The Truth Be Told: The Real Story Of Joe McCarthy
by Bernie Reeves | View comments |
Print This Post
While Venona proved that “McCarthy was right,” M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted By History demonstrates in exact detail that his enemies created a false portrait of McCarthy that continues today with passionate participation from newly minted detractors.
Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies
by M. Stanton Evans
published by Crown Forum (November 6, 2007)
Hdbk., 672 pgs.
ISBN-10: 140008105X
ISBN-13: 978-1400081059
It’s like finding out you’ve been cheated by everyone you know. And they have all been lying about it for a long time. The deceit and dissembling required to maintain the devious conspiracy becomes an ersatz reality comprised of lies. Even when the truth is revealed, the effort of the conspirators carries a potent influence. It’s hard for others to accept that it happened. Even after full disclosure, the attraction to the intricacy of the deception lingers. The truth may be finally free, but it flies hesitantly.
This is how it happened with the saga of Senator Joseph McCarthy, besides Hitler and Stalin the most maligned figure in the modern era, a veritable Beelzebub everyone loves to hate. To discover that McCarthy was the victim of a massive campaign to discredit him, rather than the other way round, takes some time to absorb. But it turns out McCarthy didn’t ruin lives – it was his life that was destroyed by a big lie designed to protect a cadre of despicable traitors unprecedented in US history. Everyone seemed to agree that McCarthy was “tearing the nation apart” with his false accusations that departments of government – even the US Army – were infiltrated with Soviet Communist agents. The nation was indeed torn apart, but not by McCarthy. It was the ideological forces against him who won the day, and wrested control of the future political debate that still divides the country.
From the 1950s to today, political and intellectual conspirators have made hating McCarthy a national pastime. Young people don’t know who Winston Churchill is, but they can orate confidently on McCarthyism. It’s a magnificent achievement when you think about it. Not only has the radical Left destroyed learning in the process, they’ve deleted the accepted facts of Western history and replaced it with political sociology of their own making.
In this environment – the prevailing one in education today – Thomas Jefferson and the “founders” are racist white male pigs, but the Communists who spied on America right under our collective nose – working in our own government on behalf of the Soviet Union – are well-meaning heroes. Some have even been beatified as martyrs, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. These so-called “innocents” are praised in today’s culture as heroes, victims of a fascist, imperialist America. Genuine achievers are consequently maligned by the revisionist historians as enemies of the people.
The Wheel Of History Turns
In 1995, the NSA and CIA turned the wheel of history toward the truth by declassifying the Venona files, intercepted messages from Moscow to their American agents from 1942 until 1964. And lo and behold there they are: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lachlan Currie and hundreds of other American Soviet agents working for the US government – code names and all. Not only were these alleged victims guilty, they and their apologists made fools of us all. Yet, what followed in the national press after Venona was resounding silence.
After Venona sank in, despite violent opposition by the usual suspects, some of the more rational members of the intellectual Left – such as the venerated historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – opined that McCarthy may have been right after all, but he was a bad person and he did great harm to innocent people. Then it was back to the same shopworn clichés, such as “McCarthy didn’t uncover one communist.” Actually, according to Venona, he was way short in his estimations, but the anti-McCarthy propaganda machinery churned on to be sure history goes their way. Recently, George Clooney’s nifty propaganda stunt in the film Good Night and Good Luck was an example of the conspiracy to continue to malign McCarthy in the light of Venona, allowing the smug anti-McCarthy fellow travelers to sweep the facts under the rug and move on in their obsessive manipulations to protect their own.
Final Verdict
And that’s where things stood until November 2007 with the publication of Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Joe McCarthy And His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans, columnist, editor and former director of the National Journalism Center in Washington, DC. Drawing on previously classified FBI and governmental files – and new information available from Venona – Evans upends the McCarthy myth and turns the tables on the real guilty parties: Presidents Truman and Eisenhower; a majority of Congress; heads of several government agencies; lawyer Joseph Welch (who hurled the famous words at McCarthy: “have you no shame”); and media icons from the 1950s and 60s, including Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. Even Ben Bradlee – who went on to fame as the editor who fanned the flames of Watergate – is not spared by the facts uncovered by Evans.
The panorama of the McCarthy Era comes to life in the book, as do the dirty deeds by those who betrayed the public trust by maligning McCarthy to cloak the massive penetration of the US government by the Soviets via their American operatives. While Venona proved that “McCarthy was right,” Blacklisted By History demonstrates in exact detail that his enemies – our enemies it turns out – created a false portrait of McCarthy that continues today with passionate participation from newly minted detractors.
Evans and his book serve as existential locks in the canal to truth. First comes nausea, followed by anger when the awful reality sinks in. The American political dialogue from the mid-20th century has been dominated by the events of the McCarthy Era. The continuing anti-American harangue that continues to serve as the platform of the Left was born and nurtured in the campaign against McCarthy. The manipulation of US China policy in the 1930s and 40s by the Soviet-influenced American operatives – resulting in the victory of communism and the genocides of Mao – was applied to US efforts to stem the Red tide in Vietnam, resulting in defeat due to political manipulation on the home front by the very same ideologists. The torrent of hate directed against President George Bush over the war in Iraq sprang from the same well, waiting and warming in the oven of the McCarthy Era.
It is sad to realize that none of this would have happened, thus sparing us the past 50+ years of political distortion, if government intelligence agencies had released the Venona transcripts during the string of congressional hearings investigating the infiltration of Soviet-American agents in nearly all US government agencies during the McCarthy Era. If the evidence was made available, McCarthy would be a hero rather than a pariah "blacklisted by history." Instead, as is usually the case, history was manipulated and public policy stained due to the intelligence community’s obsessive desire to keep their secrets – no matter the consequence to the well-being of the nation.
