Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [135]
While the hearings proceeded, the famous war correspondent Edward R. Murrow assailed McCarthy from another direction. Liberal journalists had criticized McCarthy’s tactics since 1950, but none commanded the audience and widespread respect that Murrow did. In March 1954, Murrow hosted a program titled “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy” that exposed McCarthy’s ugliest tactics and hypocrisies. At the end of the program, he concluded:
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent . . . The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”55
The words of Joseph Welch and Edward Murrow pulled the curtain from the Great and Terrible Wizard of Wisconsin, exposing a cruel, deceitful, manipulative little man. As if awakened from a daze, Americans across the political spectrum finally began to speak up. Though McCarthy was tremendously popular among Catholics, Chicago bishop Bernard Shell condemned him, calling on Americans to “cry out against the phony anti-Communism that mocks our way of life, flouts our traditions and democratic procedures and our sense of fair play, feeds on the meat of suspicion and grows great on the dissension among Americans.” 56 Sen. Ralph Flanders (R-VT) proposed to strip McCarthy of his committee chairmanships. A small-town Republican newspaper editor from Wisconsin launched a Joe Must Go campaign. The Republican governor of Indiana urged Eisenhower to “discipline the recalcitrants.” A Republican congressional nominee from Ohio warned the White House that “‘McCarthyism’ has become a synonym for witch-hunting, star-chamber methods and the denial of . . . civil liberties.”57
On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy. The vote was 67-22, with twenty-two Republicans voting for censure. The wave of paranoia that had swept the nation collapsed almost immediately. The Red Scare was over, and McCarthy’s name would forever be remembered in infamy.
Almost. In her book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, Ann Coulter wrote:
The myth of “McCarthyism” is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren’t hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation’s ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy’s name. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis.58
(Perhaps Coulter is right. Let us not assassinate this man further, liberals. We have done enough. Have we no sense of decency, at long last?)
But in the magical land of persecution politics, there are no decent liberals, just as there are no wicked conservatives. McCarthy was a conservative, so he must have been a virtuous American patriot ruthlessly persecuted by the sadistic liberal elite. Any evidence that contradicts the core storyline is a lie, an intrigue, a trick. When you live in a fantasy, you cannot permit any flaws to mar the perfect surface of your beautiful, frightening little world. Because if you should find a crack, if you should start to question, if you should indulge those tiny nagging doubts—it could shatter all to pieces, and you could find yourself on the floor surrounded by shards of broken glass and fake plastic snowflakes in a cold, confusing world with no good guys