Once a month, The Duty challenges history enthusiasts to decipher a current topic based on a comparison with a historical event or figure.
In January 2024, the New York Times interviewed supporters of the Iowa Republican Party on the eve of the caucuses that would determine their Republican presidential candidate. A recurring theme in the interviews: their dislike of the temperament of bully of the former president, which even made some of them hesitate to support him. “If you could ask Mr. Trump one question directly,” they were asked, “what would it be?” A 52-year-old man replied: “Aren’t you ashamed?”
Many readers of the daily must have recognized the echo of a question posed, nearly 70 years earlier, to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, which had marked the beginning of his downfall.
In February 1950, Joseph R. McCarthy appeared before the Republican Ladies in Wheeling, West Virginia. The Wisconsin senator’s speech culminated in an explosive revelation: the State Department was teeming with traitors secretly loyal to the Communist Party. He brandished a document: “I have here the names of 205 of them!” Worse yet, these moles had been denounced to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and they were still in office!
This statement breathes new life into the great anti-communist paranoia that has undermined American political life since the end of the 1930s. It also propels to the firmament this obscure politician, who already knows “that he does not [sera] “He is no more punished for a big lie than for a small one, but the big one attracts crowds,” summarizes Larry Tye, one of his biographers.
He will rule the roost for a few years, blindly followed by a strong contingent of Americans.
Ambition
Born in 1908 in Wisconsin into an honest farming family, Joseph Raymond McCarthy became a lawyer. Politics already attracted him. It was by multiplying vicious attacks against his adversaries and exaggerating his professional experiences that he was first elected itinerant judge.
After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted and fought on the Pacific front. Upon his return, he hoped that his war hero aura would help him be elected senator, exaggerating his feats of arms. After a failure in 1944, he succeeded two years later.
In the campaign, he presents himself as a simple man, a “farm boy”, as opposed to his opponent, an academic, a doctor of philosophy, whom he also accuses of being a communist sympathiser. He hits the mark.
From the moment he arrived in Washington, he made no secret of his all-consuming ambition and his immoderate taste for political intrigue. In order to assert himself in the political joust, he launched unfounded accusations to all and sundry. Loose cannonhe is uncouth and quarrelsome. He struggles to find allies within his own political family.
So his longevity in the Senate is not expected to be high when he appears before the Republican activists of Wheeling.
Scandal
205 Communist Moles in the State Department? Local and then national media are seizing on this scandal. The senator in search of visibility has not just invented the “witch hunt” for communists, far from it. Scientists, unions, Hollywood actors have been paying the price for quite some time now. High-flying spies have already been unmasked.
In fact, McCarthy is a bit late. There are few, if any, big fish left to catch. No matter: with his hyperbole, he is grabbing the headlines.
The “205 names” mentioned are not fictitious. He has sifted through existing lists, pulling out names that have not yet been thoroughly investigated. He uses them to embarrass the Democrats, who have been in power almost continuously since 1933 and are closely associated with real cases of favoritism and corruption. It is therefore not unduly surprising when the senator claims to have evidence of laxity, even plots, incriminating sometimes high-ranking figures.
Nine of the individuals McCarthy singled out are under investigation by the Senate. All are cleared. The accuser may be discredited, but thanks to his media savvy, his notoriety is instead increased tenfold.
Trap
The Republican Party was in a bit of a trap: whatever one thought of his dubious methods, the senator’s popularity was profitable. A few rare moderates in the “GOP” denounced his methods, including Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, supported by six colleagues. Those whom McCarthy nicknamed “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs” found themselves isolated. During the election campaign of the fall of 1950, the support of the inquisitive senator was fought over.
He is unleashed. He multiplies dubious insinuations, accuses his critics of being communist sympathizers. He sows fear. In the summer of 1951, he accuses General George C. Marshall of being at the heart of a plot “of a magnitude so immense as to make any other of its type in the history of mankind seem ridiculous.”
Re-elected in 1952, he took over the Government Operations Committee and instrumentalized the investigation subcommittee attached to it. He recruited a team, including the young lawyer Roy Cohn, who was prosecutor at the trial of the Rosenberg couple, accused of espionage. Together, they launched a major operation to clean up the state.
McCarthy took advantage of this opportunity to settle scores with those who had harmed him in the past. In eighteen months, he sent out 546 subpoenas, according to Larry Tye, but found only one serious case, Edward Rothschild, an employee of the government printing press.
While some media outlets denounce him, others, like the Hearst conglomerate, are the mouthpiece of his lies. He holds Washington by fear. Opposing him is political suicide. Simply being appointed by him is equivalent to receiving a “ kiss of death »a kiss of death.
By early 1953, he felt powerful enough to take on the Army. What he didn’t know was that for some time, Roy Cohn had been threatening and cajoling senior officers to get one of his close associates, David Schine, released from active duty in Korea. A case had been secretly put together by the Army, showing that McCarthy’s right-hand man was engaged in influence peddling. On 44 occasions, Cohn, who should be beyond reproach, had tried to obtain preferential treatment for Schine.
Cornered, McCarthy opted for Cohn’s defense and counterattacked: the Army harbored and protected communists, and had tried to use Schine as a bargaining chip to silence the subcommittee. Who was telling the truth? Hearings would be held to determine.
Soap opera
Broadcast live on television, the McCarthy hearings against the army began on April 22, 1954. With both sides having a sense of spectacle, these hearings were followed like a soap opera by Americans.
To defend itself, the army hired a team of Boston lawyers led by Joseph Nye Welch, an experienced litigator. Under an imperturbable, patrician exterior, he provoked McCarthy, pushing him to expose his angry and muddled temperament directly. His nefarious flights of fancy were commented on soberly by Welch: “You have, I believe, sir, a kind of genius for creating confusion, for confusing the hearts and minds of the country.”
A photo produced by the McCarthy camp turns out to be doctored. The unedifying episodes multiply, blown out of proportion by Welch, who exposes the subcommittee’s devious methods and patiently constructs a new narrative.
On June 9, 1954, pushed to his limits, McCarthy tried to trap his opponent by revealing that a member of his cabinet had once been a member of a lawyers’ association sympathetic to the Communist Party. Welch admitted the facts: he had refused to take Fred Fisher to Washington for precisely that reason. McCarthy persisted. Welch then told him to stop destroying his colleague’s reputation. “You have done enough. Have you no decency, sir? Have you no decency left?”
Many observers present claim to have felt, at this precise moment, the wind turning. The media will dramatize this high point of the hearings, precipitating McCarthy’s fall.
Question
Can a simple question change the course of history? Of course not. In June 1954, times had changed. Americans had just been through a world war and another in Korea, in addition to the anxiety caused by the birth of a latent conflict with the USSR. A majority of them were now thirsting for optimism. Now, McCarthy’s bellicose style disturbed them. Welch materialized, in a few words, the disgust that was beginning to inhabit them, at the end of this long crisis of collective hysteria.
Still, despite the loss of all his political support, he would retain for a time the unwavering support of 34% of voters, according to a Gallup poll conducted after all these setbacks. “Even if it were proven that McCarthy had killed five innocent children,” the famous pollster would point out, [ses partisans] would probably continue to support him.”
His flamboyant career was over, despite his efforts to revive it. He slowly faded into the background of American political life, then died on April 28, 1957, of acute liver failure.
Roy Cohn will return to private practice in New York, where he will become an influential figure, counting among his very famous clients the father-son duo Trump. He will help him get out of several bad situations and build a great reputation. The former president considers him as a role model and is very grateful to him.