Joe McCarthy came from a dirt poor Wisconsin farm.  He was first in family to graduate high school, college, law school and became a circuit court judge 4 years out of law school(youngest in Wisconsin). He volunteered for Marines in WWII; was first WWII vet to be a senator and he supported civil rights for blacks.

He didn't want Communists to be working in the government where they could be security risks.  Secretary of State James Byrnes stated that there were 205 employees identified as security risks who were still working at the State Department 3 years afterwards.  McCarthy, in a speech to a West Virginia women's Republican Club, complained that he and no one else had the list.  That's it.

Yes, Ann Coulter's book TREASON is what I read.  It's a good book.

"Yes, Ann Coulter's book TREASON is what I read.  It's a good book."

- Having watched the distorted spin that Ann Coulter puts on historical facts, I prefer to read books that are done by people who are true historians.
    The fact is that true historians have accorded Joseph McCarthy a less than honorable place in our nation's history.  You disagree with that, such is your right.

of the Constitution this nation has ever seen. He ruined countless lives with his secret list, and his abuse of power. The only power he truly had, by the way, was the power the accused gave him by knuckling under to his bullying and thug tacticts. He had almost no regard for personal freedoms, right to privacy, freedom of association, and freedom of ideology. I have no leanings toward, nor sympathy for communism (except to say, "sounds great on paper"), and in fact am quite the capitalist, however, I believe that Americans have the right to be a communist if they want to, just as they have the right to be a republican or democrat.
By the way, McCarthy wasn't just interested in getting communists out of security clearnace government jobs. He went after virtually everyone, especially if they had a high profile, such as actors, playwrites, directors, authors, etc.

Dude, you're getting the HUAC mixed up w/McCarthy.  He was in the Senate and had nothing to do with the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee.

McCarthy wanted security risks out of the state department and the military/military intelligence and Gov. in general.  He wasn't trying to get anyone thrown in prison but he did.  And the Venona project shows that there were hundreds of commies in the government.  McCarthy did out these dirty rotten *sshole traitors: T.A.Bisson, Mary Jane Keeney, Cedric Belfrage, Solomon Adler, Franz Neumann, Leonard Mins, Gustavo Duran and William Remington.  

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the  Venona Project (USSR code breaker project) declassified in July 95. The soviet cables prove that Alger Hiss, Donald Hiss, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, Duncan Lee, Lauchlin Currie, Frank Coe, Solomon Adler, Harry Hopkins,Laurence Duggan,Joel Barr, Klaus Fuchs and  Judith Coplon were soviet spies that passed government secrets.

Frank Coe fled to Red China after pleading the 5th Amendment and was an advisor to the commie Chinese. Lauchlin Currie booked to Columbia.Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant booked to the soviet union and were treated like heroes.  One spy fled to Hungary and was thrown in prison!!!  Ha ha ha ha.  

I trust Ann Coulter's research. Skim thru her book, Treason, the next time you're in a book store.  It's awesome.

McCarthy did not wreck anyone's life that didn't deserve it. Checkmate.

P.S. I think Sandy Berger is an *ssh*l* and I hope he goes to prison.  He knew what he was doing was wrong and he has a whole mess of trouble.  And thank God for Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy who gave his life for his country.  He was a good man.

P.P.S. Ann Coulter sites her sources and quotes lots of primary sources

skim through it.  While you are accurate in that declassified information proved people such as Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were communist adherrents, McCarthy did destroy the lives of countless people who were not only NOT communists but who never even considered becoming one.  The only criterion for them to come under suspicion was to be somehow associated with a person who was believed to be a communist - such behavior is not consistent with the great traditions of this country.
    For me personally, if someone is enough of an idiot to want to be a communist, I say let them, our constitution gives them that right, I will simply oppose every initiative that they launch to convert more US citizens to that bankrupt philosophy.

Ann Coulter, I get enough of her just reading her unbelievably biased right wing clap-trap column. I don't think I could stomach reading her book. And no, I'm not a left winger either. There are plenty of those I can't stand as well, they just don't seem to be making such prominent asses of themselves these days.

Now, films can be edited, maybe it was misleading, maybe I'm remember wrong, I'll have to look further into all this.

But have you noticed at all that the list of people he "purged" from government does not match the list of later-confirmed Soviet spies?  I can't see one name that matches.  Could it be that McCarthy was not too careful about whether he found the right people?  Was there even any list, much less an accurate one, or was he making it up?

