Penguin History of the United States of America (113 page)

McCarthy knew nothing about communism or the State Department, but he did know that mud sticks, especially if you throw a lot of it. It is doubtful that he ever thought he was doing much harm. He spent his days largely in the company of petty crooks and swindlers, and having no scruples, no respect for law and no concern for reputation (otherwise he would hardly have swaggered so conspicuously as a foul-mouthed, drunken, mendacious brute) probably could not believe that others might have different attitudes, or genuinely suffer if they were traduced. As for the point that his conduct undermined democratic processes at home and fanned hostility to the United States abroad (where many liberals felt that Uncle Sam had at last torn off his disguise: as Richard Rovere says, ‘he was the first American ever to be actively hated and feared by foreigners in large numbers’
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, he ignored it completely. For him it was enough that he had secured his re-election, that money flowed in from anti-communist enthusiasts that
he could spend as he pleased, and that he could keep the entire political establishment of the United States in perpetual uproar. He had fun.

His impact on central government is what distinguishes him from the other heroes of the second Red Scare. While HUAC hounded private individuals McCarthy took on the State Department, the army and the Presidency itself. To their eternal shame he was encouraged by his colleagues in the Republican party, now desperate for power. Senator Taft was the son of a Chief Justice of the United States: yet he advised McCarthy, ‘If one case doesn’t work, try another.’ Baser, stupider men in the Senate joined in the cry. First the Truman and then the Eisenhower administration trembled before him; and the press let itself be used as his megaphone. It was as squalid an episode as any in American history.

It bred threefold evil. Least important was the effect on foreign opinion. McCarthyism was of course a marvellous gift to Soviet propagandists. They had long done their best to discredit the United States, abusing it ceaselessly in clichés all their own, such as ‘boogie-woogie gangsters’ (my favourite). Now the persecution of communists and fellow-travellers and plain citizens of the United States who were neither could easily be trumpeted so that the willing could forget the continuing atrocities of Stalinism. Since 1917 there had been Europeans who resented American power, wealth and leadership; McCarthyism gave them a respectable excuse for expressing their hostility. Less cynical or dishonest elements simply found their doubts confirmed. They disliked the Cold War, did not blame Russia for it exclusively and disliked some of its consequences: the building-up of Germany again (and soon, her rearmament) and the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. They began to doubt if the country of McCarthy was a safe guardian of nuclear weapons. In this way the seeds of what became a mighty paradox were sown: as the youth of Europe became more and more Americanized, in dress, speech, music, literature, outlook and even in eating habits, it turned away, or thought it did, from American leadership in politics and ideology.

However, in the long run this alienation had surprisingly little impact on events. Much more important was the effect of the great fear
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on American citizens themselves. Their lives were devastated for four years, and even after the acute phase passed, in 1954–5, there was a long aftermath of uncertainty, anxiety and occasional oppression. Journalists, diplomats, authors, actors (HUAC particularly enjoyed investigating Hollywood, for it thus generated a unique amount of publicity), trades unionists, scientists, scholars were called before Congressional committees and forced to testify against themselves. McCarthy tried to get membership of the Communist party made a crime; he failed, but to be on the safe side many witnesses
refused to answer questions, invoking their right under the Fifth Amendment not to bear witness against themselves. This did little good: ‘taking the Fifth’ was interpreted as an admission of guilt, and was often followed by the loss of one’s job. Not taking the Fifth did not work either, because the committees would not accept a witness’s refusal to tell tales. Many a victim who professed himself or herself willing to talk about their own past, but not about that of other people, ended up in jail for contempt of Congress. A similar fate met those who tried to protect themselves by pleading the First Amendment, supposed to guarantee the rights of free speech and free political activity: they too went to prison for contempt as the courts refused to help. A sort of panic spread through American life. Suspect individuals were blacklisted – that is, diligent private groups denounced them as unfit for employment, at any rate in the jobs they were trained for – and then sacked. In this way many actors fell on hard times. A firm which refused to be bullied into dismissing its employees might be blacklisted itself; a university might find itself cut off from the lucrative government research contracts that were becoming an important part of academic life. So, at any rate, it was feared. Consequently many organizations called in alleged security experts whose function it was to smell out ‘subversives’. These experts were as unsavoury a gang of informers as was ever let loose upon the innocent; sometimes their expertise arose from the fact that they had once been communists or communist agents themselves; now they earned a living by denouncing their former associates and anyone else they disapproved of. Sometimes they were former employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who had fallen out with the Director, J. Edgar Hoover. Sometimes they were simple confidence tricksters. Anyway they did enormous harm, since employers were far too ready to leave it to them to say who was or was not worthy of trust. A grey fog of timid conformity settled over American middle-class life. And New York city dismissed a public washroom attendant for past membership of the Communist party. No doubt, if he had continued in employment, he would have corrupted his customers with Soviet soap or Communist lavatory paper.

