McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning
By William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell.
Henry Regnery Co., 1954.
Hardcover, 425 pages.
Reviewed by Nicholas Mosvick.
William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell Jr., his one-time Yale debate partner, National Review co-founder, and brother-in-law, did not mince words over seventy years ago about the crisis of the West. The problem, as they summarized it in their 1954 classic McCarthy and His Enemies, was that while traitors had always “played critical parts in the past,” in the Nuclear Age, the consequences of treason were “mitigated.” Thus, “An Alger Hiss, critically situated, can, conceivably, determine the destiny of the West.” In a world faced by the “new face of treason,” they wrote, “preaching and discussing ways to adapt our traditional concepts into serviceable weapons with which to protect ourselves from the hazards the architects of our society never contemplated,” the job would be hard in the era of indecision.
As biographer Sam Tanenhaus observes, Buckley’s first political hero was Charles Lindbergh as an America-first teenager, before the venerable Ohio Senator Robert Taft. McCarthy was less the hero than the tribune—able to give voice and potency to an all-important cause: anti-Communism. More particularly, McCarthy raised a specific issue that American conservatives in the halcyon days of the modern movement could rally around–whether the U.S. State Department and its security program were corrupted by what Buckley and Bozell deemed the “criminal nonchalance” of the department in its treatment of security and loyalty risks. The duo answered in their introduction that no security program facing the Communist threat should accept that “ten suspected traitors working in the State Department should not be molested lest one of them should prove to be loyal.”
McCarthy and His Enemies was an arduous 18-month research project for Buckley and brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. Bill would later reflect on the difficulty of the research, quipping that 18 months was a “very, very long time to spend on the question whether Esther Brunauer was ever a member of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee League.” Bill would never attempt such a project again. It was made possible in part because Senator McCarthy opened his files to the duo, who were friendly to the Senator and his beloved wife, Jean. The book was released in March 1954, just before McCarthy’s televised demise under the auspices of Joseph Welch’s theatrics.
Willmoore Kendall, Buckley and Bozell’s Yale mentor, was present for much of the writing and editing period. His ideas and theories are strewn throughout the work—Kendall’s notion of the “public orthodoxy” against the liberal idea of procedural neutrality lies at the heart of the book. McCarthyism, they believed, was a crucial and existential defense of the public orthodoxy against the forces that sought to destroy the West. McCarthyism, as far as Buckley and Bozell were concerned, more so than the Senator himself, was the object in need of protection.
As the duo puts it in McCarthy and His Enemies, America, in supporting McCarthy and McCarthyism, was “rallying around an orthodoxy whose characteristic is that it excludes Communism; and adherents of communism are, therefore, excluded from positions of public trust and popular esteem.” There was, thus, no “reign of terror” under McCarthy, but rather evidence that “America’s back [had] stiffened.” They wrote of how McCarthyism was a “program of action against those in our land who help the enemy,” something which was “nine parts social sanction to one part legal sanction” and entirely legitimate because societies must defend the institutions they create lest they cease to exist. In his 1963 opus, The Conservative Affirmation, Kendall himself concentrated on the same problem—what a democracy, namely a constitutional republic, does with respect to dissent, especially dissent that borders on or becomes seditious.
Kendall, reviewing the past controversies over loyalty during the Revolutionary War, Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Civil War, analyzed the battle between McCarthyites and anti-McCarthyites as involving “a question that the American people must answer to know themselves as the kind of people they are, in order to achieve clarity as to their identity as a people, their mission in history, their responsibility under God—so, at least in those days, they would have put it–for the kind of political and social order they were to create and maintain in history.” In the 1950s, going back to the late 1930s, the particular question for every free society, Kendall thought was “Are we or are we not going to permit the emergence, within our midst, of totalitarian movements?” Thus, what the fight over McCarthyism was ultimately over for both Kendall and his two prize students, was whether the United States would be an “open society” imagined by liberalism or a consensus society in which all questions were not open questions because America was founded upon certain trust, not Millian liberalism.
