Haynes Johnson Interview (2005): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Let's help our audience get a handle on this subject. Who was Joseph McCarthy and how long did this phenomenon that he created, McCarthyism, last? What are the bookmarks here?
Joe McCarthy was a United States senator from Wisconsin, a poor boy [who] grew up in a rural area, one of nine children, north of Appleton, Wisconsin. Terribly ambitious, hungry -- the classic American story, wanted to make something of himself. Worked his way through college, actually dropped out of high school, floundered, and he had a whole series of events, and finished high school. One year later, at the age of twenty-one, he goes on to Marquette, becomes a lawyer, starts out.
He told people from the beginning, "I want to be the first Catholic President of the United States." This is a long, long time ago, way before the Kennedys, and so forth. He then became a lawyer; he was elected a judge. He was then a Democrat, a militant New Dealer, which he later defamed. He left the party not out of ideology but [because] the Republicans offered a better opportunity. He goes into the war as a Marine Corps office in the Pacific and he starts falsifying his military record, claims himself to be "Tailgunner Joe." He was an intelligence officer. He would brief the pilots when they came back at Bougainvillea, Guadalcanal, or wherever, on the mission; but occasionally they let him go up and fly a mission, though he wasn't so much in danger.
He started claiming, and sending articles back to Wisconsin about "Tailgunner Joe." He flew seventeen missions, thirty-one missions, forty -- whatever it was, and later falsified combat heroism records that he actually received. So, there was in him, from the beginning, an innate, basic [propensity] to distort. He would do anything, anything, to make a point.
When he became a United States senator he defeated -- this is a tragic story -- he defeated young Bob La Follette, who was the scion of the La Follettes of Wisconsin. People have forgotten, but this was the heart of the progressive movement. They literally put the stamp of many of the progressive policies that both Theodore Roosevelt praised and admired, and that Franklin Roosevelt adopted in the New Deal -- [these] came right out of Wisconsin -- "the test tube of democracy," Theodore Roosevelt called it at the time. And so, McCarthy defeats La Follette in '46 very narrowly, at a time after World War II, and he becomes a freshman senator. But he didn't do well, he was failing, and he wasn't connecting. His colleagues didn't like him. He would take them on, both Republicans and Democrats, he was a loose cannon.
He was losing favor in Wisconsin up until 1950, when he had two years to go before re-election. And he made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, to a Republican audience of 200 Republican women, the Republican women's club there, a Lincoln Day dinner where the party sent out people, as they still do, their top speakers, to extol Lincoln and then the theme of the year.
The theme of the Republican campaign that year, '50, was that the Democrats were soft on communism and the government was infested with traitors. McCarthy gives a speech in Wheeling. He waves a sheaf of papers in his hands and he says, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 communists who are active members of a communist spy ring who are at this moment developing and shaping the policies of the United States through the State Department." Bang, that's where it started. He made this charge. There was no list. It was made up out of whole cloth, totally untrue. And he then showed a kind of genius, the ability to manipulate the press. He would make a charge and then escalate the charge. He would raise [the accusation] from State Department communist nests and spies, then he starts escalating to Dean Atchison, the Secretary of State, to Harry Truman, all the Democrats, and as he would go around he'd make more charges. The press would be manipulated and they wouldn't really follow up. The headlines would catch the attention.
He did this for five years. He starts out from this low-ring position in the Republican Party; all of a sudden, by two years, he was the single most powerful and feared political figure in America. And he led, he's directly responsible, credited with defeating eight Democratic senators because he would go around the country and make the charges of communism, "soft on communism," "ignoble," a "godless atheist" and "we can't have these subversives in the United States Senate." And they lost their seats.
All of a sudden, the Democrats said -- as one said to another, after '52, "For whom does the bell toll? It tolls for thee." Republicans who had disrespected McCarthy, didn't have much use for him, saw him as useful. He was gaining back the power, and in fact contributed to Eisenhower's election in '52. Eisenhower would've won anyhow, but he contributed powerfully. [He was] the first Republican president since Herbert Hoover, so this new Republican era [was] fueled by fear of communism.
And you know, Harry, it wouldn't have happened had there not been the surface material, the combustible material, that McCarthy was able to stitch together about the communist threat: the atomic bomb, the nuclear holocaust, the fact that we might aim -- people who are young don't remember, if you were in grade school you huddled under your desk for tests for atomic bomb security and civil defense structure.
And also the Rosenberg trial.
Yes, and you had the idea of traitors. McCarthy out in Wheeling when Alger Hiss had just been convicted of perjury, they had arrested a spy named Klaus Fuch who worked on the Manhattan Project, developing the bomb. He did give secrets. Later on, the Rosenberg story -- they were tried and executed, so this idea that we were losing the world fight, communism about to take us over because our spies had betrayed us [was very powerful]. Mao had won the war for mainland China over Chiang Kai-shek, and so you had an alliance between the Chinese and the Russians, and Berlin was a tinder-box, everything was combustible, and Harry Truman was just about to announce the creation of the hydrogen bomb. So, there was fear and legitimate reasons to be apprehensive, fear after the victory of World War II. And rather than talk about what was the reality of the communist threat or how you combat it, McCarthy started making the charges that it was because of treason.
Next page: McCarthyism and the Destruction of Institutions
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