On November 14th, ninety nine years ago, Joe McCarthy was born in Wisconsin. He was the fifth child of seven born to an Irish-American family of farmers. He died on May 2, 1957, his life no doubt shortened by a broken heart and sheer exhaustion, for he had been the victim of an incredible campaign of vilification by the most powerful and underhanded forces in the USA. Fifty years after his death, those forces are more powerful than ever and still largely concealed from the American people. For those who think that the experiences of a Wisconsin Senator who died 50 years ago are of little importance now, let me remind you that one of the most deadly accusations that can be made against any conservative or nationalist who calls a Leftist a Leftist, or implies a lack of patriotism, is that he is indulging in ‘McCarthyism’.
How a patriotic Senator, who did more than any other politician of his day to uncover the Soviet penetration of US Government came to be so condemned by ‘history’ is the subject of “BLACKLISTED BY HISTORY: The untold story of SENATOR JOE McCARTHY and his fight against America’s enemies”. This book by M. Stanton Evans, and just arrived on the bookshelves, is a ‘must read’ for all those who believe in justice, truth and democracy.
I have never read a book more thoroughly researched and objectively written, though I predict it will be ignored or rubbished by the Media Class and its academic allies of the Left. Evans’ 605 page book is packed with impeccable sources and he has left no stone unturned in his efforts to get to the truth of McCarthy’s allegations of Communist subversion, penetration and influence in Government that led to the policy catastrophes of Eastern Europe and China during and after the Second World War. Sadly, some of the facts will never be uncovered because the Communists in Government were able, with the help of colluding, unprincipled politicians, to remove and destroy much of the incriminating material in the records. This is ironic because McCarthy spent much of his time as Committee Chairman attempting to obtain records from the Government bureaucracy and revealing that important records and top secret information wer e being systematically removed and looted for the benefit of the Soviet Government and its spies.
There are few heroes in Evans’ book, apart from Joe himself, Roy Cohn, a small group of Republican Congressmen, Democrat Senator Pat McCarran and a handful of officials who paid for their honesty with dismissal from government employment or removal from the military. Of the Government Departments of the day, only the FBI and its Director J. Edgar Hoover seemed immune from Leftist penetration and all of us who were kept safe from Soviet domination have much to thank Hoover for. Like McCarthy, Hoover’s reputation has been under constant attack from all Leftist academics and the Media Class and will continue to be so, for how else can history get rewritten except by the total destruction of the truth?
The personal stories of all individuals and especially politicians can only ever make real sense when placed in the context of their times and McCarthy’s rise to prominence and his mission can only be fully understood when placed within great events. Evans provides a background but I think it needs amplification.
The USA was born out of a fear of Big Government and its founding people were natural democrats who valued individual rights and freedoms, personal independence, the family and Christianity. The Socialism/ Communism that took root in the late 19th Century and became increasingly more influential in cities like New York and San Francisco was brought mostly by immigrants and refugees from Europe and especially Eastern Europe. For many of these people, the opportunities to own land were limited and they had only their labor to offer. Consequently, when unbridled capitalism experienced the economic downturns that are the stuff of creative destruction, these people looked to government for protection. The great Depression that followed 1929’s Wall Street Crash gave rise to the Roosevelt Presidency and New Deal of the 1930’s.
This was a turning point in US history, for the New Deal was solely about expanding government, based on the belief that only government and economic planning from the commanding heights could restore prosperity and create equality. For idealists, of whom there are a great many in academia, Communism in Stalin’s Soviet Union was living proof that Heaven could be created on earth. Conservatives and Christians know differently!
The explosion of job opportunities in Federal Government Departments in Washington D.C. naturally attracted the intelligentsia and particularly those who worshipped the planning ideology. The 1930’s decade, with its backdrop of Russia’s claim to be the world’s glowing future, with its masses of unemployed US citizens both native-born and many recently arrived from Nazi Germany as refugees, and a privileged class who felt guilty about their affluence amid poverty, promised an opportunity for Communism to take over the world’s leading capitalist nation from the inside and without revolution.
