What Bill O'Reilly Should Have Told Ann Coulter
Even historians who in recent years with the opening of Soviet archives have been justifying many aspects of the mid-century anti-communist campaign remain convinced that McCarthy was an extremist who actually hurt the legitimate goals of the anti-communist cause. But there is a new, powerful, conservative voice reaching millions who is striving to undermine this consensus and create an alternative image of McCarthy as a great American hero.
This voice belongs to Ann Coulter. In her new best-selling book Treason, Coulter uses a reappraisal of McCarthy as a unifying thread to her overarching argument that it is really liberals since the Roosevelt administration who deserve the reputation of villains. Coulter argues that liberals continually have sought to undermine the country as it has faced mortal challenges ranging from Communism to terrorism. Their most potent weapon of treachery has been to invoke the charge of "McCarthyism" against true American patriots, i.e. conservatives, who have attempted to expose liberals for their treasonous political positions. To insure that liberals never again gain control of the White House and the fate of the country, Coulter believes it is first necessary to neutralize this weapon by rehabilitating the reputation of McCarthy, particularly by disassociating him with "the myth of 'McCarthyism'...the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times."
Whatever the merits of her overarching argument that liberals have been betraying their country for the last several decades, it is Coulter's reappraisal of McCarthy that initially piqued my personal interest because I am a historian of the mid-century "red scare." But I was moved to write this essay after watching Coulter's appearance on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor" on July 22, 2003. Even the show’s strongly opinionated, right-leaning host Bill O'Reillywas taken aback by Coulter's attempt to glorify McCarthy. During their exchange of views, Coulter challenged O'Reilly to name just one individual falsely accused by McCarthy of being a Communist. O'Reilly named the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted by Hollywood studios after an appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Smirking at the thought of her own rebuttal, Coulter sarcastically noted that HUAC was a committee of the House and McCarthy was a member of the Senate, so McCarthy obviously had nothing to do with Trumbo.
O'Reilly's blunder reveals the problem with history that is taken for granted: even the most well-educated citizens can forget the most basic historical facts. So for the sake of historical truth, it seems necessary to counter Coulter's propaganda effort regarding McCarthy by reminding most reasonable and fair-minded Americans what he represented. But first, Coulter's specific argument regarding McCarthy should be explained.
By virtue of her own arguments on other subjects, Coulter must believe that McCarthyism, as I and McCarthy’s own contemporaries defined it, is an abomination. Her previous book Slander was in part a condemnation of a rhetorical style similar to McCarthyism and practiced nowadays mainly by liberals. This contemporary rhetorical style is widely known as "political correctness," which involves false or unsubstantiated accusations or insinuations of racism, sexism, or any other kind of bigotry. Coulter bemoaned the prevalence of political correctness for two reasons. For one, it makes a serious discussion of important issues next to impossible "...because one side is making arguments and the other side is throwing eggs...." Secondly, it chills free expression, for "...it is surely true that if holding political opinions can itself be scandalous, fewer people are going to want to have any of those opinion things." Since Coulter reviles political correctness, it logically follows that she cannot reasonably defend its stylistic cousin McCarthyism.
But here is the twist to Coulter's reappraisal of McCarthy: he never practiced McCarthyism. In other words, even if there were some individuals who uttered the kind of slander that came to be known as McCarthyism, McCarthy himself never engaged in it because he rarely directly called anyone a "Communist" and when he did, well, they actually were Communists. In short, Coulter argues that "[e]verything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie."