But the American people, though susceptible to panic, come to their senses eventually. The great fear, like the Red Scare, eventually sank into the past, with all its injustice and suffering. What was not so easy to get over was its impact on the government. This was the third and worst, because longest-lasting, consequence of McCarthyism.

It is never easy to discern a nation’s true diplomatic interest, and the United States, as must by now be clear, has always found it particularly difficult. But during the early Truman years the men who shaped American policy were by good fortune exceptionally well fitted for the job. They were perhaps mistaken in seeing Soviet Russia as an aggressive, intriguing enemy, aspiring to world power, like Hitler; but it is hard, perhaps impossible, to believe that any American statesmen, even if Franklin Roosevelt had survived, could have for long taken a different attitude. The United States and
the Soviet Union were simply not compatible partners, and, granted that premise, the rest follows. Otherwise there can be no doubt about the merit of Truman’s men. Marshall and Acheson in turn headed a State Department that for ability and professionalism has perhaps never been equalled. Their President trusted them and learned from them; although there were blind spots (asked why Latin America was not a participant in the Marshall programme, Truman told his questioner, ‘The Latin Americans have a Marshall programme of their own, and it’s called the Monroe Doctrine’) and, elsewhere in the administration, doctrinaires and incompetents, it can on the whole truthfully be said that they were successful at perceiving the national interest and at shaping policies to realize it. America and the West were safe in their hands; it was they who rebuilt the European economy and set up the Atlantic alliance. Left to themselves they would certainly have accepted the new government in Peking, and they would not have allowed the power of the United States to become the plaything of any particular pressure group or its friends. They believed too easily in the virtue of their country and were perhaps over-impressed by its power; some of them, notably Dean Rusk, one of the Assistant Secretaries of State, believed too devoutly in the need to mount worldwide resistance to communism; but as a whole a team of men of such intelligence would probably not long have let themselves be the victim of any delusion; and among them Dean Acheson, especially, understood the importance of training a generation of worthy successors.

All this was destroyed by the anti-communists. To them the question of China was not so much a political as a religious one. The fall of the quasi-Western, quasi-Christian Chiang government, the ‘loss of China’ (a country which America had never owned or controlled or found it anything but immensely difficult to influence), was only explicable on the assumption that there were traitors in high places. Joe McCarthy’s service was to identify them: Owen Lattimore, for instance, a historian of China, or General Marshall who, said McCarthy, ‘would sell his grandmother for any advantage’. (According to Senator Jenner of Indiana, Marshall was not only willing, but eager, to play the role of a front man for traitors.) But it was not only China: all events everywhere were interpreted as manifestations of a worldwide communist conspiracy, mounted and ordered by Josef Stalin. No distinctions were made: liberals, socialists and communists were all alike fiendish; Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal had been central agents of the conspiracy (McCarthy talked of ‘twenty years of treason’). All opponents of Russia, or of Russia’s allies, must be worthy of America’s friendship, and so the disastrous practice of seeking out and propping up fragile, cruel and incompetent dictatorships was reaffirmed (it had been initiated by the wooing of Chiang Kai-shek). The Presidency was not to be trusted: Senator Bricker of Ohio introduced a Constitutional amendment which would have written isolationism into the Constitution (as one critic put it) by forbidding the President to make non-treaty agreements with foreign powers, and
subjecting treaties to such an infinitely drawn-out process of ratification that none in practice could ever come into effect. Senator McCarthy (in pursuit of a private vendetta) started hearings on the loyalty of the army – an action which brought about his ruin, since the hearings were televised and exhibited all too clearly his recklessness, cynicism and brutality, but which, while in progress, did nothing for the morale of the armed services in a time of acute international crisis.