The US State Department became the most infested with undercover Communists, but all Departments were penetrated and the secret network of party members and sympathizers, ably directed by Soviet agents, was able to spread the Communist Party’s presence everywhere in Government. Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats were (mostly) unwitting aiders and abettors of this process. A number of secret Communists got to the very top of the bureaucracy, camouflaged by (what McCarthy rightly called) silver spoon backgrounds, and were able not only to pass secret information to their Soviet masters, but influence and occasionally shape government policy.
Although some freedom lovers in the US foresaw the dangers of the creeping Socialist policies of the New Deal in the 1930’s, it was not until Stalin achieved total power in the USSR and began to push forward with Communist Imperialism, that the USA was threatened from the outside. Stalin’s brutal purges of his own people and the Show Trials of former comrades Zinoviev, Kamenev, Tomsky, Bukharin (and his pursuit and murder of Trotsky in Mexico) and others had little negative effect on either the communist East European refugees or the silver-spooned intellectuals who comprised the US CP. Only the Nazi-Soviet Pact had any effect on members’ loyalties and this was short-lived once Hitler tore it up and invaded Russia.
The Second World War years which pitted the US against Germany and brought Russia into an uncomfortable alliance with the US and UK, was a boon to the Communists who had penetrated US government. Suddenly almost no-one in the US cared about infiltration and the doors of Government employment were opened to even the most flagrantly obvious enemies of capitalism. In some ways this was to have disadvantages for the Communists, for when the war ended and the Cold War began, it was clear to the wary that there was a problem of subversion.
Roosevelt was replaced by another Democrat in the White House, Harry Truman and Truman inherited a bureaucracy that was now both powerfully large and well penetrated to the very top. The deal done by an ailing Roosevelt at Yalta (which handed Eastern Europe to Stalin) was no doubt largely the work of the hidden traitors like Alger Hiss who advised him. When the Communists took power in China and the Nationalist forces were abandoned by the White House under Truman, there was a feeling in some patriotic quarters that ‘enough was enough’ and that there was something deeply wrong in the State Department. Evans, in this book, provides a fascinating background to the betrayal of the Chinese Nationalists and to the influences of not only high-placed traitors in Government, but also Government –sponsored think tanks that were seamlessly connected to the Sate Department and wholly Communist directed.
It was at this point that Joe McCarthy arrived in the Senate and Joe brought with him an outsider’s disregard for the Washington elites. It needs to be remembered here that senior bureaucrats are mostly more powerful in the long term than elected politicians for they are often faceless, carry no accountability and occupy power long enough to see politicians come and go. Furthermore, many politicians have limited knowledge about the machinery they preside over, are lazy or seduced by the chance to become Washington insiders and thus are dependent on their bureaucrats and advisers.
Party loyalty and an eye on the next election cycle also result in political leaders being reluctant to admit mistakes made by a predecessor of the same Party. There is no doubt that Truman and his henchmen were unwilling to uncover the terrible mistakes made by Roosevelt and his Democrat Party during the War years. The truth (and Evans’ research makes this painfully clear) was that Washington Government was permeated with Communists and their Fellow Travelers and that the Soviet spymasters could obtain every secret (including atomic bomb secrets)and know every strategic policy move that the US Government intended to make. As Evans is at pains to make plain, Truman was an anti-Communist and his resistance to McCarthy’s efforts to uncover the Communist grip on the State and other Departments was probably motivated by Party partisanship combined with dangerous advice from various quarters. Having read this book, I hav e to wonder whether Dean Acheson and some other leading figures of the time were also deliberately aiding the Soviets by protecting the infiltrators and keeping then in position. In any case Truman comes out of all this badly, for he put his and his Party’s interests above the national one.
