Joseph McCarthy

Larry I. Bland

A political tract disguised as a scholarly history, this book is intended to be a contribution to the right-wing side of the current “culture war” in the United States. Nevertheless, it could have been written in 1956 as a companion piece to William Buckley and Brent Bozell’s McCarthy and His Enemies. Contrary to appearances, the author is not McCarthy’s defense lawyer but a cultural historian who received his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University (1985), is adjunct professor at George Mason University, and coordinator of the Western Civilization Program at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1997 he published The Idea of Decline in Western History.

According to Herman, McCarthy was justified and correct in all important political ideas and actions. The senator’s liberal enemies in academia, government, and the media were elitist gullible fools (at best). Sometimes they were irresponsibly blind (“in complicity with evil”) to the enormous danger communist subversion and propaganda posed to American society, but just as often they were actual traitors or Marxist-inclined dupes. Revisionist and antiwar writers of the 1960s and after are the ideological descendants of this evil crew.

Most of the author’s sources are secondary, but he also uses contemporary publications, published congressional hearings, a few interviews, and some manuscript collections. The book is nicely published, illustrated, and indexed. Nobody left of Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond will be convinced by the author’s exegesis, but the book is a must for all conservatives and conspiracy buffs. One presumes that right-wing foundations and corporations will wish to buy it in bulk for distribution to true believers.
—American Diplomacy, Summer 2000

Library Journal

The principal victim of McCarthyism, according to Herman (George Mason Univ., Washington, DC), was Joe McCarthy himself. A body of recent scholarship has sought to recast what usually has been viewed as a hysteria instead as a period when Communist subversion was an authentic threat. Herman (The Idea of Decline in Western History) attempts an ambitious job indeed: the historical rehabilitation of the Wisconsin senator whose name became an ism. For all his recklessness, this book's McCarthy was essentially correct that Soviet operatives and fellow travelers had a free pass into the government. And for every brutality committed by McCarthy, Herman has one to cite on the part of opponents in politics or the press, who finally did in a man weakened by alcoholism and by the roguery of aide Roy Cohn. Provocative and well written, the book is really an extended argument, with Herman as interested in skinning liberals as he is in McCarthy's story. It might be an opposite bookend to the classic anti-McCarthy work by Richard Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (LJ 6/15/59). Thomas C. Reeves's The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (LJ 4/1/82) remains a more reliable biography than either. Optional for public and academic libraries.--Robert F. Nardini, Chichester, NH Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A combative corrective to the view of McCarthy as red-baiting demagogue that finds the true villains in the liberal establishment and the mainstream media. Using archival materials from the former USSR and declassified US materials, Herman (History/George Mason Univ.) offers evidence validating McCarthy's anti-Communist pursuits: Alger Hiss, the US Army, pro-Communist federal employees. Most satisfying are his Senate scenes, which have the page-turning life of an Allan Drury novel. But overriding these virtues is the tortuous string of narrow characterizations that make much of the book read like a radio talk-show transcript. FDR envoy to Russia Harry Hopkins is a "Communist dupe," J. Robert Oppenheimer "a conscious Soviet asset," General Douglas MacArthur's insubordination to President Truman "a daring experiment." Predictably, those most responsible for unseating McCarthy are the most radically revised targets. Rather than acting as a moral barometer, Army counsel Joseph Welch is a crafty Eastern Establishment regular mainly interested in how he appeared on TV. Edward R. Murrow is no beacon of truth but an opportunist whose manipulative McCarthy interviews are central to "the modern media's exalted self-image." One of the few events escaping revision is McCarthy's physical attack on adversarial columnist Drew Pearson: The knee in the groin and flattening slap are registered with disapproval. Herman's own rhetorical punches point to his reductionist definition of the McCarthy era—a battle pitting atheist commie liberals against churchgoing moral conservatives. This limits the author's credibility and discounts human complexity. To his credit, Herman provides a moredistanced view than Richard Rovere did in his benchmark 1959 biography; yet Herman's relentless politicizing deprives McCarthy of the dignity of a fallen man. A well-researched but hectoring book that fails to redeem McCarthy and antagonizes readers through its reductionist views of the American people. Librarians, prepare for opinion-blackened margins; readers, argue and run—to more balanced historians.