As a little bit of history, in the 1930s, when the country's economy was in danger of collapse, there were many, many people who were communists. Conservatives have resented Roosevelt's reforms  ever since, but to be accurate, Roosevelt was a conservative who saved the country's political and economic system from communism.  To the left of him was Eugene Debbs, a dyed in the wool communist.

Many of those Depression communists later became disaffected with it, once their confidence in the country's economy began to recover, and once it became certain that the Soviet Union was no utopia.  Some, however, stayed true to it.  Nevertheless, in the 1950s, finding people with a communist past in this country, much less in government, would have been as easy as shooting fish in that proverbial barrel.  The reason why outing communist was never done was that investigating so many people and discerning the "lapsed" from the "true believers" would have been a huge job.  And there were no charges to be brought for doing it, anyway.  Believing in Marx was not a crime, and it couldn't be made a crime under our constitution.  There was no thought-crime in this country, and I hope that it never is.

In fact, being an Asshole isn't a crime either.  It's strange that to rescue McCarthy's reputation, you can't do it on merit, you have to attack the guy who read him the riot act, in a game of "find the real asshole." It's irrelevant whether Sandy Berger was a saint or an Asshole.  Why don't you attack as an asshole the guy who really questioned McCarthy before that incident: Edward R. Murrow?  

And be accurate: McCarthy didn't give his life for his country.  He died of drinking, something he might have stopped doing before it killed him. If he was doing benders, it wasn't from sacrifice or patriotism.

/Zin

left of my comfortable centrist position just to counterbalance these extremists, but I find myself doing that too often these days. The better approach, as you have done, is to simply state the facts of the case. And yes, he went after many entertainers. I don't know where this guy gets his shit from, but presumably from Ann Coulter's book.

Hiss boys, Rosenbergs, and those others where prosecuted by the FBI.  McCarthy was going after the Commies in the Fed. Gov.  He wanted them fired from the gov and booted into the private sector. He wasn't trying to throw them in Jail-just throw them out of the State Department.  Some of them were caught though.

Now that we have the Soviet archives, why isn't it that McCarthy didn't point toward anyone who was guilty?  I've already said that it would have been simple to catch somebody who had been a communist at some time.  It would have been easy to compile the list, especially just from people who admitted they once had those leanings when they were hired.  Communists were common in America in the 1930s, and most were rather open about it.      

It seems that his methods purged the innocent and kept the guilty, while he harassed the innocent publicly in Congress.

Ann coulter couldn't find a library.  She in not a credible source for history.  Does have a flair for opnion- but no chops as historian.

A big so what to the many cases of spying for uncle joe.  We had him strategically, so we really did not lose that much by him having a good idea of his isolation.  That good people probably lost their lives to treason, I'll grant you.  Agreed with the punishments handed out.

But to try to tar EVERYBODY with the Commie brush?  Since it came largely fromn a group of guys who had been borderline FASCIST sympathisers, they had no right to go after alot of people who had seen the threat from the right first.  McCarthy was a total "ambukance chaser" mentality politician- all was done to further his career- mirbund otherwise as he was a dickhead rummy whne not attacking his fellow americans?

You know Geeeeeeez man- try avoiding the politics bin at your local book warehouse and go deep into the history part.  Read a few booksd on the period NOT chosen by political orientation but rather for prose style or academic qualification.  You'll be amazed.  There is the world you get packaged by Fox News and talk radio and the whole other actual history THAT HAPPENED.  for the rest of us its fun to compare the two and chuckle.  But to you guys lost in the glare and not paying attention to the man behind the curtain?  The revelation can be very illuminating!

Good luck- you have a long journey ahead of you.

Joseph Welch, the chairman, was grandstanding to the press during the hearings.  McCarthy was trying to do his job and named around a 100 loyalty risk in government jobs, not spies or even members of the communist party, just people who shouldn't have been working for the government.   History shows that was on the low side.

The McCarthy haters did to McCarthy everything they falsely accused him of doing to them.  

This is right from page 104 in Coulter's TREASON.  It's a good book.

I will but Ann Coulter sites some pretty impressive stuff;  John Earl Haynes and Harvey Kleh, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. And Allen Weinstein, Perjury,  Ellen Schrecker, Un-American Activities:The Trials of William Remington.  She has hundreds and hundreds of footnotes.

