Reckless Cruelty: The Joe McCarthy Story By Ed Rampell Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, January 2, 2020

Joe McCarthy

 

Through the years, television and film treatments have transmitted the late Senator's persona–and exposed his perfidy.

In the tradition of screen bad guys like Star Wars’ Darth Vader, Harry Potter’s Lord Voldemort, and Batman’s Joker, Joe McCarthy is a villain you love to hate. The junior Senator from Wisconsin is seen as such an embodiment of evil that an entire repressive era and tyrannical tactics are described using his name: McCarthyism, McCarthyite. His was the face of rabid anti-communism—and what an ugly mug it was.

During the Cold War, McCarthy adeptly exploited Reds-under-the-bed hysteria, rising from Senate obscurity like a “shooting star,” as Tom Wicker’s 2006 biography of McCarthy is titled. Wildly alleging communist infiltration of Washington’s highest echelons, McCarthy parlayed being Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (not to be confused with the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, which initiated the Hollywood blacklist) chairman into a position of power and prominence. He attracted press coverage with showmanship, outrageous behavior, and Torquemada-like tactics, “convicting people by rumor and hearsay and innuendo,” as Arkansas Senator John McClellan fumed about the Wisconsinite who put the “badger” in the Badger State.  

But McCarthy’s Red Scare-mongering backfired when he attacked military brass. The U.S. Army alleged that McCarthy’s vile chief counsel, Roy Cohn, sought special treatment for subcommittee ex-aide David Schine (possibly Cohn’s boyfriend) when he was drafted. That led to the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, which were broadcast live on TV. And what the American public saw proved devastating.

In fact, Joe McCarthy’s reputation has often been forged on big and little screens, transmitting his persona into theaters and homes. He has been featured in numerous television and film works, including a new PBS documentary premiering in January. 

Here are some of them: 

“A REPORT ON SENATOR JOSEPH R. MCCARTHY”

This episode of the CBS-TV news series See It Now, hosted by legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, aired on March 9, 1954, shortly before the start of the Army-McCarthy hearings. It depicted the smirking not-so-Grand Inquisitor haranguing witnesses, denouncing Democrats for “twenty years of treason,” and labeling the ACLU as a Communist Party front, punctuated by McCarthy’s hyena-like laugh.

 “I resent the tone of this inquiry very much,” State Department official Reed Harris was shown saying. “It is my neck, my public neck, that you are . . . very skillfully trying to wring.” 

The episode concluded with this declaration from Murrow: 

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men . . . . This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent.”

On April 6, 1954, CBS gave McCarthy equal time, airing his rebuttal deriding Murrow as part of “the jackal pack” of pro-communist propagandists. A week later, Murrow refuted McCarthy’s “hysterical” response, noting that it didn’t address any points made in the March 9 program. It was a classic confrontation between an investigative reporter and a demagogue uttering unfounded charges, and it stands as one of the high points of American television journalism.

McCarthy was condemned by the U.S. Senate in late 1954; he died two and a half years later due to his chronic alcoholism at the age of forty-eight.

POINT OF ORDER!

This 1964 film by renowned filmmaker Emile de Antonio showcases McCarthy’s demagoguery and deviousness using existing footage, including the Army-McCarthy hearings. He is seen railing about fighting a “war” against “communist brutalitarianism” and issuing smears and threats.

The showdown came June 9 after Army Special Counsel Joseph Welch demanded to see to the Senator’s list of 130 “Reds” alleged to be part of the nation’s defense apparatus, which naturally was not produced. Instead, McCarthy excoriated a young member of Welch’s law firm for National Lawyers Guild membership. Welch reprimanded the Senator for “cruelty” and “recklessness,” asking: “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

TAIL GUNNER JOE

This narrative treatment of the McCarthy saga aired in 1977 as a made-for-TV movie featuring Peter Boyle, who would go on to co-star in Everybody Loves Raymond. Boyle’s performance as McCarthy was nominated for an Emmy, while Burgess Meredith won a Best Supporting Actor Emmy as Welch. 