Now for the historical truth. McCarthy did in fact make many false or unsubstantiated accusations or insinuations of Communism, even though Coulter denies it and O'Reilly could not remember one. He did so the very first moment he became a figure of public notoriety in the mid-century anti-communist campaign. In a Lincoln Day speech to the Ohio County Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950, he declared that there were 57 Communists working in the State Department. The next day, he reiterated his charge by declaring that there were 57 "card-carrying members of the Communist Party" in the State Department. Later on, in a speech to the Senate and before a Senate committee hastily organized to review his charges, this number would grow larger. But when he detailed his accusations against specific individuals, like Dorothy Kenyon, Haldore Hanson, Philip Jessup, Frederick Schuman, Harlow Shapley, and John Stewart Service, he could not substantiate a single one of them. Reading from the government case files of these individuals, he could only point out their membership in organizations that may or may not have had other members who were Communists. But "guilt by association" was not a standard then that confirmed that someone was a Communist anymore than it proves today that someone is a bigot just because he or she has come into contact with someone who is. So weak were his charges that in one case he could only say: “…there is nothing in his files to disprove his Communist connections.”
Soon after his failure to substantiate his accusations against 57-plus State Department employees, McCarthy accused Owen Lattimore, an expert on the Far East, of being the "top Russian spy" in the United States and "the boss of Alger Hiss" (Hiss was a former State Department official well-known at the time for being accused of being a Communist and a Soviet spy). He also claimed that with regards to his earlier charge of a Communist infiltration of the State Department he would "stand or fall" on the basis of his accusation against Lattimore. In the forties, Lattimore had drawn the attention of many conservatives for his sober assessment of the pre-Communist China situation, which included criticism of Chiang Kai-Shek and an honest assessment of the strength of Communist forces. For this conservative heresy, Lattimore was reviled by many conservatives and eventually smeared by McCarthy. But McCarthy never offered any credible evidence to support his accusation that Lattimore was a Communist who led an espionage ring for the Soviet Union other than the testimony of an ex-Communist named Louis Budenz who himself had never met Lattimore and offered only hearsay.
Another of McCarthy's early false or unsubstantiated accusations of Communism was the one he made against journalist Drew Pearson. Though McCarthy and Pearson were initially friendly with one another when McCarthy first arrived in Washington, D.C., they had a falling out, mainly over McCarthy’s initial accusations of Communism, and they became involved in a bitter feud that one night erupted into a physical altercation. To get back at Pearson, McCarthy gave a Senate speech in which he called upon Americans to pressure the corporate sponsors of Pearson's radio news show to drop Pearson because of his supposed politics. Even though McCarthy made it clear that he was not accusing Pearson of being a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, he insisted that Pearson was a communist in principle because he consciously promoted and defended the interests of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, primarily by criticizing anti-communists like himself. To quote McCarthy himself, he said Pearson was the "voice of international communism," the "sugar-coated voice of Russia," and a "Moscow-directed character assassin."
Despite the hollowness of his early accusations of Communism, McCarthy was able to intensify his pursuit of Communists when the Republican Party won control of the Senate in 1952 and he was awarded the chairmanship of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations. Armed with subpoena power, McCarthy called dozens of witnesses before his subcommittee. All of the witnesses who refused to cooperate with his subcommittee by pleading the Fifth Amendment he called Communists. To be precise, he did not call each individual witness a Communist, but rather he blanketly called them "Fifth Amendment Communists." Now some historians acknowledge that many witnesses called by congressional investigating committees during the mid-century red scare were at one time or another members of the Communist Party. But some of them never were members and most of them were former members who were unwilling to expose themselves to possible prosecution or to name the names of fellow members who they felt would be persecuted for what they considered mere political beliefs. Arguably McCarthy could have claimed that these individuals were bad citizens for refusing to cooperate with a legally constituted congressional investigating committee. But for McCarthy to label these individuals as present Communists simply because they pleaded the Fifth Amendment was an inference that lacked logical justification.
Besides direct accusations, McCarthy also made numerous insinuations of Communism that were tantamount to direct accusations. On more than one occasion he referred to Secretary of State Dean Acheson as "the Red Dean." During the 1952 Republican national convention, he purposely misspoke the name of Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, calling him "Alger--I mean Adlai Stevenson." When he delivered public speeches, he frequently began by pointing out reporters in the audience and asserting that they worked for, for example, the Milwaukee Daily Worker (really the Milwaukee Journal) or the New York Daily Worker (really the New York Times). But perhaps his most controversial insinuation of Communism was the one he made against Secretary of Defense and former Secretary of State George Marshall. Believing that Marshall purposely worked to insure that China would fall to Communism, as it did in 1949, McCarthy claimed that Marshall was part of "...a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man."
