The premise of this book is that the Cold War began in 1917, with the Bolshevik Revolution. American attempts to subvert the revolution under President Woodrow Wilson followed almost at once, resulting in the landing of U.S. Army troops on Russian soil and pitched battles with Bolshevik soldiers. With the formation of two American Communist parties in 1919, the Soviets obtained a logistical base for their own subversion on American soil. Espionage activities started in 1924 under the cover of the trade association Amtorg and increased with the U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. The World War II period, when Russia was our ally, saw the recruitment of government servants who were ideological sympathizers.
In this context, McCarthyism existed long before Senator Joseph McCarthy, in its dictionary definition: 1. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence. 2. The use of dubious methods of investigation in order to suppress opposition.
McCarthy did not emerge in a vacuum, but as the most prominent in a long line of men who exploited the Communist issue for political advantage, recklessly smearing their opponents with false accusations. These McCarthyites used forged documents to make their case, or conducted raids of questionable legality to enhance their political reputations, or suborned perjury in the testimony of professional informants, or used the Communist issue to smear the New Deal.
The other side of the equation was that the American Communist Party served as a recruitment pool for Soviet agents. American Communists by the dozens penetrated the government, some at high levels, and stole scientific and political secrets, including information on the atomic bomb. This was confirmed by the release in 1995 of the Venona transcripts, the decoded cable traffic between the Moscow KGB and its American stations. But McCarthy and his predecessors knew nothing of Venona, and flayed about like blindfolded men in a room full of bats. The bats were there, but beyond their reach.
Now that we know the extent of Soviet espionage, it is possible to assess the impact of McCarthyism. The danger was real, but by the time McCarthy came on the scene it was all but spent, and the Communist Party was moribund, so that he was in fact whipping a dead horse. The apoplectic reaction he provoked in the nation was off in its timing. The threat was much reduced by the time he denounced it, but there had been one in the thirties and forties. McCarthy exploited something akin to the Cheshire cat’s smile, which lingers after the cat is gone. Did he have a cleansing effect, or was he merely a demagogue playing on nativist fears? Was he the leader of what Dean Acheson called “the attack of the primitives,” a populist revolt against the elite? Did he appeal to “status frustration”? Was he the champion of the dispossessed, or of Texas oil millionaires whose anti-Communism was a cover for their lobbying efforts against the regulation of wildcatters? Did he appeal to Southern racists who equated Communism with integration, or to Western conservatives who wanted a “get tough” foreign policy? Was he the stalking-horse for a party kept out of power since 1932? The Republicans got behind him because his success in dramatizing the Communist issue was also a way of discrediting the New Deal and the Truman administration.
McCarthy capitalized on the fears in American society—fear that the Russians had stolen the atomic bomb, fear of spies in government, fear due to the loss of China, and fear of the Korean War. His party was the party of fear. He mobilized the masses of the alarmed.
The brief McCarthy era, which lasted from his Wheeling speech in 1950 to his censure in 1954, had less to do with the object of his attack than with the paradoxical culture of fear that seized a nation at the height of its power. The recurring McCarthyite figure was a by-product of American anti-Communism, which became a fixed principle after the 1917 revolution. Over the years it kept reappearing through its various incarnations. It has recently reappeared in the methods Attorney General John Ashcroft has applied to counter terrorism, which are similar to those used by the government in its anti-Communist operations: deportation, detention without due process, the targeting of ethnic groups, and alarmist announcements about perils, real or imagined.