Demagogue

Joe McCarthy was born to an Irish-German American farm family in Wisconsin in 1908. He left school after the seventh grade to become a chicken farmer. McCarthy then graduated from high school by cramming four years of study into one year. He graduated from Marquette University receiving a Bachelor’s and Law Degree. McCarthy was elected a Circuit Court Judge leaving to serve as an officer in the South Pacific as a Marine during World War II. He flew in combat missions and received many decorations. He lost a US Senate bid in 1944 while still in uniform but won a close election in 1946 to become a US Senator. He was re-elected in 1952, wed in 1954 and died of alcohol related ailments in 1957.
McCarthy never read a book, loved to box and hunt/fish. He was a Don Juan and a friend of the Kennedy family hiring Bobby to serve on his Senate committees. He always looked for an issue to make his name and in Wheeling West Virginia at Lincoln Day dinner held a paper saying it contained the list of 205 Communists in the federal government,. He had no such listing but would lie, cheat, bully and play nice to the press to cement his power. He tried to destroy former Secretary of States George Marshall and Dean Acheson. He got in a fight at a party with columnist Drew Pearson and despised such figures as President Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, Senator Tydings of Maryland and any other liberal politician he wished to destroy.
His Waterloo was the Army hearings when lawyer for the army Joseph Welch faced the bully down. He was exposed as a fraud by Edward R. Murrow the T.V, journalist and was censured by the Senate for his conduct. He could be charming and affable but he gave America a bad reputation abroad and destroyed many careers and lives during his career. The modern public needs to be on the alert for the rise of such unethical mendacious politicians whose goal is power and not the welfare of the people. Senator Margaret Chase Smith R-Maine is a hero in this book for her denouncing of McCarthy on the floor of the Senate.
Boston reporter Larry Tye has done an excellent job of researching McCarthy and the danger of demogogues in a democratic society. Recommended.

I was excited to see a new biography on Joe McCarthy be released, especially since I live in his congressional district. Then I read the preface and I knew I would be disappointed.

The author makes no effort to hide his liberal bias and pure hatred of McCarthy and Trump. While those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome can’t help themselves, anything McCarthy did has nothing to do with Trump. In all aspects McCarthy was much worse than Trump (Could you imagine Joe McCarthy with a Twitter account; Trump would be a pussycat by comparison). The author also tries to compare McCarthyism to modern day issues such as illegal immigration, even though I suspect most people today who are against illegal immigration are because it is, in fact, illegal. If the author wanted to write about Trump and compare it to McCarthy, then do that, but don’t put it in a McCarthy bio. If the author really wanted to make a modern-day analogy to McCarthy he should have done it with Adam Schiff.

The book gets an extra star for solid research done in newly released archives at Marquette.

A demagogue is a sort of troll who with sociopathic intensity demonizes anyone who affords him opportunity to grab power, lies with tireless energy, contrives grand conspiracies, rages against corrupt elites, champions ethno-nationalism and isolation, feeds off his own relentless cruelty toward others, delights in his genius to create a chaotic circus that makes him the center of attention, and does so while he recklessly declines into his personal addiction, whether it be alcohol or self-aggrandizing tweets. Sadly, this odious character is someone who has always been coddled throughout American history.

Do not therefore look at the bullying demagogue as an aberration, Larry Tye observes in his solid biography Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. Rather, see America as a place that is too often a hospitable breeding ground for these heinous fraudsters. As Tye quotes James Fenimore Cooper: The true theater of a demagogue is a democracy. America has always been a place where mob sensibilities are roiling right beneath the surface.

Not only is there an appetite for these trolls; they share an identical psychology. Comparing McCarthy to Trump, Tye writes: Cross out the name Joe McCarthy in the vitriolic transcripts of his hidden hearings, and its easy to imagine we are listening to our forty-fifth president. Additionally, the two frauds show a limited vocabulary and repeat the same words over and over from their small lexicon.

We read these demagogues cut lives short, leave them with PTSD, and sicken the entire populace. Such a thesis is elaborated on in Rick Wilsons masterful book Everything Trump Touches Dies.
There is little consolation in reading about McCarthys downfall as his lies and alcoholism are exposed and he fights the US military, a fight he loses, because we see that another McCarthy emerges in the catastrophe of Donald J Trump: Joe McCarthys most apt student was Donald Trump. Roy Cohn was the flesh-and-blood nexus between the senator and the president.

Since Tyes thesis is that America has an appetite for these fraudsters, I would have liked to see more analysis of this symbiotic relationship between prominent demagogues and their followers, but since this is perhaps beyond the scope of Tyes 475-page biography, I recommend a book that provides an excellent complement to the notion that there is a dark side of America that craves demagogues who manipulate the fragile American psyche. The book is Steve Almonds Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country.

Tye, while providing voluminous information about McCarthy, makes mistakes. The biggest is labeling Dwight Eisenhower “the chief enabler” of McCarthy because he did not use the “bully pulpit” against him. In fact, Eisenhower was the architect of a clandestine attack on McCarthy that led to the televised Army McCarthy hearings, exposing McCarthy for the bully he was. Ike would not “get down in the gutter with that guy,” refusing to even use his name in public. McCarthy, riding high in January 1954, was toast by June. Ike later told subordinates that McCarthyism was now “McCarthywasm.” I know because I wrote a thoroughly documented book on the subject, published by Simon & Schuster.

Notwithstanding the subject had few redeeming features the story is well told and pacy. An interesting read well written.

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