Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [74]
“My good friends,” he said, “if there were no Communists in our government, would we have consented to and connived to turn over all of our Chinese friends to the Russians? If there were no Communists in our government, why did we delay for eighteen months, delay our research on the hydrogen bomb, even though our intelligence agencies were reporting day after day that the Russians were feverishly pushing their development of the H-Bomb? Our nation may well die because of that eighteen months’ deliberate delay. And I ask you, who caused it? Was it loyal Americans? Or was it traitors in our government?”
There you have it, an absurd but compelling case against those in high places. It was the old charge of rot at the top. If the Chinese Communists took over China, it was the doing of Commies in our own government. If the Russians had sprinted forward and now had flaunted their H-bomb, it was because we’d slowed down to let them catch us. In short, if anything bad happened, the reason is we were stabbed in the back.
McCarthy loved charging respected figures with bad faith, thus lending a catchy populism to his accusations of treason. In his view, it was the country’s best and brightest who were selling us out. “The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in government we can give.”
To validate this belief system, he fixed in his sights on such lofty officials as President Truman himself, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and his predecessor, George Marshall, who’d been army chief of staff in World War II. He attacked them all, famously calling Marshall the perpetrator of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”
Of course, no demagogue ever has a lifetime career, and Joe McCarthy’s own downfall was determined when he decided to focus his crusade on the presence of hidden Communists in the U.S. Army. The target he selected for attack was an army major, Dr. Irving Peress, a dentist who’d been a member of the American Labor Party, believed to be a Communist Party front. When Peress’s commanding officer at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker—a Silver and Bronze Star recipient who’d been a hero of the Battle of the Bulge—appeared before his committee, the senator taunted him, saying he was “not fit to wear that uniform.”
That encounter showed the extent to which McCarthy was beginning to spiral out of control. His absolute fall from grace came a month later in a moment of television history. The newly launched American Broadcasting Corporation, ABC, covered gavel to gavel the thirty-six days of hearings convened. The April 1954 broadcasts of the Army-McCarthy proceedings gave the audience sitting at home the chance to examine McCarthy’s own conduct as well as the wild charges he brought against army personnel.
Thus, with the entire country watching—on some days, as many as 20 million people—he self-destructed, with the help of a righteous attorney, Joseph Nye Welch, the army’s chief counsel, who objected to the senator’s innuendo-filled attack on one of his staff lawyers for a past membership in a left-wing legal group. Voicing his distaste, he accused McCarthy of “reckless cruelty” and then asked whether he had “no decency.” It was a stunningly unexpected comeback, and one that marked McCarthy as a pure bully. For the first time, many Americans focused on Joe McCarthy’s tactics and didn’t like the looks of them.
Not everyone turned on McCarthy. More than a third of the country remained loyal to him after the five weeks of legal spectacle.