Wall Street Journal - July 7, 2003
CRITIC AT LARGE A Conspiracy So Vast
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
John G. Adams, a key figure in the proceedings that effectively ended Sen. Joseph McCarthy's career, passed quietly from the scene last week at age 91. Not surprisingly, his death made no news; it's been a while since those heady days when McCarthy launched his investigations of the Army, which had, he charged, been shielding countless Communist agents at Fort Monmouth and elsewhere. It fell to Adams, the Army's chief counsel, to deal with the charges, which he did to devastating effect in the Army-McCarthy hearings that held the nation in thrall in the 1950s.
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You can read all about McCarthy's downfall, and the alleged dupes and traitors responsible for it, in "Treason," a new book by Ann Coulter, the Maureen Dowd of the conservatives. It derides McCarthy's critics and brands the notion of McCarthyism itself as a myth and "the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times." She also thanks her publisher for his bravery -- a suggestion that it took courage to publish this work. Here we are, only up to the acknowledgments page, and already enjoying a laugh. True, at one point a book representing the Democrats as the party of treason, and Sen. McCarthy as one of the greatest heroes of the age, might have given some publishers pause. Not today -- the era that has put its money on outrage merchants and shock jocks.
Imagine the delight Ms. Coulter's publishers (Crown Forum, a division of Random House) felt as they contemplated the possibilities. "Treason" had everything -- attacks and dark revelations about eminences hitherto untouchable, such as CBS's Edward R. Murrow, author of the famous "See It Now" broadcast that struck the first blow against McCarthy, from which the senator would never recover. "On what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?" Murrow asked, in that searing indictment, delivered to a huge national audience, charging McCarthy with the reckless destruction of lives and reputations. It was, Ms. Coulter claims, a vicious and deceptive hatchet piece, "produced by Edward R. Murrow, friend of Soviet spy Laurence Duggan."
Pure gold. Could a publisher ask for more? But more there is: Ms. Coulter has not just set about rehabilitating McCarthy as a martyr destroyed by anti-American leftists -- she has also set about rehabilitating the most notorious of his cases, the kind dramatized in famous film clips of the period. Cases like that of Annie Lee Moss, a black code clerk who had lost her job at the Pentagon when she was hauled before McCarthy's committee as a security risk and Communist Party member. She had been confused with a different Annie Lee Moss, the witness explained -- and who Karl Marx was she could not even say. So evident was Ms. Moss's confusion at what she was doing there that applause erupted in the hearing room when Democratic Sen. Stuart Symington declared he believed her.
But the evidence against Ms. Moss was not insignificant, the author of "Treason" now maintains. The code clerk had said there were two other people called Annie Lee Moss listed in the Washington phone book -- whereas the two others were actually Anna Lee Moss and Annie Moss. Dynamite evidence, as far as Ms. Coulter is concerned -- case closed. After all, an FBI report had identified her as a Communist.
Also up for refurbishing is another famous McCarthy case, that against Army Capt. Irving Peress, a dentist reported to be a member of the Communist Party -- to become famous mainly for McCarthy's insistence on learning who promoted the captain to major. "Who Promoted Peress?" became his battle cry for a year. Even after the Rosenbergs had been caught, Ms. Coulter now charges, the Army had promoted the dentist reported to be a Communist. "When were they going to learn?"
Yes, a book with everything -- and we don't forget the classy prose. "Needless to say, the scrawny pinko was also a failure as a soldier," writes Ms. Coulter, about Peress.
And the book with everything has been getting precisely the kind of media attention the publishers counted on -- anywhere one turned on the TV screens last week there was the author of "Treason" happily confronting wide-eyed interviewers wanting to know how she can say the things she says -- her manner inviting them and the public to see just how bad she can be. Wait, you think that was something, her tone seems to say -- there's worse to come.
There always is, in the book, which ranges from the martyrdom of Sen. McCarthy -- without whose great fortitude and perspicacity in exposing the Communist menace, we might, Ms. Coulter suggests, all now be in the gulag -- to such matters as the Hollywood blacklist and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which in fact had little to do with McCarthy. Here Ms. Coulter pauses to reflect on the whining of those on the blacklist, all of whom she mocks as prosperous exiles racing happily around Europe with rich friends and having a good time. In Ms. Coulter's version of this history, of course, the blacklisted are only the rich and resourceful -- a history that doesn't include the countless people destroyed because their names had popped up on some list of alleged Communists or fellow travelers, or sounded like a name on one of those lists. People like the actor Phillip Loeb, for example, unemployable and ultimately driven to suicide because he could no longer pay the bills for the care of a mentally ill son.
The portrayal of Sen. McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is "sheer liberal hobgoblinism," Ms. Coulter maintains. It is true enough that there was nothing particularly wild-eyed about McCarthy, though that eerie giggle of his which tended to erupt at odd moments did have a certain out-of-this world pitch. Matters like that aside, the senator knew what he was about -- knew how much gold, political and other, a crusading Communist hunter could mine -- particularly one who could wave lists of names, numbers of traitors and plotters against the nation. The times were ripe for his kind.
Whether Sen. McCarthy actually believed some of the more fantastic charges he made -- charges that brought him instant fame -- remains a question. In 1951 he declared that Secretaries of State George Marshall and Dean Acheson had conspired to deliver China to the Soviets; and, not least, that they and other American leaders had taken part in a conspiracy against the United States, "a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man."
In another time -- our own -- he might have found a calling as a political shock jock. It was his fate, instead, for his name to be forever associated with a reign of fear and terror all too real. In her devoted effort to redraw Sen. McCarthy's history, Ms. Coulter makes the point that the members of the elite establishment all despised McCarthy. So did most educators, intellectuals and university faculties. That last is always worth remembering, though not for the reasons Ms. Coulter thinks. It is worth remembering that during that bleak political time the universities, faculties and students understood the threat McCarthyism posed to intellectual freedom -- and, dismal to note today, that the universities which were once hotbeds of opposition to McCarthy are now little worlds of their own, where political censorship, speech codes and other ideologically driven assaults on freedom are the accepted order of things.
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Ms. Coulter's work includes an admiring if brief biography of McCarthy's political career. One that for some reason excludes the senator's remarkable efforts on behalf of the members of the SS battle group who executed 86 American POWs in the Ardennes campaign in December 1944; otherwise known as the Malmedy Massacre. In his impassioned efforts on behalf of the accused -- one never to be repeated in his investigative career -- the senator charged that the U.S. Army had cruelly mistreated the former SS men.
All things considered, Sen. McCarthy's reputation would be hard to refurbish, but give Ms. Coulter credit for an all-out effort. The senator -- who knew something about the art of outrage merchandising -- would have understood the latest of his public advocates.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.