Despite a constant campaign against him by the rich and powerful, subversives and petty-minded politicians, McCarthy did not give up, and his tenacity, aided by the FBI (who had all the facts about Soviet espionage and infiltration but could not overcome the conspirators and their lethargic friends in Congress and the White House) and some other patriotic leakers, he began to reveal to the public the extent of Soviet penetration in Government. Largely as a result of this, the Democrat Party narrowly lost power in the November 1952 elections and Eisenhower entered the White House in the following January. McCarthy was re-elected too and became more powerful now that he was a Committee chairman. Eisenhower, never a fighting general but an administrator who could preside over a coalition by dint of charm, underhandedness and seeming neutrality, was less suited to deal with Communists in Government than Truman. Like the modern-day Rhinos of the Republican Eastern Establishment, Ike was more at home with Liberals than Conservatives. McCarthy had already upset Ike by attacking the bad judgment of his old military friend Marshall and Ike came to the White House willing to believe anything bad about McCarthy. Like many who create a public image of patrician detachment, Ike was capable of pettiness and poor judgment and his animosity towards McCarthy was soon fuelled by those around him who had their own reasons for fearing Joe and craving his absolute destruction. The more Joe revealed Communist scandals in the Government, the more he made life difficult for the indolent and popularity seeking Ike. When McCarthy began probing Communist penetration of the Army, Ike was ready to stab him in the back, and did so.
I remember reading much in the newspapers about McCarthy and his investigations when I was a Leftist in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. My understanding (and this says so much about the Media and its power to churn out propaganda even then) was that McCarthy was merely hounding poor one-legged subway ticket collectors out of government employment for the sin of once having attended a Communist meeting. I suspect, having now read Evans’ book, that this kind of nonsense was rooted in the case of Annie Lee Moss, an African-American woman who worked as a code clerk in the Army. Although she strenuously denied ever having been a Communist, she was a liar. Her work also enabled her to get access to secret materials. One would never know this from the history books.
On this website we claim that the Media Class is now the most powerful Class in society and pushes its agenda through Leftist politicians, academics and public sector unions, and by controlling and distorting the news. The 1950’s saw the entry of television into all US family rooms and was a time when the Media Class was beginning to take shape. The newspapers and magazines of the period were founding members of the new Class and were already mostly Leftist mouthpieces. Not surprisingly, the Press generally hounded McCarthy and lied about him and two columnists in particular used their influence to destroy him. They were Jack Anderson and Drew Pearson and no-one will be surprised that the New York Times and Washington Post were dedicated in their campaign to misrepresent McCarthy and his work. The TV stations also did their best to use the televised Army Hearings to portray McCarthy in the worst light possible. Once the Eisenhower Administration made common ground with the Leftists and the Washington elites and the embedded Communists, McCarthy was doomed, for without honest news coverage he could not appeal over the heads of them to the American public.
The fall of the Soviet Empire and the access it briefly afforded to many Soviet espionage documents have revealed, beyond any doubt, that Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and Joe McCarthy were right in their claims about Communist spies and Communist infiltration of Government. Indeed they were more right than they knew.
In an enlightening moment on page 540 of this book, Evans recounts some of his attempts to set the record straight with modern-day journalists who have written about McCarthy. His letter to Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal setting out facts that she had got wrong received no reply, no acknowledgment and no redress. Rabinowitz is supposedly a campaigner who rights wrongs, but not in this instance. I wait to see if the Evans book is reviewed in any major newspaper, but I am not holding my breath. Since the book is underpinned with research and documentation it will be difficult to refute. In such cases, the Media Class usually simply ignores the existence of news.
Finally I must draw attention to the State Department of today. It has a parallel with the UK’s BBC in that once a public Department has been so absolutely captured by the Leftists it cannot be reformed, for it is wholly owned by them. We should not be surprised that the State Department is the most disloyal to America’s interests to this day and has worked against President Bush and his foreign policies without pause.
Go out and buy this book immediately!