For Buckley and Bozell, the liberal obsession with destroying McCarthy and McCarthyism came from the idea that McCarthyism “spells evil days ahead for our society; for McCarthyism has its roots in the desire of man to control the thinking of his fellow man.” More dangerous than Communism, they imagined, was the rise of an “Age of Conformity” under McCarthyism. This, they believed, was why liberal writers, like James Wechsler, the editor of the New York Post, felt comfortable calling McCarthy “America’s national disgrace.” As M. Stanton Evans wrote decades later in National Review, part of Buckley and Bozell’s analysis was a “searching critique of liberal spokesmen in press and government who grossly misstated the facts about McCarthy, and an effort to fathom the curious mentality that dismisses the crimes of a Stalin or Mao, but is galvanized to instant outrage by any hardshell anti-Communist.”
Liberalism, Buckley and Bozell suggested, was hardly “on the run” in America. For instance, the supposed “victims” of McCarthy’s October 1952 campaign speech, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Archibald MacLeish, were rewarded lavishly with prizes and prominent positions. Instead, continuing to reflect Kendall’s lessons, the New Conformity was the anti-McCarthyite liberal position. McCarthyism was, on the other hand, “a weapon in the American arsenal” around “which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”
The book was intended to be a publishing event. As Stan Evans put it, it “remains the definitive work of McCarthy’s doings up through 1953,” covering everything beginning with McCarthy’s infamous “Wheeling Address” in February 1950 and the list of subversives in the state department–either 205, 81 or 57–through the Tydings committee, the subcommittee investigating McCarthy’s efforts, and every notable public case brought by McCarthy from Owen Lattimore to George Marshall.
The charges in the cases Buckley and Bozell analyzed ran the gamut from accusations of espionage—as in the transfer of American secrets and documents to Soviet hands—to membership or involvement in various Communist-front organizations like the Institute for Pacific Relations, to gross negligence and carelessness which aided Communist strategic ends. The two men, though close enough to McCarthy that both wrote speeches on his behalf with Bozell joining his staff during his censure fight, intended the analysis to be as rigorous and fair as possible. They did not intend to write a biography or defense of McCarthy, either the man or his character, but to defend his cause and the cases made under it.
Buckley himself encapsulated this point in his 1960 introduction to the new edition, in which he shared an exchange with the British conservative writer Evelyn Waugh, who thought that while the book “makes plain that there was a need for investigation ten years ago,” those who were sympathetic with McCarthy’s cause “must deplore his championship of it.” Buckley responded that the book was “not an attempt at biography” but rather a “fragmentary inquiry…of security procedures in the government, of McCarthy’s charges, of the tumult that ensued. It is a study (by no means uncritical) of the rhetoric used by McCarthy to make his case… Our ambition was to set down the facts upon which a responsible judgment can be made of the issues McCarthy raised, and rode, through the years that made him prominent.”
The case of Philip Jessup is instructive of the strengths of the duo’s analysis in McCarthy and His Enemies. As the authors note, Jessup was, next to McCarthy’s attack on George Marshall, the most celebrated case for liberals and the “definitive proof of the evils of McCarthyism,” as they believed Jessup to be a great American whose “patriotism and integrity were simply not open to question.” The authors painstakingly show how the Jessup case, rather than proof of the “Great Witchhunt,” was instructive of the necessity of McCarthyism.
Jessup was nominated to be the Ambassador to the United Nations in the fall of 1951, but the Senate refused to confirm his appointment. The Left blamed McCarthy for losing what they deemed Jessup’s invaluable services, even though prominent members of both parties in the Senate sternly opposed his elevation. McCarthy remarked to the Tydings Committee that his intent was to discuss the “unusual affinity of Mr. Philip C. Jessup, of the State Department, for Communist causes.” As Buckley and Bozell put it, Jessup was the “model of confidence, dignity and restraint” before the Committee, denying his membership and sympathies with Communism. They note the lack of cross-examination and the sycophantic behavior of members of the Tydings Committee.
Among McCarthy’s charges against Jessup was that he had been a “leading light in the Institute of Pacific Relations at a time that organization was reflecting the Communist Party line” and that Jessup led the “smear campaign against Nationalist China and Chiang Kai-Shek.” Buckley and Bozell argued that had the Tydings Committee investigated the public files of the House Committee on Un-American Activities “it would have found that each organization with which Jessup had been connected was engaging in pro-Communist activities at the time of Jessup’s association” and that had they questioned some of Jessup’s prominent colleagues they would have discovered “that the Communist complexion of the organizations was not very difficult to spot.” Only a year later, the McCarran Committee reported that the IPR indeed was a vehicle used by Communists to “orientate American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives.”