Gunner has a Citizen Kane-like format, with a 1970s journalist researching the witch-hunter’s rise and fall; she interviews contemporaries of the late Senator, including All in the Family’s Jean Stapleton as the widow of an engineer so vilified by the senator that he killed himself. These “interviews” are intercut with dramatizations of McCarthy’s life, including dialogue from the Army-McCarthy hearings.

AN AMERICAN ISM: JOE MCCARTHY

In this film the great journalist Jack Anderson asserts, “If you want to find out about Joe McCarthy, you’ve got to go back to Wisconsin,” and that’s what University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate Glenn Silber (who would later snare an Oscar nomination for the searing documentary The War at Home) did in this 1978 documentary. He interviewed fellow Wisconsinites who knew McCarthy when he was growing up on a farm, was elected as a judge (after lying about his opponent’s age), joined the Marine Air Corps (concocting fiction about tail-gunning), and so on. 

A picture emerges of a ruthlessly ambitious wannabe who, as Tom Korb, a Marquette University classmate, says in the film, “had an inferiority complex that he overcame in his public image.” Publicity-hungry McCarthy found what Anderson called his “gimmick,” riding red-baiting into Cold War America’s corridors of power. An American Ism also reveals that McCarthy collaborated with then-U.S. Representative Richard Nixon when the latter served on HUAC.

CITIZEN COHN

This 1992 HBO movie, based on Nicholas von Hoffman’s 1988 biography, scored twelve Emmy nominations and three wins. It starred James Woods as Roy Cohn and Joe Don Baker (1973’s Walking Tall) as McCarthy. Baker captured McCarthy’s bluster, swagger, and whine. Woods’s Cohn is a slimy maestro of Machiavellian manipulation. Oscar winner Lee Grant, herself blacklisted in 1952, played Cohn’s mother, Dora (and, like Woods, was Emmy-nommed). 

Directed by Frank Pierson, the film zeroes in on Cohn, who outlived McCarthy by twenty-nine years. But as Cohn dies of AIDs, McCarthy reappears in one of Cohn’s hallucinations—which frame the movie—asserting he has “a list.” In that delusional hospital sequence, Cohn is confronted by Ethel Rosenberg, Robert F. Kennedy, and Ray Kaplan, the Voice of America engineer driven to suicide by subcommittee slanders, tellingly proclaiming, “The fact is, he never found a Communist.”

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK

Centered on an Oscar-nominated performance by David Strathairn as Murrow, this 2005 theatrical release was directed by George Clooney (likewise Oscar-nominated), who played producer Fred Friendly. Dramatis personae include Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, and Jeff Daniels, but Clooney cleverly casts the only person who could fully do justice in depicting the repulsive, sweaty Senator: McCarthy himself. Vintage footage of Joe is skillfully incorporated on studio monitors and in the editing room, intercut with the thespians’ re-enactments.

Recent McCarthy-related productions similarly have current events in mind. This September saw the release of the documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn?, which takes its title from beleaguered President Donald Trump’s complaint that he lacks legal representation as loyal as that of Cohn, his late lawyer, friend, and mentor. Directed by Matt Tyrnauer, the film recounts the lessons Trump learned at the master’s feet about innuendo, deceit, smears, and tactics. Lessons like: Never apologize, always counterattack, distract, make shit up, bully, bluff, stage-manage media, withhold and falsify evidence, and, of course, that oldie but goodie: red-baiting.  

And on January 6, PBS will air the documentary McCarthy, a comprehensive chronicle of the boozing bamboozler, from his humble Wisconsin roots to his Senate ascent to being condemned there by a 67-22 vote. Partially based on David M. Oshinsky’s book A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, the two-hour film is written and directed by Sharon Grimberg, longtime senior producer of the PBS history series American Experience.

McCarthy includes interviews with contemporaries and relatives, including David Lattimore, whose father, Owen, was a State Department consultant McCarthy slandered as a Soviet espionage agent. Lefties who consider McCarthy repugnant may find it perplexing that McCarthy is repeatedly referred to as “charming.” 

