Joe McCarthy Demythologized

In a recent critique of Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies that appeared in National Review, historian Ron Radosh makes numerous assertions about the book by M. Stanton Evans that are completely unsupported by the work itself. We will deal with just one of that multitude in this column.

“In a similar fashion, Evans supports McCarthy’s outrageous assertion about Gen. George C. Marshall,” Radosh writes. “It is fair game to argue that Marshall had a wrong and naïve view of Mao and his comrades—which he almost certainly did.”

“It is another to argue that he acted on behalf of the conspiracy set in motion by Service and the other China hands, who, Evans argues unconvincingly, ‘were controlling U. S. policy in the Pacific.’” Actually, Evans produces quite a paper trail, much of it declassified, to support that assertion.

“And even if Marshall was wrong, nothing can justify McCarthy’s charge that the general led a ‘conspiracy so immense’ to undermine America,” Radosh writes. And Evans doesn’t try to.

You can listen to Evans discuss the book on The Right Hour with Paul Weyrich. Weyrich assembled a panel of interviewers for the broadcast who included John Gizzi, the Capitol Hill correspondent for Human Events, the nation’s oldest conservative weekly newspaper, Wes Vernon, a former reporter for CBS and yours truly.

Unlike Radosh, all of us read the book. On the broadcast, Vernon tells Evans that many people may think that he went too easy on Harry Truman’s one-time Secretary of State.

“The question I addressed is whether he was the engineer of a ring of Soviet agents and I don’t think that he was,” Evans said. In the book he goes even further, taking nearly a chapter to rebut the McCarthy charge that Marshall was at the center of a ring of Soviet agents who helped put bloodthirsty communist dictator Mao Tse Tung in power in mainland China.

“McCarthy has taken his lumps for giving this speech from just about everyone who ever made a comment on it,” Evans notes in Blacklisted by History. “The criticism is deserved, but for reasons slightly different from those suggested in the standard treatments.”

“For one thing, a good deal of what he had to say about the policy blunders was not only true but urgently important.” Ironically, Evans goes on to exonerate Marshall in terms similar to those that Radosh uses to trash the veteran journalist.

“The uproar about Marshall’s motives tended to obscure this,” writes Evans. “For another, McCarthy was quite right that an immense conspiracy was afoot—especially with regard to China—though erring as to the role of Marshall.” Evans goes on to actually give Marshall credit for trying to clean up the State Department during his tenure there, another element of the book Radosh fails to acknowledge, if he noticed it to begin with.

“Also, on the internal security angle that was McCarthy’s own main focus, there are indications that Marshall sought to tighten security measures in the State Department when he was secretary there,” Evans writes. “It was Marshall, for instance, who in June 1947 ordered the suspension of ten security risks under the McCarran rider and a few weeks later authorized John Peurifoy to permit the House Appropriations Committee probe that produced the Lee list.”

“Though the first of these decisions was reversed, and the second never to be repeated, it’s noteworthy that in both cases Marshall’s initial moves were geared to better security practice and cooperation with the Congress.” By the way, Radosh never mentions the failure of the Truman Administration to use that act of Congress to fire security risks in the U. S. government, but then, you could write a whole book of relevant history that Radosh never discusses.

Oh, wait a minute. Stan Evans did just that.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.