Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The most sensational evidence from the HUAC was released in the late summer of 1948 just in time to influence the presidential election in November. Apparently it did not have the influence expected, since Truman was elected. The controversy from its revelations continued for years, and the charges, both from HUAC and from other sources, increased in violence. Few of the revelations after 1948 were ever sustained in court. For example, two separate “atomic espionage” cases involving Clarence F. Hiskey at Argonne Laboratory in Chicago and Joseph W. Weinberg at Berkeley Radiation Laboratory were played up by HUAC in 1949. Eventually Hiskey refused to answer questions before HUAC, was prosecuted for contempt, and was acquitted in 1951. Weinberg, accused by HUAC of giving “atomic secrets” to a well-known Communist, Steven Nelson, eventually was prosecuted for perjury at the committee’s insistence, and was acquitted in 1953. Both scientists found their careers injured by the committee’s charges. There were many similar cases.

The revelation of Communist influence in the United States was undoubtedly valuable, but the cost, in damage to the reputations of innocent persons and in the total confusion of the American people, was a very high and largely unnecessary cost. Eventually some agencies of the government, such as the Bureau of Standards, the army and, above all, the State Department were severely injured by loss of morale, disruption of work, and refusal of valuable personnel to work for the government under such conditions.

Much of this damage came from the efforts of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican, of Wisconsin to prove that the State Department and the army were widely infiltrated with Communists and from the efforts of the neo-isolationists and the “China lobby” to demonstrate that the Mao conquest of China was entirely due to the treasonable acts of Communists and fellow travelers in the State Department and the White House.

McCarthy was not a conservative, still less a reactionary. He was a fragment of elemental force, a throwback to primeval chaos. He was the enemy of all order and of all authority, with no respect, or even understanding, for principles, laws, regulations, or rules. As such, he had nothing to do with rationality or generality. Concepts, logic, distinctions of categories were completely outside his world. It is, for example, perfectly clear that he did not have any idea of what a Communist was, still less of Communism itself, and he did not care. This was simply a term he used in his game of personal power. Most of the terms which have been applied to him, such as “truculent,” “brutal,” “ignorant,” “sadistic,” “foul-mouthed,” “brash,” are quite correct but not quite in the sense that his enemies applied them, because they assumed that these qualities and distinctions had meaning in his world as they did in their own. They did not, because his behavior was all an act, the things he did to gain the experience he wanted, that is, the feeling of power, of creating fear, of destroying the rules, and of winning attention and admiration for doing so. His act was that of Peck’s Bad Boy, but on a colossal scale, as the total rejection of everything he had come from in his first twenty years of life. He sought fame and acclaim by showing an admiring world of schoolmates what a tough guy he was, defying all the rules, even the rules of decency and ordinary civilized behavior. But like the bad boy of the schoolyard, he had no conception of time or anything established, and once he had found his act, it was necessary to demonstrate it every day. His thirst for power, the power of mass acclaim and of publicity, reached the public scene at the same moment as television, and he was the first to realize what could be done by using the new instrument for reaching millions.

His thirst for power was insatiable because, like hunger, it was a daily need. It had nothing to do with the power of authority or regulated discipline, but the personal power of a sadist. All his destructive instincts were against anything established, the wealthy, the educated, the well mannered, the rules of the Senate, the American party system, the rules of fair play. As such, he had no conception of truth or the distinction between it and falsehood, just as he had no conception of yesterday, today, tomorrow as distinct entities. He simply said whatever would satisfy, momentarily, his yearning to be the center of the stage surrounded by admiring, fearful, shocked, amazed people. He did not even care if their reaction was admiration, fear, shock, or amazement, and he did not care if they, as persons, had the same reaction or a different one the next day or even a moment later. He was exactly like an actor in a drama, one in which he made the script as he went along, full of falsehoods and inconsistencies, and he was genuinely surprised and hurt if a person whom he had abused and insulted for hours at a hearing did not walk out with him to a bar or even to dinner the moment the hearing session was over. He knew it was an act; he expected you to know it was an act. There really was no hypocrisy about it, no cynicism, no falsehood, as far as he was concerned, because he was convinced that this was the way the world was. Everyone, he was convinced, had a racket; this just happened to be his, and he expected people to realize this and to understand it.

Of course, to the observant outsider who did not share his total amorality, it was all false, invented as he went along, and constantly changed, everything substantiated by documents pulled from his bulging briefcase and waved about too rapidly to be read. Mostly these documents had nothing to do with what he was saying; mostly he had never looked at them himself; they were merely props for the performance, and, to him, it was as silly for his audience to expect such documents to be relevant as it would be for the audience in a theater to expect the food that is being eaten, the whiskey that is being drunk, or the documents which are read in that play to be relevant to what the actor is saying.

Like any actor who might be charged with inconsistency or with lying because what he says in one play is not compatible with what he says in another play, McCarthy was puzzled, offended, hurt, or amused. With him every day, every hour, was a different play. As a result, to the audience nothing was consistent with anything else. He gave several different dates for his birth, and after 1945, never the correct one (November 14, 1908). Every time he spoke or wrote of his war experiences, the story was a different one, and with each version he became a larger, more nonchalant hero. Eventually, in 1952, when his power in Washington was at its height, and most of the government feared to draw his wrath (or even his attention), he intimidated the Air Force into awarding him the Distinguished Flying Cross (given for twenty-five combat missions), although he had been a grounded intelligence officer, who took occasional rides in planes.

Since laws and regulations were, for McCarthy, nonexistent, his business and financial affairs are, like his life, a chaos of illegalities. From 1935 to 1942 his gross income was less than $25,000, yet during the seven years he put more than twice that into the stock market. When he was elected judge in 1939, one of his earliest decisions was appealed by the state to its supreme court, where it was found that McCarthy had destroyed those portions of the record in which he had justified dismissing the state’s complaints. Shortly after he arrived in Washington, as a new senator in 1947, he heard of Pepsi-Cola’s difficulties with sugar rationing, accepted a $10,000 unsecured loan from Pepsi-Cola’s lobbyist, and, the next day, opened an attack on sugar rationing. When this attack was successful, the same lobbyist endorsed a note for $20,000 which McCarthy used to cover his overextended bank account in Wisconsin. A year later, as the most active member of a joint congressional committee on housing, he gutted the public housing features out of the Taft-Ellender-Waggoner housing bill in return for thousands of dollars in favors from the private housing lobby. One of these favors was $10,000 from Lustron Corporation in return for putting his name, as author, on one of its publicity releases. And so it went, most of his ill-gotten gains being dissipated on horse-racing bets, gambling, or parties for his friends. When the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, late in 1951, began to study one of his bank accounts, it found unexplained deposits of almost $173,000 and others of almost $97,000 funneled through the administrative assistant in his office.