly before pleaded with Eisenhower not to, warning it was to divisive for the party. But the speech’s text was already leaked to press, leaving Eisenhower looking weak.

Eisenhower was embarrassed but as president all the more determined to stop McCarthy, knowing very well that he and his Administration were McCarthy’s ultimate targets. Columnist Joe Alsop warned White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams that McCarthy was going to allege that Eisenhower, as Supreme Commander in Europe, had abetted communist influence in occupied Germany.

Eisenhower publicly criticized McCarthy only by inference, never directly. But his Administration furiously behind the scenes worked for McCarthy’s demise. When McCarthy’s lead staffer Roy Cohn was caught using his influence to demand special privileges for his friend in the U.S. Army, the Administration exploited the public scandal to maximum effect. Famously, McCarthy was deflated when a lawyer for the U.S. Army during McCarthy’s hearings demanded of him: “”Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

With the bubble burst, many Republicans who had obligingly defended McCarthy no longer felt obligated. And he was censured by the U.S. Senate in 1954, acting as a shadow of his former self until his death in 1957 at age 48. He left no positive legacy.

The exposure of major Soviet spies after WWII, such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, occurred before McCarthy’s rise. He exploited the atmosphere their exposure generated while adding nothing to the cause of fighting Soviet influence or exposing major covert Soviet sympathizers.

As Beverly Gage’s recent biography of J. Edgar Hoover explains, the FBI chief quickly realized that McCarthy was not helpful and largely avoided him. And official Washington divided between McCarthy’s partisans, who loved the sound and fury, and supporters of Hoover, who relied on FBI’s investigations instead of slanderous unsubstantiated allegations.

Larry Tye’s recent biography of McCarthy shows him to be garrulous, almost likeable, and largely conducting his anti-subversion crusade as a political game, not from serious conviction. He held no animosity for his targets. Their destruction was just a political necessity.

McCarthy’s widespread appeal was not that he produced results but that he offered a performance that evinced he was “fighting,” while others, who were less performative, appeared passive and indifferent. Sam Tanenhaus’s recent biography of William F. Buckley, who was a young defender of McCarthy’s, makes clear that Buckley was aware of McCarthy’s loose relationship with facts. But Buckley thought McCarthy helpful for beating a loud public drum against communism. The narrative was more important than the specifics.

In retrospect, McCarthy was not helpful at all. His self-serving public hearings and sprawling allegations discredited, at least for many, anticommunism as a cause. After McCarthy, any allegations of communist sympathies were inevitably met with denunciation of “McCarthyism.”

The Christian influencer who complained that McCarthy “didn’t go far enough” begs the question: to what purpose? McCarthy advanced McCarthy, not his country or the cause of anticommunism, to which he contributed nothing but maudlin demagoguery.

If Christians are looking for a model today from that era, they should instead look to journalist Whitaker Chambers, the former communist who exposed Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, at considerable sacrifice for himself. He refused to associate with McCarthy, explaining:

“In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.”

Of course, McCarthy did just that, repeatedly. While McCarthy rode the wave of sensationalism until his wings melted and he crashed, Chambers lived quietly. His memoir Witness magnificently explained his journey from communism to Christianity. Carefully reasoned, this book is 800 pages. But McCarthy communicated in soundbites.

For this reason, Joe McCarthy unfortunately is a man for our times. But Chambers, with self-sacrifice and precision, is a man for all times.

More from IRD:

Whittaker Chambers’ Enduring Witness

Churches, Cuba & Communism

Evangelicals & Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ Speech