Much of Donald Trump’s demagoguery was foreshadowed by Joseph McCarthy’s rise to power. This is probably no accident — McCarthy’s main advisor was Roy Cohn, who has been described as one of Trump’s “mentors.” (I will return to Cohn’s importance soon.)
McCarthy, a Senator from Wisconsin who grew up raising chickens and didn’t finish high school until he was twenty years old, used a gruff, anti-elitist, no-bullshit attitude to sow fears of Communist infiltration in the federal government. Much of his claims were wildly exaggerated or invented out of whole cloth, and he would often respond to skepticism from the press with claims that definitive proof would be released at a later date. When that date came, yet more proof would be promised later. This evidentiary Ponzi scheme seemed to continue ad infinitum. He began by alleging infiltration of the State Department, then moved on to the Defense Department. In the end, after a roughly four-year reign of terror, McCarthy was censured and humiliated by a Senate controlled by his own Republican Party. How did it happen? Could the same circumstances be recreated to defeat Trump?
Popular legend has it that everything changed when Joseph Welch responded to a typical McCarthy allegation with the famous question, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” This legend has fed the modern belief that a direct and public challenge to the demagogue and appeal to decency is enough to peel the scales from the audience’s eyes. In fact, by the time Welch delivered this line, McCarthy was already almost finished. Three events led to his downfall.
- He attacked people and institutions too widely respected, in particular by his own party.
McCarthy attained notoriety with mostly baseless allegations against the State Department and its employees, when Truman was president and very unpopular. The public, and Republicans in particular, were willing to accept the idea that the Truman State Department was filled with Reds. There was the suspicion that Truman and his administration had bent to easily to Russia at the end of World War II, closing Eastern Europe behind the “iron curtain,” and then not fighting hard enough in the Korean War.
McCarthy then pressed on to attack George Marshall and the Department of Defense, which the public held in higher regard. Even this found some support, at least among Republicans, since Marshall was a Democrat serving under Truman. But by this time respected figures like Eleanor Roosevelt, and even some moderate Republicans, were denouncing McCarthy’s tactics and questioning his integrity loudly and publicly. This is roughly the place where Trump is now, and it took further developments for McCarthy to become vulnerable.
The first was that Eisenhower, a Republican, was elected in 1952. You would think this would be good news for McCarthy. But Eisenhower, as a fellow WWII general, had tremendous respect for Marshall and resented McCarthy’s attacks against him. Moreover — and this was probably necessary, since Eisenhower was convinced not to attack McCarthy when they were on the same stage during the 1952 campaign — McCarthy continued to go after the Army even after Eisenhower became President and Commander-in-Chief. This caused his downfall, in two ways:
2. Eisenhower Turned on McCarthy
McCarthy’s war against the Army forced Eisenhower to take McCarthy on in order to protect his own generals. Eisenhower was able to do this because the public had absolute trust in his opposition to Communism, and because he could delegate the task of attacking McCarthy to his Vice President, Richard Nixon, who also had impeccable credentials in that regard, having served on the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Opposition from the Republican White House might have been enough on its own to defeat McCarthyism. But an unrelated scandal made McCarthy’s demise certain and complete:
3. Roy Cohn’s Abuse of Power
Roy Cohn, as I mentioned earlier, was McCarthy’s top aide. He was also a closeted gay man who fell in love with David Schine, another aide in McCarthy’s office. Schine was drafted into the Korean War and sent to train in New York. The separation was intolerable to Cohn, who pressured the Army to give Schine more leave time, as well as other favors. Cohn threatened Schine’s supervisors with investigation from McCarthy’s office if they did not comply. This gave the Army the ammunition they needed to launch a counter-attack on McCarthy.
The scandal eventually resulted in hearings by McCarthy’s Senate sub-committee, and it was during these hearings that Joseph Welch delivered his famous line (Welch was the lawyer for the Army). After the hearings, McCarthy was censured by the full Senate and stripped of his chairmanship.
You might think that the Republican Party would gain more respect in the public eye for having prosecuted the misdeed of one of its own. But you would be wrong. The lesson, again, is that one rotten member infects the entire Party. Republicans lost 18 seats in the House and 2 seats in the Senate.
The Republican Party has no figure today more popular and powerful than Trump who could serve in Eisenhower’s role. There are plenty of corruption scandals that could be fodder for investigations, but Republicans in the House seem uninterested in pursuing them. Trump’s attacks on the CIA and affinity for Putin seem like the closest analog to McCarthy’s attacks on the Army — the CIA and the “Intelligence Community” more broadly are fairly well respected by Americans overall and by Republicans in particular. And the underlying issue — support for Russia — is not what Trump rode to power. But the partisan incentives for Republicans to protect Trump rather than prosecute him remain strong. The destruction of McCarthy at the hands of his own party required unique circumstances.
It also bears mentioning that though McCarthy had been defeated, conspiratorial anti-Communism was not. The assumption that there were large numbers of Communist spies in the federal government, and great vigilance was required to keep them at bay, went unchallenged. Likewise, fear of Muslims and immigrants is sure to survive Trump, no matter how humiliating and total a political defeat he suffers.