Blacklisted By History is available on Amazon.com.
reevesmedia@ncrrbiz.com
http://www.metronc.com
Read more articles by Bernie Reeves
Hitler and Stalin were maligned?
Comment by GriffithLea | January 8, 2008
The vast a majority of this gentleman's article is comprised of subjectivities. I think he carries with him such a hatred for the Left, he conjures up ways to discredit them. As a college student, I've never been made to believe that the Rosenberg's were hero's. And Hitler and Stalin maligned? No, whoda thunk it.
Unreal.
Comment by ConservativePopulist | January 8, 2008
#2: You've done a riff off my tongue-in-cheek comment about Bernie Reeves' apparently accidental misuse of the word "maligned" in that one sentence (perhaps "hated" would have been a better choice - McCarthy was maligned, but Hitler and Stalin deserve most or all of the bad stuff said about them), but I want to make clear that I wasn't taking issue with the rest of his book review, so the "me-too" tone of your post is misplaced.
I think it's amusing that you are criticizing the article for subjectivities - it is, after all, a book review. Maybe you should take issue with the book itself (after having read it, of course).
You are, or were, just one college student. That you never saw any misrepresentation of who the Rosenbergs really were doesn't mean others didn't.
And what conjuring can you mean - have you nothing to say about Venona?
Comment by GriffithLea | January 8, 2008
Let me start by admitting that I haven't read the book. Let me further admit that I probably won't. Yet I read the article/review with the most open mind I could. All too often we let our preconceived notions and things we've always been told and accepted carry us away, which is a point the article seemed to be making.
I would agree that truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth must be what human beings constantly seek. If McCarthy has been unfairly maligned, then yes, the record needs to be set straight - in other words, only the truth needs to finally come out.
But isn't this where McCarthy himself fell short? While trying to heroically do very good things by getting at the truth about despicable traitors, he got recklessly side-tracked and destroyed the lives of innocent people in the process.
I'll say it again: if McCarthy has been unfairly recorded, the facts and ONLY the true facts need to be brought to light. But I believe that his eventual censure by Congress was due to his not having done that same thing himself. Maybe there's a sort of poetic justice that if you malign that many people, you'll just have to put up with a bit of maligning of your own name for some time.
Comment by danielk | January 8, 2008
In discussing Blacklisted by History with people like danielk, I find myself at a disadvantage, as I have read the book.
Specifically, danielk writes that McCarthy "got recklessly side-tracked and destroyed the lives of innocent people in the process." I must ask: how did McCarthy get "side-tracked"? Who were these "innocent people" whose lives he "destroyed" (besides himself, I mean)?
If danielk can tell us that McCarthy "destroyed the lives of innocent people," surely he can tell us their names?
Comment by Mark LaRochelle | January 9, 2008
“The Untold Story?” Several years back Ann Coulter told the “untold story” of Joe McCarthy in one of her bestselling books. The Venona transcripts have been well-documented in several books and various historians have detailed similar information when describing certain WWII events. There is even an amusing story about Harry Truman and Winston Churchill discussing the first successful test of the atomic bomb during the Potsdam conference in June, 1945. The subject of their discussion was how much to tell Josef Stalin; the Soviet Union didn’t know about the “bomb” and couldn’t appreciate its tremendous destructive power.
Here was poor, earnest Harry trying hard to assume the mantle of the late FDR and do his best for America vis-à-vis the Russians. Here was sly, ruthless Josef Stalin who knew about the successful test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo even before Truman did. Cryptically mysterious telegrams were transmitted to the 70 year old American Secretary of War accompanying Truman that announced the birth of his new baby, whose lusty screams could be heard for many miles. The ensuing comedy has Harry cagily referring only to a revolutionary new weapon of vast destructive power that will soon be unleashed on Japan. Uncle Joe played his part well and nonchalantly told Harry he was glad to learn of it – end of discussion. Neither Churchill or Truman were aware Washington was riddled with Soviet spies and communist sympathizers. Or, that the Soviet Union had a few spies in Washington aware of the “bomb” or actually working within the super secret Manhattan Project.
Americans love their mythology, particularly those myths with a moral lesson. Kids eagerly learn stories that feature Paul Bunyan, his blue ox Babe, the exploits of Davy Crockett, George Washington not lying about chopping down the cherry tree and so forth. As Americans mature, the myths become more sophisticated but still manage to retain their simplistic moral lessons.
And, we hate it when facts get in the way of a cherished myth. Whether it’s Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunts or the Scopes Monkey Trial and the ignorant creationists, we remain steadfast believers even when the true facts come to light. Would it have made a difference if the intelligence community had released the Venona transcripts to the American public during the McCarthy investigations? Probably not, why spoil a good morality play? And who in Washington, besides McCarthy, would have wanted Americans to know the “truth”?
Conservative writers, including those featured on this website, have used the pejorative term “McCarthyism” in their sermons. Lately, these various writers may be wondering if anyone remembers their unintentional blunder and considers them a gullible fool. Of course no one ever admits to being a gullible fool so there must have been something, some identifiable thing truly evil about Joe McCarthy. Maybe he was correct about the communists within our government but his methods were highly questionable, perhaps even diabolical. We can all applaud or, at the least, sympathize with that convenient rationalization. Maybe he also picked his nose in public and never chucked a few cents into the Salvation Army bucket at Christmas either.
There is something warmly endearing about a child and a child’s belief in a wonderful story. But somehow that charming effect is lost when the child becomes an adult pathetically clinging to a few beloved myths. But, fortunately, America has always had a shortage of thinking adults.
Comment by Pat Skurka | January 10, 2008