In the last few decades a new debate has emerged among historians, in light of revelations obtained from Communist Archives, the Mitronin Archives, and the Venona Project. The debate centers upon the extent to which in the 20th century the U.S. was facing an existential threat from Communist infiltration in all levels of government and society. Was McCarthy right?
McCarthyism arose during dark times, following the Soviet theft of the secrets of the U.S. atomic bomb, the Communist takeover of China, and the fall of Eastern Europe under the “iron curtain”, seemingly with the complicity of the Truman administration. McCarthy exploited the unease.
Senator Joe McCarthy was an ambitious senator from Wisconsin, from 1947 to 1957. He rose to national fame after a February 9, 1950 speech in West Virginia, in which he claimed to have in his hand a piece of paper that contained a list of Communist spies in the U.S. government. Four years later, he was disgraced. His downfall was heralded by withering criticism from famed journalist Edward R. Murrow, and by a fiery retort on the Senate floor by Army counsel Joseph Nye Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Writing in 2003, senators Collins and Durbin wrote, “Senator McCarthy’s zeal to uncover subversion and espionage led to disturbing excesses.” (Collins, Susan and Levin, Carl (2003). Preface (PDF). Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations. U.S. Government Printing Office). McCarthy personally flamed out spectacularly; consumed by addictions to heroin and alcohol, he died of liver failure at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1957. He was only 48.
McCarthy’s name lingers on as a dirty word, as Harvey Klehr notes:
To accuse someone of McCarthyism or to label a person a McCarthyite is not to issue a compliment. The implication is that a person so named has made scurrilous and unwarranted accusations and is engaged in unethical and sleazy maneuvers. The late Senator from Wisconsin even gave his name to the period. The McCarthy era is commonly depicted as one where America, consumed by a paranoid and irrational fear of domestic communism, went on a witch-hunt. (Harvey Klehr in Frontpagemag.com).
An article in The American Prospect” notes the following:
McCarthy’s claims were ultimately discredited, of course—along with the senator himself. But today the story is taking a new turn. A growing number of writers and intellectuals are beginning to argue that for all McCarthy’s bluster and swagger, he may have been right after all. And I don’t just mean writers on the right. Editorializing in the Washington Post in 1996, Nicholas Von Hoffman concluded that “point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” Still more dramatically, the London Observer opined that historians who had vilified McCarthy for two generations “are now facing the unpleasant truth that he was right.”. In his book Blacklisted By History, M. Stanton Evans writes: “The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.”
The Venona Papers are one of the sources of information shedding new light on Communist espionage. Venona was a secret counterintelligence program conducted by the National Security Agency and its precursors from 1943-1980. The program, so secret that even Harry Truman was in the dark, intercepted and decoded thousands of messages from the Soviet Union’s secret police (NKVD).
As the Washington Post reported:
The recent publication of a batch of Venona transcripts gives evidence that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were rife with communist spies and political operatives who reported, directly or indirectly, to the Soviet government, much as their anti-communist opponents charged.
… The sum and substance of this growing body of material is that: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in June 1953 for atomic espionage, were guilty; Alger Hiss, a darling of the establishment was guilty; and that dozens of lesser known persons such as Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon and Harry Gold, whose innocence of the accusations made against them had been a tenet of leftist faith for decades, were traitors or, at the least, the ideological vassals of a foreign power.”
In response to McCarthy’s attack John E. Peurifoy, deputy undersecretary of state, said that in the previous three years the government had investigated over 16,000 of its employees and had failed to find a communist. “If I can find a single one, he will be fired by sundown,” Peurifoy declared. The Venona transcripts contain the code names of about 200 persons, although some of these were clearly persons who had unwitting contact with Soviet agents. The Venona documents indicate that there were perhaps a dozen Soviet agents in the State Department alone. It is now clear that the Truman administration wasn’t looking very hard.”
Further reading:
The Washington Post.