Historian David A. Nichols left out the real Joe McCarthy in "Ike and McCarthy." Read the Book Review on Amazon by Peter B. Hrycenko

Why would expert historian David A. Nichols in his “Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Secret Campaign against Joseph McCarthy,” avoid acknowledging the finest book ever written on McCarthy? That is M. Stanton Evans’ “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.” A slight oversight perhaps?

What about the vast liberal network of NGO’s, of Big Education, of Big Media that worked hand in glove with Ike’s liberal confidants to prod a Republican president to attack a great American patriot, a Republican champion in McCarthy? Nichols doesn’t bother with those important details.

Let me be clear; headlines of that day show many media and education people just the same supported McCarthy and his work. He would not have gained such power without them.

Before anyone endeavors to read the entire “Ike and McCarthy” hoping for historical truth, please start elsewhere. Yet I have some good things to say about this book as we go.

What we don’t read in the book is that McCarthy’s primary goal was to rid the federal payroll of Reds and fellow travelers which since Roosevelt were subverting foreign policy and ultimately empowering Stalin and Mao to imprison and kill our people overseas.

Consider the backdrop of McCarthy’s early 1950’s. Severe economic recession. A million casualties from WWII. A see-saw bloodbath in Korea raging, 37,000 American men and women to die, and another 100,000 wounded in a “conflict” we weren’t supposed to be seen as winners lest we offend Stalin.  Thanks, Truman-Acheson.

There were some men coming home from overseas, couldn’t find a job, so re-enlisted rather than starve.

These same Americans had been reading the newspapers and listening to radio. Nasty Joe McCarthy dared to expose the Truman White House, State and Treasury country-clubbers who created a policy of appeasement and squandered our wealth.

Nichols writes that the Left never forgave Eisenhower for defeating Adlai Stevenson in 1951.

Well, Eisenhower was a product of the New Deal Roosevelt-Truman continuum, a consensus man and he aimed to please. He could have run as Democrat or Republican, indistinguishable. He was drafted by the Establishment, the reluctant old soldier, and groaned throughout “Ike and McCarthy.” Surrounded by a staff of lib-mods with the best of intentions.

Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy burst onto the scene with his 1950 Wheeling WV about 57 red security risks in the U S State Department. Detractors to this day try to change 57 to 81 or 205, to confuse us. Eyewitnesses never recalled a number. There is no existing record of the number other than McCarthy’s personal statement. Two of those numbers originated in State Department security risk findings from 1946.

The State Department, later investigating itself – yes, investigating itself -- agreed in the end McCarthy was right and that State was loaded with subversives needing immediate attention.

Meanwhile, Democrat Senator Pat McCarran’s own committee would go over the same charges and more, forcing out 81 security risks from State by 1954.

A Truman-controlled Millard Tydings senate committee began an investigation that turned against McCarthy, slandering him, white-washing some big-name subversives, declaring there were no communists in government.  Maryland’s Tydings was soon voted out of office but not before the Democrats began an illegal overreaching investigation into McCarthy’s life that would go on for years.

 Nichols sets the tone in his Preface with “Beginning in 1950, Wisconsin’s junior senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, threw the United States into turmoil with his reckless, unsubstantiated charges that a variety of citizens, especially government employees, were Soviet agents. McCarthy’s disregard for the truth, his insatiable appetite for headlines, and his willingness to damage reputations turned ‘McCarthyism’ into an enduring epithet in our political language.”

He has it wrong. Not surprising, the last thing the Eastern Establishment wants broadcast is that Joseph R. McCarthy is truly America’s Cold War Conscience.

Biographies on McCarthy usually admit that McCarthy, on the social scene off the political stage, was liked by many, owing to his wit and surprising gentleness. Historian Nichols doesn’t mention that.

What historian David A. Nichols does abundantly reveal, most likely unintentionally, through many of McCarthy’s own words, is a shrewd and eloquent speaker with delicate humor, hardly a raving caveman. Something of a Patrick J. Buchanan of old White House fame.

The conventional notion, the news soundbite, that McCarthy called everybody who opposed him a communist is not true. On television and radio, he was clear to praise rank and file Democrats as good Americans in general.  Yet, like any fighting politician, he used hyperbole, particularly in response to vicious colleagues.

McCarthy ruined no innocent people. Rather, in his short time, he kept the nation safer. That’s why he carried the 50-29 Gallup approval into early 1954.

Real history now shows McCarthy was right.  We know this from the Army’s Venona ultra-secret decrypts of USA-Russian-Chinese cable traffic, Russian defectors, the FBI, a brief opening of the KGB archives, communist party escapees, executive session senate hearings releases. Further, a treasure trove of hidden notes and stories guarded by their retired US investigators came to light only a few years ago.

Pat Buchanan's cousin Meredith Gardner (far left) renowned code breaker

US government secrecy shrouded that extensive record, warping the vital understanding of our nation at war with communism.

Establishment types would have us believe McCarthy cooked up charges on the run. Hardly. Whistleblowers came to McCarthy. His subcommittee work -- which lasted less than two years and ended when the Democrats seized Congress in 1954 -- as well as the work of other committees like McCarran (who died in 1954), used carefully examined evidence covered up by the Establishment.

