It's worth asking yourself why Joe McCarthy is so frequently and consistantly tied to HUAC, and the persecution of the arts and free speech, subjects that almost everyone agrees should be left unrestricted?  How come that keeps happening?  Why, and to whom, is maintaining that connection important?

       Why is the astounding idea that paid soviet agents were allowed access to the highest levels of the American government, and NO ONE WAS TRYING TO STOP IT treated like it didn't matter?  How come people say, "Yes, there were communist spies in the government, BUT, Joe was a cruel bastard"?  Which is more noteworthy?

     It was a very weird time in American history, indeed. 

Which is further evidence that communist infiltration was pretty successful.  Remember that line from UNUSUAL SUSPECTS, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled..."   Joe McCarthy was the real enemy, hunting witches.

And here it is again, not 10 years ago, we were being taught in school that there were no communists to speak of, and McCarthy was persecuting innocent people  entirely for political gain.  He was a new Hitler.  That's out the window, there WERE communists, including the Rosenbergs.  Recently, Murrow's broadcasts have come under fire as being deceptive, especially the famous Annie Lee Moss sequence that was actually made into a Broadway play.  Turns out Annie was a communist, and Murrow's friends like I.F. Stone were too. 

So it's time to make a movie, smoothing all that over.  Ebert was a sucker for Oliver Stone's JFK too.

McCarthy was a lying sonovabitch who destroyed people's lives in order to further his own career. He was not a "Commie Hunter", he was a self-aggrandizing scandal-monger who drove innocent people to commit suicide. If that isn't a "villain" I guess I don't know what is.

IIRC, a number of people in entertainment who were ruined by HUAC (thank you, Richard Nixon!) joined the Communist Party in the early twenties because it was the "thing to do," and had little to do with real ideological commitment. I'd suspect that most of the really dangerous subversives didn't care to associate with the party in any fashion, nor would the Soviet spymasters want someone with a paper trail back to the party. In other words, in most cases, party affiliation was a red herring (pun intended).

McCarthy became the face of this movement, which everyone has equated with a modern Spanish Inquisition. He was a senator and had nothing to do directly with HUAC, but if he hadn't started the pot boiling, the House couldn't have brought its lobsters to the cookout. (Ugh. Sorry-- ugly metaphor.)

There were Communist sympathizers and agents in the government in the Fifties. However, fostering a culture of fear and paranoia did not help root them out.

"McCarthy was a lying "  Which politician can this not be said of?

"sonovabitch"  You never met him.  I've read accounts of his being a rather nice fellow in person.

 "who destroyed people's lives in order to further his own career." You can't be sure that this was his motivation.  In order for this to be true, you'd have to be sure that McCarthy didn't believe his own assertions, and that seems like a false lead.  I've read McCarthy's writings.  I believe that he believed he was doing the right thing. 

 "He was not a 'Commie Hunter', " That would have been news to him.  He spent the last 7 years of his life a committed anti-communist, supported by an anti-communist constituency that included the entire Kennedy family. 

 "he was a self-aggrandizing"  On the contrary, he was rather humble.  He continued to grab headlines because he felt the only way to make the real problem of communist infiltration in the public eye.  Remember, what started this all was in a speech in West Virginia, in which he brought out the following charge, quoted from McCarthy himself: "At Wheeling I discussed a letter in which Secretary of State Byrnes wrote in 1946 to Congressman Adolph Sabath.  In that letter Byrnes stated that 284 individuals had been declared by the Presidents security officers as unfit to work in the State Department because of Communist activities and for other reasons, but that only 79 had been discharaged.  This left a balance of 205 who were still on the State Department's payroll, even though the President's own security officers had declared them unfit for government service." 

McCarthy didn't have those names, but he did have the names of 57 who were members of the Communist party.  He wired Truman, and suggested that he ask Dean Acheson for the names of those 205, and that he himself could offer another 57.  To quote McCarthy again, "I offered those names to the President.  The offer was never accepted.  The wire was never answered."

So what to do, exactly, with information that amounts to a ticking bomb regarding your government, and no acceptable answer from your President?  That's what the press is for then.  Time to make some noise.   

"scandal-monger who drove innocent people to commit suicide."  McCarthy on his 'smear tactics':  "Whenever I ask those who object to my methods to define my 'objectionable methods' for me, again I hear parroted back to me the Communist Daily Worker stock phrase "irresponsible charges" and "smearing innocent people".  But as often as I have asked for the name of a single innocent person who has been 'smeared' or 'irresponsibly charged' nothing but silence answers."  Interestingly, it was McCarthy who got the lion's share of the scandal monger trade.  Those nice liberals called him a 'fairy' and a 'pervert' because he worked alongside Roy Cohn.

As for innocent 'people' (plural) committing suicide, there is only one, Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr., who allegedly killed himself because he'd lost a 1946 primary election to McCarthy that ended his political career, and feared that because an ex-communist party official came forward alledging that La Follete's aides had communist ties, McCarthy would come after him.  So he killed himself.  McCarthy never did come after him, nor is there an evidence or documentation that he was planning to. 

"If that isn't a "villain" I guess I don't know what is. "  I dunno.  I liked the way you drew Doctor Doom.

-EVS

number of people in entertainment who were ruined by HUAC (thank you, Richard Nixon!) ....There were Communist sympathizers and agents in the government in the Fifties. However, fostering a culture of fear and paranoia did not help root them out.

**

Well, Richard Nixon did root one out.

A good one too.  Nixon caught Alger Hiss, the man responsible for helping a dying FDR negotiate away Eastern Europe to the Soviets.  At Yalta, he got the Soviets three seats on the United Nations.

The old line about joining the Communist party during the Great Depression is often trotted out in defense of the so-called innocent victims.  This is a diversion.  It's just a fact that the U.S. allied itself with the Soviet Union during WWII.  We cooperated in order to defeat the Nazies.  We had inside people rooting for the U.S. to develop the bomb against the Nazis, but were worried about American power used against the Soviets later.

The uncomfortable fact is that this all levels of the U.S. government infested (by any reasonable measure) with Soviet agents and sympathizers.  These were government officials, not actors and directors we are talking about.  Alger Hiss is the bedrock example that some people wish would go away.  The issue needed serious attention, and the real embarrassment to our country is that it took a politician out of left field to have the courage to call attention to it.