One key sequence starts with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address intercut with shots of unemployed Americans, as McCarthy chronicles the Communist Party USA’s heyday during the Great Depression. The period, asserts Yale history professor Beverly Gage, “seemed to indicate that capitalism was done for and something else was going to have to rise from its ashes.” With “a 25 percent unemployment rate,” adds Columbia University journalism professor and New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb, “the Marxist critique of the capitalist economy seems to make more sense in the 1930s.”

Red rallies and marches are shown in vintage photos and clips. “The Internationale” is sung, and Moscow’s influence on American communists is raised. “Fear of Soviet penetration of the U.S. . . . is based on fact,” insists Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Yet the film, according to Grimberg, is about “the fragility of democracy and how someone in power can pervert democracy. And it’s about being willing to challenge a bully and stand up for our sense of decency as Americans.” And Susan Bellows, a senior producer with American Experience, adds that McCarthy “is also a cautionary tale of what can happen to democracy when politicians use fear-mongering as a tool for political gain.”

Living in another despotic era in which the press is attacked as “fake news” and “enemies of the people,” federal civil servants are conspiratorially condemned as “deep state” coup plotters, whistleblowers are threatened with execution and presidential accusations of treason, it’s worth remembering what Tom Wicker’s Shooting Star pointed out: “Not one prosecution resulted from McCarthy’s investigations into communists in the U.S. government.” 

Sidebar - The Progressive's McCarthy Takedown

Editor’s note: From the start, The Progressive was a leading voice against Senator Joseph McCarthy. The magazine once called him “an ambitious faker living by his wits and guts, a ruthless egotist bent on personal power regardless of the consequence to his country, a shrewd and slippery operator with the gambler’s gift for knowing when and how to bluff.” These are words that sound eerily familiar today.

But the magazine’s greatest shot across McCarthy’s bow came in the form of its April 1954 issue titled, “McCarthy: A Documented Record.” The issue was divided into sections including “The Numbers Game,” “McCarthyism in Action,” “Win at Any Cost,” and most notably, “Striking at the Freedom of the Press,” which chronicled McCarthy’s efforts to undermine journalists and news outlets.

The Progressive’s special issue sold 180,000 copies, making it by far the most popular in the magazine’s history, and its bold, critical, and well-researched content no doubt played a part in McCarthy’s downfall. 

Morris Rubin, editor of The Progressive from 1940 to 1973, wrote the introduction, an abbreviated version of which appears below:

This issue of The Progressive is devoted entirely to presenting a documented report of the public record of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

Our purpose is two-fold: 1) to provide the people of the United States with the factual background to help them evaluate the public statements and actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin; and 2) to make available to our friends of the free world authentic materials which will enable them to gain a clearer perspective of the meaning of McCarthyism and the extent to which it is at war with the finest traditions of Americanism.

McCarthy has struck repeatedly at the letter and the spirit of our Bill of Rights by using methods of intolerance and intimidation in an effort to create a national climate of hysteria, fear, and suppression.

The “ism” added to his name has become a generic symbol of guilt by accusation, character assassination, the big lie, and the repudiation of our country’s traditional devotion to fair play and a fair trial.

He has impaired the functioning of some of our most important defense laboratories, and he has battered at the morale of those who administer our country’s program of military defense.

He has exercised a decisive influence, for the worse, on our civil service and our foreign service.

He has left his mark of intolerance on the government, the churches, the schools and colleges, the literature and the press of our country.

He has appointed himself a one-man purge squad committed to smearing and destroying those who disagree with him.

The great hope of the professional demagogue is to avoid public exposure while he plies his trade of creating hysteria, capitalizing on people’s fears, and diverting public attention from basic problems with side-show stunts. We are convinced that the most effective weapon against McCarthyism, as, indeed, against Communism, or any other counterfeit philosophy, is the truth. 

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Ed Rampell is a Los Angeles-based film historian and critic who contributes regularly to The Progressive; he created the Progie Awards in 2007 to highlight the year’s best progressive films and filmmakers. Rampell is the author of the 2005 book Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and the coauthor of three other film history books, most recently The Hawaii Movie and Television Book

https://progressive.org/magazine/reckless-cruelty-the-joe-mccarthy-story-rampell/

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