The major trouble with anti-Joe McCarthy books is that they regurgitate the tired old smears against the late Wisconsin Red hunter and never concede his significant successes. Larry Tye's "Demagogue," alas, fits the same humdrum pattern.
Take, for instance, the famous Tydings Committee which initially examined McCarthy's charges of continued Communist infiltration of our government, dismissed them as bogus and then insisted the senator had unfairly branded his hapless victims as subversives. But it was not McCarthy but the Democratic controlled committee which compelled disclosure of the names he suspected of treason.
The senator repeatedly stressed that he felt it would be wrong to make his list public until the panel itself had authenticated his findings. He felt his information was solid, but conceded to Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas that “I may be wrong” and that it's “possible that some of these persons [after committee scrutiny] will get a clean bill of health.” The Tydings panel, however, demanded the open hearings—with the names to be publicized worldwide—without any vetting and no matter whom it would harm--a fact conspicuously overlooked by an author who makes the Wisconsin senator a reckless character assassin.
Nor does he enlighten his readers on another crucial point: that McCarthy was one of the most effective anti-Communist figures during the Cold War. Whatever his failings, he relentlessly exposed significant security risks in the State Department, the Treasury, our military and even the White House. At least ten important persons he named as Communists or Soviet assets were confirmed by the Russians themselves in the Venona papers. During World War II, U.S. cryptologists deciphered thousands of coded messages between Kremlin intelligence officials and their agents in America. When these papers were released in 1995, “all these McCarthy cases were right there in the decrypts, each named significantly in the Soviet cable,” as the late M. Stanton Evans revealed in his impressive book "Blacklisted by History."
Among the “Red Ten” were such stalwart Moscow loyalists as Solomon Adler and Lauchlin Currie, identified by former Communist Elizabeth Bentley as part of the Silvermaster Soviet espionage cell and who played critical roles in advancing a pro-Mao Tse-tung foreign policy. As the McCarthy charges began to percolate in May of 1950, Adler left his job at the U.S. Treasury, hightailed it to his native England and then ended up living out his days in his preferred homeland of Mao's China--the Utopia he had labored so energetically to create. Currie left the USA for Colombia, never to return. Tye, however, refuses to give McCarthy a crumb of credit for having alerted the nation to the notable pro-Soviet enemies still embedded in our government and influencing policy.
During the Tydings hearings, the most important figure McCarthy accused of being a subversive was Owen Lattimore, whom he insisted was under Communist discipline and had proved instrumental in torpedoing our alliance with wartime ally, Nationalist China, and transferring our affections to the Chinese Communist leader and Stalin favorite Mao Tse-tung. McCarthy's attack against Professor Lattimore was serious and substantive, revealing that from 1941 through 1949 he had the ear of presidents and held critical positions in the government which had major say over China policy. Louis Budenz, the former managing editor of the "Daily Worker" and a reliable witness against his ex-comrades in multiple venues, supported the senator's major charges in some detail when he addressed the committee.
McCarthy's case against Lattimore was also sustained by the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security's 244-page bipartisan report released on June 27, 1952. Under the professor's guidance, the report concludes, the Institute of Pacific Relations, a renowned body of Far Eastern experts, “possessed close organic relations with the State Department,” with Lattimore having avidly stuffed the IPR with Soviet agents and Maoists. Other excerpts:
“Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent [who occupied a key post at State directing China policy during the Truman administration] were influential in bringing about a change in United States policy in 1945 favorable to the Chinese Communists.”
“Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930's, a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.”
His writings suggest he was a fawning admirer of the mass murderer Joseph Stalin. In "Solution in Asia," Lattimore writes that what attracted neighboring nations to Russia was that it “stands for . . . economic prosperity, technological progress, miraculous medicine, free education, equality of opportunity and democracy. . .”
He praised Stalin's collective farm policy, which resulted in a devastating famine that triggered hundreds of thousands of deaths, as an improvement over the previous system and thought the purge trials, which caused even Nikita Khrushchev to recoil in horror at its enormous bloodletting, had “rectified “a “great many abuses” in the bureaucracy.
He even had nice things to say about the Magadan-Kolyma gold mining slave labor complex in Siberia, where the death rate among miners, as Soviet scholar Robert Conquest has noted, was “estimated. . .at about 30 per cent per annum.”
FBI files are replete with data concerning his deep ties to Soviet agents and reliable allegations that he stacked the Office of War Information with pro-Stalinist propagandists. There were even multiple charges linking him to Soviet espionage. Alexander Barmine, a former Soviet intelligence officer who had fled Stalin in the 1930s to become an American citizen, told the Bureau that General Berzin of Red Army Intelligence “identified Lattimore to him as a Russian agent” and was their man in the IPR.
What's extraordinary is that the author airily dismisses evidence from extensive FBI files, thousands of incriminating IPR documents (which McCarthy had discovered), testimony from ex-Communist truth tellers such as Bentley, Budenz and Barmine and the writings and actions of Lattimore himself. Tye's own conclusion: he was never a Communist, not even close, and that his real purpose was to “woo Mao Tse-tung away from Russia's orbit.”
Tye is forever loathe to draw the slightest inference of guilt about McCarthy's targets, no matter how crimson their resumes. Did Dr. Irving Peress, promoted by the Army to the rank of major, organize a Communist cell at Camp Kilmer? McCarthy thought his case was emblematic of the gutting of our national security practices and brought him before the senator's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in January 1954. Peress pleaded the Fifth Amendment. No matter. Yes, the Army bureaucracy had mishandled his case, Tye concedes, but Peress was essentially a patriot in his own way.Tye then attempts to “de-Communize” the dentist, speculating he was no longer a CP member when he had signed his Army loyalty forms and never believed the party was subversive to begin with. He even gives the last word to the dentist and a New York Times' reporter, who fundamentally mock the investigation as a silly waste of time directed by an ambitious bully.
Annie Lee Moss was a party member in the District of Columbia, having been outed by a veteran undercover agent of the FBI and leaving a paper trail showing she regularly paid her CP dues. McCarthy puzzled over how a cafeteria worker with a strong Red background had been elevated to a code clerk with access to classified information at the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Tye, one might think, would praise McCarthy for exposing such a gaping hole in our national security. Through stunningly tortuous reasoning, he ends up condemning McCarthy for raising a tempest in a teacup.
All this just touches the surface of the author's seeming indifference to blatant Communist subversion when uncovered by McCarthy. If the reader is sincerely interested in a balanced view of “McCarthyism” and the times he lived in, he would be better off looking elsewhere.
*Mr. Ryskind, a former editor and owner of "Human Events," a favorite publication of Ronald Reagan, is the author of "Hollywood Traitors," a history of how Stalinist screenwriters came close to capturing the movie industry.
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