Before I talk about the book, I want to talk about Joseph McCarthy, because for me, this all goes back to Joseph McCarthy, who he was, what he did all those years ago, and how the ground covering his memory and his deeds was burnt, then covered in salt to ensure nothing would ever grow there ever again. Ever.
It was a form of malignant character assassination, unlike anything organized I had ever seen as an American.
I have, over the last 20 years acquired an interest in Joseph McCarthy. Oddly enough, it was Ann Coulter’s book “Treason” which piqued my interest. Like most people, I had grown up hearing how terrible Joseph McCarthy was.
My teachers told me. Television told me. Entertainment told me. Media told me. Politicians told me.
Everyone told me. He was a very bad man. A demagogue.
When I read Ann Coulter’s book, she discussed Senator McCarthy in some detail. And I was baffled, because the account she gave of him was diametrically opposed to what I had been told. The opposite in just about every way.
In particular, the famous account of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 in which Joseph Welch uttered his well known “ Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” line which was considered to be the beginning of the end of Joseph McCarthy.
The account Ann Coulter gave of this exchange was so far from what I had heard my whole life, that I concluded they could both not be correct. It wasn’t just that they were different.
They were opposite. They couldn’t both be true.
So I got my hands on the official government transcripts of the Army-McCarthy Hearings, and I read them with my own eyes.
Ann Coulter’s account was far closer to the truth. And it began to dawn on me that all the people in my life, the teachers, the newscasters, the movies, the history books I was forced to read in school, the documentaries I saw on television, all of them, had either outright lied to me or unintentionally told me lies because it was what they had been told.
It was a great turning of the worm for me. And it wasn’t that all those people had lied to me which had the greatest effect.
It was that my country, and people I trusted had lied to me.
I was never someone who blindly believed my government. But the government sanctioned character assassination of Joseph McCarthy was extremely disturbing to me.
I view it now as my first realization that the government and the country I loved could, and was, weaponized against its own citizenry.
I saw the same dynamic when I read Whittaker Chambers’ book, “Witness”.
And it is what I saw what our country did to President Trump.
And that is why the life and times of Senator Joseph McCarthy are important to me.
Excellent post.
I remember an old book that covered the topic very well:
https://www.amazon.com/McCarthy-His-Enemies-William-Buckley/dp/0895264722
I was a prodigy I guess—read books like this before I went to college—inoculated me against the leftist professors.
I had a lot of fun tricking them into contradictions of their own propaganda—because I knew more about various topics than they did.
After a few months you could see the look of sheer terror in their eyes every time they looked at my raised hand.
;-)