Review: Trying to rehabilitate 'Joseph McCarthy'

March 9, 2000
Web posted at: 5:17 PM EST (2217 GMT)

By Reviewer Larry Meagher

(CNN) -- There's a trick known to all successful debaters. Control the definitions, and you win. Arthur Herman must have been a debater. His attempt to rehabilitate the actions and reputation of "the Junior Senator from Wisconsin" is, fundamentally, an exercise in changing definitions.

Take, for example, his analysis of isolationism in the 1930s. "The term is actually a misnomer," he writes.

Herman argues that politicians who opposed U.S. involvement in Europe during the rise of Nazi Germany were doing nothing more than defending a cherished American tradition of non-involvement that dated back to George Washington. He dismisses out of hand any suggestion that "noninterventionists," as he calls them, might have been sympathetic to the Nazi cause.

Fast forward two decades. In the aftermath of World War II, the issue of U.S. involvement in Europe was again a hot topic in Washington. This time, the threat didn't come from Germany. It came from the Soviet Union.

Those who wanted to take active -- even aggressive -- measures to counter Soviet expansion are heroes in Herman's eyes. And those who opposed such involvement are villains. Herman doesn't call them "isolationists." Nor does he confer on them the title of "noninterventionists." He calls them Communist sympathizers, fellow travelers and dupes.

The subtitle of "Joseph McCarthy" is a clever bit of marketing. In it, Herman claims he is "Reexaming the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator." Instead, he attempts to redefine McCarthyism, and portray it as a noble, even necessary, enterprise. Along the way, Herman tries to burnish the image of McCarthy the man, usually by trying to tarnish the images of those who opposed him.

Herman's fundamental argument is that McCarthyism was a patriotic response to the clear and present danger of Communist subversion in the United States.

Indeed, he explicitly defines McCarthyism as "anti-Communism," plain and simple. Anyone who actively opposed Communism was, by Herman's lights, a McCarthyite. And anyone who opposed McCarthy was, again under Herman's definition, a Communist.

To support this semantic sleight of hand, Herman reconstructs the life story of Joseph McCarthy and follows his meteoric rise to national prominence and his equally dramatic fall from favor. In the process, the author tries to portray McCarthy as a man of his times, forged by the Great Depression, tempered by combat in war, and brimming with idealistic fervor as he made his way to Washington in 1946.

But the portrait that emerges is actually very different.

The Joseph McCarthy revealed by Herman is a venal, petty, vicious opportunist. He may have been, as Herman suggests, a wonderful drinking companion. He may even have charmed Georgetown hostesses and the Kennedy family with his broad Irish humor.

But in Herman's portrayal, those elements of McCarthy's personality disappeared whenever he entered the public arena. At those times, his most forceful character trait emerged. All the evidence Herman amasses about Joseph McCarthy demonstrates that underneath his garrulous veneer, the junior Senator from Wisconsin was a liar.

Herman credits McCarthy's first political success -- election as a judge in Wisconsin -- to a lie he told about his opponent. His election to the Senate over venerated incumbent Robert LaFollette Jr. is attributed to McCarthy's baseless assertion that the Progressive icon was in thrall to Communists.

And, Herman asserts, McCarthy owed his success as a Commie hunter to an ever more audacious series of lies he concocted about his targets.

To his credit, Herman chronicles many of the untruths upon which McCarthy erected his reputation. Then he tries to excuse them. After all, he argues, Stalin lied, too. So why should Stalin's enemies be held to a higher standard of truth-telling?

If McCarthy used the flimsiest of evidence to excoriate those brought before his investigators, Herman pleads, he was only following the example of Franklin Roosevelt, who interned hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

If McCarthy based his conclusions about loyalty on often-distorted FBI files, Herman suggests, he was merely using the same tactics the Bureau itself employed to root out Nazi spies in the 1940s.

Those arguments might carry more weight if the book didn't also contain some glaring factual errors that undercut Herman's credibility.

Some of his factual missteps are relatively minor, as when he misquotes the title of the Tom Brokaw bestseller "The Greatest Generation." Others are more troubling.

"McCarthy decided to get the ball rolling," Herman writes, "with a speech he was scheduled to give on Lincoln's Birthday, on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia. Lincoln's Birthday was a traditional speech making day for Republican politicians -- an opportunity to ruminate on the nature of the GOP and the American political tradition."

The adjunct professor of history at George Mason University is right about the role the birthday of the Great Emancipator plays in Republican politics. But he's wrong about something much more fundamental. Lincoln's Birthday is February 12, not February 9. That's a fact a history professor really ought to know.

"Joseph McCarthy" is littered with such errors. They cast serious doubts on Herman's thesis that McCarthy, for all his faults, was a great American who suffered because he dared to challenge the monolith of Communism.

Herman's mistakes can justifiably lead the reader to reject the definition he concocts for McCarthyism as a righteous crusade against evil.

And that leaves us where we started, with the definitions of McCarthyism enshrined in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: "the political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence" and "the use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition."

Despite Herman's best efforts, those definitions are the true legacy of Joseph McCarthy.

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