The State Department collapsed under the McCarthyite attack, and the consequence, given the American political system, was inevitable: everybody got into the act. Congressmen, Senators, union leaders (especially George Meany, the ferociously anti-communist head of the AFL), businessmen, editors, clergymen: everyone with an axe to grind felt it his business to settle the foreign policy of the United States in one respect, or in all. They used every lever at their disposal, and, no longer meeting any significant resistance except from each other, got their own way far too often. Politicians running for election or re-election, whether to Congress or the Presidency, found it especially profitable to cultivate ‘the three Is’ – Ireland, Italy, Israel. The China lobby continued as vigorous as ever. As the international traffic in arms revived, a side-effect of the Cold War, American businessmen and generals were natural lobbyists, not just for continuing weapons research and development, but for their best customers: foreign countries which wished to buy American. Even Presidents in office were not immune to such pressures. President Truman, for example, was convinced that the right policy to pursue with respect to the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust was to allow them to settle in Palestine, and in 1948, needing all the friends he could get, made haste to recognize the state of Israel, born that year. This fateful decision was taken before the destruction of the State Department, but once professional advice was downgraded, once the experts no longer dared offer unpleasant or pessimistic appraisals, for fear of what would happen to them, once, in short, the determination of foreign policy had been taken over by personal hunch (Truman was convinced that Jewish colonization of Palestine went ‘hand in hand with the noble policies of Woodrow Wilson, especially the principle of self-determination’) and by lobbyists with limited views, no one would ever be in a position to point out how unwise it was, and unhealthy for both parties, to assume (and many soon did) that American and Israeli interests were or would always be identical; or to act on the perception. Not that the Israeli lobby was the only, or the worst, or the least plausible offender. By the end of the fifties the United States was committed to propping up any number of weak and worthless regimes, which by no possible stretch of the imagination could be said to have the sort of claim upon America that Israel had. There was a particularly ripe crop of such regimes in Latin America, notably in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately the imaginations of many Americans politicians are all too flexible when votes are in question. They wanted to please their constituents; they needed funds for their election
campaigns; they believed in America’s supreme virtue and global omnipotence; where Latin America was concerned, the Monroe Doctrine made a fine theme for unreflecting, assertively nationalistic speeches. Voices in another sense simply could not get a hearing, and one of the preconditions for the disasters of the sixties and seventies had come about. Once more the making of American foreign policy had become the plaything of prejudice, ignorance and selfishness.

However, it would be years before the full measure of the disaster became apparent, for the Marshall generation was still in control in the fifties, and the problems it had to deal with were still the old ones (it was when new ones emerged that the inadequacy of the system would begin to matter). Of these the chief was still, undoubtedly, the question of Marshal Stalin’s intentions.

It is difficult to recapture the atmosphere of the late forties, when it seemed self-evident to Washington that Stalin controlled a monolithic world communist movement which had been turned into nothing more than the powerful instrument of Soviet policies. Even then it was not the whole story: Tito’s Yugoslavia showed that, in favourable circumstances, a communist country would not automatically toe the Kremlin line, and Stalin’s relations with Mao Tse-tung were always difficult. But the belief was so close to reality that the failure to distinguish between communism and Soviet activity was usually of little importance. After the 1948 coup in Czechoslovakia Stalin had imposed a thoroughly tyrannical regime on that country, like those, every bit as oppressive as his own in Russia, which his minions were busy creating in the rest of Eastern Europe. There was every reason to believe that a communist take-over in Western Europe would simply mean more of the same, for the local party leaders (Thorez in France, Togliatti in Italy) were obedient Stalinists; and in a number of test-cases the communists of the world showed themselves indeed to be members of a united movement. For instance, all of them joined in the endless bitter denunciations of Tito, the great heretic. Stalin’s desire to crush him was notorious and palpable, and Tito got no aid or comfort from the Communist party of any other nation. Had it not been for the support which the West hastened to offer him, on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, Tito would no doubt have been suppressed as rapidly and thoroughly as Nagy of Hungary was to be in 1956 or Dubček of Czechoslovakia in 1968, when the West was too distracted by troubles of its own to intervene. So it is scarcely surprising that in the late forties the United States and its allies saw themselves as the last guardians of human freedom. They resolved to be strong. There would be no Munich this time: Hitler’s successor would be taught caution and good behaviour by all necessary means.