Regarding George C. Marshall, Eisenhower’s former mentor and boss. A number of observers have called Ike a “coward” and “yellow belly,” for several things,  most notably for not speaking up for Marshall.

On June 14, 1951 McCarthy in a rambling 70,000 word senate speech exposed “Yalta” Marshall for his role in giving Eastern Europe to Stalin and China to Mao. Right away, the news wire gatekeepers in The Swamp had in a number of instances passed along false reports on the speech, further outraging the American reader. Further, who would take the time to read the whole speech.

Yet anti-McCarthy historian Richard Rovere had to concede that most of it was true.

An absolute must read: to enlighten the public on the above, McCarthy spun off that speech with books “America’s Retreat From Victory” and “The Fight For America” which expanded the speech with superb documentation.  Of course, both books are out of print.

An open question: how many McCarthy critics have actually read the entire speech and the McCarthy books?

Russians in Korea

Facts are, Marshall was on the ground during the Marshall Mission to China, executing foreign policy, sabotaging nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek repeatedly and building up comrade Mao.  US Lend-Lease funds were going to the Russians, funding the Siberian Soviets who swept Manchuria and Korea. What a marvel to see the 1949 victor’s parade of Russian-trained Red Chinese, Manchurian, Korean and Japanese enter Beijing in US vehicles.

Historian David A. Nichols mentions several times Eisenhower worried about having mingled with communists in Berlin (after Patton was held back from taking it) after the war, with political insiders warning that McCarthy might use the red card on him. I don’t know what details Nichols had on that, he didn’t elaborate.

We do know by way of history, that Marshall was warned in early 1945 in a letter signed by 50 US military intelligence officers with rank of colonel and above, to not follow through with the then-secret Yalta accords which favored Stalin at every turn, including Manchuria.

Both Generals Marshall and Eisenhower executed parts of Yalta in 1945, Marshall in China later.

Eisenhower nervous? He was less than honest in 1945 to inquiries about the estimated 20.000 US servicemen and women then in Russian captivity. Again, not to upset the Russians. Reports from survivors decades later placed a number of the forgotten victims in Siberia having mined radioactive ore and mercury by hand.

General Eisenhower launched “Operation Keelhaul” which forced up to 4,000,000 anti-communist men, women and children mainly in Europe back to Joe Stalin at gun and bayonet point. There was even a bloody fight at Fort Dix and refugees were buried there. Although Marshall and Eisenhower were following orders from above, the record shows thank God that some US Army officers on the ground opposed it and rescued refugees by hiding nationality.

McCarthy talked about the war crime of Operation Keelhaul in his June 14, 1951 speech.

I had wanted to elaborate much on Nichol’s handling of the saga of the Chip Bohlen confirmation Ambassador to Moscow hearing before the senate. I’ll leave out extensive detail on what the FBI had on Bohlen which could have disqualified him. At the same time of Bohlen’s ordeal the State Department had quietly unloaded his brother in law.

Bohlen was opposed by former ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, and Arthur Bliss Lane, former ambassador to Poland.

Lane’s searing book, “I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People,” blasts Chip Bohlen in 1946 for pushing a $60,000,000 loan to communist Poland while the Poles were screaming don’t do it. Then it happened -- funding the hidden communist terror police (the mask came off so to speak) which committed mass murder in purging nationalists and deporting minorities to the USSR.

As one opposing senator Everett Dirksen said so well, “I reject Yalta, so I reject Yalta men.”

Edward Bennett Williams

Historian Nichols has another omission about as unforgivable as leaving out M Stanton Evans’ work. Little said about McCarthy’s famed attorney Edward Bennett Williams at the McCarthy censure hearings.

The senate kangaroo court was not a court of law. Edward Bennett Williams knocked down all the charges so there were none standing. After – yes, after -- the hearings concluded, the senate piled on one charge “conduct unbecoming” to make the “condemnation” stick.

Credit goes to historian Nichols for including, elaborating, on his source material that accidentally puts McCarthy in a good light. The networks grudgingly gave McCarthy airtime November 24, 1953, to defend himself against “Trumanism.” When, shockingly, Attorney General Brownell had exposed Truman, an accomplished liar, for lying about having appointed Soviet super agent Harry Dexter White to the International Monetary Fund ignoring FBI protests, Truman attacked McCarthy and the Republicans.

Here’s the best way to know the real Joe. Listen to the McCarthy speech take apart the lying Truman. Listen to McCarthy responses to Edward R. Murrow. Start with the Wheeling WV speech.

Inside those speeches, McCarthy points out unerringly in detail how the Communist Party and its organs made McCarthy public enemy number one. Establishment politicians sometimes incorporated the communist editorials verbatim in attacking McCarthy!

That Truman choose to not seek re-election in 1951 was largely influenced by McCarthy.

That the Republicans lost both houses of Congress to the Democrats in 1954 was largely attributed to the Establishment persecuting Joe McCarthy and trying to cover up for 35 red moles at Fort Monmouth complex.

Like Samson in the pagan temple, McCarthy took many with him on the way out.