I'll bet that if you read the actual closer source material you will see many more shades of grey in this period.

Pretty much any page of her book is full of rubbish.  She's a fascist.  And she supports the fascist tactics that McCarthy used.  She doesn't believe in due process, or the right of dissent which is in our Constitution, any more than McCarthy did.

McCarthy was a liar, who used his threat of a secret list to bully and destroy people without using due process.  People who work for the government are entitled to their opinions just like anyone else, so long as they do their jobs.  McCarthy ruined lives of people who did nothing but their jobs correctly.

What is it about the Constitution that you find so troubling that you feel that McCarthy owed no allegiance to it?

I believe in Karma.  And I believe that Karma is why McCarthy died as a drunken bum in the gutter.  Because his life's work earned him that fate.


-- Modified on 8/2/2004 5:46:28 PM

They are either too lazy or intellectually to dense to research this stuff for themselves so they watch docudrama's to develop their opinions, as they have with Michael Moore.

Joe McCarthy was right and people of the same ilk attempted to protect the traitors in government that are denouncing McCarthy today.

The Venona Project proved McCarthy was 100% correct in his information and prosecutions.

That McCarthy had nothing to do with the House un-American Activities Committee due to the FACT that he was a SENATOR NOT A CONGRESSMAN (hence it was named House rather than Senate Committee) has little or nothing to do with lazy or stupid liberals or those still sympathetic to the Communist cause.  A cause I might ad that murdered millions in the 20th century!

P.S.  Ann Coulter's book is heavily footnoted to Senate records, in contrast to every book written against Sen. McCarthy which are filled with knee jerk liberalism and how he made people FEEL!

... get them right about Sandy Berger.  The FBI exonorated him completely of any wrongdoing.  

My source is the Wall Street Journal.  They printed a retraction of their original accucations several days ago.

BTW, Tail Gunner Joe drank himself to death.

I have just done several searches on Sandy Berger and find nothing to back up your statement?

Is everybody keeping this a secret or are you just inventing this stuff?

He may well have wrongfully removed copies of the documents for his own use.  But he didn't obstruct justice if he didn't remove ANY originals from the files, as was just announced.

Basically, he was exonerated from any of the SERIOUS charges that had been leveled against him.  Some of the minor ones, involving the improper removal of copies, may actually have happened.  But it sure makes Berger's explanation that he simply took them for his own use in preparing for testimony to the commission, a heck of alot more plausible.

I doubt that it is indexed into the internet.  I'm not making it up Berbite.  I would agree that if Berger is walking off with secure documents he should be punished.  It doesn't seem to be the case.

I think this is something like the FBI going after that security guard as the atlanta bomber.

it can happen to anybody on any side of the political sepctrum.  I don't see this as a conspiracy by the current administration.  It's another case of organizations hating to admit they made a mistake.


BTW, Kudos to the Journal, they we3re the only ones printing the correcrtion.

Harry

Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, now that we have the Venona project, was McCarthy even on the right track?  Did he even get rid of one even confirmed spy?  Or, do you believe that since there were Soviet spies somewhere, it didn't matter how many innocent people were ruined?  A very Soviet point of view.

More to the point, why is this 50 year old story so important to the current stage of conservatism?  Could this throwback to the past indicate a loss of fire in the present?    

At least Nixon in the HUAC found Alger Hiss.

/Zin  

-- Modified on 8/3/2004 1:13:11 PM

Great link Bribite...

Every single individual who was accused by McCarthy was listed in the Venona Project as a Soviet agent.

It was Truman and the democrats who blocked prosecution.  Why would they do that?  Who's side were they really on?

If this "50 year old story" has no importance, than why study history at all?  The history of this era is being re-written because of available facts and once the hysteria of the left dies down, McCarthy will be venerated as a great man.

"Loss of fire"?  Truly Zin, other than your hatred of Bush, can you name any reason that anyone would vote for John Kerry as even dog catcher?

Does this mean that Hanoi John puts him back on his advisory board?

Apparently, you do not respect history or Historians.  The story on Joe McCarthy HAS been written by a large number of clear headed non-partisan people.  McCarthy was a smudge on this country's history.  I do not expect you or GOPGezzer to get that.

Read the reports from the Venona Project then comment.  Everything that has been written on McCarthy since their release exonerates him.

But then again, I've never met a liberal who when confronted with being wrong wanted to know it or would admit it.