The authors also reviewed every article from the publication of the IPR, the Far Eastern Survey, between the years of 1943 and 1946, when Jessup was in charge. As they put it, during those years, “the Far Eastern Survey’s pro-Communist batting average in that area [editorial bias in the book review section] was a cool 1.000. Every book critical of the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communists was reviewed unfavorably; and every book praising the Communists, or dressing them up to look like non-Communists, was reviewed favorably.” Buckley and Bozell conceded that McCarthy’s statement that Jessup “pioneered the smear campaign” could not be substantiated by the evidence, the Senator’s indictment of Jessup was “decidedly closer to the mark than the uniformed yet categorical denials of the Tydings Committee.” They argued that McCarthy was justified in putting up Jessup’s case for further inquiry, as his past record was sufficient reason to inquire into his loyalty, yet they admitted that he was not a loyalty risk according to the available evidence under the reasonable doubt standard precisely because the only way to prove Jessup a loyalty risk was to “explore the questions raised by McCarthy.”
As the Jessup Case makes clear, McCarthy and His Enemies focused heavily on the failings of the Tydings Committee, which was investigating McCarthy’s efforts. Buckley and Bozell turned the rhetoric of the Left around, suggesting that the words “fraud” and “hoax” were “pretty good words for describing not McCarthy’s charges, but Tydings’ conclusions about them”—in particular, that the accused Communist sympathizers were “patriots beyond a reasonable doubt,” that the State Department’s security program was efficient and effective, and that McCarthy “was a charlatan.” The Tydings Committee’s investigation was, simply put, “a farce,” the authors strongly emphasized, because what it accomplished was not to disprove McCarthy’s charge of “shocking security conditions” in the State Department, but “merely set aside” them. Or, in the case of Louis Budenz, a first-hand source of detailed information about the Communist conspiracy “firmly established” at the time, who told the Committee that Owen Lattimore and Haldore Hanson were Communists, was treated to “every known technique for humiliating a man.”
Once more, the duo did not withhold criticism of McCarthy, noting his own “far from exemplary” behavior during the Tydings episode, sometimes showing himself “inexperienced, or, worse still, misinformed,” with some charges “exaggerated.” As such, McCarthy and His Enemies contains dozens of criticisms of McCarthy and his various tactical errors. More notably, when the duo examined McCarthy’s “Wheeling speech” and his claim of having the names of “57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party” within the State Department, they concluded that McCarthy misled the Senate and deserved to be censured on that particular point.
Neither were they unwilling to note McCarthy’s exaggerations and even smears, as in the treatment of liberal columnist Drew Pearson and General George Marshall, which they treated as an example of when McCarthy’s judgment was bad. As Eliott Abrams put in a 1996 NR article revisiting the work, “Buckley and Bozell were, then, honest in their assessment of McCarthy and his methods, though gentle in passing sentence.” Still, of McCarthy’s “Wheeling” charge, the pair notes that McCarthy did “unquestionably redeem his promise to expose shocking conditions with regard to State Department security administration.” The Senator, Buckley and Bozell counseled, should not have made the specific charge, but it did not follow that none of those named were Communists or should have been retained by the State Department. McCarthy should be remembered not for the charge but “as the man who brought public pressure to bear on the State Department to revise its practices and to eliminate from responsible positions flagrant security risks.”
A notable aspect of the work, which undoubtedly also took influence from not just Kendall but fellow founding NR editor James Burnham, was the underlying constitutional analysis. The rise of executive power over the prerogatives of Congress was one of the key reasons that American conservatives were so dismayed with the New Deal and its legacy. In Buckley and Bozell’s analysis, McCarthy was partly heroic because he fought that very liberal establishment, “executive privilege,” and presidential secrecy, which the liberal press and its leading figures gladly defended before reversing themselves during Watergate two decades later.
The book’s defense of McCarthyism also fares even better over half a century after its publication, as the opening of the Soviet archives gave Americans far more information than the authors had in 1954 and made abundantly clear not only the reality of Soviet infiltration of the American government and institutions but the depth of that corruption. Bill Buckley and Brent Bozell’s judgment, over 70 years later, retains its power:
Indications are that what we have pieced together is but a tiny, though horrifying representative fragment of the whole security picture–much of it brought to the attention of an unresponsive public by the irresponsible efforts of one man.
Nicholas Mosvick is the Buckley Legacy Project Manager for the National Review Institute and holds a PhD in American history and a J.D. He studies American constitutional history and is writing a first book on the legal debates over the draft during the American Civil War.
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