McCarthyism failed to purge the government of Communists:
The reality behind “McCarthyism” — a good recent history is that of Stanton Evans — was one in which Americans discovered that their government had been employing, in positions of great responsibility, individuals known as “Communists,” who were often extremely capable and brilliant, but who did not seem to have the best interests of Americans at heart, and seemed capable of misleading them with disturbing facility. There are no more Communists — not in the literal sense of the word. But surely the parallel is clear.In particular, Americans discovered that their own foreign-policy organs, not to mention their own official press, had been consciously and deliberately misinforming them about the nature of events and regimes in Russia and China. Oceans being oceans, these events had relatively little direct impact on Americans. (Except, of course, in the Korean War, where American soldiers fought a major conflict against the Jeffersonian reformers to whom its diplomats had just delivered a quarter of humanity.) However, their effects on Russians and Chinese were dire. Especially the Chinese.
USG, or at least its foreign-policy organs, or certain networks therein, were seen correctly to bear culpability in this matter. (In modern-day historical works, for instance, you can see the correct history in either Jay Taylor’s life of Chiang Kai-shek or Jung Chang’s Mao. Chang doesn’t give a crap about American politics; Taylor is himself a former Foreign Service officer. If you read either work, or any other reliable source, you will come away with the feeling that “George Marshall” is a perfectly sensible answer to the perfectly sensible question of “who lost China?”.)
The basic problem faced by McCarthyism was that McCarthy’s shop itself, run in practice by the freakish legal child-prodigy Roy Cohn, was a tiny dog that had caught a very large car. There was no substantive way to differentiate between a New Dealer and a Communist. After all, between the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and the Anglo-Soviet split of ’45-’48, the two had been essentially the same movement. The two were also littered with homologous doctrinal doxology — starting, but not ending, with “progressive.”
Therefore, McCarthyism had to operate under an essentially erroneous narrative of foreign subversion. Broadly, in general, his specific charges were accurate. The many sub-rosa connections to the Russian intelligence agencies that he uncovered were real. But the meaning of those connections were completely misinterpreted. As a result, a false picture was presented, both by McCarthy’s allies at the time and by his present conservative defenders.
A man like Harry Dexter White did not see himself as a tool of the KGB. A man like Harry Dexter White saw the KGB as a tool of Harry Dexter White. The KGB could put him down in their files as a tool; I’m sure they did; and perhaps, in the end, they were right. But to White and many others like him, America should have been working with the Soviets as with the British, because the two systems were on a path to convergence. No one then or now would think anything of any contact between British intelligence and anyone in Washington.
This is actually not a reassuring conclusion at all. The problem is that it directs complicity in the other direction. Instead of the crime of workin’ secretly fer furriners, ie, Stalin, the FDR administration strikes me as more likely to be prosecuted by history for employing Stalin. Who certainly made quite a steely iron fist. It is neither unusual nor unfair, however, for a leader to be prosecuted for the work of his henchmen. The Boss cannot be expected to have executed his victims personally — as if he were, say, Saddam Hussein.
But I digress. The point is not the accuracy of McCarthy’s charges, but the actual effectiveness of his actual purge. There is no doubt that many Communists and other progressives, across a fairly wide cross-section of American institutions, not entirely sparing even the most elite, were purged as a result of McCarthyism. In that sense, the purge succeeded. The tumor regressed.
A little. And not for long. We can see easily that McCarthyism failed. If McCarthyism had succeeded, McCarthy would today be hailed as a hero, and his victims execrated as villains. Since his victims are hailed as martyrs, and he is execrated as a villain, we can see easily that he lost. Any successes were only temporary. The tumor came back — and prevailed.