I’m reacting against OP’s recommendations especially strongly today, on account of just having read the reader reviews for this book trying to exhonerate Joseph McCarthy yesterday.
Note that the people writing reviews who are sympathetic to McCarthy characterize him as noble, American, and patriotic. People with different values will consider different people to have good characters. It’s not surprising that political parties align with ideas on what constitutes good character. Politicians already run more on character than on issues. This is the problem, not the solution.
By the way, have you actually read Blacklisted by History? I have, and I strongly recommend it as an interesting debiasing experience if you have any interest in the 20th century American history. The book is a work of propaganda with a clear goal (as might be gathered from the subtitle), but on this subject, the conventional wisdom happens to be so extremely biased and full of falsities that reading some contrarian material which is biased in the other direction is likely to improve one’s understanding significantly.
(Unfortunately, nothing even approximating an unbiased history of the whole McCarthy phenomenon has been written yet, and the best one can do is to make judgments based on the propaganda from both sides. Trouble is, the mainstream sources offer almost exclusively one side of it.)
Also, McCarthy’s senatorial career provides an interesting case study of the rare phenomenon when an elected politician goes into an all-out war with the entrenched bureaucracy (mainly the State Department, in this case). There is almost no other case that elucidates certain essential aspects of the modern Western political systems so clearly, assuming of course that one is willing and able to analyze it without moral and ideological preconceptions, which are in this case unfortunately very strong and widespread.
My current impression of McCarthy is that he was basically right that there were, indeed, Soviet infiltrators, but he didn’t have any particular insight into finding them and ended up making accusations basically at random. Is that a reasonable one-sentence summary?
No, I wouldn’t say that’s a good summary, and the phenomenon was unfortunately much too complex to be described with a one-liner with any degree of accuracy.
The fundamental problem with such simple summaries is that they implicitly assume an oversimplified historical background to the whole situation: the U.S. pitched against the U.S.S.R. in a state of all-out Cold War hostility, with the entire U.S. government acting in a coherent way as a unified entity in this struggle for global supremacy, and individuals accused of acting as Soviet agents being either conscious and willing traitors working for Moscow or innocent victims of a witch-hunt. One must replace these simplistic preconceptions with a much more nuanced and detailed view before one can even begin to form anything more than a cartoonish picture of the so-called “Second Red Scare” period. (Which was in fact well underway, with the HUAC hearings, the Hollywood blacklist, the Hiss-Chambers affair, etc., years before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
I could write a great deal about this topic, but I think that such a lengthy off-topic diversion would probably be too much.
I’m reacting against OP’s recommendations especially strongly today, on account of just having read the reader reviews for this book trying to exhonerate Joseph McCarthy yesterday.
Note that the people writing reviews who are sympathetic to McCarthy characterize him as noble, American, and patriotic. People with different values will consider different people to have good characters. It’s not surprising that political parties align with ideas on what constitutes good character. Politicians already run more on character than on issues. This is the problem, not the solution.
By the way, have you actually read Blacklisted by History? I have, and I strongly recommend it as an interesting debiasing experience if you have any interest in the 20th century American history. The book is a work of propaganda with a clear goal (as might be gathered from the subtitle), but on this subject, the conventional wisdom happens to be so extremely biased and full of falsities that reading some contrarian material which is biased in the other direction is likely to improve one’s understanding significantly.
(Unfortunately, nothing even approximating an unbiased history of the whole McCarthy phenomenon has been written yet, and the best one can do is to make judgments based on the propaganda from both sides. Trouble is, the mainstream sources offer almost exclusively one side of it.)
Also, McCarthy’s senatorial career provides an interesting case study of the rare phenomenon when an elected politician goes into an all-out war with the entrenched bureaucracy (mainly the State Department, in this case). There is almost no other case that elucidates certain essential aspects of the modern Western political systems so clearly, assuming of course that one is willing and able to analyze it without moral and ideological preconceptions, which are in this case unfortunately very strong and widespread.
My current impression of McCarthy is that he was basically right that there were, indeed, Soviet infiltrators, but he didn’t have any particular insight into finding them and ended up making accusations basically at random. Is that a reasonable one-sentence summary?
No, I wouldn’t say that’s a good summary, and the phenomenon was unfortunately much too complex to be described with a one-liner with any degree of accuracy.
The fundamental problem with such simple summaries is that they implicitly assume an oversimplified historical background to the whole situation: the U.S. pitched against the U.S.S.R. in a state of all-out Cold War hostility, with the entire U.S. government acting in a coherent way as a unified entity in this struggle for global supremacy, and individuals accused of acting as Soviet agents being either conscious and willing traitors working for Moscow or innocent victims of a witch-hunt. One must replace these simplistic preconceptions with a much more nuanced and detailed view before one can even begin to form anything more than a cartoonish picture of the so-called “Second Red Scare” period. (Which was in fact well underway, with the HUAC hearings, the Hollywood blacklist, the Hiss-Chambers affair, etc., years before McCarthy came to any national prominence.)
I could write a great deal about this topic, but I think that such a lengthy off-topic diversion would probably be too much.
Yeah, I suppose it’s always more complicated than that...