A Joe McCarthy We Should Know

A restless world tired of traditional faith came to embrace a new religion in international socialism. That affair cost 150 million lives.  While a hostile world intelligentsia and a liberal media, the likes of the NY Times, worked hard at covering up the atrocities through the decades, there would be those young correspondents who risked their lives and reputations to expose them.  Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones for example travelled into the Ukrainian famine and smuggled out stories to the West.  For this, Muggeridge was sacked by his newspaper the Manchester Guardian. Jones was later assassinated by the NKVD.  George Orwell, a lifelong democratic socialist and anti-Stalinist, captured that era in “Animal Farm” and worked Jones into the book.  Societal persecution dogged all three men for speaking the truth when it wasn’t chic to suggest the Russian Revolution shouldn’t happen in the West.

Peter B. Hrycenko

But that top-down revolution was indeed unfolding here.

As Ukrainians worldwide commemorate the 80^th anniversary of Holodomor, the forced Soviet famine of 1932-33 that killed 10 million, with a December 4 monument unveiling in Washington, I’d like to say a few things about a hero who shed greatest light on communist infiltration and deception in America.  Joe McCarthy.

Loathed by many in the big media yet loved by the common man, Wisconsin Senator McCarthy for a scant five years went to the media to share what was going on in a federal government having a devil of a time cleaning out national security risks.  Warring with the Eastern Liberal Establishment got him packaged into the most hated politician in American history.  

He is the eternal face of the misunderstood and poorly explained Red Scare.  

A prime example of conventional treatment today of McCarthy and the period can be seen in the columns of The Morning Call's Paul Carpenter.  A couple times a year he drags out old Joe for a drubbing.


But first about the national security nightmare under Roosevelt and Truman.   Thousands of moles nosed their way into US government.  A maturing FBI grew aware of that cultural phenomenon but was hampered  because of the lax attitude under Roosevelt who himself could have summed up  the Stalin age when he quipped “ give Uncle Joe what he wants.”  We’re not talking about cute moles your dog digs up in the yard or the silly youth who paints a basement bathroom walls in black gloss along with a glowing hammer and sickle.  We’re talking intellectuals who clubbed together for years to overthrow American life and were often on the Kremlin payroll. Highest placed agents of influence, such as the State Department’s Alger Hiss, the White House’s Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins,  and Treasury’s Harry Dexter White, helped seal the fate of Eastern Europe – and China. The atom bomb project under the mysterious J. Robert Oppenheimer had true believers delivering Los Alamos secrets.

By 1945, our Army’s Signal Corps had the ultra-secret Operation Venona decoding cable message traffic between the US and Moscow.  They found 349 US citizens and resident aliens active in espionage, while thousands more could not be fully identified, according to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr in their book “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America.”  Prosecutors had a dilemma: they couldn’t use Venona nor sometimes the best FBI evidence in courts without tipping off the Soviets.  Instead they had to settle on nailing many of the traitors and fellow travellers on lesser perjury charges. Untold numbers were quietly ushered out of government service by loyalty boards and personnel security officers.

Back to America’s astounding cold warrior.  In 15 months his investigative committee accomplished a decade’s work by Senate standards. Great energy was expended battling the White House just to get records out of various agencies such as the State Department and Army.  Famed prosecutors Roy Cohn and Robert F. Kennedy added star appeal. However the Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower continuum didn’t take well to McCarthy’s growing power. Veteran journalist and educator M. Stanton Evans in his unequaled “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fight against America’s Enemies” explained McCarthy in retaliation would help to bring down several  prominent Democrats, most notably  Truman.  Curiously, Ike and his lib-mod Beltway advisors had weighed in against McCarthy.  VP Richard Nixon -- the hero who nailed Alger Hiss not long ago while a California congressman -- had been tasked in lining up votes in the Senate to censure him for his scalding arguments with senators. The Army hearings and the censure battle would cost the Republicans control of Congress. 

One of the best attorneys in America, Edward Bennett Williams, defending McCarthy, found out the censure hearing was no court of law. The Senate gave the sentence first, the verdict later.  Of those 46 charges against him, none was left standing. That led Nixon to strike off the word "censor" and replace it with "condemn." Satisfied that blowback wouldn't burn them should there be blowback, the establishment "condemned" McCarthy on just one laughable count, "conduct unbecoming." Williams pointed out that a number of current senators were already guilty of much more against McCarthy and society in general. Hypocrisy prevailed.

Declassified Operation Venona and the brief opening of KGB archives in post-Soviet Russia proved McCarthy right about his charges. Of course the mainsteam media and many knowing historians have ignored that.