Even Coulter believes that a false insinuation of ideological deviancy is morally equivalent to a direct accusation. In her book Slander, she equally condemned both. For example, she denounced a MSNBC reporter for remarking, "[i]t finally dawned on me that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of facially all this time was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses." She criticized a former Democratic congresswoman for accusing some conservatives of "goose-stepping over women's rights." She was appalled by a Democratic congressman who said of Republicans: “These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they’re worse than Hitler.” She was outraged by references to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as "Adolph Giuliani." None of these speakers who Coulter condemns explicitly called anyone a "racist," "sexist," or any other kind of bigot, but they clearly insinuated as much. So if false insinuations of bigotry are to be condemned, so must false insinuations of Communism, which McCarthy frequently made.
It should be pointed out that not all of McCarthy’s false or unsubstantiated accusations or insinuations of Communism were directed at individuals. He also targeted entire institutions. For example, he repeatedly referred to the Democratic Party as the “Commiecrat” party. In a speech in his home state of Wisconsin, McCarthy attacked the most influential paper in the state, the Milwaukee Journal, which gave him unfavorable coverage, by telling constituents: “Keep in mind that when you send your checks over to the Journal, you are contributing to bringing the Communist Party line in the homes of Wisconsin.” And when Time magazine published an uncomplimentary cover story about him, McCarthy wrote to numerous corporations encouraging them to stop doing business with a “pro-Communist” magazine.
Some of these facts about McCarthy Coulter simply ignores. As for some of these facts that she actually discusses, she lamely attempts to whitewash them. For example, in discussing the inaugural episode of McCarthy's red-hunting career, his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Coulter attempts to justify his charges against numerous State Department employees by claiming that McCarthy was merely suggesting that these individuals were at the very least security risks. McCarthy himself did say such a thing at a later date, but it is not what he initially said and not what most Americans were led to believe. McCarthy specifically called them Communists, and when called upon to substantiate his charges, he was unable to do so. Regarding Lattimore, Coulter explains that McCarthy's attack on him was mere "hyperbole," and in any case Lattimore “acted like a Soviet espionage agent." Again, McCarthy himself did not say what Coulter interprets. Moreover, by admitting that McCarthy's charge against Lattimore was hyperbole, she fails to grasp the obvious: hyperbole was the very essence of McCarthyism.
Besides reinterpreting McCarthy's own words, another method Coulter uses to whitewash the most damning facts about McCarthy is to argue either that evidence has emerged decades later proving his charges to be true or that if no evidence has yet emerged it still may at some future date. This argument is so Orwellian (to use a favorite adjective of Coulter's) that it deserves careful consideration. What Coulter is essentially saying is that even though McCarthy may have made charges initially without foundation, he should not be condemned because evidence emerged decades later that proved some of his charges to be true or, if it hasn’t yet, may still emerge to substantiate his remaining charges. To put this argument into perspective, what if a liberal claimed between 1974 and 2003, without any evidence whatsoever, that Richard Nixon personally ordered the Watergate break-in? Coulter, who reveres Nixon for his role in the Alger Hiss case and suggests that his life should be celebrated on the Fourth of July, surely would have considered such a claim just another liberal slander. And even though evidence recently emerged in late July 2003 in the form of testimony from Nixon aide Jeb Stuart Magruder, Coulter probably would stick to the position, as she should, that it is wrong to level a charge of wrongdoing based solely on the presumption that corroborating evidence will turn up at a later date. The same should hold true for McCarthy.
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Hopefully, this brief history lesson is informative enough to repudiate Coulter's reappraisal of McCarthy. For McCarthy was truly a loathsome politician whose name has been associated deservedly with the phenomenon called McCarthyism. No amount of whitewashing and willful ignorance can change the central facts of this historical interpretation. And if Bill O'Reilly ever reads this article and has Coulter on his show again, he should be better prepared to debate her.